Right-wing Authoritarianism in India and its Impact on Tribal communities

Abstract

There has been a rise of right wing authoritarianism in general in the global context. It can be seen in various forms, in terms of increasing majoritarianism, increasing attacks on minorities, communalisation of vast sections of the society and in many places religious fundamentalism. India is no exception. In India there has been a dramatic rise of the political right in the recent years.Scholars observe that in India the political right manifests itself in the form of Hindutva ideology, which basically pursues the idea of making India a religious nation-state. This challenges one of the basic structure of the Indian Constitution, secularism. The proponents of the Hindu right like RSS and BJP have been quite successful in firstly, Hinduising and secondly Hindutvising a large sections of the Indian society. India is a representative democracy and follows First Past The Post system in election for Lok Sabha and the state legislatures. This necessitates electoral mobilisation across communities. Therefore, the main aim of these proponents of the Hindu Right in India is to make sure that more and more people subscribe to their ideology. The ideological spread of the Hindu nationalism and the electoral success of the Hindu right are thereby closely associated. The Hindu right has expanded its natural base or social bloc of Hindu upper-caste-middle-class to various other marginalised section of the Indian society, like the OBCs, the Dalits and the tribals. Studies show how the electoral success and ideological spread of the Hindutva ideology has given rise to Right- wing authoritarianism (RWA). The present work is a review of studies focussing on RWA. It takes an overview of the debates surrounding RWA in the broader global context, what are its indicators and trends and how to identify such phenomenon. We also take a critical overview of the evolution of the Hindu right and Hindu nationalism starting from 1857 up until the recent times to understand how the phenomenon of RWA has propagated over space and time in the Indian context. Finally, this work takes a review of scholarly articles focussing on the interactions of the Hindu right with the Indian tribal society and how such interactions have simultaneously changed the fundamental characters of both the tribal society and the Hindu right. The scope of this study is to analyse the research done on the evolution of the forces of Hindu right and the process of Hinduisation and Hindutvisation of tribals. An attempt is made to understand how the process of Hinduisation and Hindutvisation has helped the proponents of the Hindu right like the RSS and the BJP to expand its foothold even in the regions which earlier were thought to be socially and politically out of reach of the Hindu right.