ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter returns to the opening proposition that India’s bovine paradox can be understood as an exemplar of broader political-economic dynamics at play in Modi’s India, and of the contradiction between Hindu nationalism’s attempts at incorporating India’s poor and working classes within its fold while also pushing a neoliberal restructuring of the economy to the benefit of capitalist classes. Mobilising an optimism of the will in reflecting on the political implications of this, the chapter suggest that the unfolding intensification of political-economic dynamics under Modi’s authoritarian populism may point to emerging structural conditions of possibility for progressive counter-hegemonic mobilisation. In making this argument, the chapter engages at length with emerging scholarship on the recent farmers’ agitations in India, locating structural conditions of counter-hegemonic mobilisation surrounding bovines within broader dynamics in a restructuring economy in which agrarian relations are taking on novel configurations. The concluding discussion is concerned with examining and articulating these conditions of possibility in a conjuncture where the Hindu nationalism that underpins Modi’s authoritarian populism seeks political majority by pitting classes of labour against each other.
