Introduction

Summary

The introduction underlines the need for this book and lays out the parameters that are important to understand the intricacies of Indian politics that forms the context of this book.

The inception of this book was at a local bar over a sparkling water where a dear friend, a geographer, told me about a paper she had read about the role of language use by the Tutsis and Hutus during war and genocide in Rwanda. Soon after this encounter, the pandemic engulfed the world, and I began to observe a different type of language use in India than I had studied earlier in my career. The more I looked at language use for political gain in the context of India, the more the need for this text solidified. Before this research, I had studied language use as being dependent on highly localized contexts as they played out in sexuality and identity practices in India. My research homes were language and gender and third wave sociolinguistics. I still speak most fluently in these broadly defined fields; however, the more I explored the language of politics in the context of Hindi-speaking India, the more I realized the need to think of language and social hierarchy in a way that was not localized and can influence change in a much broader milieu.¹

It has been established that language can do harm which can have various manifestations. This book argues that specific types of language use – what I collectively call linguistic trickery, that is, using language in ways that complicate or add to the meanings of an utterance – can lead to substantive legislative actions and judicial outcomes in the lives of people whom those in power, the language users, are intending to sideline. I hope that as this text unfolds, it offers a path from words to legislative and judicial action in the context of India. Having such a path clarifies a type of harm that language can do. The four case studies presented in the book – the construction of the controversial Ramajanmbhoomi temple, Muslim women and Muslim Personal Law, Kashmir, and the adoption of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 – show that words, when maneuvered in the “right” way, can lead to long-standing changes to how a state’s legislature and judiciary will handle matters of conflict. Each of these cases has a history of discourse that becomes critical to understanding how language maneuvered is language weaponized.

I trace a genealogy of discourse on important matters that have been present in the discourse in India for decades. Genealogy, according to Foucault, is the unruly tracing of an idea through discourse on the idea. We start from the present day where legislative and judicial changes have happened and traces where words and negative constructs appear historically. Episteme – that is, the power knowledge formation and construction – shows that words are used to construct realities which are then used to construct power. I examine language as it appears throughout the history of each of the four case studies to show where words and the power associated with the words has been and how it has evolved in the hands of the modern-day Hindu right. Since this is a broad discursive history that I argue leads to legislative and judicial actions, most data come from people whose voices were governing the discourse of the time. In chapter 4, for example, data comes from speeches by Jawaharlal Nehru given in 1952, rebuttals and affirmations by politicians like Syama Prasad Mookherjee and Nandlal Sharma, poetry by Atal Bihari Vajpayee written in the 1990s, and speeches by Narendra Modi, Mohan Bhagwat, and Amit Shah delivered after 2014, the year when Narendra Modi became the prime minister of India. The book works with the assumption that major political figures of the time set the parameters of discourse about an issue. This is the principle that is followed throughout the book and across chapters. This book is a treatise on how generations of Indian politicians have projected India and imagined a nation-state and interacted with its populace. It is a look at how the Hindu right has consolidated power over citizens and defined who is worth being an ideal citizen of the Indian nation-state.

If the reader needs convincing by numbers, I implore them to give this qualitative text a chance. I have not counted the number of times any political leader has made a particular statement about any issue discussed in this book. The claim this text makes is based on the power of what Beaver and Stanley (2023) call the “hustle,” defined as “that which is either communicated without intention or communicated without the recognition of communicative intention” (75) of language. The number of times a statement is made by someone in power is irrelevant; the fact that the statement has been made holds more weight for the purposes of the argument of this book. In this respect I follow the traditions of philosophy of language where the grounds of meaning shift when new ideas are introduced to an existing set of knowledge. Repetition of facts or lies, especially in the last two decades with the advent of social media, is an exercise beyond the control or the intent of circulation. Words travel, and this text underlines the power of their journey without counting the number of times they stopped at a station.

The data, ideas, ways of seeing the world, and arguments presented in this book are contextual to the Hindi-speaking fraction of India, but the book’s insights show how linguistic trickery can play a central role in the judicial and legislative agendas of governments across the world. Language is the way we see the world, so it cannot be a surprise that language is the way we form reality, and that it can be deployed as a weapon to alter realities. The methodologies and findings of this book are productive in so much as they are applicable to other places where democratic governments make concessions to certain factions of their population.

Weaponizing Language turns an interdisciplinary lens to the study of India’s political language and discourse, something that has been noticeably absent from studies about the global rise of autocracy. Interdisciplinarity is the soul of this book. Sociolinguistic methods of understanding how power is built into language use are central to the text. Connections to concepts within the study of philosophy of language show how the meaning of words is influenced by and can itself influence perceptions of reality and truth. Other areas of study that inform the arguments in this work include the critical analysis of how subjects are created, South Asian studies, and postcolonial studies of India. By blurring – or perhaps even defying – disciplinary boundaries altogether, we can build an understanding of how to best decipher Indian politics in the present moment and the linguistic questions it poses.

Let me explain my approach in this book. Within the field of third wave sociolinguistics, the framework of communities of practice has been understood as localized communities where interactions between individuals are profound enough to bring about linguistic variation which itself influences identity formation (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). The local nature of a community of practice is key to understanding this approach, which has been followed by scholars in sociolinguistics (including myself) for the past three decades. Using communities of practice to show why members of a certain group vary grammatical gender in a group setting (versus a public setting) makes the most sense when reading interactions within community members as being informed by the very specific and local context of the needs of the community. The variation of grammatical gender makes sense to the members of the community of practice even when it is used only for specific purposes. Expanding on this traditional understanding, Beaver and Stanley (2023) suggest that a community of practice could be a group that understands the particularized meanings of words, phrases, and expressions because the group collectively follows an ideology which resonates with all of them, even if members of such a group have never actually interacted. The interaction with the ideas associated with the ideology is enough that the community respond to them in meaningful ways. In this understanding of a community of practice, explaining language variation is not the goal, but explaining the reach and potentials of political language is. Through this lens, the Hindi-speaking people of India who also agree with the Hindu right can be seen as a community of practice that responds to the ideology and the historicity of the ideology pertaining to the Hindu right.

To explain why the ideology of the Hindu right resonates with so many, this book leans on critical studies of South Asia that are fundamental to understanding the historicity of the ideology of the Hindu right and the post-2014 India.² Pandey’s (2006) research on why violence between Indian Hindus and Muslims is pervasive and routine is particularly significant. Absence or presence of violence, as Mbembe (2001) notes, is in and of itself an exercise in keeping boundaries. There is a possibility that a demarcation between violence and the absence of violence is not a valid exercise. If, as Pandey suggests, violence is seen as a routine social act – one that is in tango with the Hindu majority and its view of Muslim minority rights and politics – then the community of practice (as defined by Beaver and Stanley) responds to the routineness of the violence as if it were a practice. Violence does not have to be part of the present. Its very existence in the past, like the knowledge of the rupture of the Hindu-Muslim-Sikh violence of the partition between India and Pakistan in 1947, makes its possibility vivid and alive. This is to say that if I have been violent once, I can be violent again. My act of violence can be a routine social act.

In order to somewhat tame the scope of this text, I work with these three assumptions:

1. 1. Elections in India are, by and large, fair and independent. I add this caveat to acknowledge that there are discrepancies in elections at local, state, and federal levels.

2. 2. India is still a democracy.³ “Still” is the key word here. Even though democracy is under threat in India and dissenting people’s voices are muffled, elections do occur at various levels of government and voters do choose political parties and candidates other than the ones in power. Elected officials are held accountable and opposition parties share their opposition. This is not to say that an ideal of democracy is not threatened in India. It is. But it is also to say that all is not lost. At least, not yet. The 2024 parliamentary election, which weakened the Hindu right, is a case in point.

3. 3. A metadiscursive approach to language use, which underlines the power exerted by those with political capital, is crucial to understanding both linguistic and political systems. This approach is important for understanding linguistic systems because, as it refocuses attention away from local systems (which have been the center of attention in sociolinguistic study in recent decades), it reaffirms the effect of global decisions on local lived experiences.⁴ As we explore the route from discourse to legislation, a metadiscursive approach to language use is important for understanding political systems and offers new tools to study local, state, and global politics.

Weaponizing Language traces the history of discursive trajectories and actions that led to legislative and judicial changes that, over many decades, have had a lasting and profound effect on the lives of Indian Muslims. Linguistic trickery makes the path to permanent legislative and judicial action possible. This is not to say that linguistic maneuvering is the be-all and end-all of regimes that aim to enhance some at the cost of oppressing others. Rather, it underlines actions and creates pathways for permanent, and often devastating, change.

