Investigating Political Violence in India Through a Resonance Machine Model

Written by Carter Gleason | Winter 2025 |

Introduction

                    On July 31st, 2023, two groups of rioters violently clashed in the Nuh district of Haryana, a state in north-central India.^[1] One group of rioters was mostly young Muslim residents of Nuh, which has a seventy-nine percent Muslim population—the highest of any district in Haryana.^[2] The other group was a Hindu mob organized by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), a religio-nationalist organization under the umbrella of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and associated with other Sangh Parivar^[3] groups. The VHP’s purpose includes strengthening “right-wing nationalist standpoints that exclude the minorities of India, notably Muslims and Christians, from the national ambit and ideas of Indian citizenship.”^[4] On July 31st, the VHP organized a yatra—a Hindu religious march—into Nuh, sending over twenty-five thousand people to purportedly “revive holy Hindu sites” that were “home to three Shiva lingas from the era of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata.”^[5] But by the end of the yatra, mosques, homes, and businesses in Nuh—and in neighboring districts Palwal, Sohna, and Gurugram—were engulfed in flames. In Gurugram, a Muslim cleric reported that a mob of one hundred and fifty rioters broke into his mosque, chanting “Kill them, kill them,” and yelling religious slogans.^[6] In total, across the four districts that saw violence, six people were killed—all of them Muslim.

The rioting in Nuh is far from the only instance of political-religious violence that India has witnessed recently. Organizations and individuals associated with the broad Hindu nationalist movement, including the VHP, RSS, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have been linked to an outbreak of violent attacks across India over the last three decades, which has been steadily worsening since the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. Muslims, Dalits, Christians, and other religious minorities have faced lynchings, mob violence, and attacks on places of worship. In 2017, Sandipan Baksi and Aravindhan Nagarajan compiled and detailed more than a hundred cases of public, vigilante violence targeted at Muslims since Modi took office just three years earlier.^[7] This number has increased even more sharply since then.

Where did this forceful violence come from? How has the majoritarian fervor risen this much along religious lines in a country with secularism enshrined in its Constitution? Authors have identified multiple explanations, all situated within an ongoing sociological subjugation of religious minorities to Hindu nationalism and majoritarianism. As Cristophe Jaffrelot elaborates:

Christian and Muslim minorities have been subjected to stigmatization and violence in India that are transforming them into de facto second-class citizens who are no longer in a position to assert their rights… The destruction of everyday relations between [Hindu and religious minority] communities is part of a bigger plan to establish an ethnic democracy in which the majority no longer has anything to do with the minorities and relegates them beyond the cognitive horizon of the masses.^[8]

Where does violence come into play? Scholarly opinions here are manifold. Shakuntala Banaji argues that Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, ideology has activated “vigilante publics,” or localized groups composed of “ordinary citizens ready to be mobilized either in ethno-cultural violence or its defence and disavowal.”^[9] Jaffrelot, on the other hand, centralizes the role of the BJP, which has “traditionally protected Hindu nationalist vigilantes… [by] exert[ing] a strong influence over the government of certain states, such as Haryana, thus shaping public policies—some of which pertain to law and order—from within.”^[10] Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer, in their edited volume, track the violent development of what they call “Neo-Hindutva,” a “hybridized and syncretic” ideology virulently permuting itself into new technological, religious, geographic, and cultural spaces in ways that are “difficult to disaggregate.”^[11] Arvind Rajagopal conceptualizes violence as the final step in Hindutva’s “series of makeshift stratagems aimed at symbolically unifying Hindus,” explaining that “Violence serve[s] to exaggerate the movement’s density and force, concealing the chinks between its different sections, and masking the confusion that would arise from the profusion and variety of its symbols.”^[12] Still other authors investigate violent imagery in mass media,^[13] the digital infrastructure of Hindutva on social media and online,^[14] or Hindu nationalism’s mirroring of a global trend towards violent right-wing extremism.^[15] A political-philosophical explanation that integrates these perspectives while addressing the vast diversity of places, ways, and forms in which Hindu nationalist ideology manifests is absent from the scholarly literature.

                    This Article proposes that one viable explanation for political violence in India comes from the resonance machine model, first described by William Connolly.^[16] In his paper, he interrogates the United States’s recent rightward political shift and its heterogeneous manifestations, asking “What is the connection today between evangelical Christianity, cowboy capitalism, the electronic news media, and the Republican Party?”^[17] Connolly describes this connection as a “resonance machine,” which this Article will summarize before arguing the existence of a Hindu nationalist resonance machine, translating Connolly’s model to an Indian context for the first time.^[18] In doing so, this Article will show that the Hindu nationalist resonance machine model illustrates how key ideas in the Mahabharata, particularly the dharmic justification of righteous violence, are mobilized through Indian film, broadcast, and social media to reinforce Hindu nationalist ideology and catalyze episodes of political violence.

