protest and the security state: the case of india
INDERPAL GREWAL
With the new century, we find numerous authoritarian rulers around the world, some of them in postcolonial states. Several continue on from the twentieth century. With these governments, decades after neoliberal globalization, comes increasing inequality and repression. Even postcolonial democracies such as India now have authoritarian leaders, enabled by populist right-wing nationalisms. “Security” has become a dominant agenda in most states, surpassing welfare or development as state logics (Ali 2019; Duffield 2001). Even in those states that see themselves as liberal democracies, security appears to be the primary agenda for government (Al-Bulushi et al. 2022; Grewal 2016).
What is often overlooked across authoritarian and liberal governance, is that all these states enable and support patriarchy and the attendant heteromasculine domination over family mainly by suturing national security with “family” protection (Albanese 2001; Bjork-James 2020). This security logic with its intimacy between family and nation is critical for political power, one that some of us have been arguing is the founding assumption of all “state security” projects, those that exist in authoritarian-led states and those that consider themselves liberal democracies (Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, Grewal 2023). In authoritarian-led states, this connected securitizing of family and nation may embolden patriarchy and government in more extreme ways—one that I have called “patriarchal authoritarianism” (Grewal 2020)—while in liberal democracies such power is often overlooked or downplayed by suggesting it does not exist in developed countries. For feminist and queer scholarship, attention to this key aspect of the security state is critical (Puar 2017; Mikdashi 2022; Rao 2020)
However, as feminist and queer scholarship has also amply shown, none of these security projects are totalizing, and both family and state are continually unsettled by those who transgress boundaries of all kinds: territorial and familial (Peyrifitte and Sanders-McDonagh 2018). Authoritarian patriarchy is a process of recruitment that is also undercut by boundary-crossers with cohabitations of all kinds, and even the most authoritarian states face divergent and numerous protests—many of which might not claim to challenge the state, but which undercut implicitly its state-sponsored identities. This aspect of protest and transgression has been abundantly evidenced by queer theory (Butler 1994), and feminist and related social movements.
“What is often overlooked across authoritarian and liberal governance, is that all these states enable and support patriarchy and the attendant heteromasculine domination over family mainly by suturing national security with “family” protection”
For all those bemoaning UN-type “governance feminism,” many international treaties, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) can get lip service, and may not alter patriarchal power in state or local cultures (though they might enable transnational NGOs). Patriarchies, and notions of “protection” of family, girls, marriage, etc., work by transposing familial hierarchies into national ones, thus nationalizing and naturalizing patriarchy and its hierarchy (Cooper 2019). Along the way, patriarchies reify gendered ideologies, namely, binary gender and often, though not always, heteronormativity. While feminist and LGBTQ movements claim new identities, it cannot be forgotten that all states and their policies construct gender in numerous ways, both in social and political worlds and through economic policies and politics (Moallem 2005; Najmabadi 2005). Even in gendered, patriarchal governance, which is almost universally the case, people and identities and genders and sexualities are also—albeit not wholly—made and remade.
At the same time, it is not a given that such authoritarian power is ever absolute (Bajoghli 2019). Fissures, competition among elites and patriarchies, and transnational media attention can disrupt the security logic. As is visible in the recent movements in Iran, a population can protest at any moment and protest can spread, making it difficult for states to ignore and needing to find ways to assuage or silence the protest. If such protest seems to take shape in ways that are visible or spectacular, there is transnational media attention that can enable the protest to be part of geopolitics, and such geopolitics can offer solidarity, global attention that might be helpful or, in sporadic instances, become connected to unwelcome partnerships (Shakhsari and Moallem 2019).
While public and street protests are often clearly visible across the globe and in countries ruled by authoritarians, there are also ongoing, private forms of transgression that unsettle state-sponsored gendered identities, and these can be much less spectacular, often emerging in secret or even in ordinary sight in all sorts of guises. These also undermine state-sponsored gender identities, especially in terms of patriarchal control and governance. Though Iran is an excellent example of the state project of gender formation and how protest movements can remake identities and cultures, I offer the example of India to show how rich traditions of protests of all kinds emerge to challenge the security state. In the case of India, both public protest and quiet transgressions are ongoing, unsettling the state in their own ways. Both forms of protest have long histories and are impossible to eradicate because such protests have become deeply embedded culturally (Mitchell 2023). In postcolonial states such as India, the history of anti-colonial politics remains so powerful because it produced a culture and history of protest that is being fought over by the Right-wing, the liberals, and the Left.
