This is the last of three discussions in Violent Majorities: Indian and Israeli Ethno-nationalism, a Recall This Book series put together by the anthropologists Ajantha Subramanian and Lori Allen. First Ajantha and Lori spoke with Balmurli Natrajan about the slippery slope to a multiculturalism of caste in India. Then Natasha Roth-Rowland joined them to discuss what the most extreme Israeli ethno-nationalists share with the established political ruling parties. Here Ajantha and Lori join RTB host John Plotz to unpack the key ideas from those conversations.
A longer version of all three conversations aired recently on Recall This Book, a podcast partnered with Public Books. You can listen to the interviews here or by subscribing to Recall This Book on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Ajantha Subramanian (AS): I can start by saying I really appreciated Murli’s characterization of the Hindu nationalist project as having a twofold structure. He talked about how, in the effort to manufacture hegemony, this project constructs the Muslim as the racialized external other, and the Dalit, by contrast, as the ethnicized internal other.
What was particularly striking was his discussion of the racialization of the Muslim, which explicitly draws upon fascist discourses about the Jew in the early 20th century. He said that the racialization of the Muslim in India is easier to accomplish, and that often it’s done through the use of state and vigilante violence. But the making of the Hindu “us,” through the incorporation of Dalits and other populations, is actually much harder. Hindutva has a harder time constructing “the people” that are necessary for growing it from an elite project into a mass movement. This is because so many of the constituent parts of the Hindu us—not just Dalits, but a whole bunch of others—turn out to be recalcitrant subjects.
This project consists of a constant back and forth between claiming these recalcitrant groups as part of the Hindu “us,” and deeming them as actually antinational, or part of the ever-expanding “them,” when they refuse to comply with Hindu nationalist ideology. And the easiest way to stabilize that boundary is violence.
This also connects well to the conversation about Israel. In the case of Israel, you also have this tension around who is the “us” and who is the “them.” And the “them” can be this ever-expanding category, that at one moment might be just the Muslim and the Palestinian, but at another moment could also include the liberal, the secularist, the queer person, etc.
John Plotz (JP): You’re saying something more than just that nationalist governments work well on a friend-foe distinction. You’re actually saying something more about the slipperiness of the need for, especially in the Hindu nationalist case, Dalits to both be inside and outside of the national body. Is that right?
AS: Right, that’s what Murli means by ethnicization—that ethnicization is the idea of horizontal difference, which obscures the violence of caste hierarchy. So, caste is a particularly important sticking point for the Hindu nationalist project, because it’s very difficult to talk about caste as anything other than violent hierarchy. To ethnicize the Dalit is to somehow obscure that reality of caste and to make the coexistence of different castes into a form of happy multiculturalism. Hindutva has become more of a mass politics, especially in the last 30 years. Groups that you think would’ve been far more resistant, and we’d have expected to see through these overtures, have actually become conscripted into this project. Obviously there’s something that this nationalist ideology is offering them. Murli had different takes on what that might be, and Lori talked about disenfranchised youth, men in particular, who derive a sense of satisfaction and pride from being foot soldiers in this project.
LA: It’s really important to understand the kind of ego satisfaction that especially young men enjoy through their participation in these violent thug groups. Their violent acts give them prestige as well as standing within their communities. In terms of the Hilltop Youth, which are one group of Israeli settler thugs, often young men—there is some research showing that some of these people are marginalized folks who feel that, by engaging in this violent expression of Israeli-Jewish supremacy, they’re taking a place in society that is important, important to the nation. The Israeli army has in fact started to try to incorporate them as shock troops in the West Bank.
In Israel, one of the dynamics that Natasha helped us understand was the way that the far right gets incorporated into the state and pushes the center rightward.
The whole point is that in both of these ethno-nationalist projects, the goal is political hegemony. And the place of the state in that goal has changed over time for different groups, whether or not they are committed to the state or are anarchist and outside the state, like the Hilltop Youth. The point is that they want to redeem the land, however they’re defining that, in a politically hegemonic way.
However, far-right groups have a different orientation toward the state at different moments. The religious right has slowly become increasingly powerful within the Israeli army and the military forces, partly because of their greater discipline, apparently. They have risen in the ranks, and so there are more religious right officers within the army. In all these different ways, we’re seeing elements of the state being taken over by the far or extreme right.
