The global Covid-19 pandemic has led an alarming transformation of the world’s social, economic, and political life. In that context, it is important to understand how the pandemic has added momentum to India’s inertial slide into a full-fledged Hindu majoritarian state. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has seized upon this public health emergency as an opportunity to strengthen its hold on Indian society. In this article, we examine how the Covid-19 pandemic has provided Modi’s single-party national government with fertile ground for advancing its Hindu nationalist project.  Vigilante Blame Culture  The global spread of Covid-19 has provided Hindutva organisations, which seek to merge Hindu and Indian identities, with a fresh target for their nationalist propaganda. In line with …

When Rick Santorum claimed that JFK’s 1960 ‘separation of church and state’ Houston campaign speech made him want to throw up, he was rightly criticized for it. Kathleen Townsend for the Washington Post said ‘Either Santorum doesn’t know his American history or he is purposefully rewriting it.’ Working in the wonderful New York State Archives in Albany this week I found a great deal of material on Catholic religious school aid controversies, which shed light on the history of US anti-Catholicism and ‘Wall of Separation between Church and State’ rhetoric. Since Santorum is a Catholic and so was JFK, along with fully a quarter of all Americans, examining such materials may help us to understand why Santorum made such remarks, …

I have a new piece on Salman Rushdie in Current Intelligence, following up on my previous article, ‘Does Salman Rushdie Exist’, also republished on Politics in Inspires. In this new piece I discuss the “Rushdie Affair” more broadly.  Below is a snippet of my longer article, the rest of which can be read over on Current Intelligence’s website.   Rushdie Redux As a symbol of free expression under threat, Salman Rushdie has become a fetish for liberals, who not only consider it blasphemy to criticize this wealthy and influential author, but also require a ritual condemnation of the “fanaticism” that once put his life at risk. This despite the fact that the threat he faced lies more than twenty years …