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I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy ...

India's dramatic decline from a shaky but functional democracy into an authoritarian dictatorship under the hard-right Hindu nationalist BJP is nearly complete. But deeply rooted traditions of dissent and tolerance, which had long been in abeyance, have during the past 15 months created a strong democratic challenge that has caught both the government and seasoned observers by surprise. The first wave of poplar protests against a new and discriminatory citizenship law were followed a few months later by the ongoing farmers' protests against new laws handing over the keys to Indian agriculture to a few select corporate cronies of the BJP.This powerful and spontaneous democratic surge poses the most serious challenge in decades to the mixture of populist sectarian violence, political repression, and crony capitalism that has kept the Hindu right in power. Embracing tolerance, democratic rights, and social justice, the protest movements explicitly reject the religious hatred that has fueled Hindu nationalism. Given that the new U.S. administration has committed to supporting human rights and democracy, and is still engaged in its own struggle with populist ultra-nationalism at home, the Biden administration should naturally support these protest movements.

By taking over Kashmir at gunpoint, India has set itself up to reap the whirlwind.\"The hasty stroke goes oft-astray.\" This piece of remembered wisdom from The Lord of the Rings seems to be an apt description of the Indian military siege of Kashmir.On August 5th, at midnight local time, the disputed territory was abruptly cut off from all communication, both with the outside world and within Kashmir, as India snapped internet and phone connections and shut down all Kashmiri television channels. A strict curfew was imposed across Kashmir, a region roughly comparable to the state of Virginia in extent and population (8 million).During the previous week, an additional 50,000 Indian troops had been moved into Kashmir, to join the roughly 750,000 already deployed there. And on August 6, the Indian home minister announced that India was revoking Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, which gave Kashmir some limited autonomy and restricted outsiders from buying land in the state.Under the new dispensation, Kashmir is to be ruled directly from Delhi as a Union Territory. The last time Kashmir was ruled directly from Delhi, from 1990 to 1996, it witnessed human rights violations on a massive scale, with extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, disappearances, firing on unarmed demonstrators, burning of homes, crops, and standing harvests, and a complete clampdown on all political activity. The warning signs that this will be repeated are already loud and clear.The entire operation has been overseen by Home Minister Amit Shah, from the hard-right Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), infamous for his orchestration of the massacre of 3,000 Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002. Though very little news escapes the military cordon India has thrown around Kashmir, there are reports of mass arrests, including of young children, a near-total clampdown on freedom of movement within Kashmir, and Indian military forces opening fire on protesters with live ammunition, tear gas, and pellet guns. Pellet guns are an Indian invention designed especially for \"non-lethal crowd control\" and used only in Kashmir. They bullets explode like shrapnel on impact and have been responsible for blinding hundreds of Kashmiris since 2016.

The consequences for the fragile mountain environment have been devastating. The entire pilgrimage route is lined with trash several feet deep, and the river is choked with filth. By contrast, another Hindu pilgrimage to Gangotri, the source of the Ganges, in the central Himalayas in India, is carefully controlled and limited to 150 pilgrims a day to avoid burdening the environment. When Kashmiris protested against the transfer of the entire pilgrimage route to a \"Shrine Board\" packed with Hindu nationalist supporters, army and paramilitaries opened fire on the protests, killing at least 60 people. A two-month blockade of the national highway leading into Kashmir by Hindu nationalist supporters in the Jammu region cut offthe only supply line to the valley since the closing of routes westward to Muzaffarabad, in Pakistan, in 1947. The resulting shortages of food, medicines, and fuel were intended to \"teach the Kashmiris a lesson.\" Over the decades India has tried unilaterally to annex Kashmir and refused internationally mediated negotiations, claiming that it is \"an internal matter.\" The autonomy supposedly granted to Kashmir under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was a fake from the beginning: the only autonomy Kashmir has ever enjoyed is to be exempt from the privileges, such as they are, of Indian citizenship. And the only lesson Kashmiris have learned over the years is that if they want to avoid being swallowed by the upper caste Hindu majoritarian state, they must continue to resist, no matter the cost. Censorship and repression are not new to Kashmiris, and they have been applied in recent years to those seeking to break the long silence on Indian abuses there. Writer [Arundhati Roy] was charged with sedition in 2010 for pointing out the simple historical fact that Kashmir has never been part of India. In 2011, Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan was attacked in his office by the extremist Hindu nationalist outfit Shiv Sena, and his office was trashed after he expressed his support for the Kashmiri right to freedom. In 2011, anthropologist Angana Chatterjee and her partner Richard Shapiro were fired from their positions at the California Institute for Integral Studies for discovering and documenting mass graves in Kashmir. In 2010, they had been denied entry into India even though Chatterjee held an Indian passport. Radio host David Barsamian was deported from India in 2011 for reporting on the mass graves. Civil rights advocate Gautam Navlakha has been \"deported\" from Kashmir, which India claims is its \"integral part.\" Kashmiris trying to protest in India are likewise \"deported\" back to Kashmir.