Legislating Nationalism

In 2012, a Hindu fundamentalist organization, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), initiated a magazine, flyer, and social media campaign in the largest and most populous state in India, Uttar Pradesh, that alerted people to the dangers of “love-jihad.” Love-jihad is a conspiracy theory that asserts that Muslim men lure Hindu girls into marrying them and then forcefully convert them to Islam. While the conspiracy theory has been around for decades, it found a renewed voice in the 2010s. In 2012, Kareena Kapoor, a prominent Bollywood actor born to Hindu parents, married actor Saif Ali Khan. Khan’s mother is Hindu, and his father was Muslim. Khan himself did not overtly identify with any religion, but his name identified him as Muslim. Kapoor did not identify with any religion either, but her name identified her as Hindu. VHP took up this marriage between two extremely wealthy individuals with family pedigrees in Bollywood and used it as an instrument against love-jihad. The printed poster of an image associated with the VHP’s love-jihad propaganda campaign showed Kapoor’s face divided such that one half represented a Hindu woman wearing a bindi and sindoor, and the other half wearing a hijab covering the face except for the eye.⁵ Under the image the text said, Love-jihad – Dharamantran se rashtraantran, “Love-jihad – from changing religion to changing nation.” Neither Kapoor nor Khan had ever spoken about religion and its role in their relationship. Kapoor had not said she would change her religion and become Muslim, and Khan had not said that she should convert to Islam or that he would convert to Hinduism. Yet, VHP’s propaganda reinscribed the conspiracy theory by insisting that if a Hindu woman married a Muslim man, she became Muslim. The sexism and bigotry of such assumptions notwithstanding, the image and its accompanying statement tie Hindu women’s religion to the core religious identity of the nation-state. The statement implies that Hindu women changing their religion to Islam is tantamount to the entire nation becoming Islamic. India does not have a designated religion per se, but to the Hindu right, India is Hindu – and Hindu women marrying Muslim men is an affront to the Hindu Indian nation.⁶

Propaganda such as this is speech that aims to convince people to join an ideology. Propaganda keeps people in a certain state of rage against a real or imagined enemy, and if they stay enraged, the propaganda machinery succeeds. Repeated associations between words and social meaning make propaganda work (Stanley 2015). The printed poster asks its audience to accept three ideas: Hindu women are in danger from Muslim men, love-jihad is a real threat, and Hindu women converting to Islam is a threat to the Indian nation. For this poster to work with one image and five words, one must buy into the simplicity of its message for the propaganda to succeed. If successful, the visual and linguistic action performed by the love-jihad poster lays the groundwork for other types of actions such as legislation against love-jihad (Nagar 2023). When the government later established legislation against love-jihad, as happened in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2020, the state justifies its own intervention in maintaining strict boundaries between Hindu and Muslim, thereby defining Islam as outside the Indian state. This kind of boundary definition establishes cartographies of language and citizenship that legislate entire groups of people from inclusion in a nation-state.

Weaponizing Language argues that language and harm caused by speech have framed legislative and judicial action against Muslim communities in India in the last three decades. This book treats propaganda and rhetoric as harmful speech and uses examples of hate speech to bolster its central argument which is that deliberate maneuvering of language has led to legislative and judicial change in India. The title of the book speaks to the way the Hindu right has used language to attack rights of Indian Muslims, construct a specific type of Muslims subject, one who must be guarded against, and put the Indian Muslim citizen on a constant defensive. The book argues and shows with four case studies that language has indeed been weaponized by the Hindu right. Weaponization of language has taken a few different forms all of which speak to creating a threatened and singular Hindu identity and an aggressive Muslim subject. The Hindu right has used Hindi language as a device to promote Hindu nationalism and fan nationalist pride while ignoring India’s linguistic and subsequently cultural identity (Sengupta 2017). Politics of bilingualism, multilingualism, as well as Urdu have come to focus from time to time reflecting how useful linguistic identity can be to political movements (King 1989; Jha 2018). Language has also been the focus of many studies on the Hindu right and the discursive construction of power in contemporary India (Bhatia 2021; Sambaraju 2022). What we have not seen is a discussion of the productivity of weaponizing language. We have seen that specific use of words creates a particular kind of subject, but we have not seen how creating this subject also results in monitoring the subject. This book fills this critical gap in the study of India and societies across the globe, to understand the tactics that make linguistic maneuvering effective. The linguistic case studies in this book demonstrate the ways in which nationalist parties employ language to institute division, accentuate difference, and construct marginalized subjects, separating them from the general population, and targeting them for oppression.

The basis of my claim that the Hindu right weaponized language is the discourse they created about Indian Muslims. This discourse, as each chapter shows, helped the Hindu right gain legislative and judicial victories.⁷ The creation of such a discourse is weaponizing language, the creation of a specific kind of Muslim subject is weaponizing language, and the application of the discourse to legitimize the need for legal and judicial action is weaponizing language. The book charts a history of consolidation of state and religion. Such a consolidation is not unique to India or to non-Western democracies. Consolidation between religion and state manifests as a power to govern some subjects as differently from others. In such an arrangement, legislating in ways that differentiate between types of people based on their belief systems is normalized. As we will see in examples throughout this book, religion and state are conflated in India since the arrival of Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) on the national scene. However, studies of the interaction between religion and state rarely focus on language. Using words, phrases, historical tropes, visual devices such as color, and Hindu iconography in state-sponsored occasions amounts to fortifying a Hindu identity. What I define as linguistic trickery or linguistic maneuvering is using language in ways that highlight the productivity of language to create discord and establish supremacy for those in power. Using language this way amounts to weaponizing language.