I turn to the case of contemporary India to make clear why feminist and queer analysis is so important: first, for paying attention to the global and geopolitical importance of protests based on gender and sexuality both in the street and the home, the neighborhood and the community; second, to bring attention to the power of authoritarian and liberal governance projects that connect family and state through new logics of security; and third, to show how states work to construct gender in ongoing ways, tying it to identity projects that make gender norms seem sacrosanct, even as their work is continually undone in visible and invisible ways.
Cultures of protest in contemporary India
As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rules in India, its leader, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, comes from the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an early twentieth-century Hindu nationalism that contends that India should be a religious Hindu state (with a heavily North India form of Hinduism), and not a liberal, plural democracy (Jaffrelot 1999). The government promulgates religious nationalism by use of colonial-era repressive laws to reject pluralism, but simultaneously wants to claim a radical history of anti-colonialism. This nationalism recruits followers by enabling the power (official and by vigilantism) of conservative religious patriarchy, even as the government claims to work for the “empowerment” of women. Rapes and sexual assaults continue unabated, and these are the only kinds of violence that make the news (if the violence is extreme), while material forms of inequality remain the norm (women own only 11 percent of rural land, for instance, according to CGIAR Gender Platform). The Prime Minister’s slogan, “Beti Bacchao, Beti Padhao,” (save the daughter, educate the daughter) suggests that only those identified as daughters need state support, and the exhortation is directed at its key subject, the patriarch. This is just one example of remaking nationalist patriarchy in India today (Banerjee 2012).
That those who do not occupy the role of the daughter are to be ignored is visible in the most recent protest that has occupied public debate in India in the spring of 2023. Female wrestlers (including some Olympic medalists) protested their sexual harassment by the BJP Member of Parliament (MP), Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who is also the head of the Wrestling Federation of India. They weren’t even able to lodge a case against him with the police until they asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Prime Minister Modi was silent (as is his practice, especially when the conflict is instigated by his party’s politics), not asking the accused MP, who belongs to his party, to resign, or the police to investigate. The MP involved has a long history of Hindu nationalist violence and allegations of criminality, though he has been able to avoid conviction thus far. The wrestlers, including the men on the Indian team, staged a protest during Modi’s inauguration (some called it “coronation”) of the new Parliament building to get maximum attention, and they succeeded, with TV and social media questioning their impudence. Yet even TV news, mostly compliant under Modi, and fearful of government harassment if they speak out, have supported the women, albeit also positing a “he said, she said,” approach. The Modi government has been silent as of this writing.
These protests echo the street protests that rose up in 2012 after a brutal and fatal gang-rape in New Delhi, and after feminist activists had worked for decades to change laws and policing to be less discriminatory towards women (Roy 2021). There have been some changes in laws concerning rape since 2012, though they exempt the military and husbands from liability for rape, and sexual harassment and sexual assault laws have brought forth less than satisfactory results at workplaces. At the same time, these issues of sexual assault and sexual harassment remain in the forefront in duplicitous ways, as BJP govern by often accusing Muslim men of kidnapping or raping Hindu women, claiming that these men are committing “Love Jihad” (Gupta 2009). Incorporating the language of the American “War on Terror,” which stereotyped Muslim men as prone to extremism, such terms reveal ways in which Muslims are being racialized and criminalized, and many have been lynched or imprisoned because of several laws targeting the Muslim community (Farokhi 2020).
“Diasporic spaces, in particular, enable connections and communities, supporting nationalisms or struggling against them (and this is not new to this century). Diasporas enable solidarity and protest, research and publicity, and also love and romance that might not be possible elsewhere, nurturing new solidarities in distant spaces”
The spectacle of rape is central to patriarchal politics, as it is to feminist ones. Some Hindu nationalists have even promoted the rape of Muslim women while claiming protection for those who are their “Hindu daughters.” Nationalist “protection” of women—only from rape by the Other—diminishes all women’s rights, even as it enhances the sovereignty of the patriarch or those who identify with him (Sarkar 2002). In confronting this patriarchy, struggles against the state often come to espouse the language of freedom and rights as citizens, hoping that what remains of the liberal civil society, judiciary, or of political parties and media will offer some help. As Lisa Mitchell has pointed out, there is a formidable history of protest that seeks support and redress from the state rather than resisting the state (Mitchell 2023). However, sometimes protest can also claim the nation, rather than the state; for instance, the wrestlers in spring 2023 often are at pains to claim that they are patriotic and that they claim allegiance to India and to its flag.
