Rohit Chopra is a professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University and the author of Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from Colonialism to Cyberspace, The Gita for a Global World: Ethical Action in an Age of Flux, and other books.
His research centers on global media and cultural identity, new media, and media and memory, with a focus on global Hindu nationalist and far-right online communities.
We discussed Narendra Modi’s rise to power, his use of Hindu nationalism as a political tool, and India’s lessons for America.
Glossary
The discussion goes into some detail about people, places, and political parties that may sound unfamiliar to some listeners, so below we include a brief glossary if you need a little more context:
The Congress
The Indian National Congress, colloquially the Congress Party, or simply the Congress, was founded in 1885 and became the leading movement organizing for independence from the British Empire under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. After independence in 1947, Congress dominated Indian politics for the next half century, initially led by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. His daughter, Indira Gandhi—the surname is from her husband Feroze Gandhi, not related to Mahatma—was prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977, and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. Her son Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister from 1984 to 1989. He was assassinated in 1991.
The BJP and the RSS
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been the ruling political party in India since 2014 under the incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP is aligned with right-wing, Hindu nationalist politics and has links to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a far-right paramilitary organization that began life as a Hindu cultural organization in 1925.
The Emergency
The Emergency in India was a 21-month period from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency across the country after a court found her guilty of electoral malpractices, invalidating her election win. Citing imminent internal and external threats to the Indian state, the government suspended elections, imprisoned political opponents, censored the press, banned worker strikes, and imposed wage freezes.
The Babri Mosque and the Ram Temple
The Babri Mosque (or Babri Masjid) was built in 1528 in the city of Ayodhya, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (where the Taj Mahal is located, a few hundred miles away).
A Hindu nationalist mob destroyed it in 1992, claiming it had been built on the birthplace of Lord Rama, an important god of the Hindu pantheon, and that it had been a sacred Hindu site before the mosque’s construction. In 2019 (after Modi was entrenched as prime minister), the Supreme Court of India decided to give the disputed land to Hindus for construction of a temple, while Muslims were given land nearby.
Shah Bano case
Shah Bano Begum, a Muslim woman, was divorced by her husband under customary Muslim law in 1978. In India, “personal laws” govern matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, and may be decided by different religious communities, and under personal law, the husband would not need to pay alimony. She sued, and in 1985, won the right to alimony in a case heard by India’s Supreme Court. Protests by Muslims against the judgment broke out across India. A group of Muslim politicians also tried to get the verdict nullified.
Amit Shah
India’s current Minister of Home Affairs who has been accused of crimes including arranging an extrajudicial killing, but has never been found guilty.
Umar Khalid
A student activist who has been accused of sedition and later of being a “key conspirator” in ethnic clashes and has been in jail since 2020 without being formally charged or having a trial.
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