Modi Ka Parivar: Reactive ethnicity and the articulation of long-distance Hindu Nationalism amongst Indian-Americans

• In Event: 40420 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Politics and Democracy

Abstract

In both 2020 and 2024, a plurality of Indian-Americans supported and planned to vote for the Democratic party ticket in the US. Surprisingly, many of these individuals simultaneously support or strongly support the far-right, Hindu Nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in India. How do we account for these two apparently contradictory sets of politics with the same population? How do these individuals reconcile the competing political visions of these two parties? Drawing on extensive ethnographic, interview, and archival data sources in both the US and India, this paper situates Indian-Americans’ paradoxical politics lies within the transnational conditions of their lives by following them as they move across borders. I show that, at home in the US, Indian-American Hindus, who experience ethnoracial marginality despite attaining high socioeconomic and political standing in the US, may lean into Hindu Nationalism as a response. Drawing on theories of political articulation, I show how the BJP channels these experiences into long-distance partisanship through a variety of proxies that interpenetrate Indian-American community life, including community and religious organizations, family members and friends returning from visits, and social media messaging. However, when visiting India as part of a majority (Hindu) community and faced with the real religious polarization and conflict that results from Hindu nationalist policies, they encounter evidence and have experiences that contradict their political beliefs as Democrats in the US. I draw on data during these visits to show how they are able to continue maintaining support for the BJP in these circumstances. I show that they are able to actively use discourses of development to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes with supporting multiculturalism back home and ethnic majoritarianism in India. These findings suggest we actively study political sense-making across borders to make sense of the contradictions of diasporic politics.

Author

• Nisarg Mehta, University of Chicago