Contesting utopias: Hindu nationalism, the cleansing counter-polity, and the critique of ategories

The Hindu nationalist movement's combination of State power and paramilitary violence has established unsecular, subordinationalist, cleansing counter-polities within the Indian Republic. Despite constitutional guarantees of legal equality and protection, minorities (Christians and Muslims) face intimidation and violence from non-State Hindu nationalist organizations. Their actions often have tacit support of provincial authorities when the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) is in power. This subordinationalist cleansing does not exterminate or physically transfer minority populations, classic definitions of ethnic cleansing, but "puts them in their [subordinate] place." The Indian case can be fruitfully compared to the subordinationalist cleansing of African Americans in Jim Crow America. It is not a simple case of State-led cleansing or mob violence. These extra-legal, public/private shadow regimes (counter-polities) are unsecular since Hindu nationalist cleansing violence and tax-support of Hindu and only Hindu temples do not fit any definition of 'secular' operative in Indian politics. In order to grasp the significance of the Hindu nationalist movement we have to re-examine many of the utopian terms used to describe ethnic violence and nationalist movements. The scholarly discourse surrounding the terms ethnic violence, ethnic cleansing, nation, nation-state, nationalism, Hindu nationalism, civil society , secularism, and establishment is insufficiently clear and so assumption-laden that it leads analysis nowhere ("utopia" in Greek). It is important to contest these terms because you cannot understand the complexity and perniciousness of events in BJP provinces just from the above insufficiently precise terms.