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“I hope you are not researching the so-called Internet Hindus,” an upcoming politician

in Mumbai said to me, almost as a caution. “A correspondent from Al Jazeera had come

here to do exactly this. What a ridiculous project! How can you dub someone an Internet

Hindu, and with such a casual charge of criminality?” I stared at my notepad, trying to

see reason in his argument. “See the energy of the youth here? Do you think it is just

Internet Hindu, whatever that means?” he asked, pointing to a large audience of more

than a thousand youth gathered for a political meeting of social media users with avowed

Hindu right-wing leanings. The gathering might indeed have been a confl uence of varied

motivations and energies, but the politician’s defensive demand ironically brought into

sharp focus how these energies coalesced as such a fi ne chorus around the drumbeat of

“Hindu nation” and how the relentless online work of such social media users keeps the

Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) project alive among educated middle-class youth in Mum-

bai. Hence, in this chapter I do exactly what the politician wanted me to avoid: trace and

unravel the nexus between social media and an emergent group of right-wing “Internet

Hindus,” bringing to the fore a range of mediations—technological, social, and urban—

behind its making and seeking to avoid, by the same token, the reduction of right-wing

sentiments to a fl at polemic.

A majority of studies on Hindu nationalism focus on the ideological discourse, organ-

izational strategies, and political philosophy of the Sangh Parivar, a cluster of organiza-

tions that fuel the Hindu right-wing movement in India and its allied political outfi ts,

notably the Shiv Sena, which engages in multifarious politics in the urban neighbor-

24 INTERNET HINDUS Right-Wingers as New India’s Ideological Warriors

Sahana Udupa

Handbook of Religion and the Asian City : Aspiration and Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century, edited by der Veer, Peter van, University of California Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brynmawr/detail.action?docID=1882084. Created from brynmawr on 2018-07-15 08:33:11.

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 3 3

hoods of Mumbai (see ch. 22; Hansen 1999; Jaff relot 1996). I turn away from this top-

down analysis to highlight an unexplored area—the media practices of Hindu activists

in the internet age and how digitally mediated agency builds up and maintains the

momentum of Hindu nationalist ideology. Specifi cally, I explore the production of the

strangeness of the “religious other” through digitally mediated agency in Mumbai as a

form of violence. Building on ethnographic fi eldwork in this city with the largest number

of social media users in India and a history of violent communal clashes, I show how

social media shapes Hindutva politics, which is at once urban, affl uent, and unabashedly

confi dent.

My main argument is that social media’s technological and commercial attributes

combine with imaginations of India’s place in the global world and the youth force driv-

ing the dream of a resurgent “new India” purged of corruption and “Muslim menace” to

recast Hindu nationalism as an entrepreneurial, ideological project of net-enabled youth.

This entrepreneurial Hindutva unfolds at the nexus of market, technology, and society.

The imagined capacity to create public truths endows social media with a force of truth-

fulness even as Internet Hindus use them, ironically enough, as forums where pseudo-

nyms and alter identities mask their real-world identities as they perform truth claims

about the Hindu nation and the Muslim threat. This online Hindutva, I suggest, consti-

tutes a distinctive right-wing politics of social media in India and a troubling continuity

in the ideology’s key premises.

In forwarding this analysis, I build on important scholarship by Thomas Blom

Hansen (1999), Arvind Rajagopal (2001), and Peter van der Veer (1994), who have

shown, among other things, that Hindu nationalism is shaped not as much by the polit-

ical system or religious fi eld as by the broader public culture, where “a society and its

constituent individuals and communities imagine, represent, and recognize themselves

through political discourse, commercial and cultural expressions, and representations of

state and civic organizations” (Hansen 1999, 4). It is also an arena where media play an

increasingly important role, as in liberalizing India, which has seen an explosion of a

variety of media (Udupa 2015). Equally, this ethnographic case study of social media

users in Mumbai challenges cyberutopianism—the presumption that social media

espouse secular individuality with the liberal language of civic contracts and embody the

radical redistributive capacity of digital circulation (Turner 2006)—to show how imagi-

nations of religious-political communities and their deeply uneven interlacing with

urban politics saturate social media space with heated arguments, often fi lled with abuse

and counterabuse, on the political rights, cultural status, and even sacred history of reli-

gious groups. The internet, then, is not growing “apart from the world, but to the con-

trary is increasingly embedded in it” (Agre 1999, 3). The political possibilities of digital

circulation are inscribed by the broader social locations of online actors, despite minor

upsets for established authority structures along the way.

In the rest of this chapter, I trace the growth of social media in Mumbai, with particu-

lar attention to Twitter, the microblogging platform, to highlight two important aspects

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4 3 4 • S A H A N A U D U P A

of digital agency of Internet Hindus—net anonymity and what we might call net busy-

ness. I examine how these interlace with the digital market and organized Hindutva and

what ruptures they might provoke. I conclude with broader implications of these online

practices for religious politics in Mumbai and Hindu nationalism in particular.

S O C I A L M E D I A I N M U M B A I : F R O M C O F F E E TA B L E C A M A R A D E R I E T O O P I N I O N S H A P I N G

We call ourselves the perfect nationalists.

A HINDU RIGHT-WING TWEETER IN MUMBAI

With eighty million internet users on personal computers (24 percent of the population),

thirty-nine million internet users on mobile phones (12 percent), and fi fty-seven million

on social media (17 percent), urban India constituted a growing community of online

media users by the early decades of the new millennium. Needless to say, in a country

like India, access to the internet implies that these users are economically privileged, and

their use of social media implies considerable ease with the English language. However,

with expanding smartphone markets and growing internet penetration, new online plat-

forms for short messaging, microblogging, and social networking have made tremendous

inroads across India.