AS: The history that Natasha tracked was one where there’s a kind of increasing blurring of the boundary between the far-right movement and the state, and between state violence and extraparliamentary violence. But she also said that, at different moments, it was convenient to externalize certain forms of violence as nonstate. Here, too, we see a shift. In 1994, when Baruch Goldstein goes and shoots up the mosque in Hebron, the preferred alibi at the time was that “well, he was an American settler”; that this was a kind of imported extremism. But that alibi is no longer necessary, and in fact, there’s been a total embrace of vigilantism as necessary and legitimate in Israel. So, now you’ve got current National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir handing out guns to settlers to go and take over the West Bank.
LA: And the acceptance of this vigilante violence and the pushing of the red lines of what is acceptable violence is also a reflection of our global moment as well, where we’ve seen a shift of extreme right parties becoming more central to governments across Europe and the United States.
JP: That relates to the connection between a diasporic minoritarian presence in other countries and the extremist majoritarian logic of the in-country ethno-nationalism. Lori, I take your point about the rising ethno-nationalism within the diaspora, and we should include the United States in that. But nonetheless, those are groups that are operating as minorities within that complex ethno-nationalist context in the West, who also looking back toward India or Israel. What are your thoughts about the way that these conversations help us think about that tension or that duality?
AS: One of Natasha’s main points is that we have to think about the far right as always already transnational. Jabotinsky was from Odessa, but his story is a transnational one.
LA: There’s a great book by Daniel Kupfert Heller called Jabotinsky’s Children, which traces the development of Betar, the youth wing of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement. Heller argues that the transnationalization of that movement from early on was core to their political project and served as a way of gaining power specifically by bringing American Jews into the picture.
AS: Yeah. In the Israel case, Natasha’s argument is that we have to think of the Israeli right wing as transnational all the way through. In the Indian case, it’s a different trajectory. The Hindutva project is also transnational from the outset, insofar as it derives a lot of its inspiration from European fascism. In that sense, ideologically it’s part of that same formation. The RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] was the first institutionalization of the Hindutva project, and it starts in 1925. From the start, they’re using a lot of the same language as European fascists. One of their founding fathers even travels to Italy to meet Mussolini. So, there’s a kind of fascist diaspora, in an ideological sense, that all of these groups are a part of. But in terms of actually having a presence in the US, that’s much later.
LA: I have a question about the timing of this. Is it the case that the Indian diaspora became important to the Hindutva project once the Indian diaspora in the US becomes a strong ethnic minority in that context?
AS: Initially there’s an effort to exploit the cultural anxieties of the diaspora. And this is happening not just in the US but in other parts of the diaspora, in Trinidad and Mauritius, and in the UK. You’ve got Hindu nationalist outfits starting organizational work in all these places. What they’re mainly doing is doing summer camps for kids and trying to address the anxieties around cultural loss that are being expressed by people in the diaspora. I don’t know at what point that begins to translate into much more active financial support from the diaspora for the Hindutva project in India. It’s very clear in the early ’90s that it’s already happening. This is when the BJP, which is the political wing of the RSS, really gained parliamentary strength. They did so through this mobilization around destroying a 16th-century mosque in the northeastern city of Ayodhya. There’s this whole Hindutva story about how this mosque is actually the birthplace of the God-king Ram and needs to be reclaimed, and the only way to avenge this hurt to Hindu sentiment is to destroy the mosque and build a temple. There’s a ton of money that comes from the United States and the UK to fund this effort. But I’m not sure how early those financial links are forged.
JP: Can we tell an interesting story about the analogous forms of diasporic nationalist support in the case of the Jewish diaspora and Israel? Which I recognize is different, because it’s, in a way, triangulated—most of that Jewish diaspora comes from Europe originally, not from Israel itself.
LA: The idea of Jewish diaspora assumes an originary homeland in Israel. That is actually part of Zionist ideology—to claim that Jews around the world are part of a diaspora.
As it has unfolded, it’s the American Jewish people who have been among the most influential and supportive parts of world Jewry for Israel and the Zionist project. What’s interesting is that originally American Jews were not so enthusiastic about Zionism. They were maybe supportive from afar but not in a way that made them want to move there.
