F O R U M      3 0 3

Nikolai Ssorin‐­Chaikov
Department of History
Higher School of Economics St Petersburg
St Petersburg 198099
Russian Federation
nssorinchaikov@hse.ru

References
Chatterjee, P. 1986. Nationalist thought and the colonial world: a derivative discourse?. London: Zed Books.
Dumont, L. 1970. Homo hierarchicus: an essay on the caste system. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Snyder, T. 2017. On tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century. New York: Crown.
Taylor, C. 1992. Multiculturalism and ‘the politics of recognition’: an essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Turner, T. 2005. ‘Marxian value theory: an anthropological perspective’, Anthropological Theory 8: 43–­56.

Keynotes

A R J U N A P PA D U R A I

How to kill a democracy

I am keenly conscious that the situation in India is changing rapidly and that we are
witnessing new assaults on Indian democracy every day. For this very situation, it
might be helpful to look back at what has happened in the short period since the abro-
gation of Article 370 in Kashmir, and to place this short period in the context of the
longue durée of the subcontinent.
We are witnessing India’s first mass movement since the movement for national
Independence, which began in the 1880s and ended in 1947. At no time since 1947 have
we seen such an inspiring show of democratic dissent, bringing together students and
workers, old and young, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and other faiths,
Marxists, liberals and traditional nationalists, government servants and corporate lead-
ers, men and women. In this mass movement, women, students and youth in general
are the leaders, with Muslims speaking their minds with a courage born out of the sense
that other options are non‐­existent. The Emergency, a brief period of repressive state
control over all dissent, under the regime of Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977, had
some of these features, but the broad opposition to Indira Gandhi now recognises that
she had a greater ability to listen, learn and respond, than the current regime.

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

3 0 4      F O R U M

At a time when many of us are on the barricades, either physically or politically, it

is easy to be caught up in the news of the day, the week or the month. At such times, we
need to bear India’s long history in mind and put our apocalyptic moment in long‐­term
perspective. In this light, I have three observations to offer.
The first has to do with the long history of the relationship between Gujarat, the
state that nurtured the careers of Modi and Shah over decades, and the Godhra train‐­
burning of 2002, a relationship that helped them to leverage a national platform for
their vision of a polity cleansed of Muslims. But these events in Gujarat have a deeper
history, which goes back to 1956, when the Gujarati‐­speakers of Bombay lost the city
to Maratha regionalists and the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were born. From the
Bombay Gujarati point of view, Bombay was the city built by Gujarati and Parsi cap-
ital, but was also the long‐­term home of many Marathi‐­speakers (whom the Gujarati
mercantile elite stigmatised as lowly domestic workers and factory serfs) and Muslims
(whom they already feared and disliked because of the long Hindutva historiography
of the Muslim ravaging of the Hindu temples of Gujarat). Thus, the loss of Bombay
in 1956 was a double loss for many Gujaratis, which was only redeemed in part by the
ascendance and royal status of people like the Ambanis.
The southern end of Gujarat meets the northern end of Maharashtra on the Arabian
Sea, in a belt that runs from Mandwa to Daman and Diu, always a zone of struggle
between Gulf pirates, coastal Marathi‐­speaking magnates and state functionaries, and
Gujarati merchants and smugglers. Though many in Gujarat do not identify strongly
with Bombay (and its loss in 1956), for ideologues and strategists like Shah and Modi,
the mutual traffic between them, the Adanis, the Ambanis and other smaller Bombay
tycoons, is the key counterweight to the power of Maratha regionalism, which has
become openly anti‐­Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and anti‐­Gujarati again, in the weeks
since Udhav Thackeray became Chief Minister of Maharashtra. In short, the Modi–­
Shah regime is built on its whipping up of regional angers and hatreds in Gujarat from
2002 to 2014, and this Gujarati power base for Modi is a key part of the current BJP
effort to impose a reign of terror in much of the rest of India. Gandhian non‐­violence
is not simply a product of the deep strain of Jaina ahmisa in Gujarat. Rather, Gandhi
flew in the face of the massive propensity of Gujarati populations in Surat, Baroda,
Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat to turn to violence against Muslims since at
least the late 18th century. The Modi–­Shah combination has leveraged this long‐­term
Gujarati history into a national programme for ethnic cleansing.
The abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution and the dismemberment of the
state in Kashmir have been much commented on since August 2019. Some commen-
tators have seen these frightening events as rehearsals of what is to come elsewhere in
India, and others as extensions of state repression in Kashmir and elsewhere in India by
all the ruling parties since 1947. The fate of ordinary Kashmiris looks dire and India’s
claim to be a democracy is facing its most severe test.
The causes of the recent decision to accomplish a legal coup in Kashmir surely
have long‐­term causes and motives for the Modi regime. But the short‐­term trigger
was the need to give their electorate something to salve the diplomatic defeat in the
aftermath of Balakot in February 2019. The abrogation of Article 370 for Kashmir in
August 2019 is a blood offering for the BJP military mouse that roared in February
2019. Thus, Kashmir is indeed a proxy for Pakistan, but in a new context. The stunning
abrogation of state privileges for Kashmir in August 2019 may have been prepared
months, perhaps years, ago, but it became a necessity for the BJP in the course of this

