The Irregular’ and the Unmaking of Minority Citizenship

The Rules of Law in Majoritarian India

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12282980
AutoresM Mohsin Alam Bhat (0000-0001-8256-0367, Queen Mary University of London, autor correspondente)
Ano2024
Volume33
Fascículo5
Páginas690-721
Data de publicação2024-04-13
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoSocial & Legal Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0964-6639 • E-ISSN: 1461-7390
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/09646639241238427
OpenAlexW4394784480
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas10
Referências citadas62

This article focuses on the important aspect of India's democratic decline, the ascendance of the Hindu majoritarian state, and its relationship with the law. It argues that the law is central to the Hindu majoritarian project but often in obscurely informal ways. India's majoritarian state seeks to radically reconfigure the law in Indian social life by making the rule of law inapplicable to its minorities. Through a series of examples drawn from the everyday socio-legal life in contemporary India, the article shows how arbitrary and extralegal state violence is endorsed, affirmed, and acquiesced on grounds of serving ethnonationalist values and interests. It theoretically develops the novel interpretive framework of ‘the irregular’ to capture the practices of the ethnicization of the law, ethnonationalist legitimisation of extra-legality through intense political mobilisation, and the production of subordinated minority citizenship without the formal incorporation of graded citizenship

Citizenship · Democracy · Hinduism · Political science · Politics · Principle of legality · Rule of law · Sociology · State (computer science · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Philosophy · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies