Description

Unexpected resolutions of the “agrarian question” have stoked upper- and middle-caste anxieties about secularism and development. This has led not to the abandonment of development but rather its articulation to a communal “war machine” that has attempted to capture the state for its Hindu nationalist agenda. The outcome is a re-constituted development machine that sanctions anti-minoritarian violence in the name of development. The populist career and bizarre alliances of Hindu ethnonationalism in Gujarat prompts a rethinking of the workings of Gramscian hegemony: as an ecology of ‘affect’ that has the structure of contingent necessity.

Vinay K. Gidwani is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Institute of Global Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He received an interdisciplinary PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, His research interests include geographies of work, agro-ecological change, the intersection of class and cultural politics, and critical social theory.