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Mehta, Akanksha (2017) Right-wing sisterhood: everyday politics of Hindu nationalist women in India and Zionist settler women in Israel-Palestine. PhD Thesis. SOAS University of London. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/24903 Copyright © and Moral Rights for this PhD Thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. A copy can be downloaded for personal non‐commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This PhD Thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder/s. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. When referring to this PhD Thesis, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the PhD Thesis must be given e.g. AUTHOR (year of submission) "Full PhD Thesis title", name of the School or Department, PhD PhD Thesis, pagination. multi-religious syncretic times/practices and of secular sentiments in the subcontinent (Sarkar & Butalia, 1998; Hansen, 1999; Bhatt, 2001). At the heart of these erasures of the ‘other’ are practices of denial that formulate certain Right-Wing Sisterhood: subjectivities. Everyday Politics of Hindu Nationalist Women in India and Cohen (2001), in his book States of Denial, identities three forms of denial that allow individuals and collectives (and states) to know and then ignore Zionist Settler Women in Israel- atrocities and human suffering. The first, literal denial refuses to acknowledge Palestine the ‘facts’ and asserts that the claims of atrocity and brutality are simply untrue. The second, interpretive denial acknowledges the facts but gives them a different meaning and narrative. The third, implicatory denial does not side line the ‘facts’ and their interpretation, however, through a series of rationalizations, denies the political and ethical implications of the events in Akanksha Mehta these narratives. Unlike literal and interpretive denial, knowing about suffering and atrocity are not in question here, but the manner and level of action and the response to this knowing hold the denial (Cohen, 2001:7-8). All Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD in Gender Studies three forms allow a denial of responsibility, a denial of injury, and a denial of the victim (ibid.:60-61). 2016 In the case of the right-wing movements that are discussed in this thesis, these three forms of denial work together in enabling the aforementioned erasures of the ‘other’. Excuses (including apologies, defensive accounts, and rationalizations) or what Goffman (1961) refers to as sad tales allow settler Centre of Gender Studies women and Hindu right-wing women to deny all three—the victim, the injury, and any responsibility. For my interlocutors, the victim, as a collective, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences does not exist, and the victim, as an individual, is either to blame for all that SOAS, University of London befalls him (a denial of responsibility) or is simply exaggerating his/her plight (denial of injury). 220 Declaration Added to these ‘excuses’, are ideological allegiances that intensify this denial. For example, settler women often use their allegiance to God, to Judaism, and I have read and understood regulation 17.9 of the Regulations for students of to the mythological idea of the Jewish land/Jewish state to bring coherence to the SOAS, University of London concerning plagiarism. I undertake that all their narratives of denial. As Yehudit pointed to me in a long interview, the material presented for examination is my own work and has not been We are just here because that is what H’Shem wanted us to do; if people written for me, in whole or in part, by any other person. I also undertake that were going to be hurt in the process (especially innocent people) he any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of would not have wanted us to live in this Jewish land. God is kind, why another person has been duly acknowledged in the work which I present for would he allow us to harm anyone?339 examination. For the Hindu right-wing woman, an allegiance to Hindu nationalism as well as to a neoliberal idea of ‘India Shining’ enables a similar twisted process. As Pooja elaborated in an interview in Delhi, Signed: ____________________________ Date: _________________ The media claims that we are anti-Muslim and we are violent against their community. We are not violent against anyone. We just want what is best for India and India’s development. If someone is being anti-national and not allowing us to move forward as a country, then of course we have to take action. I am a proud Hindu want to see India rise and beat China and even America and I will do anything to make that happen. But how is that violence? How can there be a victim if it is about making our country go forward?340 Adding to Cohen’s (2001) pertinent analyses, I put forth three arguments related to practices of charity and denial here. First, as elaborated in the previous sections, charitable efforts allow right- wing women to produce and constitute themselves as positive and ‘good’ subjects in the Foucauldian sense. Simultaneously, they also allow for an entire means of formulating the negative ‘other’ and denying any notion of 339 Interview with Yehudit Katsover, Givat Oz V’Gaon, West Bank, Palestine, 31 August 2014. 340 Interview with Pooja, New Delhi, India, 18 February 2014. 2 221 Thesis Abstract injury or victimhood to this other. Through service and charitable practices, the grievances of the ‘other’ are placed out of focus and denied existence, a Right-Wing movements have gained political momentum in the last few voice, and an ear. By centring on right-wing communities and the lacks as decades, drawing within their ranks women who not only embody their well as injuries within and to these communities and their members (such as exclusionary and violent politics but who also simultaneously contest the lack of facilities, funding, spaces or the presence of loss and injury due to everyday patriarchies. This thesis examines the everyday politics of women in war, violence, and migration), the ‘other’ is simply reduced to a perpetrator, a two right-wing movements, the cultural nationalist Hindu right-wing project nuisance, and a cause of lack and pain. The framing of charitable activities in in India and the settler-colonial Zionist project in Israel-Palestine. Based on ways that assert the resilience, survival, and resistance of the right-wing fourteen months of ethnographic, narrative, and visual ‘fieldwork’ conducted entity in the face of the ‘other’ allows my interlocutors to then justify with women in both these movements, I argue that through a politics of the exclusionary and violent politics as a necessity. For example, my interlocutors everyday, right-wing women bargain and negotiate with patriarchal in both right-wing projects would justify policies and violence against communities/homes, male-formulated ideologies and discourses, and male- Palestinians and Indian minority (and anti-national) groups as necessary, dominated right-wing projects and spaces. These mediations replicate and making statements such as – They deserved it. “What could we do? We had to affirm as well as subvert and challenge patriarchal structures and power protect ourselves from them”. “You have seen what they do to us and how we keep hierarchies, troubling the binaries of home/world, private/public, our communities together. Do you blame us for our politics?”341 Quotidian personal/political, and victim/agent. I assert that dominant literature on right- charitable practices allow for the proliferation of this image of the ‘other’ as wing women focuses on motherhood and family, ignoring various other one who only deserves contempt and violence. In the process, they also crucial subject positions that are constituted and occupied by right-wing perpetuate a deep denial of any form of injury or victimhood to the other. As women and neglecting the agential and empowering potential of right-wing Nadia asserted, women’s subjectivities. If we who live in Judea and Samaria are working so hard to ensure everyone feels safe and everyone is looked after and doing so much I use four themes/lenses to examine the everyday politics of right-wing work even in the face of adversity, then can you imagine, if we ever do women. These are: pedagogy and education; charity and humanitarian work; have to take action against an Arab, then it is not violence, it is a intimacy, friendship, sociability and leisure; and political violence. By necessity. If they let us reach that level, it is their fault not ours.342 interrogating the practices that are contained in and enabled by these four locations of Hindu right-wing and Zionist settler women’s everyday politics, Second, as mentioned earlier, charitable practices equip right-wing women this thesis highlights the multiple narratives, contradictions, pluralities, with the ways to elevate themselves to superior levels of morality and hierarchies, power structures, languages, and discourses that encompass 341 Fieldnotes, London, UK, 20 October 2014. 342 Interview with Nadia, Givat Oz V’Gaon, West Bank, Palestine, 8 August 2014. 3 222 right-wing women’s projects. By capturing the processes of subject formation goodness. Denial of the ‘other’ intensifies the categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and of right-wing women, I encapsulate how my interlocutors shape the allows the ‘self’ to further its mission civilisatrice and assert its goodness. It subjectivities of those in their communities, transforming the local and also allows my interlocutors to display blatant disbelief at anyone who international landscapes of the Hindu right-wing and the Zionist settler challenges their exclusionary violent actions and to deny their own status as project.