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Paper short abstract

How Hindu nationalist networks offer Indian university students material security through transactional and emotional belonging, shaping who belongs in contested urban campus spaces.

Paper long abstract

As Indian universities become sites of intensified political contestation, young people navigate genuine institutional precarity, scarce job prospects, moral policing, and discrimination in classrooms and hostels, through affiliations that promise both material security and emotional belonging. Drawing on interviews with university students across genders, caste, class, and regional backgrounds, this paper examines how Hindu nationalist politics and networks shape youth claims-making within urban campus spaces.

The paper explores how the framework of the 'good Hindu citizen' operates as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion within universities, determining whose claims to institutional resources, hostel accommodation, safety, social networks, recommendation and patronage, are legitimated. For students from North East India, South India, and non-dominant caste backgrounds, negotiations of belonging reveal how Hindu nationalism creates internal hierarchies even among those ostensibly included in the nationalist project. Political affiliation here is rarely a matter of pure ideological conviction or pure strategic calculation. Rather, youth navigate genuine needs for security and belonging that become channelled into transactional relationships with dominant groups, organisations, and caste networks, blurring any clean separation between emotional and instrumental motivation.

This research complicates narratives of youth activism as inherently progressive by revealing how insecurity and gatekeeping drive young people towards organisations offering both material advantage and felt belonging. Universities emerge as contested spaces where regional, caste, and class differences shape who can perform the 'good Hindu citizen' identity and access support structures. The paper shows how youth solidarities may form through the entanglement of pragmatic need and emotional belonging.