Ashutosh Varshney writes: The politics of Hindu nationalists is threatening to create a Jim Crow India in BJP-ruled territories. What race was to the American South, ethnicised religion is to Hindu nationalists.
To identify the core of BJP politics since 2019, I would like to introduce a new concept: Jim Crow Hindu Nationalism. This concept allows us to distinguish the BJP’s current politics from how the party exercised power when it last ruled Delhi. Equally important, the concept also reveals how BJP’s India is different from Nazi Germany, to which it is now increasingly compared in many circles worldwide.
What exactly is “Jim Crow”? Taking its name from a musical play depicting Black Americans in a demeaning light, the phrase has come to refer to an ensemble of laws and practices, which deprived Black Americans of their voting rights, subjected them to lynchings, and forced segregation upon their neighbourhoods, churches, schools, businesses and social lives. Inter-racial marriages were outlawed and inter-racial sex, especially between a Black man and a White woman, was violently punished. By the 1890s, such laws and practices were institutionalised in the southern states of the US, creating the term “Jim Crow South”.
Such politics lasted over seven decades, ending finally with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid-1960s. Until then, according to democratic theory, America was a “semi democracy”.
Electoral democracy coexisted with a racial political order, premised on White nationalism, in those 11 southern states that seceded during the Civil War, 1861-65, and were defeated. Two and a half decades later, White majorities in these states managed to impose, legally, a brutal regime of Black subordination.
