In this ECPS interview, Dr. Maggie Paul argues that India under Narendra Modi is best understood as a “civilizational populist electoral autocracy,” in which Hindutva politics operates not only through elections and state coercion, but also through affective mass culture, media infrastructures, and majoritarian common sense. Drawing on her work on “futurist nostalgia,” saffronization, and the securitization of the “Bangladeshi infiltrator,” Dr. Paul examines how the BJP mobilizes emotions, historical memory, migration anxieties, and cultural narratives to reshape democracy and citizenship in contemporary India. The interview also explores the transnational dimensions of Hindutva mobilization, democratic erosion, bureaucratic exclusion, and the emerging cracks within the BJP’s hegemonic project.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
In an era marked by democratic backsliding, affective polarization, and the global resurgence of majoritarian populism, India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become one of the most consequential cases for understanding how nationalism, media, religion, and state power can converge to reshape democratic life. Far from operating solely through electoral competition or overt repression, the contemporary Hindutva project increasingly functions through what Dr. Maggie Paul describes as a broader “affective economy” that mobilizes emotions, historical memory, cultural nostalgia, and civilizational anxieties to construct a new political common sense.
In this wide-ranging interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Maggie Paul, Lecturer in Politics at La Trobe University, examines how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has transformed Hindutva from a political ideology into what she calls an “affective mass culture” embedded across cinema, digital media, bureaucracy, migration policy, and every day public life. Drawing on her influential co-authored work on “futurist nostalgia,” Dr. Paul argues that Hindutva politics “does not merely romanticize the past” but instead projects “a future-oriented civilizational populism” centered on the promise of restoring a glorious Hindu civilization through the symbolic framework of Ram Rajya.
According to Dr. Paul, the BJP’s political success rests not simply on electoral dominance, but on its ability to institutionalize a majoritarian cultural common sense. “What the BJP has achieved,” she argues, “is the normalization of a particular way of being Indian—of shaping what ‘being Indian’ is supposed to feel like.” Through multi-platform media infrastructures, WhatsApp ecosystems, cinema, religious spectacle, and transnational networks, Hindutva mobilization has generated what she describes as “a majoritarian fear and anxiety circulating across multiple platforms.”
The interview also explores how migration and citizenship have been securitized through the figure of the “Bangladeshi infiltrator,” a discourse that Dr. Paul traces back to colonial governance structures. In her analysis, Hindutva politics has expanded these colonial categories into a broader process of “migrantizing the citizen,” particularly targeting Muslims and marginalized communities through bureaucratic exclusion, citizenship legislation, and mass electoral revisions such as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.
At the same time, Dr. Paul emphasizes that coercion remains central to the Hindutva project. “Hindutva populist mobilization legitimizes coercive practices,” she explains, noting how violence, incarceration, bulldozer demolitions, and punitive state measures are reframed as acts of national protection within a broader civilizational narrative.
Reflecting on the broader trajectory of the Modi era, Dr. Paul ultimately argues that contemporary India cannot be adequately understood through a single conceptual framework. Competitive authoritarianism, ethnocratic majoritarianism, and civilizational populism each capture only part of the picture. Instead, she concludes, “the current Indian regime is best understood as a hybrid of all these elements,” which she characterizes as “a civilizational populist electoral autocracy.”
Yet despite the apparent hegemony of Hindutva populism, Dr. Paul also points to emerging cracks within the system—particularly among younger generations confronting unemployment, precarity, and frustrated aspirations. Echoing Antonio Gramsci, she reminds us that “hegemony is never total or complete,” and that democratic resistance in India may ultimately depend not only on institutional opposition, but also on the mobilization of alternative affective imaginaries rooted in India’s pluralistic and syncretic traditions.