Mumbai has the most social media users and the highest penetration rate for social

media of any Indian city—a refl ection of its large population and its importance as the

country’s economic powerhouse. According to the Indian Market Research Bureau, one

of the largest market research companies in the country, the number of active online

media users in Mumbai grew from 4.5 million in 2008 to 6.8 million in 2012—a sig-

nifi cant 51 percent growth in just four years. By 2010, various social media platforms had

entered the lives of online users in Mumbai, from Rise, Orkut, Facebook, and YouTube

to LinkedIn and XING. After this fi rst spell of social media expansion, the new microb-

logging site Twitter enticed online users with instant short messaging services along

extended online networks, and WhatsApp modifi ed this niche market to make it even

more aggressive.

Twitter entered Mumbai and other major cities in India at a time when online users

had grown familiar with and quite addicted to Facebook and LinkedIn, where they could

reactivate, maintain, and expand their friendship groups, familial ties, and professional

networks and satisfy, in some measure, their “insatiable nosiness about what other peo-

ple are doing” (Miller 2011, 101). It was not surprising, then, that Twitter, despite its

emphasis on imageless, short messages of no more than 140 characters, was initially

used as an extension of personal networks, yet another online gateway for “real-world”

socializing and snooping. Typically, people on Twitter would post updates on what they

ate, what fi lm they had watched, or where they went shopping. Naved, an avid online

user from a Muslim neighborhood in central Mumbai, once told me, “A lot of people

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 3 5

used it [Twitter] to say we are waking up, going to shower, just wore my shoes, which is

really stupid!” Such updates on mundane, everyday routine conformed to the original

design of Twitter as an online platform for sending messages to a small group of people

with common interests and shared concerns.1

In just a year from Twitter’s foray into the Indian market, tweeters in Mumbai grew

enough in number to encourage some enterprising users to take the next step and pro-

pose off -line gatherings. In the middle-class neighborhoods of Chembur, Ghatkoper, and

Bandra, with a large majority of educated Gujarati, Marathi, and Tamil residents, tweet-

ers assembled for off -line tweet meets, endearingly calling them coff ee tweet-ups and

dinner tweet-ups. Some business-minded tweeters gathered to discuss budding technol-

ogy projects. After such a gathering, they would typically go out to a movie or a restaurant

and lounge chatting with their cyberpals till the wee hours. These closed-group tweeter

meetings were driven by an assurance that they would be small, attended by those with

common business interests or a shared cultural taste for movies and restaurants.

The terrorist attack on Mumbai in 2008 was a turning point. A medium couched

comfortably for coff ee table camaraderie became a potent site for organizing quick relief

work. Shocked by the sudden crisis that had descended on the city, enterprising tweeters

exchanged and coordinated a swell of online messages to reach out to people who were

anxious to know the plight of their friends and family caught in the dramatic terrorist

capture of four prominent locations in Mumbai. Tweeters with experience organizing

tweet meets swung into action and spent hours on Twitter to connect the surging online

queries with those for whom they were intended. They searched their lists of Twitter

followers, alerted their friends on Facebook, or pulled up phone numbers from the net-

work, creating a fl ow of information and connections that stood distinct from state chan-

nels and those opened up by mainstream mass media. This same voluntary relief work

of informational service repeated during the fl oods of Mumbai in 2011, when tweeters

managed a huge fl ow of queries and messages to arrange housing for people stranded at

train stations or in their offi ces. After 11/26 and the Mumbai fl oods, a section of tweeters

were convinced that they could achieve something with their own eff ort and knowledge

of networks.

Twitter’s transition from a platform for “silly updates” to one with the capacity to

organize voluntary work—at least among English-educated middle-class groups during

crises—was signifi cant in the brief social trajectory of the microblogging site in Mumbai.

By 2010, it had experienced yet another transition. Although routine updates and the

impulse to organize tweeters for social causes or business interests did not disappear,

Twitter came to be perceived more as a platform to share information, opinionate, and

remain up to date on “hard” news. This transition coincided with Twitter’s offi cial brand-

ing in later years of its inception as a “real-time information network” where the user can

“have access to the voices and information surrounding all that interests her/him.”2 The

rapidly changing new media landscape and new smartphone applications were crucial

for this branding, since Twitter had to distinguish itself from more fun-driven, frivolous,

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4 3 6 • S A H A N A U D U P A

and at times outrageously intrusive new media services. Soon Twitter users commenting

on politics and news events or tagging stories on “current aff airs” were more common.

Twitter became a high ground for opinion exchange, as opposed to what was increasingly

seen as frivolous Facebook—a result of assigning “political moralities” to diff erent media

technologies (Miller 2011). Many online users in Mumbai had little doubt when they said

that “Facebook is timepass; Twitter is for serious people.” Despite the circulation of com-

mentaries and “serious” content on Facebook, it was still largely seen as a platform for

connecting intimate networks of friends rather than a public forum for serious matters.

It was indeed the supposed public nature of Twitter, with its potential to open up chan-

nels of anonymous connections through pseudonymous and hidden handles (Twitter

IDs), that confi rmed its status as a “serious forum for serious people,” as one social

media user described it. In practice and in corporate branding, Twitter mimicked the

repertoire of news and its claims to public opinion shaping, wrapped as such in tiny

packets of 140 characters. What was more, like other interactive new media technologies,

Twitter embodied an arena where recursive relations between virtual and off -line interac-

tions were possible (Marshall 2001).

It was in this context of Twitter’s market-mediated self-fashioning as a forum for

opinion exchange that many celebrities entered the Twittersphere, to connect with the

public and their fans without the mediation of mass media, and aspiring opinion shapers

joined to post their comments and communicate directly with political leaders and cin-

ema stars. Cybertalk trivia and market promotions continued on Twitter, but a section of

politically savvy youth seized the opportunity to air their views without the fi ltering bar-

riers of organized media, on a platform that promised to take them beyond tightly weaved

online networks of friends and acquaintances. Such was the enthusiasm around this new

short messaging service that the practice of chalo ek tweet dalenge (okay, let’s just toss a

tweet) became a sort of urban common sense. Yet this juvenile celebration of tossing a

tweet and the dikhawa (display) of thumbing cell phones inherited Mumbai’s deeply

fractured political and cultural legacies: tweeting expanded in a megacity that was at once

the quintessential symbol of postcolonial modernity and cosmopolitanism, the seat of

India’s dream factory, and a symbol of the very crisis of this secular developmental vision

(Hansen 1999).

Excited by the possibility of directly connecting with mighty political leaders on a

“publiclike” forum, a new generation of English-educated and technologically alert Hin-

dutva sympathizers confi dently plunged into the Twittersphere. In many cases, these

sympathies were not preconstituted. As they tweeted and met with more tweeters online,

they were drawn into the broad web of an emergent collective consciousness. Diverse as

they were in their levels of ideological commitment, motivations to come online, and

online style and poise, they nonetheless joined the growing group of online right-wing

tweeters who engaged in Hindutva politics as a discursive practice. Some openly declared

that they were right-wingers, self-christened themselves as “tweeple” (people who tweet),

and used shared Twitter handles, notably “Internet Hindu,” and similar handles and

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 3 7

hashtags such as “The Proud Nationalist,” “The Saff ron Knight,” and “Ex-Muslim.”3 This

mission statement, for instance, fl ashes below the Twitter ID “Internet Hindu”: “Reclaim-

ing my motherland from Pseudoseculars. Bharata, the cradle of every other civilization

and human existence.”

By their own account, self-declared Internet Hindus are a growing community in the

megacity of Mumbai, where I conducted ethnographic fi eldwork among social media

users in early 2012. “It is pure passion,” an Internet Hindu who was barely in his twen-

ties told me. “We don’t get any money. It is passion—kuch karne he [we wanted to do

something].” I was struck by the young man’s enthusiasm and confi dence; his energy

evoked the alacrity of a youth leader. “Our vision is clear,” he continued. “We are here to

change the youth. Many youth Congress [party] people have joined us. [If ] you follow us

on Twitter, you will also be converted.”

Internet Hindus in Mumbai imagine themselves as heroic warriors fi ghting an ideo-

logical battle on their own terms and upon their own will. To them, these platforms

promise a completely autonomous arena where energies can cohere without any top-

down mentoring or monitoring, where the youth can fi nd a voice and a means of linking

their voices, free of political might and manipulation. “First of all,” an Internet Hindu

emphasized, “we don’t have an organization kind of a thing, with a secretary, president,

and so on. It’s only people and their passion. People are fed up with the system.” A col-

lege student who had joined the discussion added, “There is a lot of frustration with

people. We do this because we are frustrated with corruption.” One fi nds here a deepen-

ing of the articulation of Hindutva with the liberalization discourse of the early 1990s

(Rajagopal 2001),4 nonetheless pitched against secular corruption after two decades of

liberalization and two continuous regimes of the Indian National Congress party. This

is in fact not entirely new or distinct from the strategies of organized Hindutva in India.

As van der Veer (1994) and Jaff relot (1996) have astutely observed, Hindu nationalist

politics has oscillated between ethnoreligious nationalism and socioeconomic issues of

corruption and economic growth throughout its career in postcolonial India. On social

media, these two discourses are brought together, erasing any possible contradiction

between them.

T H E A L L U R E O F A N O N Y M I T Y A N D T H E F O R C E O F H A S H TA G S

“We are the wheels to keep the communication running,” an Internet Hindu declared in

the quaint Mumbai neighborhood of Ghatkoper. “We are the wheels and the engine.”

The metaphor of wheels starkly contrasted with the image of leg workers of a larger

organizer—wheels signifi ed faster and more effi cient movement and a sense of empow-

erment. To keep the communication running, most Internet Hindus assume pseud-

onyms and acronyms, often invoking grandiose images of the Hindu nation. For the most

part, the romance of secret networks and underground rebels during the liberation move-

ment has translated digital anonymity into imagined heroic politics of individual net

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4 3 8 • S A H A N A U D U P A

warriors. This self-presentation unfolds in a network, an environment where anonymity

is contingent on being inconsequential, since it can be disrupted with some eff ort to

extract personal details, if this is found to be important and necessary. But despite the

technological possibilities of decoding online traces and social networking sites turning

into spaces where “time-space paths and patterns of interaction . . . become data points

in algorithms” (Andrejevic 2013, 159), the network environment nonetheless provides an

experiential sense of absolute anonymity. This is especially striking in the Mumbai con-

text, which guarantees relative impunity to Hindu youth, who benefi t from the historical

bias of the Hindu-dominated police force against Muslims (Hansen 2001). Most Internet

Hindus I met in Mumbai were quite assured of keeping their professional careers at a

safe distance from their online identities. Varun, for instance, is a retail businessman

who runs a small garment store close to his house in Kalyan, a large suburb. Born into

a Marwari family, part of a caste group known for strong business networks across the

country, he entertains customers from all religious groups, and some of his major sup-

pliers are Muslims: “I am a businessman. As a businessman, I have to work with Hindus

and Muhammadans. I want Twitter because I want to be me. I have a hidden handle

because they [customers] should not think that ‘kuch karta he, kuch aur sochta he’ [he

does something, thinks something else].”