The Resonance Machine Model

                    Connolly’s resonance machine model provides a framework for understanding how diffuse elements of society align around an ideology and amplify each other, creating a powerful political and cultural force. Under this model, “Causality, as relations of dependence between separate factors, morphs into energized complexities of mutual imbrication and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify, and dissolve into each other, forging a qualitative assemblage resistant to classical models of explanation.”^[19] In the United States context, Connolly argues the existence of a resonance machine between evangelical Christianity, neoliberal corporatism and capitalism, the electronic news media, and the Republican Party. The relationship between these parties is not one of direct manipulation or precisely shared doctrines, but rather a deeper resonance, energized by what Connolly calls “affinities of sensibility” and “affinities of identity.”

Affinities of sensibility, Connolly explains, reflect shared “spiritual disposition[s] to existence,” taken to mean shared existential orientations, attitudes, values, and emotional responses to the world. In the evangelical-capitalist machine, for example, groups’ shared “ruthlessness, ideological extremism, readiness to defend a market ideology, [etc.], express a fundamental disposition towards being in the world.”^[20] Shared dispositions help amplify a shared ideology, encourage participating parties to ally with each other, and perpetuate a particular political program—namely, in the U.S., the Republican Party’s “destruction machine,” “as much involved in initiating corporate policies and political programs as in the character destruction of opponents.”^[21] Along similar lines, affinities of identity are shared “affect-imbued ideas…installed in the soft tissues of affect, emotion, habit, and posture as well as the upper reaches of the intellect.”^[22] For instance, Connolly identifies a common “bellicosity” in groups promoting the U.S.’s rightward shift, and an “insistence by [their] members that they are being persecuted unless they are thoroughly in power.”^[23] Affinities of sensibility and identity create deeper resonance for shared political ideas.

Crucially, resonance machines (both the evangelical-capitalist variety and the Hindu nationalist resonance machine that this Article proposes) involve a repertoire of implicit messaging strategies, what Connolly terms an “unsung melody” reverberating through symbolic gestures and cultural artifacts that convey meaning without explicit articulation.^[24] For example, in 2004, when George W. Bush raced around a NASCAR track for 100,000 fans, Connolly argues that he embodied a “symbol of disdain for womanly ecologists, safety advocates, supporters of fuel economy, weak-willed pluralists, and internationalists. Bush played upon the symbol and drew energy from the crowd’s acclamation of it,” adding energy to the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine, which reverberates today with “resentment against cultural diversity, economic egalitarianism, and the future.”^[25] These presentations, along with their representation by allied broadcast media outlets, “do much of their work below the level of explicit attention” to subtly encode the vocabulary of public dialogues on contemporary issues.^[26]

In sum, conceptualizing relationships between disparate societal institutions in this way reveals the resonance machine’s unique power: its ability to coalesce seemingly unrelated societal forces into a formidable political phenomenon, capable of subsuming internal contradictions and maintaining momentum by continually generating shared affective intensities. The following sections will illuminate how this structure translates to an Indian context by setting forth groups involved with—and mechanisms of resonance within—the Hindu nationalist resonance machine, particularly considering how the machine catalyzes political violence.

The Mahabharata and Dharmic Justification for Violence

                    The “core” of the Hindu nationalist resonance machine is formed by the Hindu religious tradition, partly articulated in two Hindu epic texts, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. These are foundational documents in Hinduism; Simon Brodbeck confirms that they “form a constant point of reference for Hindu thought… always in use as two basic cultural lenses through which to interpret the world.”^[27] To more formally “locate” them in the resonance machine model, not only do the texts sit deeply as part of people’s identities that allow them to engage in affinities of identity, but given that the Hindu nationalist movement is composed of Hindu followers mobilized in defense of Hinduism, the texts also articulate a particular moral sensibility by which Hindu individuals should act to remain pious and follow dharma, or righteous duty.

The Mahabharata, in particular, is “commonly termed an itihasa or ‘history,’” especially understood in the cosmological sense.^[28] It chronicles the Kurukshetra war, in which the army of the one hundred Kauravas fights the army of their cousins, the five Pandava brothers. In this context, the text takes positions on the necessity of violence and offers cosmic, dharmic justifications for violence under certain circumstances. In doing so, it contributes particular sensibilities, positions, and narratives that constitute and energize the thematic and ideological substrate of the Hindu nationalist resonance machine.