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 F O R U M      3 0 5

past year. This sequence of events was not inevitable. But it follows a logic that makes
terrifying sense.
There is another long‐­term proxy logic at play for the BJP in Kashmir since August
2019. And that has to do with Gujarat after the pogroms against Muslims in 2002. In
the months after the Godhra train‐­burning, a democratically elected government in
Gujarat led by Chief Minister Modi, ably abetted by the present Home Minister, over-
saw a systematic effort to target Muslims, to sponsor mob violence against them, to
mobilise detailed data to target Muslim leaders, homes and businesses, and to cordon
off the Muslim population of Gujarat in the name of peace and security. This series of
actions by the Modi regime in Gujarat was largely accomplished by organised mobs,
but was closely supported by the bureaucracy and armed forces at the disposal of the
Chief Minister. This time in Kashmir, the Indian army and its various paramilitary
arms did not need mobs to inflict terror in Kashmir. They are the organised mob that
holds Kashmiris hostage in their own land and homes. Gujarat was Modi’s political
lab for his push to national power and the incomplete effort to terrorise Muslims in
Gujarat after the Godhra incident. This period witnessed the first major state exper-
iment in mobilising legal, bureaucratic and military power in the service of reducing
Indian Muslims to bare humans.
During this period, therefore, Kashmir played a dual role for the BJP. It confirmed
the power of a Hinduised state machinery to terrorise Muslims, as in Gujarat in 2002,
and it restored the reputation of this regime in the eyes of its followers, by making
Kashmir perform the role of a fully dominated territory of India, the displaced fantasy
of Indian rule over Pakistan. Thus has Kashmir become Kashmiristan, where India can
now exercise its full dominion without losing the appearance of being a parliamentary
democracy, at least among many opinion‐­makers across the world.
Another question that the attack on democracy by the BJP–­RSS machine in the
last six months raises is about what the long‐­term ends of the ruling regime are, and
how it has gotten this far in the effort to dismantle the infrastructure of democracy in
India. Here I offer a detour into the longue durée of the subcontinent and the nature
of caste, class and power in this region over two millennia. No serious anthropologist
or historian of India can claim to have decisively answered the following basic ques-
tion: why has caste –­as an ideology, a social formation and a cosmology –­spread and
survived over two millennia or more without any sort of central political authority,
bureaucracy or continental religious organisation of priests, monks or clerical staff?
The spread and persistence of this unique form of racial, ethnic and economic strati-
fication has been studied in all its avatars, variations and disguises but its remarkable
region‐­wide tenacity has not yet been accounted for adequately. The puzzling fact is
that caste functions in a cellular, metastatic and decentralised manner, in which some
sort of social and political DNA replicates itself successfully across a remarkable range
of ecological, social and historical contexts, extending from Pakistan to Bangladesh and
from Nepal to Sri Lanka.
Whatever the answer to this massive puzzle, it casts an unexpected light on the
BJP–­RSS organisational structure and might let us see the current regime as not a
smooth machinery of media savvy, populist militarisation and xenophobic mobilisa-
tion, but as a blundering, uncoordinated and poorly run series of initiatives, policies
and programmes. The actual roll‐­out of every major BJP policy since 2014 has been a
chaotic instance of shoot now, check targets later.

