ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on gender, religion, and populism in South Asia, especially India. Its theoretical framework is informed by post-Marxist analyses of populism as a discourse, notably the approach developed by Ernesto Laclau. This provides a better understanding of the relationship between gender and politics than does the more influential ideational approach. We need to pay particularly close attention to the intersectionality of various forms of inequality. This framework is applied to the Bharitaya Janata Party’s (BJP) mobilization of Hindutva to promote the idea that Hindus comprise a single distinct people and are the original, and thus the most legitimate, inhabitants of India. This ethnoreligious nationalism is deployed against the Muslim ‘other’. Moral panic around the so-called ‘Love Jihad’, the purported attempt by young Muslim men to convert Hindu women to Islam, are used to illustrate the gender dynamics of this form of nationalist discourse.