Situating Language in the Politics of Discrimination

Weaponizing Language is an analysis of language use in society and shows how manipulative language use, which I call linguistic trickery, can build on itself over time and affect democratic principles within the bounds of constitutionality because it expands the bounds of constitutionality. Linguistic trickery allows for discriminative actions. Each chapter shows this aspect of language in society. I use the terms linguistic trickery and linguistic maneuvering synonymously. These terms speak to the incredible power of using language in ways that weaponizes it. A simple example, one which Stanley (2015) discusses at length, is someone saying in a speech, “There are Jews amongst us” (140). Stanley sees this statement as one that quietly, succinctly, and violently instills the idea that Jews are not part of “us.” Stanley reads this broadly as a propagandist statement, which is productive because other forms of actions can be built upon it. The at-issue content here is true: Jews live in America. However, the not-at-issue content, which is that Jews are outsiders, is communicated here as well by making Jews not part of “us.” A statement like this does the job of adding emotions to common ground and other more negative emotions can build upon them. This situating of ideas in common ground is a way to weaponize language. Propaganda is discourse that tries to change our mind about ideology through the linguistic elements associated with it, such as silencing (both as a discursive as well as linguistic action), presupposition, gaslighting, dog whistling, and subordination as collectively or singularly constitutive of linguistic trickery or linguistic maneuvering. Weaponizing Language claims that linguistic trickery such as these techniques has led to legislative and judicial change in India.

Studies on propaganda and rhetoric have shown systematic connections between how people belonging to minority communities are spoken about and how they are perceived. Propaganda can make hating ambiguous (Ellul 1973) by showing that those being hated are in that place because they deserve to be there. Discussions of the role of discourse as well as specific linguistic items have been part of studies of propaganda and rhetoric. Yet what has been missing is integration between philosophy of language, which emphasizes meaning, and critical discourse analysis, which emphasizes the role of power within social structures and how they are impacted and informed by specific language use. The discussions in this book are enhanced by an awareness of the power of language to form group identity, as explored in sociolinguistics research, which will also be crucial to this work’s examination of the construction of Hindu national identity through anti-Muslim linguistic tactics. Weaponizing Language brings to bear insights on the social structures and the structures of meaning in language, demonstrating a trajectory from rhetoric, propaganda, and linguistic trickery to discrimination and creation of hateful spaces and to legislative and judicial actions that have far-reaching consequences for the Indian Muslim community. As an example, consider silencing and the approaches that have been taken to discuss it. Langton and West (1999) argue that pornography is speech and follows rules of accommodation. Pornography is a type of speech that silences women and undermines “felicity conditions of their speech” (129). The edited volume (Thiesmeyer 2003) on silencing as a discourse strategy shows the different discursive mechanisms across different political spectrums around the globe use silencing as a tool to smother political discourse. Following Langton and West, this book works with silence as a subordinating tool, and, in chapter 3, shows that Muslim women are silenced and their rights reconfigured as a political maneuver against Muslim men. However, silencing also operates within the broader context and power structure of the Hindu right overall (Thiesmeyer 2003) to legitimize the creation of legal remedies against invading Muslims.⁸ The book utilizes the productivity of multiple frameworks to explain the linguistic trickery deployed by the Hindu right.

Weaponizing Language shows how anti-Muslim rhetoric and actions have come to a head since Bharatiya Janta Party-led government came into power in 2014 and how linguistic maneuvering has played a central role in this process. Studying the language of Hindu nationalism involves the weaving together of work in connected but disparate fields of language study, primarily critical discourse analysis, critical studies of language, research on language and propaganda, studies on meaning in language, studies on language and harm, and language ideology and nationalism to show how meaning in speech responds to broader social forces that produce and reinforce mechanisms of discrimination. This is an interdisciplinary project that shows how words are used with an intent to cause actions that are detrimental to a group and can lead to legislative action. The book shows that some actions might take decades or even a century, but they will happen.

In line with the interdisciplinary focus of this text, I will define discourse, social meaning, and social practice. These terms will be used throughout the book and provide a critical theoretical basis for the analysis provided in this book. Discourse is used in purely Foucauldian terms as the sum of knowledge about a subject. This definition incorporates the historicity of given knowledge on a topic. As we will see throughout the book, knowledge on a subject is highly capable of shifting. What this means is knowledge about a topic can be changed over time and discourse on a subject is the general understanding of the most spoken and repeated “truths” on a subject. Social meaning is how we understand the meaning of a sound, a word, a grammatical entry, or a sentence in the context of the placement of its speaker in society. Social meaning is what tells us something extra about a speaker without factually knowing whether our understanding is true. For example, if a speaker of Hindi uses Sanskritized Hindi in a particular context, there are conclusions that can be drawn about the speaker that go beyond the meaning of their utterances. That is social meaning.⁹ Social practice as we understand from Bourdieu (1972) is participation that goes beyond structures in which we participate and bleeds into becoming parts of the structures. For Bourdieu, participation in practices is a natural outcome of being. Practices are what we do in a day as individuals as well as participants in society. So, for academics, faculty meetings and all the pleasures that come with them are part of the practice of being academics.¹⁰ Third wave sociolinguistics showed us that participation in a social practices as members of communities of practice is at the heart of language change (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992), but we are now learning that participation in social practices is also at the heart of understanding some trickier aspects of language use that are commonly related to how language is used for political gain. This understanding, developed by Beaver and Stanley (2023), expands the umbrella of communities of practice from a local to a more global frame, where responding to the social meaning of language use is tantamount to being a community of practice and participating in the social practice of mutual reciprocity (what Beaver and Stanley call attunement) to a specific issue. With these definitions in place, let us get to some specifics about the case at hand.

Language and the Hindu Right

The Hindu right, as discussed in this book, is a conglomerate of forces, individual as well as organizational, that propagate an ideology which supports the supremacy, historicity, and timelessness of Hindus in India. Sanatan dharma, an eternal continuation in Hindu practice, is understood as the basis of Hindu ideology. This book takes an approach which defines the Hindu right as a social, political, and economic backbone of the Hindutva ideology. The Hindu right thus defined works through individuals who have political power (e.g., Prime Minister Narendra Modi), organizations that have institutional power through decades of grassroot campaigns (e.g., Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), and social, economic, and strategic wings of Sangh Parivar, which is the conglomerate of several organization that propagate Hindutva or Hinduness at different levels of the social spectrum. The book treats the Hindu right as an ideological vehicle of Hindutva and treats its various arms as one.

Language is at the center of the concentration of Hindu nationalist ideology, making Hinduism a part of formalized majoritarian citizenship. The ideology of Hindutva is translated through language, and language is being used to make Brahminic forms of Hindu religious practice, ritual, and cultural capital the criterion and the framework through which people are treated as citizens. Language is also being used to show how the ones who do not fit can be excluded from the gates of the polis.¹¹ This book traces the process of this exclusion for the Muslim citizens of India. The book assumes that one of the primary goals of the Hindu right is on the “construction” of the Muslim subject that must be agitated against.¹² This book focuses on the role of language in establishing such a Muslim subject and a Muslim identity that needed to be “dealt with.” The current Hindu nationalist government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been working slowly and deliberately toward making India more Hindu while sidelining the 170 million Muslims who live in India. Linguistic maneuvering stands in service of this agenda.

The book argues that the relationship between harm in speech and laws against minority citizens is causal – that is, harm in speech causes harmful legislative action which creates the category of a Muslim citizen as fundamentally different from a Hindu one. I show how this causal relationship frames the formation of the contemporary Indian nation-state, which is different from a post-independence, Nehruvian India that had embraced a philosophy of modernization, secularism, science, and nonalignment (Parekh 1991). The meaning to the words “secular” and “secularism” have been altered by the BJP-governed nation-state. As Iwanek (2018) shows, dharamnirpekshta, which used to mean absence of religion from politics and underlined the secular nature of Indian democracy, has come to be understood as panthnirpeksheta, “absence of favoring a community over another.” This shift marks a change to an understanding of dharma, “righteous action,” as one that must be adhered to. This is a way to expand or shift meaning, an act of linguistic maneuvering. This definition of dharma presupposes a Hindu national identity. Discourse and the meaning situated in linguistic maneuvering are placed at the center of the debate about how and why India is quickly becoming a more Hindu country at the expense of its minority citizens. The book ties together critical studies of the Hindu right with studies on language, meaning, and ideology to enhance our understanding of the consolidation of the Hindu right in India.

Throughout his first presidency, Donald Trump’s use of language was shocking, stark, sometimes painful, and often disturbing. As the volume Language in the Trump Era, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, showed us, language was a critical element for creating the kind of society Trump envisioned. It was central to creating fear, anger, and igniting action. A critical difference between the use of language by Donald Trump and his associates and the language use described in this book is that Trump’s poison started suddenly and seems to have staying power, but it has had limited legislative impact. In India, the anti-Muslim sentiment and subsequent legislation we have seen since the BJP’s rise to power in 2014 are culmination of about a century of linguistic maneuvering. In the introduction to Language in the Trump Era, McIntosh says language “breathes life into identities constructed on the fly through interaction, establishes hierarchies, and enlists people into patterned rituals of social life” (2020, 3). Of course, language does all this but sometimes it takes a century for the rituals to fully settle into the social life. This book shows the progression with four cases pertaining to India and Indian Muslims. The following example underlines the connection between language use and anti-Muslim sentiments in India.