Such claims of patriotism were also visible in the Shaheen Bagh protest against the Citizens Amendment Act (CAA), undertaken by Muslim women from an area in Delhi. The protests lasted from December 2019 through March 2020, at which point the women were forcibly removed and/or arrested under the pretext of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CAA was discriminatory because it made possible for every other religious identity except Muslims to claim refugee status in India. A related law sought to create a national register for citizens. Since many people still lack identity cards or birth certificate or have no access or control over their information, it is low-income men, women and their children who are most threatened by these laws; one result is many (mostly Muslims) are now imprisoned in so-called “detention centers,” accused of being foreign nationals. The Shaheen Bagh protest drew many students, intellectuals and activists, and was joined by many groups and related protest communities. Protest sites became sites for instruction and exchange of information, and the protest gathered national and international attention. It was unthinkable for many Indians that ordinary Muslim women would protest, especially since many protestors were grandmothers even, and these protests changed some national and international perceptions about the supposed passivity of Muslim women (Bhatia 2021). The protests ended with the pandemic, but also with a pogrom against the Muslim community in another area of the city.
A year later, Dalit groups (those deemed as “low-caste”) and Farmers also staged protests—the latter directly against new farm laws that the BJP tried to pass and which would have enabled corporate control over farmland. Small farms and rural small landholdings support half the population, and the proposed laws would have driven people off their land into urban labor peripheries. Both landowners and labor unions across India, many of the latter comprising Dalit communities, came together in this protest that occupied the streets surrounding Delhi, disrupting flow of people and goods into the region, The year-long protest along the roads leading to the capital, Delhi, was a massive effort on behalf of farmers from several states in the region, both Sikh and Hindu, supported by the rural villages that made sure the protestors had enough to eat and shelter (the artist photographer, Gauri Gill, has made an extraordinary record of the shelter structures and these photos are on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London).[1] That protest led the government to withdraw the neoliberal laws, a clear victory for this struggle.
Dalit and Adivasi groups have continued the centuries-long struggles against upper-caste India. Since upper-castes comprise most of the judiciary, the media, and the political sphere, this struggle has a long history, beginning with alliances with the Communist party, struggles against the building of dams, the continued protest of the rapes of Dalit women by upper-caste men, and the common charge that any affirmative action is oppressive to upper-castes. The history of struggle in India cannot leave out Kashmir, a place that the Modi government has now occupied in the colonial quest to end Kashmiri independence. Weaponizing terminologies of calling the opposition “terrorists” or “extremists,” the government continues to militarize—“securitize”—many border regions, surveilling Muslim and Sikh communities. Under the present government, internal dissent is heavily targeted formally and informally (using social media trolls), and policing of territorial boundaries is often only for national, masculinist spectacle.
I end by considering two issues of struggle that do not often make the news or do not come from public or street protest.
First, while nationalist patriarchy uses violence to enforce religious, caste, and gender boundaries, the long history of transgressive love, not just in present-day India but also across a broad trans-region comprising Northwestern India and West Asia, remains to remind people of the affiliations beyond the territorial of the nation-state. They also are reminders of the fluidity of culture, religion, identity, and community, and the transience of any kind of rule. These cultures of love transgress patriarchal control of family and kinship, and suggest that transgressions, conversions of identities (of many kinds, including religious ones), and unsettlings of state power are ongoing. The history of fluid religion, for instance, of Sufi Islam and its impacts across what Richard Eaton calls “Persianate India,” means that ideas of love, passion, pain, divinity, and worship traverse trans-regionally all sorts of cultural practices (Ali 2016; Orsini 2006). Stories of love and romance (not just heterosexual), especially those that are tragic, remain a popular cultural memory. What the stories of romance (those of Heer/Ranjha, Laila/Majnu, Sohni/Mahiwal) reveal are histories of mobility of people and of armies since the beginning of the second millennium, and of love, fascination, and romance for the stranger that transgresses patriarchy (Ali 2016; Mir 2010). In some cases, charges of rape are cover for consensual sexual relations across patriarchy-enforced boundaries of caste or religion, and the charges are forcibly brought by family members trying to hide or criminalize that relationship (Oza 2022). There are so many cinematic and literary representations of love and romance across borders (with varying politics), that such televisual productions form an ever-expanding genre of their own.
Second, if transgressive love is a continual thorn in the side of nationalist patriarchy, the histories of mobility across regions of the Indian subcontinent and its neighbors, including diaspora histories, create new opportunities for political affiliations. Connections across national boundaries—reminders of transnational histories that historians are only now beginning to probe—produce forms of cross-border affect and kinship that cannot be controlled by the state (Ghosh 2022; Parsard 2018).