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

3 0 6      F O R U M

Some of this blundering, ad hoc quality is visible in demonetisation, in the hot and
cold moves in relation to Pakistan, in the ridiculously ambitious housing and sanita-
tion policies of the state, in the chaotic enforcement of the new population policies in
Assam and so on. In truth, the only place where the Modi–­Shah machine has shown
anything like a centralised organisation is in the elections of 2014 and 2019, and even
that success is in the process of eroding and unravelling, in Rajasthan, Bengal, Kerala,
Maharashtra, Jharkand and other states. The biggest series of clownish manoeuvres
was in Maharashtra, where Modi and Shah were brilliantly outmanoeuvred by Sharad
Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray and others who nursed grudges against the BJP. So much
for brilliant central organisation.
In short, the BJP–­RSS power machine works in the same way as caste has worked
for millennia, not because there is a brilliant central machine in which the parts and
the whole are tightly meshed, but because there is something in the BJP formula
of xenophobia, anti‐­minority rage, anti‐­secularism and promises of a quick fix that
helped it succeed from place to place and given it the longish run it has enjoyed in
Delhi. This is cellular, metastatic fascism, and not vertebrate or coordinated fascism.
Herein lies the big difference between Nazi Germany and today’s India. In addition
to this structural dynamic, we also need to recall how Hindu India has traditionally
regarded powerful persons. Modi evidently has a massive charisma surplus, both
in relation to others in the BJP–­RSS world and in relation to the whole array of
opposition leaders, most of whom would make the claim that they are colourlessness
a hyperbole. He is a Hindu samraat full‐­blown, often wearing the turbaned head
gear of royalty, who also picks up on the iconography of the militant sadhu and the
celibate ascetic. These images have long cohabited in the Hindu imaginary and they
operate in an economy of gifts, ritual deference and tribute, which has nothing to do
with civility, law or due process.
In this cosmology, the king upholds the dharmic order and does whatever is needed
to accomplish this, including the expansion of territory, the extraction of tribute, the
personal settlement of disputes, the distribution of titles, honours and fiefdoms, and
the triumphalist elimination of enemies. This is the Hindu‐­rashtra, and what Modi
and Shah have done is to capture enough of the resources of a modern nation‐­state
to perform the drama of a Hindu theatre‐­state (the phrase is from the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz) with enough force and fakery to capture a major part of the electorate
for the last six years. Modi in particular has gained tremendous mileage by annexing
the means and procedures of an electoral democracy to the messages, icons and rituals
of an ersatz Hindu kingdom.
India, however, is not just following a global swing to the authoritarian right. It
is an innovator. The innovation that is now being tried out in India is the successful
closing of the gap between procedural fascism and substantive fascism. Procedural fas-
cism is exemplified by the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution in Kashmir,
the NRC process in Assam, The Citizenship Amendment Bill and the recent Supreme
Court Ruling on Ayodhya. In each case, the executive, the judiciary and the legislature
have made fascism far more respectable than it ever was in India, at the highest formal
levels. At the same time, the spate of rapes, murders, burnings, lynchings, and other
humiliations of women, Dalits, Muslims and children throughout India have raised
substantive fascism to an unimaginable public level.
A part of the longer history of today’s procedural fascism has its root in the
colonial ideologies of enumeration, classification and control. These ideologies were

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 F O R U M      3 07

part of the inclusive imperialism of the British and the development ambitions of the
Nehruvian order in which the state was the developmental tool of the nation. But
today, with the post‐­democratic turn to fascism worldwide, a new order is emerging
that seems to flag the end of the era of the citizen. India is at the forefront of this
development.
The idea of citizenship was linked in its Latin derivation to the city (civitas), civil-
ity (civilis) and to other related words that implied urbanity, civic norms and hospi-
tality. In the age of liberal democracy, born from the constitutions of France and the
USA in the late 18th century, citizenship as an idea anchored the rights of citizens to
participate freely, fully and equally in political life. The developments of the subse-
quent centuries saw the birth of the idea of representation, of elections and of political
parties, all seen as further ways of expressing the rights of citizens in large countries.
The problem was that in this view the city was the boundary of citizenship and in
modern times this boundary morphed into the boundary of the modern nation‐­state.
As Michel Foucault showed, the era of the nation‐­state was also the era of censuses,
territorial sovereignty, panoptical incarceration and a general rise in governmentality,
by which he meant the penetration of state power into every aspect of human life. Still,
the original idea of citizenship retained a kind of spectral life, as it became the legal
basis of national identity (as formalised in the universality of passports, for example).
In the course of the last three decades, we have witnessed the rise of extreme national-
ism, and national citizenship was no longer sufficient as a credible basis for belonging
in the political community. Citizenship was no longer sufficient. The nation‐­state now
needs what I call ’statizens’.
What is a statizen? Here India is the pioneer, notably with the revival of the
National Register of Citizens mechanism in Assam. This is a new effort by the Modi
regime to realise a pre‐­existing legal mechanism to pursue political enemies, and it
seems to have become an example for other states in India. The violence of the NRC
policy has many dimensions, which include anti‐­Muslim violence, anti‐­migrant pol-
icies, extraordinarily cruelty towards marginal populations, impossible demands for
proof of citizenship and efforts to consolidate Hindutva control of all regions that
adjoin other (Muslim) nations. The dimension that concerns me here is the new cen-
trality of bureaucratic documentation as the sole and overriding criterion of citizen-
ship. The statizen is one who belongs because he has been granted a state‐­certified
document. All his or her rights flow from that fact alone. There is a complex history
here. We could go back to the census and its workings in colonial India as well as to
various forms of registration for property, security or social benefits, both during
colonial rule and after Independence in 1947. But throughout the century and a half
of this prior history, state documentation was seen as proof of an identity that had
other roots, whether territorial, familial, religious or natural. This extra‐­state source
of citizenship has been withering for some time in India and the decisive moment of
its demise was the success of the Aadhaar card. Many activists protested the Aadhaar
card on the grounds that it would become a basis for controlling dissent and iden-
tifying political enemies rather than serving as a tool for social entitlements. They
were not wrong. The real innovation of Aadhaar was not its biometric infrastructure
but its success in defining a state‐­issued document as the basis of all of life –­voting,
rations, loans, taxation and more. Aadhaar was the midwife of the birth of the statizen
in India.

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

3 0 8      F O R U M

The NRC policy is simply a weaponisation of the logic behind Aadhaar. And
it will surely spread to other states. The new forms of documentation mark a trou-
bling new moment in the rise of statism over nationalism. When the nation‐­state was
born as a political form, the state was seen as the guarantor and bureaucratic tool
for ensuring the proper allocation of rights, protections and freedoms to national
citizens, but nationality was the justification for state power. Now, a little more than
two centuries after the birth of the nation‐­state, the state and its powers have become
the primary source of value, normativity and legitimacy, and the nation is a flexible
concept that is a secondary attribute of citizens. Thus, extreme nationalism is sim-
ply the alibi and Trojan horse for something far more dangerous, which is extreme
statism. And extreme statism requires a population of statizens, that is, inhabitants
whose very right to life (as well as to liberty, dignity, well‐­being) depends on their
documented status as statizens. It is true that the first victims of this process are the
poor, the marginal, the displaced, the occupied and the minor. But we –­erstwhile
bourgeois citizens –­are next in line. All of us will have to endure the price of being
turned from citizens into statizens. And the price for some of us will be exclusion,
expulsion or extermination.
This is not a minor or incremental change. It is a potentially major change in the
logic of political sovereignty in India and elsewhere. It is a tectonic shift that explains
what has puzzled many of us in trying to account for the global shift to right‐­wing
populist authoritarian regimes. Nationalism –­white, brown or yellow –­is no longer
an end but a means, a means to the democratic installation of anti‐­democratic regimes.
Right‐­wing rulers win elections, but their aim is not so much ethnonational purity as
the absolute power of states to define affiliation, belonging and legal existence. The
electoral blocs that voted for Modi, Trump, Erdogan, Bolsanaro and many other dic-
tators may have been motivated by racism, anti‐­globalism, fear of economic displace-
ment or the like, but they were electoral fodder for a bigger project, which is the eclipse
of the nation by the state.
The sacralisation of the state is not without precedent. The Soviet Union and Mao’s
China are major examples of state‐­defined nationalism, in which ideas about the ethnic
uniqueness of Han Chinese or of ethnic Russians were not an end but a means to the
overarching power of the state. Going further back in time, many of the great empires
of the world, such as the Roman, the Ottoman, the Mughal and the British were also
not about ethnos but about the sacrality of the ruling royal house. But today’s statizens
are the undesirables of failed democracies, of modern nation‐­states that have opted to
drop the idea of ‘the people’, the ‘demos’ or the ‘citizenry’ in favour of the counted,
documented, loyal and certified supporters of the state. In India, they can be Hindu or
Muslim, Dalit or Brahmin, Kashmiri or Adivasi, so long as they line up with the ruling
regime. This is the sole requirement of a statizen.
Some of us have long recognised the need for a fundamental change in the uni-
versal acceptance of the architecture of the nation‐­state. Our hopes have been fulfilled
but in a horrible way. The sacrality of the nation is about to be democratically eclipsed
by the sacrality of the state. States will now define who belongs to them, they will
war among each other for global resources, they will make cynical alliances, they will
manipulate global capitalist possibilities –­for resources, for technologies, for markets
and for profits, all to advance themselves. And since authoritarian populism is the best
way to assure compliant statizens, it is likely to be the hegemonic ideology of the
coming decades. India is committed to this new religion of the state, but it is not alone

