India’s Religious Ethnocracy: Hindutva Vigilantism and Police Violence in Uttar Pradesh

Abstract

This paper proposes that contemporary India’s democratic conundrum, characterised by state-sustaining violence against minorities, is representative of an Indian variant of a ‘religious ethnocracy.’ The thrust of this study is that ‘communal violence,’ under the Modi-led right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party is not a violent socio-cultural residue of historical communalism alone, as concluded in literature so far. It is also an indeterminate outcome of the interaction of Hindutva’s communalism, with targeted security strategies, police vigilantism and criminalising policies that the ruling BJP regime has adopted against minorities, in its pursuit of an ethnocratic state. Departing from previous explanations of communal violence in India, this paper thus understands the location of violence against minorities to be for disciplining purposes that lie within the domain of state power.