In a savage twist of the virtual and the real, Varun fi nds in social media his true iden-

tity. The network environment not only guarantees experiential anonymity, which

emboldens some of these Internet Hindus to be their “real” selves, but also, in its con-

tinuous waves of interactions, ensures chance encounters among like-minded online

surfers. Sundaran, a civil engineer who owns a construction company in Chennai, had

traveled to Mumbai to attend a tweeters’ gathering. He had tumbled into the world of

microblogging before meeting any of the “patriotic nationalists” now assembled at the

event: “Basically I came to know about Shiv [a fellow Internet Hindu] through Twitter.

He started mentioning [a panic exodus of ] northeast people and related topics. And then

we connected. First we started, then our ideological mind-sets met . . . [and] that kind of

[ideologically like-minded] people started following.”

The Twitter fi eld, akin to a magnetic fi eld, brings together like minds with a force of

attraction in what new media literature recognizes as “affi nity spaces,” where the affi nity

is to the ideological “endeavor and not other people” (Gee 2004, 84) and its creation can

come from site designers and users alike.5 The term Internet Hindus, then, suggests not

any closely bound physical association but net users who cohere around common themes

and issues in ideologically effi cacious ways.

Many Internet Hindus admitted, in a tone of triumphant heroism, that their strategy

in this eff ort is to fi rst infuse clutter into the public discourse. As soon as an issue erupts

into the public domain exposing the seemingly delicate relations between Hindus and

Muslims in India, they raise a rapid wave of Twitter messages to drown out the “pseudose-

cular arguments” of the English-language media and later introduce a more coherent

counternarrative by increasing momentum around a semantically rich, provocative hash-

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 3 9

tag. “PappuCII,” a derogatory hashtag for the leader of the Indian National Congress,

Rahul Gandhi, was one of many politically charged online eff orts of propaganda designed

and driven by Internet Hindus to debunk the party’s claimed secular status. During sev-

eral controversial events, including public rallies of Hindu nationalist leaders in Mumbai,

Internet Hindus used shared IDs and together built hashtags to deluge social media plat-

forms with provocative and abusive comments, confronting an equally abusive surge of

comments espousing allegiance to Islamic radicalism. Such comments and hashtags kept

alive a social media rumble on Hindu-Muslim animosity and hardened the view that

Indian Muslims are active participants in international Islamic revivalism—a suspicion

that was central to Hindutva activism after Muslim mobilization around the Shah Bano

aff air6 and their association with the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s (Jaff relot 1996, 339).

Signifi cant in this revival of the key tenets of Hindu nationalism is the combination

of the feeling of being vulnerable to “alien communities” (Jaff relot 1996; van der Veer

1994) with newfound confi dence around new media as tools for public arguments (or at

least rabble-rousing) that can trump the mediation of organized news production. The

new generation of e-savvy right-wingers have thus sharpened the discourse to associate

Muslims with violence and threat, which is coeval with their strategy to deepen suspicion

about organized English-language media, dubbed pseudosecular, hypocritical, and even

blatantly antinational. Often, the producers of these media are derisively summed up by

the slang term libtards—liberal retards—who are blamed for glossing minority appease-

ment and cowardly timidity as liberalism and secularism.

Internet Hindus are not always physically connected with the shakhas, the neighbor-

hood organizational units, of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent right-

wing Hindutva organization in India. Shakhas have been the locus of recruitment and

ideological power for organized Hindutva, but Internet Hindus rarely attend their daily

rituals of patriotic display and ideological grooming.7 An Internet Hindu took pains to

draw the distinction between Hindutva organizations and online Hindutva: “First, Twit-

ter [as a particular form of online Hindutva] is not an organization. There is no hierarchy.

It is a fl at organization. No identity is required, actually. You don’t need to be an RSS

member. You say something good for the nation, society, and the individual, and you see

people responding. People know me by my Twitter account and not my actual name.

What matters is not identity but the content you post on Twitter or Facebook.”

The absence of formal affi liation with Hindutva organizations suggests that Internet

Hindus represent new forms of dispersed agency, which are inspired if not bound by the

organizational authority of the RSS. For the RSS, the coalescing affi nity spaces on social

media are best left untouched—they can expand on their own and fi ght battles with their

own arms. If the RSS has relied on its strategies to forge an alliance among “swayamse-

vaks, notables and men of religion” (Jaff relot 1996, 351) on the one hand and continued,

on the other hand, its social work and ideological grooming through local organizations,

it has regarded the growing number of e-savvy right-wing Hindu youth as an army that

both serves and disrupts its centralized organizational authority.

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In an old yet affl uently furnished building in Dadar, an expensive neighborhood in

Mumbai, Pramod Bapat, the regional head of the RSS in Maharashtra, clarifi ed his organ-

ization’s position on Internet Hindus:

Bapat: On [the] net, there are the doors. You can knock, you can enter, you can see, you can watch, you can use, you can get involved. [The] sangh does not plan separately or specially for social media. It [social media] is a social entity. It is a social bench. Everybody can sit there, everybody can talk, listen—that is why it is there! And thousands of swayamsevaks [volunteers] are working on that. They are using that media, they have constructed very many communi- ties and groups, they are sharing their thoughts, ideas, and working on causes.

Udupa: What causes?

Bapat: Like, say, love for the motherland. If this is the theme, what are the ways to express your love for the motherland? From media or such social platforms, they are spreading ideas, asking people to get involved, to know more about joining hands. But it is in their individual capacity [that] they are doing [this]. [The] sangh, as a whole and an organization, has not done such community [of “Internet Hindus”] or a page. Yes, we have an interactive website. The number of clicks on our website is increasing.

