Description
In recent years and especially since India’s 2019 election, supporters and critics have increasingly analogized the Hindu nationalist project in terms of an ‘Israeli model’ of counter-‘terrorism’, colonialism, and ethnocracy, where disfavoured subjects of a putatively liberal-democratic state face forms of state violence and are afforded unequal rights and status. An emerging body of scholarship sheds light on whether this analogy is justifiable and/or analytically fruitful, but overwhelmingly within a methodologically nationalist, comparative framing. Rather than just evaluating this comparison on its own terms – assessing whether/how an ‘Israeli model’ is materializing – this paper instead argues that invocations of this analogy can themselves function as discourses implicated in (re)producing material practices of the Hindutva project. Focusing on the politics of governing Kashmir, the paper demonstrates how the Hindutva project draws on right-wing Zionism, as an ideology and set of practices, as a resource for (re)producing itself. To this end, the paper 1) theorizes the utility of moving beyond a comparative analytic of militaristic nationalisms; 2) discusses how Hindutva ideologues have envisioned and legitimated their project through favourably invoking Israel’s modes of state violence; and 3) examines how, following the August 2019 abrogation of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, appeals to an ‘Israeli model’ have helped condition the possibility of annexation and demographic reconfiguration of Muslim-majority Kashmir.