                    Specifically, the Mahabharata contains a vision of violence that is not just dharmically justified but inevitable. The war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas is framed as a necessary act for the preservation of cosmic balance, made inevitable on the human scale via a web of inexorable individual dharmic commitments. As the armies move towards the battlefield, Dhritarashtra comments, “We cannot dispose our future; we are but wooden dolls, moved by strings.”^[29] Even when one tries to avoid violence by refusing to fight, they are reminded of violence’s inescapability. In the midst of battle, Arjuna “threw down his bow on the floor” and tries to refuse violence, asking “What happiness will it bring to kill them for the sake of a kingdom?… We know better, we must act better.”^[30] But Krishna reminds him, “Unless he surrenders, Yudhishthira will die. Karna will kill [the five Pandava brothers], he will kill every man of the army, you cannot stop this war.”^[31] Krishna sings “The Song of the Lord” to Arjuna, conveying a similar message with a religious tonality, and Arjuna concedes that he must fight.^[32]

The Mahabharata’s justification of violence energizing the Hindu nationalist resonance machine also contains an important individual dimension. Arjuna’s acquiescence to fight is particularly significant because he is a Kshatriya—a warrior by caste.^[33] The Mahabharata centralizes various aspects of Kshatriya dharma, the specific duty of this caste to fight valiantly as warriors. Kshatriya dharma plays a significant role in justifying the violence of the Kurukshetra war, as Brodbeck explains, “Krishna says that everyone should do their class duty as a ritual sacrifice… [if one] is a Kshatriya, fighting for him is a ‘ritual of battle’; the Kurukshetra war is a ‘ritual of battle,’ and the Mahabharata identifies ritual homologies for its various aspects.”^[34] The dharmic necessity of the war in the story absolves individual violent actors of moral consequences—“Violence is justified as a professional and religious duty, and the ethical aspect is defused, transferable only to the system as a whole.”^[35] Most importantly, there is a larger implication that violence is necessary to preserve cosmic order. In Hindu cosmology, as individuals make adharmic decisions, cosmic dharma (understood as the dharma that underlies the orderly structure of the universe) unravels. Therefore, individual righteous decisions are necessary to keep macro-dharma alive. Ankur Barua roots this implication in a Mahabharata context: “if Arjuna—qua warrior—were not to fulfill his micro-dharmic responsibilities of restoring macro-dharmic order, the fabrics of reality would unravel.”^[36] These characteristics of Kshatriya dharma—the ritual necessity of fighting, absolution of individual moral guilt, and cosmological consequences—echo through the Hindu nationalist resonance machine, providing a basis for contemporary positions on violence in Hindutva discourse.

                    Beyond this conversation on violence, the Mahabharata (and its sister text, the Ramayana) contributes an entire religious tradition’s worth of narratives about the origin of the universe and society, moral guidelines for living a dharmic life, and epic histories of a pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses. All these elements may be broadcast with religious intensity in the Hindu nationalist resonance machine, especially as the ideological “substance” that the machine seeks to propagate—its particular vision of the “good” life. However, this Article is concerned specifically with those narratives energizing political violence in India today, hence its focus on the Mahabharata’s view on violence. As the next section will elaborate, these narratives on violence are visualized and refashioned by Indian television, cinema, and social media, shaping Hindutva public discourse.

Resonance in Indian Television, Cinema, and Social Media

                    In Connolly’s conceptualization of the resonance machine, he emphasizes the power of visual media in shaping the public encoding of experiences and narratives; Connolly comments that “the TV and film viewer is immobilized before a moving image and soundtrack… immobility amplifies the affective intensities received, just as a basketball coach feels the intensities more than the players on the floor who absorb the intensities into action.”^[37] As such, Indian television, cinema, and social media play outsized roles in visualizing Hindutva ideology and amplifying the intensities of the Hindu nationalist resonance machine, including sensibilities favoring violence. Along these lines, Rita Manchanda refers to Indian mass media as “the context in which an unstable Hindu public is consolidated on the template of militarised Hindu nationalist discourse.”^[38] More specifically, she writes:

Several studies have examined how the mass media substantively shifted the nature of political and cultural discourse [in contemporary India]; how it enabled the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) to project itself as co-extensive with Hinduism and facilitated the BJP becoming spokesperson for a hegemonic militant Hindu discourse. The mass media became the vehicle for a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideology aimed at recovering the culturally essentialist character of Indian society, the object being to build a strong state by militarising Hinduism and the Hindu community. … For the RSS Hinduism is militant: every Hindu God is armed. Indeed, the remaking of the figure of Ram as warrior-god is integral to the creation of the hegemonic discourse of the Hindu as militant.^[39]