It’s really in the 1960s that American Judaism becomes more inclined toward Zionism and more tied to Israel. That’s partly a result of what happened in the 1967 war, when Israel’s victory produced a prideful international nationalism. But it’s the result of a concerted effort by the Zionist movement to create a link between Jewish American identity and Israeli American identity. You can see that in the intermixing of cultural and religious elements. There’s an Israeli flag in temples from that period on, for instance. Kids get drawn into these campaigns to raise money to plant trees in what are settlements in Israel. So there are all these ways, similar maybe to what the Hindutva folks do for kids, in raising religio-nationalist consciousness.
AS: The 1960s is really key because of the 1967 war. But Natasha also said that there’s this earlier moment in the ’50s when, as part of Americanization, you’ve got a conservative turn away from Communism, which had offered another important form of internationalism for American Jews.
There’s an internal fracturing of the American Jewish population, with Jewish Americanization now getting expressed as a disavowal of Jewish Communists. This political conservatism comes together with support for Israel.
JP: As somebody at Brandeis University (where the tactic of suturing Zionism to Jewish identity, and asserting that every form of anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, is alive and well), it’s also profoundly depressing to think that American Jewish identity gets constituted through the lens of Israel. Because I was born and raised with the Arendtian notion that Jewish cultural identity in America was premised on cosmopolitanism or universalism. And now, to be at a university that prides itself on particularizing Jewish identity by way of connecting it to Israel, it just hits home to me at this particular moment. It’s kind of awful.
LA: It is awful, but it’s also important to recognize the immense amount of work and institutional energy that has gone into getting us to this point, wherein there’s an equation between Israel and Judaism, an equation between anti-Israeli critique and antisemitism. This has been institutionalized in Europe and in the US, especially these days through the IHRA redefinition of antisemitism and its illustrative examples that state baldly that critique of Israel is antisemitic. But that didn’t come out of nowhere. This has been a very successful campaign supported by the Israeli state itself. So in this moment where we’re probably all looking for ways of understanding how any of this can come unraveled, recognizing those institutions and the funding sources of those institutions—those funding sources being groups that benefit from tax breaks in the United States—there are places to intervene.
AS: One more thing about Zionism. Another reason it’s important to combat these equations between Judaism and Zionism is because Zionism is becoming a model for other long-distance nationalist projects like Hindutva.
And you also have groups in the United States taking their cues from Zionist strategies.
LA: Not just their cues, but their training.
AS: Yeah. You have a group like the Hindu American Foundation, which is aligned with the Hindu right in India, sharing platforms with the ADL [the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League] and other groups. The most obvious expression of that is this term Hinduphobia, which is being weaponized in the same way as antisemitism is weaponized, to shut down criticism of the Modi government. But in the US, it has a second goal, which is to shut down conversations about caste. Because again, there’s this real fear of caste as a fragmenting force that can undermine Hindu unity. In the same way that caste is disavowed by the Hindu right in India, you have echoes of that now in the US.
JP: Can you mention more about the training? That’s news to me.
LA: Yeah. People like Azad Essa and other journalists are doing research on the Hindutva lobbying groups that are receiving training from Zionist support institutions in the US.
JP: How strong a bridge is Islamophobia between the two ethno-nationalisms?
LA: Very. In many ways, Netanyahu individually has come to stand as a strongman to emulate and learn from for a lot of Islamophobic countries and political leaders. Their mobilization of the notion of terrorism and the need for nationalist security that somehow justifies their quashing of any resistance mimics Israel’s approach. And the oppression of Palestinians, who are not, by the way, all Muslim, but for the sake of an ethno-nationalist project, who’s counting the 20 percent Christians? Israel stands for this. And you see this kind of bromance between Modi and Netanyahu at different moments. What do you think, Ajantha?
AS: Oh, absolutely. In fact, there’s all these exposés now about Modi’s troll army playing a hugely consequential role in generating disinformation about October 7. Some of the most lurid social media tweets about beheaded babies and raped women have all come out of India. This is what Hindutvites in India do all the time, and they’ve just repurposed their domestic disinformation campaign to support the Zionist defense of Israel.
JP: Lori, I know you had a lot of thoughts about the nominalism question, or whether it matters what we call “fascist.”
