Papers – Page 5 – ECSAS 2025

Hindu Religious Populism Against Religious Minorities: Cases of Christians and Muslims Minorities in India

Linking populism to religion helps populists/party to turn religion into a divisive instrument for consolidating power in societies in which religion already plays an important socio-political role such as India. In this context, the use of Hindu religious populism against religious minorities, under far-right Hindu nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reached a new […]

Violence And Its Discontents: Counter-mobilizing Muslims in Contemporary India

How does religious persecution and political violence impact political agency and democratic conduct among religious minorities? Under the BJP, political consensus in India has shifted dramatically away from secular democracy and toward the normalization of a majoritarian and exclusivist agenda of Hindu nationalism. A key feature of the BJP’s rule since 2014 has been the […]

Hindu Recolonization and Muslim Marginalization: Unraveling Xanmiholi and the Contested Geographies of Assamese Identity

This paper examines the systematic dismantling of xanmiholi – the centuries-old ethos of mutual belonging and collective identity in Assam – through the intricate mechanisms of Hindutva politics that produce a dual transformation: the marginalization of Muslims as “Mughals,” “invaders,” and “illegal immigrants” and the simultaneous recolonization of Assamese Hindus. By analyzing historical and contemporary […]

Liminality and Erasure: Hindutva Violence Towards Imam Shah Bawa Dargah and the Shifting Boundaries of Religious Identity in Colonial and Postcolonial India

The 700-year-old Imam Shah Bawa Dargah, in Ahmedabad, has been subjected to Hindutva violence and last year, according to the police, the structures built on the graves of Imam Shah and his family members were razed by Hindu sect trustees. In March 2022, Prime Minister Modi attended the All India Representatives Assembly of RSS at […]

Anti-Muslim Violence and Residential Segregation in India

Scholars often examine the impact of anti-Muslim violence on residential segregation in India by focusing on large-scale events like the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. However, India’s shift toward Hindu nationalism has coincided with a new form of violence: low-intensity, localized incidents, such as public lynchings over cow slaughter allegations. This paper conducts a large-N analysis to […]

Against Muslimness: Islamophobia in Indian-occupied Kashmir

In India, both secular liberal and Hindu nationalist ideology converge in processes of Islamophobia. This presentation examines how secular liberal and Hindu nationalist ideologies operate in the case of Indian-occupied Kashmir. Having been colonized by India for over seventy-five years, Kashmir is a site of both Indian secular liberal—which achieved its apex during the Nehruvian […]

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

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 […]

The Ethno-Religious Contract: Sub-Personhood and Displacement of Assam’s Muslims

the ‘Racial Contract’ to explore how Indian Muslims are displaced from national belonging, with a specific fucos on the Muslims of Assam. I trace displacement through three interweaving realms: epistemic (constructing ideological and rhetorical divisions), economic (creating marginalization and precarity), and spatial (imposing segregation and ghettoization). In the end, I document how Assam is being […]

The interpretation of public policy as an exception to the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards in South Asia

Arbitration is now the principal method of resolving international disputes involving states, individuals, and corporations.[1] Particularly, as multiple parties, nationalities and jurisdictions are embroiled in complex commercial transactions, international commercial arbitration has taken precedence over traditional litigation due to its flexibility, efficiency and efficacy. One of the most striking features of international commercial arbitration, is […]

Transnational Environmental Injustices and the Bloody Loaf Argument (BLA)

Can developed nations justifiably export hazardous technologies prohibited for domestic use to developing nations? The Bloody Loaf Argument (BLA) is one of the most significant attempts to answer this question; it asserts that such exports are justified based on a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. Overall, the BLA states that the export of hazardous industries enables impoverished […]