Partly since the RSS defi nes Internet Hindutva as a private endeavor carried out by

individuals with no offi cial approval or sponsorship, it has not issued a public call for

restraint and moderation from Internet Hindus, signaling the deeply ambivalent status

of this growing community. In his tiny offi ce on a congested road of Bhendi Bazaar,

widely seen as a Muslim ghetto, the Barelvi Sunni leader Saeed Noori lifted his hands

and exclaimed, “Kya kare, Madam? Sab log fouji bangeye” (What to do, Madam? Every-

one has become a soldier). On a sprawling campus of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya

Janata Party’s training center in Byandar, miles from Bhendi Bazaar and the crowded

inner city, Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, a senior BJP leader active on Twitter, commented on

his fellow tweeters, “You see, nobody comes with an empty head today.”

The agency of Internet Hindus, and online political actors more generally, thus con-

stitutes a dilemma for the organizational authorities, and its public visibility is always

mired in uncertainties. One such moment of disruption and clutter arose when Internet

HinduNDTV, a national English-language news channel, invited Internet Hindus to a

talk show hosted by one of its prominent anchors. The channel had been trying hard to

get these invisible online warriors to the studio and involve them in a debate on social

media’s highly eff ervescent forms of radical Hindu nationalism. It was not successful for

a long time—many Internet Hindus told me that they fi rmly turned down the open

invitation by the anchor on his shows. However, a few Internet Hindus were tempted.

Their decision to appear on the show raised scathing criticism from a section of right-

wingers online. A string of accusations and counteraccusations ensued. The confronta-

tional repertoire hitherto reserved for online battles with “Muslim sympathizers” became

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 4 1

the means of bickering within the community. Some right-wingers felt that representing

Internet Hindus on mainstream television would rob them of their anonymity—affi xing

their agency within the limits of a corporeal body visible on television screens and

exposed to asinine anchors. But this anxiety was couched in ideological terms. Online

right-wingers asked their fellow Internet Hindus not to pay heed to the request of a

“biased” channel that was, according to them, fully under “the control of the pseudose-

cular Congress party” and involved in “false propaganda.” Even so, a few Internet Hindus

braved the opposition from their camp and appeared on the talk show. Months later, one

of them told me that his decision was based on “inside information” that the channel was

planning to plant dummy Internet Hindus on the show. “Dummy and loose candidates

would only [have been] bashed up by the opponents in the debate. This would have done

more harm than some of us exposing our identity!” he said, justifying what others saw

as a selfi sh act of hogging media publicity to the peril of collective anonymity.

These digitally mediated agencies, dispersed and diff use as they are, and seemingly

recalcitrant at times, rally behind related structures of authority. In online battles over

issues from the territorial invocation of Akhand Bharat (Undivided India) and fears about

a global conspiracy of Christian proselytization to the threat of multiplying Muslims and

refusal to accept mosques as sacred places of worship, a set of “Twitter heroes” often

anchor Internet Hindus. These internet icons tweet the most frequently and in terse,

caustic, and provocative verse. Dr. Subrahmanian Swamy, an organizer of the Global

Patriotic Tweeples Meet, for Hindu right-wing tweeters in Mumbai, is a chanteur extraor-

dinaire of online Hindutva—an undisputed Twitter hero.

Long sidelined in formal national politics despite his key roles in the economic

reforms of the early 1990s and the legal battles in the telecom spectrum scandal,8 Swamy

mastered the art of leading social media users through a tide of quick Twitter updates—

posting and responding to comments, tagging links, and inventing an ever growing list

of provocative acronyms to deride political and religious opponents. Soon he had amassed

close to 270,000 followers on Twitter, with more than twenty-fi ve thousand tweets in just

two years. The newfound popularity of leaders like Swamy—at least among a section of

net-savvy youth—what might be called net iconophilia, signals an emergent authority in

the politics of religious diff erence in India. The key here is that they respond to indi-

vidual tweets in a manner that evokes a sense of direct dialogue with ordinary people,

exuding confi dence that is unchecked and unrelenting. These leaders urge their audi-

ences to pledge to continue their online activism and encourage them to invent new ways

of adding force to their online heroism. Activism, after all, cannot remain in the virtual

land forever. Twitter heroes regularly assemble crowds on the ground for tweeters’ meets

and get participants to reveal not just their names but also their full addresses—a feat

that could turn social media marketing companies green with envy. The Global Patriotic

Tweeples Meet was thus not a single episode but an itinerant gathering that carried the

spirit of patriotic tweets to Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, and other major cities, with

fervent calls on energetic youth to march ahead to “transition beyond Twitter.” Such is

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4 4 2 • S A H A N A U D U P A

the fascination with these new Twitter heroes that when I used the blank side of a copy

of Swamy’s speech at the meet, Viren, a self-proclaimed Internet Hindu who had traveled

forty miles from a Mumbai suburb to attend the conference, gave me a scathing look. “So

you are writing behind Swamiji’s speech copy?” he chided; his towering fi gure made me

quickly shove it down in my cramped bag and take out a disheveled notepad instead. The

respectful term of address Swamiji, reserved for Swamy, signals ties of devotion similar

to those enjoyed by a charismatic religious guru whose knowledge of history, politics, or

theology is never open to challenge and never in doubt.