What Manchanda identifies here as the vehicularization of the mass media in disseminating violent RSS discourse is more accurately characterized as a section of the Hindu nationalist resonance machine, translating religious narratives on violence into visual images that have intensities aligned with Hindutva’s political project. The mechanism of resonance here has been developing for decades, even before the Narendra Modi era. Its roots show themselves in the 1992 Ayodhya movement, a Hindu-led campaign to demolish the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya and replace it with a Hindu temple. Hindu fundamentalists believed that the Babri Masjid site was the original birthplace of the preeminent Hindu god Ram, and protested that a Hindu temple there was thus justified. Just five years earlier, in 1987, Indian state-run television channels began broadcasting a serialized version of the Ramayana, to great success. Rajagopal argues the show built a bridge between the Ram religious narrative and “systematic political mobilization,” “drawing upon myth…under a symbolic rubric that could be tied to the banner of Hindu assertion.”^[40] The BJP, with the serial giving their “pre-eminent symbol, the god-king Ram,” such publicity, declared in 1989 that supporting the Ayodhya movement was their “number one priority.”^[41] The televised series reinterpreted and added scenes from the epic that evinced support for the political movement—for example, Ram himself utters prayers to his birthplace, Ayodhya, on-screen. In turn, “Battle scenes in the tele-epic were seen as models for Hindu militancy.”^[42] As Rajagopal concludes, the representation of myth on television “participate[d]” in the events of the Ayodhya movement, culminating in the violent destruction of the Babri Masjid and subsequent riots that wounded 6,957 people and left 2,026 dead.^[43]

How, then, do the Mahabharata’s violent themes resonate? Roshni Sengupta discusses their appearance in various televised recreations, summarizing that “In the Mahabharata… several instances of graphic violence [are] brought to life quite vividly on television screens by the visual renderings through the decades.”^[44] Sengupta’s assessment of the Mahabharata’s position on violence accords with that of this Article; he argues that “The utilization of violence putting several lives at risk for political decision-making remains a practice throughout the narrative of the Mahabharata… justifying the use of it for the attainment of the ultimate goal—establishment of rule of law.”^[45] Further, televised recreations of scenes from the Kurukshetra war “attempt[] to channelize the utility of violence…into the realm of visibility so that understanding the necessity of indulging in violence for righteous human beings such as the Pandavas could be conveyed to viewers.”^[46] In one particular on-screen version of the Mahabharata, “The television avatar of Krishna describes killing as simply a necessary means towards a just end.”^[47] A Hindu audience, enamored by vibrant visual depictions of violent conflict, feels an affective intensity towards violence here, resonating with their sensibilities and identities. Connolly describes such resonance in the context of American media, but his argument applies equally against an Indian backdrop: “Those who received these messages… were not simply manipulated by the media to accept them; many were predisposed to the message through the spirit of their preliminary orientations to being.”^[48]

Beyond televised depictions of the Mahabharata, Indian cinema also demonstrates resonance of religious themes and their politically-motivated transmission to the Hindu public. In his book Bollypolitics, Ajay Gehlawat tracks the “recent rise of fervently nationalist and/or Islamophobic fare from the [Indian film] industry,”^[49] along with the parallel establishment of the BJP “government-appointed national censor board, which arbitrarily forces directors to snip content that might be against ‘the interests of the security of the State, …public order, decency, or morality.’”^[50] In her work on what she calls “Hindutva intervisuality,” Christiane Brosius argues that many recent Bollywood films, by visually representing stories infused with Hindu religious content, “affirm, and even increase, the gazing subject’s perception of an invisible, overwhelming and intimate presence in the images on their display,” amplifying a religious affective intensity while also communicating a subtextual political message, namely the glorification of a Hindu nation-state.^[51] Brosius finds that the Hindutva project appropriates “already circulating narratives, iconographies and genres from the sphere of popular visual representation, and political and religious practices,” and gives them “new meaning, …evolved when familiar imagery and narratives are situated in the new or altered context of dichotomies such as crisis and solution, exile/imprisonment and liberation, and stereotypes of ‘tolerant Hindus,’ ‘aggressive Muslims,’ the unresponsive state, and so on.”^[52] Connolly, for one, would ascribe this evolution of new meanings to the power of the resonance machine—its ability to integrate diverse “perceptions, creeds, interests, institutions, and political priorities; each of them in turn recoils back upon [another], modifying it in this way and intensifying it in that.”^[53] Both television and cinema serve as powerful domains of visual expression for the thematics of the Hindutva resonance machine, expanding the movement’s reach to new audiences and amplifying its ideas in public discourse.