“The street and the home are constantly in ferment, defying those who seek to control these spaces and the nationalist suturing of nation and family can go both ways, disrupting and enabling in a continued struggle. Feminist/queer analysis is vital for such politics.”
Diasporic spaces, in particular, enable connections and communities, supporting nationalisms or struggling against them (and this is not new to this century). Diasporas enable solidarity and protest, research and publicity, and also love and romance that might not be possible elsewhere, nurturing new solidarities in distant spaces (Sameh 2019). The Indian diaspora in the U.S., for instance, has spoken up against Modi, and the Indian community is split politically between those who support Modi and his Hindutva nationalism and those who see it as discriminatory and destructive. Diasporas can support nationalism from afar (Axel 2001; Mani and Varadarajan 2005; Bernal 2014), but they also can support human rights violations caused by this nationalism, or solidarity with dissident voices (Anand 2005). While Modi’s government supports U.S.-based NGO’s advocating for Hindu nationalism, there are other NGOs that have come to speak for human rights in India. In another example, while the Sikh community in the U.S. has long been charged with supporting “terrorism” in Punjab (which is what the state terms an eruption of Sikh nationalism), the diaspora continues to record human rights violations made by the state during its militarization of the region in the 1980s and 90s (Ensaf.org). Scholars and journalists in the U.S. and Europe research and publish on Modi and Hindu nationalism, and the dominance of social media means that such forms of documentation and theorizing circulate internationally. Since the Modi government’s nationalist platform includes a goal of international dominance, such projects lead to uproars in India and more publicity for the specific document (BBC documentary, “India: The Modi Question”). Moreover, the need for national media to have transnational (diasporic, especially) publics also means that news media in India has to find new audiences outside of the region, changing their language and terminologies to create new meanings that escape nationalism. I have written, for example, of how terms such as “lynching” and “pogroms,” used to describe violence against Muslim communities in India, are commonly used by the English-language media—implicitly indexing the racialization of Jews and African Americans, and of Muslims in contemporary India (Grewal 2023).
Yet diasporas are not the only spaces of anti-authoritarian struggle, as my examples from India and as Iran’s recent history reveals. While I argue that diasporas also should be credited in the struggles for a plural democratic India, I do not forget how different kinds of protest emerges in India from its own protest traditions and from its diversity (Mitchell 2023). This diversity means cultures of the North are quite different from the South, and the quite different caste, religious, linguistic, and patriarchal traditions of the South do refuse Northern control. Thus, BJP’s imposition of Hindutva often does not sit well in the South, or in regions that claim their own version of Hinduism, or indeed other religions. Despite the emergence of ever-expanding forms of control and surveillance, brave journalists, scholars, jurists, and ordinary people speak up—some from desires for a more liberal India of a plural democracy, and some from their everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination (Kaur 2020). Women’s participation, whether against sexual violence or discriminatory laws concerning Muslims or the Farmer’s protest, cannot be discounted (Chakrabarty 2022).
While it seems that authoritarian rule is growing globally, what is also clear is that people—and that includes those in diasporas—resist and transgress this growth in numerous ways and in numerous spaces. The street and the home are constantly in ferment, defying those who seek to control these spaces and the nationalist suturing of nation and family can go both ways, disrupting and enabling in a continued struggle. Feminist/queer analysis is vital for such politics.
ENDNOTES
1. See here for Gauri Gill’s images that have been displayed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDERPAL GREWAL is Professor Emeritus of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is one of the founders of the field of transnational feminist studies, and known for her prolific work on transnational feminism, cultural theory, feminist theory, and her extensive research on post-colonialism, South Asian cultural studies, mobility and modernity, nongovernmental organizations, human rights, and citizenship. She is the author and editor of numerous articles and essays and books. Her most recent works include the co-edited (with Sahana Ghosh and Samar Al-Bulushi) special issue of Socialtext, entitled Security from the South, as well as a forthcoming essay for Annual Review of Anthropology (written with Ghosh and Al-Bulushi) entitled “Security Regimes: Transnational and Imperial Entanglements,” a co-written essay (with Hazel Carby) entitled, “Beyond Intersectionality: The Geopolitics of Race and Caste” that appeared in the Routlege Companion to Intersectionalities (2023), and an essay entitled “GBV and Postcolonial India:Transnational Media, Hindutva, and Muslim Racializations” forthcoming in The Cunning of Gender (Duke UP, 2023).
