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Paper short abstract

Decolonial vocabularies are being appropriated by authoritarian regimes to legitimise power, securitised development and majoritarian nationalism. Using India as an illustrative case, this paper theorises such appropriation as epistemic violence that delegitimises critique and reproduces domination.

Paper long abstract

Decoloniality has been primarily concerned with challenging the domination of the Global South by Eurocentric knowledge regimes and institutions in the Global North. However, decolonisation itself has become a contested terrain of power. Recent political developments reveal that decolonial vocabularies are being appropriated by right-wing and authoritarian regimes in ways that undermine their emancipatory promise. This paper conceptualises such appropriation as a form of epistemic violence, through which decolonisation is re-signified to consolidate state power, delegitimise democratic critique, and reconfigure development discourse in line with majoritarian nationalism and national security logics.

Taking India as an illustrative case, the paper examines how state and state-aligned actors mobilise decolonial terminologies to recast development as a civilisational and security imperative. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of policy narratives, political speeches, public debates, and development interventions in indigenous and forested regions, it shows how resistance to extractive development is reframed as anti-national and obstructive to national interest, particularly in debates around large-scale mining and infrastructure projects. Rather than dismantling colonial logics of domination, this paradoxical form of “decoloniality from above” empties its emancipatory potential, marginalises subaltern epistemologies, and reproduces new hierarchies of knowledge, authority, and legitimacy within the postcolonial state.

Foregrounding the politics of epistemic capture, the paper offers a reflexive complication of decolonial frameworks, demonstrating how domination can be reproduced through decolonial language within the Global South.

It argues that a genuinely decolonial development politics requires not only the rejection of Eurocentric knowledge but also the refusal of state-centred, majoritarian forms of “decolonisation”.