Language is the most important weapon for fanning anti-Muslim sentiments manifested by the Indian government at the federal, state, and local levels. An example can be found in a speech celebrating the release of convicted rapists. On August 15, 2022, the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s independence from the British, eleven men, who were serving life sentences for murdering Muslims and gang-raping a Muslim woman during the 2002 Gujarat riots, walked free.¹³ They were greeted with a warm welcome. The woman, Bilkis Bano, had witnessed the murder of her family; the scars on her body, brutalized by gang rape, are for life. The panel of people responsible for the release of the perpetrators consisted of two members of the BJP, the political wing of the Hindu right in India. One of them, a member of the Gujarat Legislative Assembly, C. K. Raulji, said that because the men in jail had good values by virtue of being Brahmins, they probably didn’t commit the crime. His words were:

Is ka jo mamla tha, ye Bilkis Bano kaun hai, kya hai, mereko pata nai tha. [Name] ko aur uske ke bhoot kal ki jo karyavahi hai, uske family ke jo activity hai vo bahut achi hai. Brahmin log the, vaisi bhi brahmin ke jo kuch hai brahmin hai uske sanskar achche the. Crime kiya ki nahi kiya mereko pata nahi hai.

This matter, who is Bilkis Bano, what is she, I didn’t know. But [perpetrator’s name], his past, the activities of his family, that is very good. They are brahmins.¹⁴ And, as such, brahmins have, they good values. I don’t know if a crime happened or not.¹⁵

Two utterances in this brief comment stand out. Raulji denies personhood to Bilkis Bano by saying he doesn’t know who or what she is. He silences her by not acknowledging her as a person. This type of linguistic action makes the very existence of a person invalid. Silencing translates to absence of an audience for the interlocutor (MacKinnon 1993; Dotson 2011). In the absence of an audience, she can be nothing but silent. If Bilkis Bano’s very existence is in question, her statements, her brutalized body, and her words are all silent. Raulji also gaslights by saying he does not know if a crime happened or not. The criminals who were released had been serving a life sentence, which was granted after court procedures and presentation of evidence. These men gang-raped a woman. A crime happened. Blatantly denying it gaslights the victim and her supporters. Gaslighting is an effective trick in the arsenal of one who aims to weaken institutions and communities. It makes affronts against them seem inconsequential. As Abramson notes, gaslighting “involves isolating the target in various ways” (2014, 2).

Expressing doubt on whether a crime occurred, greeting the eleven criminals with garlands and applause, and denying Bilkis Bano a presence points to a pattern of denying individual Muslims a voice and using language as a weapon to sideline Indian Muslims as a group.¹⁶ I argue that without a thorough engagement with the history, practice, and social meaning of linguistic bits, our understanding of the Hindu right or any political and social movement is incomplete.

Good Muslims and Bad Muslims

Scholars of sociolinguistics have known for decades that social hierarchies are reflected in language use. Politicians, laws, and media use language to manipulate public opinion. Language is used to “do” things and there is intertextuality – that is, a historical, cultural, and localized context to language use (Austin 1975; Agha 2005). Manne (2018) shows that controlling the narrative by linguistic means such as silencing and gaslighting allows patriarchy and its advocates to control the narrative. This narrative, Manne argues, perpetuates the cycle of the subjugation of women. One of the primary ways in which the BJP in particular and the Hindu right in general has succeeded in negotiating legal intervention against Muslims is their absolute control of the anti-Muslim narrative. Reading anti-Muslim narrative in the framework that Manne’s work provides, shows that there is value in understanding anti-Muslim narrative as one that is opposed to an idea and not individuals. For example, Manne defines misogyny as a generalized hatred of women and a desire to control women’s voices and agency and not a specific hatred of some women by some men. Manne’s argument is situated in an analysis of how patriarchy makes misogyny rampant. Patriarchy also plays a role in subjugation that moves beyond women to other minority groups. In discussing the settings which make misogyny structural, Manne states:

I take it that a social milieu counts as patriarchal insofar as certain kinds of institutions or social structures both proliferate and enjoy widespread support within it – from, for example, the state as well as broader cultural sources, such as material resources, communal values, cultural narratives, media and artistic depictions, and so on. These patriarchal institutions will vary widely in their material and structural, as well as their social, features. But they will be such that all or most women are positioned as subordinate in relation to some man or men therein, the latter of whom are thereby (by the same token) dominant over the former, on the basis of their genders (among other relevant intersecting factors).

