Equator in the News

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• In the Irish Times this weekend, the writer Mark O’Connell devoted his weekly column to Equator:
  
  “Equator, so far at least, has tended to prioritise more long-form essayistic writing: the sort of pieces that take time to research and write, and involve a great deal of editing. But in recent weeks, there have been forays into other, more nimble and reactive forms, including, this week, an illuminating interview with Iranian-born academic Arang Keshavarzian about the protests in Iran, the murderous response of the regime, and the strange re-emergence of Reza Palahvi, the Shah’s son, as a potential political contender. Amid the relentless anxiety and uncertainty of the present political moment, certain intimations of a global future can be glimpsed. The disintegrating mental faculties of the US president – as palpable, in its way, as that of his immediate predecessor – are, along with his increasingly stupid and reckless actions, painful to observe; but it’s possible to see that some good might come of the chaos, not least in its hastening of Europe’s decoupling from a collapsing American hegemony. And we might, in time, become less relentlessly focused on our own particular region of the world, as the gravitational pull of its once central body loses its force. In the meantime, there is Equator.”

• In the London Review of Books’ Winter Lecture, titled Another Country, Adam Shatz invoked an Equator launch essay in his interrogation of America’s place in the world: “As the historian Rahmane Idrissa, who grew up in Niger, reminds us in his essay ‘Statemania’, published in Equator, foreigners have always been drawn to the US as much for its ‘sheer power, the sense of boundless strength it projected’ as for its democracy, the defects of which are clear enough to people outside it.”

• On the podcast Politics Theory Other, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh discussed his Equator essay Homeland Empire – his argument that, from Venezuela to Minnesota, Donald Trump is creating a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity. Singh discussed how the second Trump administration represents a mere deepening of pre-existing trends in American statecraft; the ways in which the MAGA movement is genuinely innovative; and why he thinks the Trump administration is fundamentally unable to construct a genuinely hegemonic project.

• Last week, in the New Yorker’s lead comment, Benjamin Wallace-Wells cited Homeland Empire as a way to understand the violence wreaked by the Trump administration abroad and at home: “If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers ‘to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants—and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.’”

Mapping the RSS

In December, The Caravan published an extraordinary expose of the Hindu right. A team of researchers spread across the world, coordinated by Felix Pal, a political scientist at the University of Western Australia, has painstakingly identified and gathered information on over 2,500 organisations that are controlled by or linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right network that advances Hindu nationalism and that counts as its political companion Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

These organisations are big and small, domestic and foreign, covert and overt, violent and charitable. To put these revelations in context, the RSS itself acknowledges only around three dozen affiliates. Anyone who suspects that their local temple, gymnasium or health clinic is run by the RSS can now confirm this on the interactive map that Pal‘s team has made public. An accompanying essay lays out their methodology.

Equator spoke to one of the key researchers, who asked to remain anonymous, about the lessons their project holds about the nature and prospects of the Hindu far-right.

What compelled you to spend all this time looking into the RSS’s innards?
Most Indians have prematurely conceded the Sangh to be unknowable. We've repeatedly met activists and organisers who think of the Sangh in abstract, almost conspiratorial terms – as an ideological tendency in Hindu society rather than an organisation with a leadership and agenda. Most progressives assume the Sangh is succeeding simply because Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, is popular, when the reverse is at least equally true.

Most Indians experience the Sangh not as a set of ideas but as a network serving a range of quotidian functions. The Sangh educates their children, conducts local religious events, sets up places for evening exercises – or backs the militia that burns down the homes of Muslims. If you want to fight or even understand the Sangh, you need to map their organisational activities. It took us six years. That’s how large and complicated the Sangh is.

The RSS is not even a registered entity. Yet you’ve found over 2,500 RSS affiliates, from cow shelters to think tanks. What was your methodology?

