Paper short abstract:

This presentation focuses on the imagination of solidarity among online active Indian Muslims on Twitter. I will investigate the mediation of solidarity within what is often called IMT (Indian Muslim Twitter) as an imaginary community of discourse.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the imagination of solidarity among online active Indian Muslims on Twitter. I will draw on online ethnography and conversations with practitioners to flesh out some conceptual stakes of debates that deal with the possibilities of solidarity as they pertain to activism on digital platforms. My focus will be on Indian Muslim and lower-caste Muslim activists and intellectuals. I will investigate the mediation of solidarity within what is often called IMT (Indian Muslim Twitter) as an imaginary community of discourse. The activists I engage with are all highly visible and often the target of moral outrage by the Hindu right and/or by upper-caste Muslims. The debates on solidarity usually center on normative and practical understandings of Islam and/or bahujan (anti-elite majoritarian) politics. My research question is about the limits of solidarity as they pertain to agency in the digital space. I will argue that the imaginary limitations on solidarity need to be contextualized in respect to the limitations on human agency at the intersections of digital infrastructures, commodified communication and moral-political self-understandings of these practices. I argue that IMT-discourse is an excellent field site to explore the limitations to express solidarity within platform capitalist environments.

Paper long abstract:

Fieldwork is a constant negotiation. Anthropological fieldwork among ideological groups, especially those that believe in a certain vision of identity, nationalism, religious or ethnic identity, complicates the field furthermore. While reflexivity, especially feminist methodological tools, have enabled a more honest engagement with interlocutors and the field, the actual fieldwork is always an experience that one can truly never be fully prepared for. My fieldwork among Hindu nationalist students has thrown up questions that traditional anthropological fieldwork texts and ideas of positionality left me unprepapred, especially in the context of power and research.

There is journey from understanding one’s own political standpoint, guilt and struggle in engaging with the public ideology of the interlocutors and their private lives, to reflecting on complicated fieldwork encounters. What binds this journey are the differential definitions of power that are encountered throughout fieldwork. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Hindu nationalist students in Delhi in 2019 and 2021-2022, in this paper I would reflect on questions of ethics and power, the research process and trust, and involvement of field interlocutors with violence, responsibility towards field interlocutors and solidarity. Unlike the traditional understanding of a binary view of power between the researcher and the researched, we need newer vocabulary in academic work to accommodate the grey areas, especially in the context of studying powerful ideological groups with resources at their disposal. My aim is to go beyond merely ticking boxes while writing on positionality, methodology and ethics sections. I hope to use the paper to reflect on the fluid and conflicting nature of power in a fieldwork site and help align expectations of the fieldwork terrain in such contexts.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I use a Laclauian framework to analyze the emergence of grassroots solidarities between diverse communities of women in the last five years of Pakistan's Aurat March.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, the election of Donald Trump, an unabashed sexual predator, as president of the United States sparked a nationwide women’s movement that spread to countries across the globe—including the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. While the women’s march in the United States has since lost steam, its Pakistani counterpart, the Aurat March, continues to have strong mass appeal. Unlike progressive women’s movements of the past, whose leadership had been drawn largely from Pakistan’s elite, today’s march organizers have done considerable work on the grassroots level to build solidaric links between women of diverse backgrounds.

I argue that the Aurat March has developed from a one-off event to a social movement that operates according to a populist logic as articulated by Ernesto Laclau (2002). I demonstrate how a diverse demands are linked by a chain of equivalence to create solidarities between disparate communities of women. Here protestors define themselves in opposition to a common enemy, the patriarchal state, embodied by the heterosexual Pakistani Muslim cis-male, allowing for an array of marginalized ethnic, religious and gender identities to be subsumed under the Aurat March banner.

I analyze how slogans like mera jism, meri marzi (Urdu: my body, my choice) become increasingly empty, allowing a variety of demands to be projected upon them: religious minorities protesting abduction and forced conversion, factory workers demanding medical insurance, trans women raising voice against gender-based violence, etc.

In the conclusion I explore the limits to solidarity that emerge when elite demands threaten to alienate more conservative protestors.

Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how religious minorities in Pakistan strategically make their grievances visible for the sake of producing broader networks of solidarity, using, what I will call, "affectivism"

Paper long abstract:

When studying the social movements of non-Muslims in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan today, the concept of solidarity plays a key role. Until only a couple of decades ago, state-sponsored media widely ignored the country’s religious minorities, and public knowledge about their day-to-day lives was scarce. The liberalization of media and, most importantly, the increasing ubiquity of social networking sites has helped Pakistani Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Sikhs to have more visibility in Pakistan’s public spheres. For many members of these communities, the digital mediation of their grievances plays an essential role in their pursuit to produce broader solidarities, recognition, and accountability. I explore the digital practices of leading activists through an analysis of their online activities and their interviews from the field. This shows how people wittingly crowdsource their demands to gain broader solidarity through what I will call affectivism: strategic use of rhythm, entertainment, and affectively charged (audio-)visual material. In their attempt to produce wider networks of solidarity in the time of digital capitalism, religious minorities need to a.) be aware of the logic of platform algorithms, b.) vastly reduce the complexity of their intersectional grievances, c.) package and commodify their suffering to a national and international audience with an increasingly limited attention span.

Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to explore solidarities forged by the Kashmiris living in Delhi with Indians and each other against the changing and evolving contours of the social-political unfolding.

Paper long abstract:

The streets in Delhi reverberated with the Azadi slogan in the aftermath of the amendment to the Citizenship Act. The slogan that finds its roots in the Kashmir Valley, as an appeal against Indian occupation, found resonance with and came to the rescue of the Indians resisting the amendment. The protests stood out as a moment when the Kashmiri Muslims extended solidarities with the Indian-Muslims. The moment separated from abrogation of Article 370, that formed the legal basis of the relationship between India and Kashmir, by a few months saw very different reactions from the Indian community. Emerging from the ethnographic fieldwork, the paper explored different communities and alliances that are forged in the occupier's land by Kashmiris. The paper seeks to explore these connections and solidarities forged by the Kashmiris living in Delhi with Indians and with each other against the changing and evolving contours of the social-political unfolding. “Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor foreshadows future conflict” (Yang and Tuck 2012). The paper seeks to explore what does solidarity mean for the Kashmiris in Delhi? What does it seek to achieve?