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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how women in Hindu far-right organisations in India and the UK enact non-state social protection through self-defence, healthcare relief, and childcare. It shows how welfare withdrawal enables exclusionary solidarities and new forms of political belonging beyond the state.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on a comparative ethnographic study of women’s activism within Hindu far-right (HFR) organisations in India and the UK. By focusing on practices commonly associated with social protection, i.e., self-defence training, pandemic relief, childcare provision, and family regulation, this paper examines how non-state actors step into domains vacated or distrusted by the state, and how these interventions produce gendered and exclusionary forms of community.

Across both contexts, women justify paramilitary-style self-defence camps as responses to women’s vulnerability, even where empirical evidence of threat is limited, revealing protection as a moral and political claim rather than a purely pragmatic response. In the UK, welfare gaps in childcare were mobilised to justify community-based facilities structured around religious belonging. During the COVID-19 pandemic in India, HFR groups distributed branded relief kits in impoverished neighbourhoods amid the collapse of public healthcare, effectively operating as pseudo-state welfare providers. Similar efforts in the UK failed to gain traction, highlighting how the strength of public welfare infrastructures can limit the reach of far-right actors.

By examining a group that is a minority in one country but a majority in another, this paper analyses the role of the welfare state and complicates dominant binaries around migration, welfare, and nationalism. It argues that HFR women both call for and benefit from state withdrawal, producing solidarities that form political subjects beyond and against universalist welfare frameworks.