The Sangh, as a totality, is secretive, but most individual organisations within the Sangh are not. (The exceptions are the militias and other groups engaged in illegal activities.) Our dataset relies entirely on publicly available sources: the biographies of Sangh leaders; the output of dozens of Sangh publishing houses, newspapers and journals; blogs written by mid-level activists with a mania for documentation. Other researchers have ignored this vast archive not because it‘s hard to access but because it‘s mindnumbingly boring.

Here’s an example. Suruchi Prakashan, the RSS’s central publishing house, has in one of its books listed residential hostels for the indoctrination of [indigenous] Adivasi students, founded and run by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a paramilitary group known for its attacks on Muslims and Christians. One of those hostels is the Samrat Prithviraj Chauhan Chhatrawas in Beawer, Rajasthan. We triangulated this hostel in the 2019-20 Annual Report of Support a Child USA, the innocuously named fundraising wing of the VHP’s American chapter (so titled to bring in donations from well-minded Hindus who might otherwise shirk from donating to the Sangh). From Facebook posts, we discovered that a local BJP leader donated to the hostel; that another BJP leader attended an event there; and so on. Each of these datapoints was matched to a certain criteria score which in cumulation allowed us to conclude that the organisation is conclusively a part of the Sangh.

Only a few organisations you list focus on targeting Muslims. Most engage with Hindus. What forms of internal violence might the RSS be deploying against its own co-religionists, Dalits and Adivasis?

Anti-Muslim violence is understandably the fundamental moral and ethical question that grounds most progressive’s opposition to the Sangh. But it‘s a tactical blunder to focus solely on this issue. The Sangh’s foundational anxieties – and most of its “constructive” activities – are about overcoming the boundaries of caste, language, belief (and in the case of Adivasis, ethnicity) to create a political subject known as “the Hindu”. This is not an easy task, not least because of the tenacity of the caste system. The Hindu “Nation” is constantly fraying at the edges, and constantly having to be stitched back together, most obviously at the level of the BJP's electoral coalitions.

On our map, you will find that the Sangh’s energies are directed primarily at areas where it is weakest: states like Kerala and Karnataka, with strong regional identities; the Northeast, where Hinduism competes with other tribal identities; and Adivasi communities. They’re less methodical in the Hindi heartland of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The Sangh’s investment in “welfare” activities like education and healthcare, overwhelmingly aimed at children, rests on the same principle: the Hindu Rashtra doesn’t simply pre-exist, it has to be made.

The Sangh is seldom troubled by accusations of anti-Muslim bigotry. It is largely a proudly anti-Muslim organisation. But it is extremely sensitive to stories of casteism, corruption, the abuse or trafficking of children in boarding schools, and religious fraud – because those revelations fundamentally corrode its hegemony-building project.

What does your project tell people outside India?

The Indian diaspora is the largest in the world, and the Sangh has followed it outside India too. We traced its presence in 40 countries across every continent except Antarctica.

This has significant consequences to the politics of those countries. In 2022, the city of Leicester, once heralded as a beacon of multiculturalism, saw Hindu-Muslim riots in which Sangh groups clearly had a hand. In the US, a section of Hindu-American voters has moved sharply to the right, led by the likes of Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy. In Canada, the Hindu far-right has not only aligned itself with the Conservative Party but also heightened conflict with the Sikh community, going to great lengths to defend the Indian regime’s attempts to assassinate Khalistani activists. The Sangh has also sought alliances with Sinhala extremists in Sri Lanka, Buddhist anti-Muslim bigots in Myanmar and anti-Palestinian genocidaires.

Which brings me to a second reason why people outside India should care. The Hindu right has been a model for far-right movements across the globe, not just for its size and longevity, but also because it represents a certain type of right-wing Gramscianism – a project that can transcend the ebbs and flows of its figureheads, and that seeks to build long-term hegemony through precisely the type of civil society network we‘ve mapped. In understanding far-right movements as organisational forces, we can understand them as material, mortal and defeatable; but we also learn that they can’t simply be treated as psychological pathologies and wished away.