(2018, 45)

The gendered and patriarchal aspects of the Hindu right have been explored in some detail (Hansen 1996; Banerjee 2003, 2005; Vijayan 2020).¹⁷ The larger point that Manne notes (and one that is relevant to the goals of this book) is that social structures facilitate certain types of behaviors against minorities which harm minorities. Within the structure of voter politics, state overreach, electoral victories, and prevalence of anti-Muslim rhetoric and propaganda, the systems that enable actionable anti-Muslim decisions are strengthened. This book speaks to how language enables such structures to thrive and flourish. As Manne notes, not every woman experiences misogyny; one must also consider the possibility that not every Muslim faces anti-Muslim structures. Some might even benefit from them. The propaganda against Muslims in general also creates the imagined “good Muslim.” A “good Muslim” serves the nation in ways that the state has assigned him or her. The irony is of course that just like the “good woman,” who can serve her patriarch and the system of patriarchy to the best of her abilities, a “good Muslim” does not exist. In true Butlerian fashion, the individual represents a performative aspect of that which is not (Butler 1990). To the Hindu right, being Indian and being Muslim are somewhat contradictory. Yet, there are representations of “good Muslims” pitted against “bad Muslims” in more Bollywood films than I care to count.¹⁸

Linguistic Trickery, Power, and the Anti-Muslim Narrative in India

There is a history and context to the anti-Muslim narrative in India, and there are some events which have had persistent presence and supply easy fodder for anti-Muslim rhetoric. I examine four events in their historical and local contexts and the language used in relation to each event to describe Muslims. Using words, phrases, and sentences uttered by politicians over the years – in speeches and in writings, in parliamentary debates, in the language of laws created after debates and discussions, and in media-mediated dialogue between politicians – this book ties research on language with critical studies on India to show that social meaning, propaganda, presupposition, gaslighting, and slurs are essential to understanding the current moment of Hindu nationalist reach across India.¹⁹ These specific types of language use enable the Hindu right to control the anti-Muslim narrative and bolster their agenda or their imagined reality and bring about legislative and judicial change that is permanent and transcends governments. The so-called love-jihad conspiracy is a case in point: it did not exist before the BJP created it, and once it was created, the BJP created legislation to prevent it (Nagar 2023).

Within the field of sociolinguistics, the study of nationalism has primarily focused on language policy, bilingualism, multilingualism, and the role of politics in empowering or disempowering certain language and language varieties. In recent years, scholars (Levon 2010; Milani and Levon 2019; Milani, Levon, and Glocer 2019) have expanded the field of sociolinguistics to include the interactions between linguistic expressions and belonging as a way to understand nationalism in the context of Israel. I consider how language can create subordination and hierarchy within the context of the same language – Hindi or English – in India. How can language use about a group of people by those who hold power over them disenfranchise such groups and empower the perpetrators to discriminate against them? What is the degree of harm that harmful speech can cause? This book is an exercise in interdisciplinarity that negotiates different scholarly fields to answer these questions.

Research on propaganda in Germany, the United States, Rwanda, and across the world has shown how linguistic maneuvering precedes violent action. Language use shapes social hierarchies and suggests a need for intervention even when there is no such need. This book shows the way in which four critical events unfolded in India’s recent history where linguistic trickery preceded legal action, and violence followed in many cases. Throughout history, governments and ideologies have used language to accomplish several purposes: to define and promote an ideal citizen while denigrating others; to isolate, target, and dehumanize minorities perceived as weaker and less desirable; and to justify discrimination and violence against those minorities. I will show how linguistic trickery encourages discrimination, inequality, and violence and use philosophy of language, critical discourse analysis, and critical studies of South Asia, to show that when people in power – politicians, celebrities, and media personnel – use repeated association between words and negative social meaning, the negative association eventually becomes part of the words’ conventional meaning. Meaning within communities is deeply situated in historical context, cultural knowledge, and prevalent social hierarchies.

On March 12, 2020, the New Delhi state government stopped all public gatherings in response to COVID-19. The next day, Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary organization, proceeded with a gathering of 1,400 members in New Delhi. It was later reported that some members of the Jamaat had coronavirus and had carried it to different parts of India. On March 23, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that a full lockdown would start the next day, chaos ensued. Migrant laborers were stuck in place throughout the country, and as the crisis intensified, Hindus blamed the country’s Muslim minority and the Jamaat for spreading the virus throughout India. Subsequent social media posts, media organizations, and several government leaders referred to all Muslims as desh ke dushman: “enemies of the nation,” “outsiders,” “dirty,” “vectors of the disease,” and “corona jihadi.” The repeated use of this phrase became associated with Muslims and part of everyday understanding. As the coronavirus crisis grew in India, hate messages against Muslims intensified, and being Indian and Muslim became more dangerous than usual. Language and government messaging around Muslims – in the context of Indian history, politics, and social hierarchies – encourages discrimination, inequality, and violence. And, while systems of dissent still exist in India – people are able to express themselves and write and talk, albeit with more and more restrictions (Kamdar 2018) – these systems are increasingly threatened, and the dissent falls on deaf ears.