On June 11, police and paramilitaries were firing tear gas shells and baton-charging the protestors. A press note prepared by Tufail's father, Mohammed Ashraf Mattoo, gives an eyewitness' version of the killing: \"The woman, who is sole 'official eye witness' of the above case, narrates the heart wrenching incident of Tufail's killing,\" Matoo wrote. \"'It was 11th June, a Friday. There was a loud bang,' she says. The boom that sounded like that of a grenade explosion 'was actually sound of a tear gas shell being fired.' She says that moments before hearing the explosion, 'I saw three boys running towards the Gani Memorial from Syed Sahib Shrine. One of them was Tufail. He was being closely chased by the policemen. Tufail entered the gate of the stadium but could not go too far as he slipped on the mud. Two Jammu and Kashmir police officers then came out of the Gypsy (police van) and followed him to the ground,' she says. They were hurling abuses at him in Kashmiri, saying \"we will not leave you.\" The officers aimed at Tufail from close range and fired a tear gas shell straight at him.' The officers went near his body, she claims. 'I managed to catch hold of arm of the officer who had fired at Tufail and started slapping his face. But another officer who had ordered the former to shoot pushed me to the ground and freed him from my hold. They escaped in the same white colored Gypsy they had arrived in,' she says. 'The tear gas shell shattered Tufail's skull and killed him instantly.'\"

This dissertation looks at factors behind the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and at the changes that take place in culture and civil society before the movement can gain political power. It is an ethnographic study of a popular, right-wing movement and documents the progress of the Hindu right through the lives of its actors and the experience of the victims of anti-minority violence. It focuses on the state of Rajasthan, which does not have a history of Hindu nationalism; and is based on fieldwork conducted in “social welfare” projects run by Hindu nationalist organizations in tribal districts in the state and in urban slums in Jaipur, the state capital. It also tracks the anti-minority violence occurring in different parts of the state between 1990 and 1992, based on interviews with survivors and relief workers, the hearings of the Inquiry Commission investigating the events of the 1990 “riots” in Jaipur, and on personal experience of relief work carried out in the wake of the anti-Muslim riots of 1992. It attempts to understand the success of Hindu nationalism through its appeal beyond dominant groups to disprivileged and marginalized social groups, such as tribals, the urban poor, women, dalits, trade unions etc. It views the ideology of Hindutva (“Hinduness”) as a form of symbolic capital, which is accepted by subordinated groups as a means of advancing their claims to a higher status within a system which disprivileges them in very comprehensive ways. It examines the patterns of violence in Jaipur in 1990 and 1992, and argues that while the conditions of this violence are made possible by the development of Indian capitalism within the globalized economy, the violence follows not a political or economic but a cultural logic.

The images of Islam which inform the RSS and its carefully nurtured and directed hatred are not limited to the Hindu right alone but are found in popular and academic discourses both in India and the west. They bear little relation to the reality of Islam as lived by Muslims in India and around the world where faithful adherence to the tradition coexists with tolerance of other faiths. But this reality exists outside the Orientalist grids which inform our understanding of Islam.