Social media increasingly also harbors Hindu nationalist content. Sahana Udupa conceptualizes an emerging form of Hindutva, “enterprise Hindutva,” or a “mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media.”^[54] In her article tracking the translation of Hindutva ideology into online spaces, Udupa accurately assesses that online Hindutva “inhabits the ideological project envisioned as a range rather than a point of convergence…It is ‘an irreducible multiplicity with an operative logic,’” comprising a variety of actors, interests, and views.^[55] The resonance machine is capable of encompassing this range, and is even strengthened by it, subsuming multitudinous particular beliefs into a coherent political and cultural force. The unique character of social media plays a role in encouraging the amplification of Hindutva ideology; as Udupa explains, “most of the discursive work [online] is taken up by the net-savvy youth of their own will, fueled by the excitement of scoring over their ideological rivals on online media.”^[56] Thus, social media not only amplifies Hindutva ideology but also transforms it into a dynamic and adaptive force, driven by the voluntary participation of its digital adherents.

Ultimately, as television, cinema, and social media increasingly serve as spaces for the resonance of Hindu nationalist ideology and its sensibilities, the strength of the Hindutva political and cultural force is increased. Broader audiences are reached over time, and as violent thematics resonate through the machine—lifted from, and justified by religious narratives like the Mahabharata—the catalysis of political violence comes into view.

Resonance in Politics

                    The final major domain of the Hindu nationalist resonance machine this Article discusses is politics. Before doing so, however, it is key to recognize that political influences and resonances have been present in all previous discussions. In the 1992 Ayodhya movement, it was state-owned television networks that broadcast the Ramayana serial, the popularity of which “invested claims by the BJP…about the rebirth of a Hindu public with an ominous force.”^[57] In cinema and mass media, it is the BJP and their associates asserting control over Bollywood and “building up hegemony through molecular permeation” of society.^[58] And online, “the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the first major political party [in India] to systematically adopt social media strategies… Social media branding helped to transform Modi’s image…into a messiah of ‘New India.’”^[59] The significance of this political apparatus doing much of the amplification work in the Hindu nationalist resonance machine is difficult to understate. The opening of the Ram Mandir temple—the temple built upon the remnants of the Babri Masjid as a result of the 1992 Ayodhya movement—demonstrates this. For the temple’s opening, the Modi government organized a grand consecration ceremony, inviting “506 A-listers, including prominent politicians, leading industrialists, top film stars, sportspersons, diplomats, judges and high priests.”^[60] The actors and actresses from the original Ramayana serial even appeared, “dressed as Lord Ram and Goddess Sita,” filming videos for national news and social media.^[61] The coalescence of these disparate societal figures and forces around political leaders and movements is a hallmark of the resonance machine model.

                    Crucially, though, political leaders also serve as parts of the machine—“spaces” of a sort in which ideas can resonate. Connolly refers to important figures like this—people at the nexus of politics and media—as “catalyzing agents and shimmering points in the machine.”^[62] Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi is the prime example of this in the Hindu nationalist resonance machine. Jaffrelot describes how Modi’s campaign and tenure as Prime Minister reflects “a state of quasi-permanent mobilization and spectacle.”^[63] Modi started two of his own television channels, intimating an effective identification with the mass media universe, and when television appearances did not suffice, Modi invested in 3D holograms to project his likeness throughout India. These holograms “mesmerized masses, [creating] the sense of a leader who is seemingly directly accessible” and “relay[ing] the leader’s aura” to audiences.^[64] In this way, Modi’s identity itself is a resonant element in the Hindutva resonance machine, wrapping itself up in broadcast media, focalizing the discourse of the BJP, and even assuming a religious affect. Moumita Sen and Kenneth Nielsen expand on the religious dimension here in their work on “political deification,” or “the phenomenon of political leaders being treated like Hindu deities.”^[65] In a succinct demonstration of the resonance between religious thematics and contemporary political figures, they explain:

It was…the narrative of the mythic figure of Ram, the hero of the Hindu epic Ramayana, that allowed the BJP to effectively use ideas of India’s sacred geography to create a strong popular support base. The leaders of BJP embodied the iconography of Ram by bearing his weapons, in a gesture to awaken the dormant masculinity of Hindu men…There are countless other instances of effective politicisation of established religious icons in smaller communities, and at the level of grassroots politics.^[66]

                    Modi, too, is often politically deified. In 2022, he “was described by a minister…as an avatari purusha, an avatar or incarnation of God. According to the minister, Modi had been born into this world—like the great Hindu gods Ram and Krishna—to end the atmosphere of despair caused by the corruption and casteism of his predecessors.”^[67] By not only identifying with the Hindu religious tradition but also allowing religious imageries and symbols to resonate in his public portrayal, Modi infuses the Hindutva political movement with the power of the Hindu pantheon, demonstrating resonance between these disparate domains—religion, media, and politics—that energizes Hindu nationalism.

