Is India under Narendra Modi, who became prime minister in 2014, beginning to resemble the American South under Jim Crow? The term refers 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 racialised chattel slavery such as held sway in fifteen of the then-34 US states plus several US territories at the time the Civil War broke out in 1861—it remains fair to say that if Jim Crow was about the severe marginalisation of black Americans on the ground of their race, then Hindu nationalism under Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is about the attempted marginalisation of a minority, namely, Muslim Indians, on the ground of their religion.
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 marginalised, 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.
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 institutionalised 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.
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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 ethnicised religion. Moreover, both are governed by historically constructed notions of honour and ignominy and do not shy away from violence as a mode of restoring honour and avenging perceived humiliation.
Why do Hindu nationalists exclude Muslims?
What race was to Jim Crow, religion has been to Hindu nationalism since that ideology’s founding a century ago. If white supremacy in the US South meant rejection of racial equality, Hindu nationalism comes with the denial that Muslims and Hindus can be equal in India. And if India’s post-independence constitution has made Hindus and Muslims legally equal, such equality, according to Hindu nationalists, must be reversed, just as the racial equality imposed by Reconstruction required backtracking. White supremacists such as Alfred Moore Waddell, the former Confederate officer who led a bloody 1898 coup against a duly elected, biracial city government in Wilmington, North Carolina, believed that “the white people who settled this country” had by that token superior rights. Hindu nationalists think that Hindus are India’s “original peoples,” which justifies a greater endowment of rights for them. Muslims, say Hindu nationalists, came as “invaders” from the Middle East and Central Asia, and granting them equality with Hindus is a grave historical and political injustice.
In his 22 June 2023 speech to a joint session of the US Congress, Prime Minister Modi offered Hindu nationalism’s reading of Indian history as “a thousand years of slavery,” a standard ideological trope in the movement’s literature. The term “slavery” here is not meant to signify chattel enslavement such as was found in the antebellum South. Instead, it is a metaphor for colonialism. Hindu nationalists believe that India’s colonisation did not begin with the British in 1757, but started more than a millennium earlier when Muhammad ibn al-Qasim led forces of the Umayyad Caliphate in conquering Sindh (then a kingdom in Northwest India, now a province of Pakistan) in the year 711 CE. Later came the establishment of first the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and then Mughal rule (1526–1757). Muslim princes, say Hindu nationalists, humiliated Hindus by forcing them to convert and by destroying Hindu temples, with some of those sites later used for mosques.
In the minds of Hindu nationalists, then, the rise of Islam and Hindu decline in India are two sides of the same coin. It follows that a restoration of Hindu pride not only means rebuilding magnificent Hindu temples, buildings, and statues, but also attacking historic Muslim influences in India and its culture. The BJP government in Delhi and its junior partners in the eighteen states where the BJP rules by itself or as part of a coalition are altering the names of buildings, cities, and roads even when these names date to medieval times. These Hindu nationalists in power believe that India’s arts and architecture, films and music, literature and thinking must be purged of allegedly corrupting Muslim influences no matter how old such influences may be. Today’s Hindu India, the thinking runs, cannot be itself until the symbols of an earlier, Muslim-dominated India are erased.
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Emerging Indian laws
In India, legal discrimination against Muslims has not yet achieved the suffocating ubiquity of racial oppression in the Jim Crow South, but we must recall that Jim Crow laws took time to be put in place. It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that sweeping segregationist policies and racist legal subterfuges such as poll taxes, literacy tests, property qualifications, and “grandfather clauses” were brought to bear with comprehensive force to restrict black Americans to second-class status, bar their way to advancement, and strip them of voting and other rights. How far India’s anti-Muslim laws will go, of course, depends heavily on the BJP’s electoral fortunes at both the national and state levels. Things have gone far enough in an illiberal, exclusionary direction in both Delhi and the states, however, that it is worth taking stock.
Soon after the BJP won reelection in 2019, having increased both its vote and seat share and remaining at the head of its ruling coalition, two of its biggest moves in Parliament were anti-Muslim.
In August 2019, the BJP used its new majority to strip Kashmir of its special autonomy and make it the eighth of India’s “union territories.” These federal entities are run directly by the national government in Delhi, with no governments of their own. The implication was clear: A Muslim-majority state was being shown its proper place in Hindu-majority India.
In December came passage of a change to the Citizenship Act of 1955. This law had imposed no religious criteria on aspiring citizens, but the new law (called the Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA) opened a “fast track” to Indian citizenship for “persecuted minorities” from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
Not only did the CAA rest on the false premise that only Muslim-majority countries near India have religious persecution problems, but it also specified “persecuted minorities” in a way that conspicuously ignored Muslim victims of ill treatment.
Amit Shah, head of the Home Affairs Ministry under Modi, announced that the CAA would set in train the creation of a National Registry of Citizens (NRC). The need for proof-of-citizenship documents imposed by the NRC had the potential to strip millions of their citizenship. Hindus without papers could sidestep the threat, however, by citing their status in the eyes of Indian law as members of a minority persecuted elsewhere in the region. Muslims have no such recourse. Even if born in India, they could face expulsion for want of papers.
