Paper short abstract:

The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has spawned killer squads policing and realigning public conduct in accordance with a Hindu civil order. My analysis will explore the trepidation experienced by small-scale community patrol groups in Mumbai while negotiating this new nationalist terrain.

Paper long abstract:

The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has spawned killer squads responsible for the moral policing of social behavior, and realigning of public conduct in accordance with a Hindu civil order. Spread across the rural and urban landscape of the region, these civil policing groups are called anti-Romeo squads, anti-Love Jihad task teams, and cow vigilantes, and are responsible for a range of violent actions from public shaming of lovers to honour killing of women to lynching of Muslims accused of consuming/purchasing beef. Against this backdrop of aggressive mass policing promoted by a wider Hindu nationalist discourse, my analysis will explore the crisis of identity experienced by small-scale, everyday community patrol groups (anti-theft night patrols, 'slapping aunties', anti-crime neighbourhood uncles), that negotiate the new nationalist terrain with confusion and trepidation. Using Mumbai as my ethnographic landscape, I show how lower class, marginalized urban communities which have 'respectable' monitoring practices to compensate for the lack of state protection in their residential colonies, grapple with the local, national and global rise of the right, the latter having usurped the notion of 'policing the other' under a right-wing discourse. Being increasingly thrust into the periphery of the capitalist progress that is integral to the urban growth of Mumbai, I argue that these surveillance groups often acquiesce to the electoral agendas developed within the realm of powerful populist politics in order to avoid further social vulnerability and urban economic precariousness, which have little to do with ideological commitment to political nationalism.