Conclusion: The Hindu Nationalist Resonance Machine and Political Violence

With justifications for violence provided by religious texts like the Mahabharata, visualization of that violence and of Hindutva ideology in mass media, and adoption of religious narratives by political leaders, the Hindu nationalist resonance machine represents a formidable political and cultural force in India. This force finds expression in violent outbreaks like the one in Nuh discussed in this Article’s introduction, or the 2002 Gujarat riots,^[68] or the 1992 Ayodhya riots, or any other number of violent attacks on religious minority individuals and communities perpetrated by Hindutva-aligned individuals in recent Indian history. These individuals are themselves imbued with such a strong affective intensity by the Hindutva resonance machine that they feel compelled to physically act, and after the fact, political leaders often remain silent.

This rise of violent Hindu nationalism in India is globally significant, as it parallels the rise of violent right-wing extremism worldwide. While scholarship on right-wing extremism has predominantly focused on North American and European case studies, and scholarship on Hindutva has often relegated it to the realm of religious, rather than political, extremism, Eviane Leidig argues that the two phenomena are more tightly intertwined than they may appear.^[69] Leidig explains that Hindutva’s “right-wing extremist ideology can be perceived as having a transnational nature” linked in form and function to proto-fascist, nationalist movements occurring in various nations.^[70] Significantly, India uniquely showcases the “‘mainstreaming’ effect of right-wing extremism from the fringe to electoral politics” through the emergence of the BJP, “the only political party with Hindutva as its official ideology.”^[71] In this way, the increasing severity of violent Hindutva in India could serve as a foreboding model for mainstreaming political violence worldwide.

Political violence begets more political violence—in her analysis of vigilante publics in India, Shakuntala Banaji assesses that spectacles of “incredible, genocidal violence” against Muslims are themselves “part of the visual repertoire of Hindutva,”—a “call to arms for some, a final warning for others.”^[72] In this way, the Hindu nationalist resonance machine perpetuates a cycle of violence, amplifying affective intensities and embedding them within the cultural and political fabric of contemporary India. Stopping this cycle is crucial for protecting vulnerable minorities in India, lest the Hindutva movement refashion the constitutionally secular country into a Hindu Rashtra once and for all

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Edward, and Arkotong Longkumer, eds. Neo-Hindutva: Evolving Forms, Spaces, and Expressions of Hindu Nationalism. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021.

Baksi, Sandipan, and Aravindhan Nagarajan. “Mob Lynchings in India: A Look at Data and the Story behind the Numbers.” Newslaundry, July 4, 2017. https://www.newslaundry.com/2017/07/04/mob-lynchings-in-india-a-look-at-data-and-the-story-behind-the-numbers.

Banaji, Shakuntala. “Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India.” Javnost – The Public 25, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 333–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1463349.

Barua, Ankur. “Spectres of Violence and Landscapes of Peace: Imagining the Religious Other in Patterns of Hindu Modernity.” In Violence and Peace in Sacred Texts, edited by Maria Power and Helen Paynter, 29–51. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17804-7_3.

Brodbeck, Simon. “Violence and Peace in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa.” In Violence and Peace in Sacred Texts, edited by Maria Power and Helen Paynter, 9–28. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17804-7_2.

Brosius, Christiane. “Hindutva Intervisuality: Videos and the Politics of Representation.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 36, no. 1–2 (February 1, 2002): 264–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/006996670203600109.

Buck, William. Mahabharata. World Literature in Translation. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019.

Business Standard. “Who’s Who from Business, Cinema, Politics, Sports Attend Ram Temple Event,” January 22, 2024. https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/who-s-who-from-business-cinema-politics-sports-attend-ram-temple-event-124012200854_1.html.

Centre for Study of Society and Secularism. “Anatomy of Violence in the Hitherto Peaceful Nuh,” October 18, 2023. https://csss-isla.com/fact-finding-reports/anatomy-of-violence-in-the-hithero-peaceful-nuh/.

Connolly, William E. “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine.” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (2005): 869–86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30038467.

Dutta, Mohan J. “Digital Platforms, Hindutva, and Disinformation: Communicative Strategies and the Leicester Violence.” Communication Monographs, April 30, 2024, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2024.2339799.

Gehlawat, Ajay. Bollypolitics: Popular Hindi Cinema and Hindutva. 1st ed. World Cinema. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350401914.

Godbole, Madhav. Unfinished Innings: Recollections and Reflections of a Civil Servant. 1. publ., Repr. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1996.

Government of Haryana. “Nuh: District at a Glance,” 2011. https://nuh.gov.in/district-at-a-glance/.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Translated by Cynthia Schoch. First paperback printing. Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2023.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s. Office of Head of Government Series. London: Hurst, 1996.

Katju, Manjari. “Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Hindu Nationalism.” In Hinduism, by Manjari Katju. Oxford University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195399318-0275.

Leidig, Eviane. “Hindutva as a Variant of Right-Wing Extremism.” Patterns of Prejudice 54, no. 3 (May 26, 2020): 215–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2020.1759861.

Mahajan, Karan. “India’s Streaming Auteurs.” The New York Review of Books, July 1, 2021. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/indias-streaming-auteurs/.

Manchanda, Rita. “Militarised Hindu Nationalism and the Mass Media: Shaping a Hindutva Public Discourse.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (December 1, 2002): 301–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400208723504.

Mukharji, Arunoday. “Haryana: Days after Nuh, Gurugram Violence, Victims Count Losses,” August 3, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66391587.

Rajagopal, Arvind. Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Sen, Moumita, and Kenneth Nielsen. “Gods in the Public Sphere: Political Deification in South Asia.” Religion 52, no. 4 (October 2, 2022): 497–512. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2022.2094780.

Sengupta, Roshni. “Iconography of Violence in Televised Hinduism: The Politics of Images in the Mahabharata.” Continuum 31, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 150–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1231791.

The Indian Express. “Nuh Communal Flare-up: What Is the Yatra During Which Violence Began?” August 2, 2023. https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/nuh-communal-violence-yatra-violence-8873437/.

Udupa, Sahana. “Enterprise Hindutva and Social Media in Urban India.” Contemporary South Asia 26, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 453–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2018.1545007.

Ugarte, Rodrigo. “Understanding Gujarat Violence.” Items (blog), Social Science Research Council, March 3, 2020. https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-archives/understanding-gujarat-violence/.

^[1] Centre for Study of Society and Secularism. “Anatomy of Violence in the Hitherto Peaceful Nuh,” October 18, 2023. https://csss-isla.com/fact-finding-reports/anatomy-of-violence-in-the-hithero-peaceful-nuh/.

^[2] Government of Haryana. “Nuh: District at a Glance,” 2011. https://nuh.gov.in/district-at-a-glance/.

^[3] “Sangh Parivar” groups are the “family of the RSS”—various organizations associated with the RSS that share its main objective: the formation of a Hindu nation-state. See Christophe Jaffrelot. The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics: 1925 to the 1990s. Office of Head of Government Series. London: Hurst, 1996, 144

^[4] Manjari Katju. “Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Hindu Nationalism.” In Hinduism, by Manjari Katju. Oxford University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195399318-0275.

^[5] The Indian Express. “Nuh Communal Flare-up: What Is the Yatra During Which Violence Began?” August 2, 2023. https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/nuh-communal-violence-yatra-violence-8873437/.

^[6]Arunoday Mukharji. “Haryana: Days after Nuh, Gurugram Violence, Victims Count Losses,” August 3, 2023. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-66391587.

^[7] Sandipan Baksi and Nagarajan Aravindhan. “Mob Lynchings in India: A Look at Data and the Story behind the Numbers.” Newslaundry, July 4, 2017. https://www.newslaundry.com/2017/07/04/mob-lynchings-in-india-a-look-at-data-and-the-story-behind-the-numbers.

^[8] Jaffrelot, Modi’s India, 209.

^[9] Shakuntala Banaji. “Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India.” Javnost – The Public 25, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 333–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1463349, 1.

^[10] Jaffrelot, Modi’s India, 230-1.

^[11] Edward Anderson and Longkumer Arkotong. Neo-Hindutva: Evolving Forms, Spaces, and Expressions of Hindu Nationalism. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021, 3-4.

^[12] Arvind Rajagopal. Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 213.

^[13] Rita Manchanda. “Militarised Hindu Nationalism and the Mass Media: Shaping a Hindutva Public Discourse.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (December 1, 2002): 301–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400208723504.

^[14] Mohan J Dutta. “Digital Platforms, Hindutva, and Disinformation: Communicative Strategies and the Leicester Violence.” Communication Monographs, April 30, 2024, 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2024.2339799.

^[15] Eviane Leidig. “Hindutva as a Variant of Right-Wing Extremism.” Patterns of Prejudice 54, no. 3 (May 26, 2020): 215–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2020.1759861.

^[16] William E Connolly. “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine.” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (2005): 869–86. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30038467.

^[17] Ibid., 869.

^[18] Harker, Spacing Debt implicates Connolly’s model in the context of Palestine; Karaman, “Urban Neoliberalism with Islamic Characteristics” does the same in Turkey; Miyazaki, Arbitraging Japan examines the resonance machine in Japan; and Pelkmans, “The ‘Transparency’ of Christian Proselytizing in Kyrgyzstan” examines the model in Kyrgyzstan.

^[19] Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,”870.

^[20] Ibid., 872.

^[21] Ibid., 872-3.

^[22] Ibid., 873.