If the CAA and NRC resemble Jim Crow’s poll taxes and literacy tests in their intended effect of keeping a disfavoured group from voting, the “anti–love jihad” ordinances of today’s India resemble the anti-miscegenation laws of the American South. Hindu nationalists have long pushed a conspiracy theory that Muslim men are seeking to lure Hindu women into marriage in order to swell Muslim numbers. Interfaith marriages, it is said, must be outlawed lest Hindus find themselves reduced to a minority. The strangeness of the math here—Hindus currently outnumber Muslims in India by more than five to one—has not stopped BJP politicians and ideologues from insisting that the love jihad is a real threat and trying to spread fear that the far-fetched scenario will come to pass. Several BJP-ruled states have passed measures to prevent Muslim men from marrying Hindu women, even if the desire to marry is wholly voluntary on the part of two adults.
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Exclusionary violence in the US South
Jim Crow, of course, was more than unfair laws. Behind the laws stood the ever-present threat of extralegal violence, including but not limited to lynchings. Increasingly, extralegal violence such as lynchings became a backup expedient for enforcing white supremacy, while laws were its mainstay.
Recent comparative research suggests that vigilante violence is frequently enabled by a “politics of impunity,” whereby perpetrators are protected against prosecution or reprisal for their crimes by state actors. Such was the case in the US South, in which lynching perpetrators were seldom punished.
India’s mob violence: Then and now
In India, the primary form of mob violence used to be the riot. Lately, however, riots have declined in frequency, and lynchings are taking their place. Riots and lynchings are different, and exploring how they differ will also clarify what the role of the state is in vigilante violence.
Riots are clashes between civilian mobs. Many people on both sides are targeted for violence. The neutrality of the state—embodied, in effect, by the refusal of its police on the ground to “take sides”—may be in doubt but is not abandoned. A lynching is a mob attack whose target is a single person or at most a handful of people, which makes such attacks different from riots. As a new and growing body of research shows, lynching will not become widespread unless those who lead lynch mobs feel confident that the police and local authorities will look the other way and let lynchers go free. Studies from India are beginning to underline this finding.
Unlike the American South after the close of Reconstruction, India has had no noted tradition of communal lynchings. There have been lynchings in reaction to individual violations of law and order—after traffic accidents, thefts, or “black magic,” for instance—and mob violence has also been known to punish transgressions of entrenched sexual boundaries, as when relationships between Dalit men and upper-caste women come to light. But India has had no sustained, long-term record of Hindu-Muslim lynchings. This may now be changing, however.
Figure 1 shows lynchings since 2009. Modi and the BJP entered government in May 2014, and after that time we see a distinct rise. Figure 2 breaks down lynchings by the victim’s religion. Muslim victims exceed Hindu victims several times over even though Muslims form a much smaller share of the population. The numbers leave no doubt that Muslims have been the main victims of lynching.
It can also be shown that a disproportionately large proportion of lynchings have taken place in states ruled by the BJP. So long as lynching is presented as serving a larger ideological cause, the BJP’s state administrations rarely take action.
Indeed, something worse is now being done. In several BJP states, local officials or the police are increasingly bulldozing Muslim homes and businesses while claiming that Muslims of the vicinity took part in a protest, impeded the celebration of a Hindu festival, or committed a crime. Court orders for these demolitions of property are neither wanted nor sought.
State conduct such as this is disturbingly reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. “Rulers supplemented restrictions on civil liberties by directing, endorsing, or acquiescing in the physical coercion of their subjects. . . . Coercion took many forms, from imprisonment . . . and destruction of property to torture, murder, and state execution.” Legal and extralegal forms of subordination are not the exclusive province of authoritarian states. With power handed to them by the voters, governments in democracies can deploy both forms for illiberal, oppressive ends.
What makes Modi’s India and the Jim Crow United States comparable? It is the idea that electorally legitimated majoritarianism can be used to create an ensemble of laws and practices which seek to deprive a disfavoured group of its rights, subject it to extralegal violence, and reduce it to second-class citizenship.
The emergence of the full-blown Jim Crow system in the post–Civil War United States took several decades. As an ideology, Hindu nationalism has been in power at the national level for only a single decade. The political order preferred by Hindu nationalism is not yet complete or firmly in place; only the first steps have been taken. If the BJP keeps winning elections, there can be no doubt that these steps will continue and the impetus behind them will be stronger. In the United States, Jim Crow went against the Constitution, but the courts for a long time would not apply that document. In India likewise, the judiciary is not playing its assigned role as guarantor of liberal constitutionalism against the trespasses of overweening executives and legislatures. Although it took them until the 1950s to fulfil their role, America’s courts eventually did so and began enforcing civil rights. Will India’s? Whatever the answer, friends of liberal, constitutional democracy will be wise not to count on judges to salvage the situation. In the end, only the voters can decide to stop Hindu nationalism, or else underwrite its final advance. The choice is theirs.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences, and professor of political science at Brown University. He tweets @ProfVarshney.
Connor Staggs is a doctoral candidate in political science at Brown University.
Views are personal.
This article is an edited extract from the authors’ essay ‘Hindu Nationalism and the New Jim Crow’, first published in the Journal of Democracy. Read the full essay here.
(Edited by Prashant)