By Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs
Is India under Narendra Modi, who became prime minister in 2014, beginning to resemble the American South under Jim Crow? The term refers, of course, to the politics of racial oppression that came to dominate in the eleven former Confederate states following the end of Reconstruction in 1877. From about 1880 to 1965, each of these states saw grave democratic backsliding as elected legislative bodies and executive authorities ignored or circumvented the citizenship, due-process, and equal-protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868); deprived African Americans of the voting rights they had been guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment (1870); and directly or indirectly supported extralegal vigilante violence against blacks, especially in the form of lynchings.
Allowing for historical differences—India never had a system of racialized chattel slavery such as held sway in fifteen of the then-34 U.S. states plus several U.S. territories at the time the Civil War broke out in 1861—it remains fair to say that if Jim Crow was about the severe marginalization of black Americans on the ground of their race, then Hindu nationalism under Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is about the attempted marginalization of a minority, namely, Muslim Indians, on the ground of their religion.1
As Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen argue, the motives behind Jim Crow were not only economic (a desire to keep the minority’s labor cheap) but also political and social: fear of black political power in the South, where blacks continued to make up a large share of the populace, and fear of the social equality presaged by the end of slavery and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.2
Here is where the parallels with Modi’s Hindu nationalism begin. Just as a key aim of Jim Crow was to blunt the Reconstruction Amendments and turn blacks into second-class citizens, Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims and turn them into marginalized, less than fully equal citizens. White supremacy and Hindu supremacy are twins in that sense. Their histories are different, but their political objectives and discourses are much the same.
Similarity marks even the methods deployed: exclusionary laws, segregation, and vigilante violence. Just as in the Jim Crow South a combination of state-level election victories and extralegal methods was deployed to deprive blacks of their rights, Hindu nationalism is using both legislative power and extralegal methods to subdue Muslims. Vigilante violence, condoned or supported by the state, has been on the rise since Modi and his party came to power. In short, elections are being used to create legislatures that pass anti-Muslim laws, while street-level vigilantism supports the formal politics of exclusion. This was also how democracy worked in the American South after Reconstruction collapsed in the late 1870s.
Unlike Nazi Germany in its targeting of Jews, the Jim Crow project was not eliminationist. Hindu nationalists likewise seek not the physical elimination of Muslims, but rather their relegation to second-class citizenship. The Third Reich had concentration camps for Jews. The Jim Crow South did not have such camps, nor does India today. To annihilate the equality that blacks were promised after the Civil War was the objective of Jim Crow. Hindu nationalists also seek to abolish the equality granted to Muslims by India’s 1950 Constitution. Jim Crow was about white supremacy; Hindu nationalism is about Hindu supremacy.
Jim Crow lasted for the larger part of a century, not weakening until the 1950s and not ending until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Hindu-nationalist project is in its early phases and can still be forestalled. Before a Jim Crow–style Hindu-nationalist order is institutionalized via political and legislative processes, voters can remove the BJP from power via defeat at the polls. If voters do not turn back Hindu nationalism, it is our grim prediction that its similarities to Jim Crow will only grow. Parallels are already disturbingly in evidence.
Exclusionary Ideologies
Jim Crow was rooted in the idea of racial hierarchy and Hindu nationalism is driven by belief in a religiously defined national community. The notion of equality among groups is an anathema to both, and the presumption of group exclusion and hierarchy a defining feature of each. In one case, the exclusion is racially formulated and in the other, the basis for exclusion is religious, or what one might call ethnicized religion. Moreover, both are governed by historically constructed notions of honor and ignominy and do not shy away from violence as a mode of restoring honor and avenging perceived humiliation.
This story was originally published in journalofdemocracy.org. Read the full story here .