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

 F O R U M      3 0 9

in this. Everywhere we see the transformation of the state into a new political form,
which claims monopoly of both political means and moral ends. Statizens will provide
the ‘democratic’ army of this new form. What is the ideological fuel that drives this
transformation?
One answer is impunity. If anyone in India today says or does anything that fol-
lows the BJP line on citizenship, security, patriotism, patriarchialism or journalism, or
the BJP line on cows, statues, space travel or women’s place in society, they can rape,
maim or lynch selected others anywhere, anytime. Impunity means the right to brutal-
ise others with the near guarantee of no legal consequences.
Others have used the word impunity to describe the worst of India’s current civic
order and public life. But where does this culture of impunity come from? First, from
the utter cynicism of the top leadership of the BJP and their minions in all official insti-
tutions, at all levels. The second source is the extraordinary corruption generated by
the alliance between corporate interests and politicians, indeed an old story in India but
now characterised by a level of official indifference that is unprecedented: the scale of
disappeared debts in the Indian banking system is one symptom of the new corruption.
The third factor is the thorough criminalisation of the legislature, at all levels, with
thugs, rapists and killers increasingly and proudly deliberating on how to shape the law
of the land. The fourth force is social media, which allows for a new and sickening form
of proletarian pornography, in which poor men consume images of rape, murder and
mayhem because it brings them ‘sukoon’ (calm, peace), as one recent report shows us.
This last remarkable story, in which a poor proletarian male from North India says
of the easy availability of documentary rape porn in Uttar Pradesh, that it brings men
like himself some peace or calm, gives us a clue to the most terrifying source of the
current links between formal and substantive fascism in India. It is what we may call
the syndrome of aspirational hatred. Normally, we associate the word aspiration with
social and economic mobility, hope and legitimate social improvement for oneself or
one’s kin. But the Indian ruling party and the state elite have installed fear, anger, scape-
goating and exclusion as the highest principles of civic and political life. Thus, aspi-
ration itself has been redirected away from better jobs, more economic security and
greater social respectability towards a darker form of the revolution of rising expecta-
tions, in which the new role models are Muslim‐­hunting cabinet members, corrupt and
sexually predatory saint‐­politicians and encounter‐­wise policemen.
When poor and marginalised men, or jobless or badly employed youth, or slum‐­
confined casual labourers are motivated, mobilised and seduced by leaders of this type,
who also offer them dreams of national and ethnic purity, they follow these examples
in their own worlds, and hunt, maim and kill those to whom they can feel superior.
Since they are guaranteed impunity (except in exceptional circumstances), the normal
restraints of prudence, sanity and humanity are easily shed, especially when there is so
little to lose. Aspirational hatred is hatred as imitation of one’s betters, and in India’s
case today’s most powerful betters are the worst of the worst.
Hence, the most important link between procedural fascism and substantive fas-
cism in India today is the absence of decent examples of leadership and decent models
for mobility. When we are ruled by thieves, killers and rapists, who enjoy and distrib-
ute immunity generously, it is no surprise that many begin to believe that hate, anger
and the degradation of those who are even weaker than yourself can take you nowhere
but up.

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

3 1 0      F O R U M

This is a hard trick to pull off and its fuel could well be running out. India is not
Gujarat‐­Pradesh (Gujarat plus Uttar Pradesh), Modi is not Nehru or Vikramaditya,
Ajay Singh Bisht is a pathological distortion of Gorakhpanthi ideals. Furthermore,
the politics of hate, stigma and killing do not draw on renewable emotional resources.
The demand for satisfaction is always ahead of the fulfilment of these dark desires and
sooner or later, enemies return to being neighbours, sub‐­humans reclaim their human-
ity and differences cease to be triggers of anxiety.
Furthermore, Indians of every type have had more than six decades in which they
have gotten used to the idea of some sort of everyday amity, to the notion that they
need not stick to their ‘aukat’ and to the idea that the state has to be accountable for
jobs, food and health. India has lived too long with these ideals to fall for a Hinduised
fantasy of macho violence, ethnic cleansing and hunting for new minorities to demo-
nise. India is a land of a million minorities and no majority. Indeed, the care of minor
populations is strictly identical to the care of us all. There is some evidence that this
realisation is the glue and the fuel that is driving the remarkable efflorescence of civil
disobedience that we see across the country today. This will not be an easy struggle
because it is a battle between dreams. And somewhere in that battle, a better reality
will and must emerge.

Arjun Appadurai
Media, Culture and Communication
New York University, NY 10012‐­1126
USA
aa133@nyu.edu

SUSAN HARDING

Getting things back to normal: populism,

fundamentalism and liberal desire

The terms ‘populism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ are of relatively recent vintage and were
coined by activists who proudly owned them. The original populists of the 1890s in the
USA were advancing the rights of farmers and workers; the original fundamentalists of
the 1920s in the USA were defending their Protestant faith. However, since their orig-
inary moments, the terms have been taken up by outsiders, by professional observers
of political activism –­journalists, pundits, scholars and policy experts –­who lodged
them in a discursive apparatus with roots in the Enlightenment in order to label, disci-
pline, marginalise and dismiss forms of popular politics deemed illiberal or excessively

© 2021 European Association of Social Anthropologists.