Many Internet Hindus in Mumbai told me that Narendra Modi from the BJP, who was

contending for the prime ministerial position when I was conducting fi eldwork and later

emerged victorious, was “several notches above” Swamy in commanding social media

allegiance, which is partly refl ected in the number of his Twitter followers: more than

two million. In a speech at the Global Patriotic Tweeples Meet in Mumbai, a professor of

fi nance from the Institute of Management in Bangalore, a premier management school

in India, described Modi as a modern-day Arjuna, the charismatic Pandava brother in

the Mahabharata, and Swamy as Krishna, the shrewd uncle (and incarnation of Lord

Vishnu) who ensured victory for the morally righteous Pandavas against the wicked

Kauravas—a ready metaphor for the Congress party. The social media right-wingers

gathered at the event responded with thundering applause as the culturally resonant

Hindu mythological fi gures raised a wave of excitement in the audience. Ironically, the

sense of net heroism as the work of individual ideological warriors obscures the struc-

tures of authority that Internet Hindus submit to and reinforce. Online icons such as

Swamy illustrate this vividly. The energies were systematically channeled in later years,

especially when BJP strategists set up “social media war rooms” for disseminating prop-

aganda before the national elections in 2014.

While organized eff orts to harness the energies of Internet Hindus picked up momen-

tum, the new media architecture inspired practices that continued to mark online Hin-

dutva’s distinctness. For instance, Internet Hindus do not prize phases of political mod-

eration in the discourse of the RSS or the politically pragmatic BJP or the general

aff ability of swayamsevaks, which is doubtless partly a result of the privilege of anonymity.

After a brief conversation with a leading Internet Hindu in Mumbai at a political meet-

ing, I repeatedly attempted to contact him for a follow-up interview. In a black jumpsuit

and shining black shoes to match, the young man in his twenties had looked more affl u-

ent than the modestly dressed rest of the audience. A badge for participants pinned on

his suit gave his name, Atul, above his Twitter ID. I instantly recognized the ID, letting

out an expression that prompted him to remark that he knew online Hindutva activists

like him were being watched. Atul wavered between cordiality and downright disgust for

an English-speaking academic who fl ew to India for fl aneurlike visits. He would promise

me all his support for my project and the very next minute would look at my notepad

suspiciously and dismiss me as a pseudosecular academic with no credentials to speak

about the lofty endeavor of Internet Hindus. In our brief, heated conversation at the

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 4 3

meeting, I gathered that he owned and ran a social media marketing company in Mum-

bai. Afterward, I probed his whereabouts on the net and fi nally traced his cell number.

Ready with questions and courteous words of reintroduction, I prepared to pitch an

interview date. I was keen on this interview, especially since Atul’s Twitter account regu-

larly sent out the tweets of the Global Patriotic Tweeples Meet and Atul had proudly said

he knew social media like the back of his hand. I doubted if he would grant an interview,

but when I called, little did I expect to face a tirade on pseudoliberals and angry accusa-

tions that I knew too little about social media to merit a discussion with him. The

exchange got worse when I evaded revealing my Twitter ID, which added to his suspi-

cions about my intentions and, perhaps, his fears of disclosing his identity to a probing

academic. He brusquely hung up the phone with one last piece of advice: “You post at

least a thousand tweets and then come to me. You cannot understand us when you don’t

tweet.” Shocked by these rude and scathing personal remarks, I turned to a friend-

informant, Malini Sriram, a gender rights activist and among the most active tweeters in

the city. Hurt as I was, I asked her whether it was true that one has to reach the mark of

a thousand tweets before one can begin to understand Twitter. “It’s the most silly, silly,

silly thing,” she retorted instantly. “It’s like saying you cannot understand maternity

problems without giving birth to a child.” Herself subject to Internet Hindu intimida-

tions on Twitter several times in the recent past, she told me, as a word of caution, “They

are fanatics. They believe they are right and they are misunderstood. They use our own

liberalism against us. I don’t know if liberalism is the right word here—but after listening

to them, we begin to feel ‘Maybe I am wrong.’ ”

She consoled me that I was there to understand social behavior and not the technical

details of a medium, adding, as a fi nal word on the matter, that “Internet Hindus are

engineers. They are very binary.”

N E T B U S Y N E S S

What is driving the Internet Hindu “binary engineers” to keep online Hindutva—and all

shades of Islamic radicalism—as a continuous ideological buzz with the potential to erupt

as a loud blare within and beyond social media? Without a doubt, historical-social forces

and political strategies have intensifi ed the climate of suspicion and antagonism toward

the religious other, but I suggest that there are also market and technological dynamics

of new media at work here. In her study of online media usage in rural India, Payal Arora

brings to light what she describes as a “ritual of immersing in tech busyness” (2010, 1)

that infuses a disjuncture in the conventional (Western) relations between class and

busyness, where advanced capitalism sees busyness as a sign of high social status, as

opposed to the Victorian leisure class, which valued leisure as a symbol of social honor

(Veblen 1899). I will not delve here into what might be seen as a certain leveling of busy-

ness induced by internet technologies, with rural cybercafés in India abuzz with online

activities and various class groups busy clicking away. What is important is that a sense

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4 4 4 • S A H A N A U D U P A

of busyness permeates the worlds of urban youth, like the Internet Hindus we see in

Mumbai.

The leisure class, to follow Staff an Linder (1970), is now “harried” by time packed with

intense consumption. Partly shaped by the intensifi cation of leisure-as-consumption,

online media markets induce busyness through rapidly changing and obsolescing product

lines, including ranges of interactive applications, which, among other things, blur the

boundaries of paid work and leisure. Furthermore, the participation of users in online

media contributes to content fl ows in ways that merge leisure with labor (Ross 2009). My

ethnographic fi eldwork suggests that the ideological activism of Internet Hindus resides

at such a market-infl ected interstitial space—where clicking on and thumbing away

online arguments constitute conscious, and at times performative, busyness. Like most

other online media users, Internet Hindus tweet incessantly, in ways that make net social-

ity a fetish and compulsive clicking a ritual. Such feelings of busyness fuse with ideas of

the collective action of “networked publics” (boyd 2009) and net enterprise to create a

distinct aspect of digital sociality that allows Internet Hindus to present themselves as

ideological entrepreneurs, just as it allows notions of “online secular modernity” to fl our-

ish—a point that needs a separate discussion.