^[23] Ibid., 873.

^[24] Ibid., 879.

^[25] Ibid., 879.

^[26] Ibid., 880.

^[27] Simon Brodbeck. “Violence and Peace in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa.” In Violence and Peace in Sacred Texts, edited by Maria Power and Helen Paynter, 9–28. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17804-7_2., 10.

^[28] Ibid.,18.

^[29] William Buck. Mahabharata. World Literature in Translation. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019, 178.

^[30] Ibid.,184.

^[31] Ibid., 184 (emphasis added).

^[32] Ibid., 184.

^[33] For background on the caste system, see Goghari and Kusi, “An Introduction to the Basic Elements of the Caste System of India.” (“In the system clearly delineated within Hindu sacred texts, there can be only four [castes] – that is, Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra – since the [castes] collectively represent discrete parts of the first being, Purusha. The Brahmins are the priests and teachers and were born from the head of Purusha; the Kshatriyas, the warriors and rulers, were born from the shoulders; the Vaisyas, or traders and merchants, were born from the thighs; and the Sudras, labourers and craftspeople, were born from the feet.”).

^[34] Simon Brodbeck. “Violence and Peace in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa.” In Violence and Peace in Sacred Texts, edited by Maria Power and Helen Paynter, 9–28. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17804-7_2, 21.

^[35] Ibid., 21.

^[36] Ankur Barua. “Spectres of Violence and Landscapes of Peace: Imagining the Religious Other in Patterns of Hindu Modernity.” In Violence and Peace in Sacred Texts, edited by Maria Power and Helen Paynter, 29–51. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17804-7_3.

^[37] Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” 880.

^[38] Rita Manchanda. “Militarised Hindu Nationalism and the Mass Media: Shaping a Hindutva Public Discourse.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (December 1, 2002): 301–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400208723504, 303.

^[39] Ibid., 306.

^[40] Rajagopal, Politics After Television, 15.

^[41] Ibid., 30.

^[42] Ibid., 31.

^[43] Madhav Godbole. Unfinished Innings: Recollections and Reflections of a Civil Servant. 1. publ., Repr. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1996.

^[44] Roshni Sengupta. “Iconography of Violence in Televised Hinduism: The Politics of Images in the Mahabharata.” Continuum 31, no. 1 (January 2, 2017): 150–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2016.1231791, 157.

^[45] Ibid, 157.

^[46] Ibid., 157 (emphasis added).

^[47] Ibid., 159.

^[48] Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” 880.

^[49] Ajay Gehlawat. Bollypolitics: Popular Hindi Cinema and Hindutva. 1st ed. World Cinema. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350401914, 3.

^[50] Karan Mahajan. “India’s Streaming Auteurs.” The New York Review of Books, July 1, 2021. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/indias-streaming-auteurs, 4.

^[51] Christiane Brosius. “Hindutva Intervisuality: Videos and the Politics of Representation.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 36, no. 1–2 (February 1, 2002): 264–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/006996670203600109, 276 (emphasis added).

^[52] Ibid., 292.

^[53] Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” 872 (emphasis added).

^[54]Sahana Udupa. “Enterprise Hindutva and Social Media in Urban India.” Contemporary South Asia 26, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 453–67. https://doi.org/10.1080/09584935.2018.1545007, 453.

^[55] Ibid., 453.

^[56] Ibid., 456.

^[57] Rajagopal, Politics After Television, 31 (emphasis added).

^[58] Gehlawat, Bollypolitics, 8.

^[59] Udupa, “Enterprise Hindutva and Social Media in Urban India,” 455.

^[60] Business Standard. “Who’s Who from Business, Cinema, Politics, Sports Attend Ram Temple Event,” January 22, 2024. https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/who-s-who-from-business-cinema-politics-sports-attend-ram-temple-event-124012200854_1.html.

^[61] Ibid.

^[62] Connolly, “The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,” 877.

^[63] Jaffrelot, Modi’s India, 44.

^[64] Gehlawat, Bollypolitics, 33-4 (emphasis added).

^[65] Moumita Sen, and Kenneth Nielsen. “Gods in the Public Sphere: Political Deification in South Asia.” Religion 52, no. 4 (October 2, 2022): 497–512. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2022.2094780, 504.

^[66] Ibid., 504.

^[67] Ibid., 504.

^[68]Rodrigo Ugarte. “Understanding Gujarat Violence.” Items (blog), Social Science Research Council, March 3, 2020. https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-archives/understanding-gujarat-violence/.

^[69] Leidig, “Hindutva as a Variant of Right-Wing Extremism,” 218.

^[70] Ibid., 235-6.

^[71] Ibid, 236.

^[72] Banaji, “Vigilante Publics,” 341.