ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses how the bovine politics of Hindu nationalism has hurt India’s classes of labour in both city and countryside, especially but not exclusively Dalits and Muslims. As a result of new forms of legal and extra-legal regulation of the bovine economy, specific segments of classes of labour are experiencing a double victimisation that restricts their economic agency and produces economic hardship and physical suffering. At the same time, they are further excluded from a transforming bovine economy because of broader political-economic restructuring that favours dominant class interests. While the social, economic, and political emaciation of Muslims and the transformation of India into a Hindu state is clearly integral to the political moment of Modi’s authoritarian populism, the wider negative impact of this politics on India’s complex bovine economy nevertheless means that the livelihoods of larger segments of India’s classes of labour that Modi’s regime depends on for electoral support and legitimacy are considerably undermined. This chapter thus offers substantial evidence that speaks to current debates within and beyond critical agrarian studies on the class dynamics of Modi’s authoritarian populism.