Notions of online enterprise and busyness should be contextualized with particular

attention to Twitter and the market dynamics that privilege short messages for data ana-

lytics and mobile phone compatibility, such that brevity becomes a function of market

effi ciency and an outcome of technological compulsion. The terse prose and confronta-

tional rhetoric to which online users are drawn lead to the gamifi cation of political

discourse—“the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al.

2011, 1).9 Here, constant inducement to participate and compete comes from individual

scoreboards for online infl uence and lively interactive channels with set rules of word

limits and ranking algorithms. For Internet Hindus, tweeting is indeed like gaming,

although the world they invoke is neither a virtual neverland nor apocalyptic but rather

a rashtr (nation) that rightfully belongs to them, their homeland, covered with the dust

of “dirty,” secular politics. They exchange IDs, use shared IDs, build hashtags, and shore

up masses of followers, setting an eye all along on how they are faring in the Twitter

rankings. Narendar in Mumbai and his friend Ajay from Ahmadabad had exchanged IDs

several times. “I use Ajay’s ID to abuse people,” Narendar said, looking at me in expecta-

tion of a compliment for his ingenious online tactic.

Subindu, an aggressive social media user who also owns a social media marketing

company in Mumbai, was at the forefront in organizing the Global Patriotic Tweeples

Meet. For about fi ve hours, the event’s hashtag trended not only in Mumbai but also

nationally. For Subindu and his team of social media right-wingers, this was a proud

moment. “See, it trended nationally. It is still trending,” he told me, fl ashing his expen-

sive smartphone. The two young students from Mumbai who had helped him in organ-

izing the meeting dutifully peeked at the phone and congratulated him on his commend-

able feat. Subindu swelled with excitement, his fi ngers still busy on the touch pad of the

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 4 5

phone, and said, “We have trended the event in a preplanned manner. We have done it

systematically. We understand the algorithm of Twitter. The moment you start the hash-

tag, you get your top guys with fi ve or six thousand followers to start tweeting with the

particular hashtag—the tweet gets retweeted and automatically goes up in trending.”

How did they manage it, I asked in bewilderment. Subindu liked my expression. “We

have the power to do it,” he said. “Aha!” He clapped and laughed loudly, his mouth wide

open, his gleaming eyes declaring his sense of triumph. The tweeple meeting was one

of several events and comments that his team had managed to trend with its sharp knack

of putting the algorithmic rationale of the microblogging site to optimal use. Like

ratings—and their associated wars—in the television industry, social media progress

bars off ered by aggregators thus deepen the politics of truth claims advanced by quantita-

tive narratives, presenting the seemingly impersonal knowledge of trendometers as evi-

dence of real power.

With no visual idioms and no burden of long prose, Internet Hindus were excited to

lead the game of hashtags fi lled with puns, snide comments, and at times abusive acro-

nyms. They take pride not in badges and rewards of recognition—essential elements of

gamifi cation—for their individual IDs, which are pseudonyms in most cases, but in the

hashtags they collectively build and trend. The trending hashtags and trolling handles

guarantee a sense of participation, but with devices designed entirely for market pur-

poses—to drive consumer retention and product promotion—and through the features

of gamifi cation embedded in them, Internet Hindus feed into the discourses that rein-

force presumptions about the strangeness of the religious other and “reciprocal tension”

(Simmel 1950) between religious communities. “Look at the crowd here,” Subindu

pointed out at the Global Patriotic Tweeples Meet. People were busy tweeting inside the

auditorium and across the online network, raising the waves of Twitter tags and mes-

sages to match the ambitions of the conference. “That is what makes us special. We

control it [social media], yaar, hum logon ke paas taakat he [we have the strength],” he said,

evoking notions of enterprise culture (fueling entrepreneurial subjectivities) and narra-

tives about hackers as untamable cyber activists (Holmevik 2012).

As the game of trending hashtags shores up a sense of empowerment for these net-

savvy youth, with the trendometer on the Twitter website standing as real evidence of

their eff ort and capacity to assemble support online, there arrives a disjunction between

online gaming and actual content—gaming overrides content and unleashes a spiral of

self-confi rmation. This occurs simultaneously with the amassing of volumes of data

from various sources, mostly peer-driven, open-source information banks such as Wiki-

pedia or international media such as the Independent (at www.independent.co.uk), to

challenge the “pseudosecular” discourse of organized media in India. Using online

resources including free storage space, many Internet Hindus build online repositories

of information on ancient Hindu kingdoms, popular translations of Vedic scripts,

preindependence politics, and communal tensions in the postcolonial decades, with a

ready corpus of data on riots, clashes, and state action extracted from Google searches

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4 4 6 • S A H A N A U D U P A

and databases and stored on free online platforms such as Scribd. At the tweeple meet-

ing, Subindu sounded exhilarated by the swelling number of online right-wingers ready

with facts and fi gures and by the ties of aff ection they shared. Overwhelmed by the

packed audience and how their Twitter strength had drawn such a large number on a hot

Sunday morning in a busy city, he said to me, in a voice laden with emotion, “Hum tweet

karte rahe kaarva banta gaya” (We kept tweeting, our caravan [following] kept growing).

