GBV and Postcolonial India: Transnational Media, Hindutva, and Muslim Racializations

This chapter examines how Indian print media covers the anti-Muslim violence that has become endemic since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014. Focusing on the widespread use of terminologies of “pogrom” and “lynching” by the Indian press, it argues the media's use of these terms reveals that Muslims in India are now racialized in ways that are transnationally understandable through the history of African Americans in the US or Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia. The chapter suggests that images of such racial violence both reveal the conditions that enable it—such as the inaction and complicity of the state, police, and judiciary—and also show how such violence is normalized as it becomes part of gendering the population through a violent right-wing patriarchy. Such gendering produces Hindu patriarchy able to violently subjugate Muslim women and men, and constructs Muslim men as insufficiently patriarchal because they are unable to protect “their” women.