Hindutva and anti-Christian violence in contemporary India

Abstract

In this special issue introduction, we analyse the trajectory and forms of anti-Christian violence in India and its role in the wider Hindu nationalist project today. Inspired by Galtung’s work on direct, structural, and cultural violence, we show how different forms of anti-Christian violence have waxed, waned, and combined in shifting constellations at different moments of India’s postcolonial political history and in different state contexts. At the current conjuncture, however, the imagined threat of ‘the Christian Other’ has acquired an unprecedented centrality to Hindu nationalist politics, producing a systemic escalation in anti-Christian violence across many states. This violence is, we argue, characterised by a strong convergence of direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence, involving vigilante attacks and police complicity, but also an increasingly coercive use of state law, coupled with the production of a wider cultural common sense about the anti-national essence of non-Hindu religious minorities.