LA: Natasha and Murli have talked about the necessity of being careful of how we apply fascism to what’s going on, because if everything is fascism, then what is it really? We need to preserve this term for really extreme cases. But I have gained a lot of insight from reading some Black American authors who talk about the fact that slavery is fascism (even Robert Paxton, the great theorist of fascism, has referenced the Ku Klux Klan as perhaps the earliest fascist organization), or recognizing colonialism as a fascist structure. It’s a style of politics.
With this idea of preserving fascism for really extreme cases, we have to ask ourselves, Extreme from whose perspective? A point that I made when we talked with Natasha is that it seems like Israel as a fascist state only came into common discourse once the Israeli state started turning against Jewish people, and that’s with the judicial overhaul. So, the Jewish majority was starting to feel the sharp end of fascism, whereas of course, Palestinians have been living under a military dictatorship since the beginning. I actually wondered what both of you thought about how we use this term and what use it is.
AS: The other thing that Natasha said was that if you trace the genealogy of these movements, there’s a shared history. In both respects, attending to that shared history and not being blindsided by the fact that these were populations that were subject to forms of colonial and fascist power themselves is important. We need to be conscious of these family resemblances and actual historical connections. Being self-aware about when we are willing to use the term and what that says about normalized violence is also important. Whether you’re talking about Black people in the US post–Reconstruction South, or Kashmiris, from their vantage point, the US and India have been fascist states for a very long time. From the vantage point of Kashmiris, India is also a settler-colonial state.
LA: After World War II, the term fascism carried a certain ideological/moral weight. It now means something bad and condemnable. We might see that shifting again, as people proudly claim to be fascist, and the whole notion of a liberal international order …
JP: Illiberal democracy, I was going to say, is the phrase that does a lot of cover work for that, because it’s respectable to be an illiberal democrat, which as far as I can tell does mean a fascist, right? Because it means majoritarian control of the country on the basis of some assumed demographic ideal, “real Hungary” or whatever.
LA: That’s why I object to this term ethnic democracy or ethno-democracy, which puts the emphasis on democracy without mentioning that it’s democracy only for some.
JP: I would love to end by semi-springing on you guys something that we always do, asking you about your “recallable books.” Meaning, for people who enjoyed this conversation, is there a book you would like to mention and say they ought to go off and take a look at that book?
LA: One that I haven’t mentioned in our conversation so far is a book called Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism. It’s quite a remarkable book, translated from French into English not too long ago. It’s a compilation of ethnographic interviews of Jewish people who have refused Zionism. It’s important for these narratives and histories that refuse the nationalist monopolization of history telling, in this case, refusing the Zionist telling wherein all Jews belong to Israel. It is really important to keep alive.
JP: Mine is odder. We did a Recall This Book conversation with Joshua Cohen, whose novel The Netanyahus, which is about one of these children of Jabotinsky, Bibi Netanyahu’s father, Benzion Netanyahu. And it’s this hilarious comedic romp of the worst job interview on earth. But he comes to America, to assimilationist 1950s America, and meets this 1950s Philip Roth–type character who just wants to be a secular Jew, a Jewish historian of 18th century America, and then this Zionist Jabotinskyite is foisted on this secular Jewish family. So it’s a description of this weekend from hell, told from the perspective of both the Zionist outsider and the would-be assimilationist American Jew.
AS: One of my go-to books to get at the lived reality of religion, and the remarkable heterogeneity of South Asia, is Susan Bayly’s Saints, Goddesses and Kings. It’s a historical ethnography and it’s just a remarkable account of religious plurality, social dynamism. Even though she doesn’t talk about Hindu nationalism, it throws into relief the violence of the project, this effort to impose this monolithic history on a subcontinent. It’s called a subcontinent for a reason. That book is one that I really cherish.
There is also a book that we referenced in our conversation with Murli, by Christophe Jaffrelot, who is the most important scholar of the Hindu right. And his most recent book is this amazing, rich account of Modi and what the Modi phenomenon has done both to the Hindu right and to India more broadly. It’s called Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. 
Featured image: The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi with the Prime Minister of Israel, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, in Jerusalem, Israel. (2017). Photograph by Prime Minister’s Office / Wikimedia Commons