The Cultural Matrix of the Online Hindutva Discourse in India

The promise of ‘Digital India’ has, on the one hand, supplied a new vocabulary of political participation, and, on the other hand, consolidated techniques of statist control. Taking off from here, this article examines the constituency of the Hindutva discourse online, and how the performativity of Hindutva reconfigures the digital public sphere. It seeks to understand: How do the ideologues of Hindutva territorialize certain online spaces? How does the Internet equip them with new imaginations and vocabulary of political partisanship? How does this provoke the political Other—the counterpublics—against which their identity is recast and amplified? These three questions constitute the central problematic of the article.