ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with India’s “bovine paradox” as an entry point for understanding the political economy of Modi’s India. This paradox involves stringent Hindu nationalist “protection of the cow” at home and the slaughter of millions of bovines every year for global beef exports. Our central contention is that this bovine paradox should be understood as exemplary of broader and acutely important political-economic dynamics and contradictions at play in India under Modi’s authoritarian populism. Offering a novel approach to understanding wider capitalist dynamics and processes of agrarian change, centred on Poulantzas’ idea of “state contradictions”, this chapter develops key conceptual strands that shape our argument: First, we argue for the novelty of taking a “bovine lens” on Modi’s India in a context of intensifying and often violent Hindu nationalist bovine politics; second, we trace the trajectory of neoliberalisation and accumulation patterns in India from the 1990s to today; and, third, we visit critical agrarian studies scholarship on the relationship between authoritarian populism and the rural world to emphasise the need for making dynamics of class, state, and capital central to the study of contemporary authoritarian populism.
