Public Intimacies: Hindu Nationalist Rhetoric and The Circulatory Politics of Hate

Abstract

The paper will examine how Hindu nationalist leaders shape intimate social spaces, fostering a culture where anti-Muslim rhetoric is normalised and expected. Using feminist hermeneutics and discourse analysis, speeches from the Ram Mandir inauguration and 2024 Lok Sabha election campaigns— archived in print, audiovisual, and digital media— will be analysed to study the production of an affective economy of hate that seeps into everyday lives. I will incorporate interviews with individuals from families where such rhetoric is openly voiced in social gatherings, alongside reflections on my own family experience, to study the circulation of hate between its macro and micro repositories. The paper will argue that rather than creating new communal anxieties, the current climate of impunity has eroded ‘hesitation’ as a speech-filter, fuelling the devaluation of minority lives. In addition, a unique form of intra-family violence has emerged, targeting those— often younger members— who reject the Hindutva project. In this way, hatred towards a constructed enemy is being redirected to punish non-conformance, delegating state power to the family as a unit of control. By examining rhetorics of persuasion and exclusion, the paper will trace democratic decay at the levels of state structures and everyday realities. It will highlight how violent majoritarian politics renders minorities and dissenters hypervisible within a crisis-driven narrative.