In the last three decades, the power of the Hindu right has increased, and their electoral victories have led to major legislative actions that are harmful to Muslim Indians. This book charts the linguistic practices that increase the likelihood of electoral victories for the Hindu right; in fact, they are at the core of the right’s electoral victories. In Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer says,

Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously. But language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it

(1995, 15).

The language of and about legislation passed after the Hindu right’s electoral victories forms an important aspect of this book since it shows how entangled linguistic choices are in larger social hierarchies.

Some elements of society can control the discourse about other elements of society. The Hindu nationalist government and grassroots organizations such as VHP, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Hindu Mahasabha, and Bajrang Dal have controlled the discourse on Indian Muslims in the last three decades and have managed to win widespread support. A work on discourse cannot be thorough without discussions pertaining to the philosophy of language regarding meaning – that is, how we come to understand words as meaning x as opposed to y. Within this framework, I engage with scholars who study propaganda, silencing, presuppositions, and speech and harm. Each chapter of this book explores how meaning is formed through the lens of the philosophy of language. Chapter 3, for example, uses theories on silencing and subordination to show how Muslim women have lost capital on matters of divorce and alimony while being told that the Hindu majority cares for their rights. Rights are translated through laws and court rulings, and while meaning is created in many ways, it gets crystallized in laws and legal documents.

Source Data

Laws and legal documents are as much about language as anything else; they are preceded by discourse that forces legal action. One of the biggest victories of the BJP government has been creating legislative paths that benefit the Hindu nationalist agenda. Legislative actions that I discuss include the controversial removal of Article 370 from the Indian Constitution, construction of a temple at the Ramajanmbhoomi–Babri Masjid disputed site, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2019 and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019, which, along with the National Registry of Citizens (NRC), ascertains that Muslims from neighboring countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh who immigrated to India before 2014 can never become citizens of India. The historical context of each issue, which usually spans several decades of discourse and speaks to the role that colonial times and the partition in 1947 plays in modern Indian politics, is also part of the discussion in each chapter. Scholarship on Muslims in India, the story of India’s economic development, postcolonial studies, and subaltern studies are fundamental here. The sizable scholarship on topics covered in each chapter, whether it be the redundancy of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2019 or the bigotry of the CAA and NRC, informs the core of this book.

The data for this book come from slogans, speeches, writings, parliamentary debates, laws, social media, and media interviews. Given the volume of data available, I have highlighted words from speakers in power who have the authority and the means to change public opinion. In this vein, several leaders of the BJP find a place in this text. A case in point is Lal Krishna Advani who is discussed in chapter 2 in relation to the Ramajanmbhoomi dispute. In the 1990s, Advani was a vocal and public proponent of the temple at the disputed site. He was a man with power whose words changed discourse. Advani wrote a book on his time as the chief agitator of the Ramajanmbhoomi conflict. His words in writing, his speeches, and his interviews from an intertextual web that informs the discourse on the temple matter. Examples were chosen using large databases (in the case of parliamentary debates), available videos that point to clear connections between words Advani spoke, actions that happened, and legislative and judicial changes that ensued. Since each chapter charts a history of discourse around an issue, the data, whether speeches or debates in the Indian Parliament, point to how a particular Muslim subject was created, discussed, and legislated against. Debates in the Parliament of India are archived and publicly accessible. The excerpts of debates presented in each chapter speak to a historicity related to the matter at hand in each chapter, a balance between different voices, and the way the debates have changed over the years. Landmark judgments are open access. Judgments often build on each other: for example, the Ramajanmbhoomi Supreme Court of India judgment was a response to an appeal to the Allahabad High Court (the highest court in Uttar Pradesh where the disputed site is located) judgment of 2009 and heavily cross referenced it. In cases of judgments (which are thousands of pages long), excerpts that summarize and highlight the key points made by judgments are part of the data, and some of these excerpts are included in the chapters.

The focus of the book is primarily the Hindi belt – that is, the parts of India where Hindi and dialects of Hindi are spoken. The reason for this is my familiarity with the linguistic context of the region as well as the political pull that this region has in the overall politics of India at the national level. Some of the issues discussed in this book have a decades-long history. The time period this book works with is the 1920s to about 2020. However, not every issue discussed here has a century-long history, and most became part of national discourse after the Hindu right gained political power in the decades after the 1980s.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the history and current potentials of the Hindu political and religious right in India. The politics of citizenship and Hindu right in the context of India are also explained. The relationship between citizenship and the Hindu right is critical to understanding the legislative agenda of the Hindu right at the core of this book.