V I O L E N C E A N D T H E U R B A N

The confi dence in their numbers notwithstanding, the expanding kaarva (caravan) of

Internet Hindus must contend with equally off ensive counterattacks by opposing camps

on Twitter and other social media. These diverse exchanges, frequently with people of

hard-to-pin-down allegiance, are often fi lled with expressions that could put to shame

even the most raucous Bollywood fi lms. In their reactions to the Azad Maidan riots, for

instance, social media users hurled a string of abuse and swearwords in Hindi and Urdu

that almost always invoked images of genitalia, incest, impotency, and violent sexual

encounters to label nations and religious communities. Such comments are indeed so

common that they are signs of a certain masculine camaraderie, and everyone expects to

see this kind of abuse as part of their daily immersion in online interactions. However,

when these comments become viral or are used to shout down disagreeing voices online,

they acquire a malicious edge that can push people, as Sriram described, to doubt their

own liberalism, including closely held notions of tolerance and cultivated indiff erence to

religious diff erence. According to many tweeters I met in Mumbai, Internet Hindus are

the loudest group among these quarreling camps and by far the most likely to troll and

intimidate.

The Hindu nationalist movement as a form of political consciousness in India gath-

ered ground through a variety of sentiments and strategies, including sociocultural work

by the RSS—such as building temples, off ering community service, and forging ecclesi-

astical authority structures by rallying leaders of various Hindu sects and Hindu reli-

gious entrepreneurs—and ideological devotionalism and ritual processions involving the

sacred symbols of the cow and the River Ganga. Despite the strategies also geared toward

political expedience, notions of irreconcilable diff erence and antipathy between Hindus

and Muslims constitute what might be seen as the movement’s ideological core. In many

ways, Mumbai remains both a theater and an artifact of this crisis—a city that has wit-

nessed violent clashes between its communities and terrorist attacks of spectacular mag-

nitude. Perhaps no other city exemplifi es as vividly the paradox of religious antipathy

thriving in a cultivated milieu of cosmopolitan modernity and the urban desire for care-

free leisure. Among a new generation of Internet Hindus in Mumbai, this seemingly

unlikely combination of the enterprise spirit of the risk-bearing (maneuvering) urban

and antipathy toward the religious other is ensuring the ideological effi cacy of the

century-old struggle to secure a Hindu nation. For politically savvy Internet Hindus, the

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I N T E R N E T H I N D U S • 4 4 7

ideological buzz of social media shapes and reshapes these sentiments, as the allure of

net anonymity and net enterprise create a perfect nexus that allows them to take up

Hindutva in their own hands. I suggest that this relentless online work to reinforce reli-

gious separation is a form of violence, what Veena Das (2006) has brilliantly described

as the constant production of uncertainty over the ontological foundation of the social

and, if we may add, the capacity to prosper in the capacious urban.

N O T E S

I thank Meera Kokhani and Nazneen Ansari for their excellent research assistance and for aiding my way through the alleys of Mumbai. Thanks also to all the social media users who gave their time and insights.

1. http://profi lerehab.com/twitter-help/history_of_twitter, accessed September 20, 2013. 2. https://twitter.com/about, accessed September 20, 2013. 3. Hashtags are metamedia tags with the prefi x #, widely used on microblogging sites. 4. Scholars have argued that Hindu nationalism ascended in the 1990s in close conjunc-

tion with the rise of the liberalization discourse that promised economic prosperity for the upper-caste and emergent middle-class groups of India.

5. However, these affi nity spaces are not purged of “race, class, culture, ethnicity, or gender,” as Juan Paul Gee (2004, 67) and other optimists characterize them. Shaped by a history of Hindu-Muslim confl icts and their reinterpretations in the online world, Internet Hindus use and reframe microblogging sites as potent weapons to connect and scale up their infl uence in quick time.

6. In 1986, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act reversed a Supreme Court decision granting alimony to the Muslim divorcée Shah Bano. This judgment had sparked a wave of protest among conservative Islamic bodies, leading the ruling Congress party to uphold Islamic personal law. Contending that this was evidence of minority appease- ment, the Bharatiya Janata Party has ever since used this episode to press for a uniform civil code.

7. Shakhas still remain the key points of entry and instillation of ideological and organi- zational commitment among locally recruited RSS members. Workers take a pledge to remain committed members of the Parivar, the grand family serving the Hindu rashtr (nation), learn to believe in its ideological coherence, and accept its organizational authority.

8. In a multimillion-dollar scandal involving the auctioning of a telecommunication spec- trum in 2011, Swamy built evidence against the defaulting and conniving government minis- ters and other offi cials.

9. Gamifi cation is used in a wide variety of contexts, from management eff orts to design “fun-fi lled” industrial work to digital marketing strategies to ensure consumer retention. Most studies of gamifi cation draw on Caillois’s concepts of paidia and ludus: “Whereas paidia (or ‘playing’) denotes a more freeform, expressive, improvisational, even ‘tumultuous’ recombina- tion of behaviors and meanings, ludus (or ‘gaming’) captures playing structured by rules and competitive strife toward goals” (2001, 42−60). This agrees with Juul’s defi nition of a game as “a rule-based formal system with a variable and quantifi able outcome, where diff erent

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4 4 8 • S A H A N A U D U P A

outcomes are assigned diff erent values, the player exerts eff ort in order to infl uence the out- come, the player feels attached to the outcome, and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable” (2003). In discussing gamifi cation, I refer not to a controlled network system where every point of data induced by game elements serves an explicit market agenda for data gathering and product promotion but rather to spaces cocreated by divergent social media practices that lie at the loose ends of networks knit by the market. Moreover, many discussions of gamifi cation and countergamifi cation approach the market as the primary locus of online activities. My aim in this chapter is to unravel gamifi cation in contexts where the market conditions online practices but is not their primary subject matter.

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