In this special issue introduction, we use the 2024 Indian national elections as our entry point for critically assessing the configuration and direction of Hindu nationalism as a hegemonic project under Modi 3.0 - a project that has forged an intimate connection between neoliberal accumulation strategies and 'Hindutva' as a vehicle for ideological legitimation. Rather than seeking to determine whether the elections mark a setback or a consolidation for Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), we ask how and to what effect they signal a more profound geographical and sociological relocation of the wider Hindu nationalist project. Working with the notion of 'relocations', we seek to capture the simultaneous yet uneven contraction and expansion of Hindutva's footprint across multiple geographies and demographic categories, both prior to and after 2024. Drawing on the granular state-level analyses contained in the contributions to this special issue, we argue that while contemporary Hindu nationalist politics displays a considerable degree of flux, fluidity, and in some cases even vulnerability, its unfolding relocations in crucial ways contribute to the continued reproduction of Hindu nationalist hegemony under Modi 3.0.

This article analyses the discursive and material work that land fictions perform in processes of land commodification and dispossession for large-scale tourism projects in the Indian state of Goa. Following recent work that conceives of land fictions as legitimating narrative, legal and regulatory devises that partake in the production of land as a commodity, we identify four distinct land fictions at work on the Goan tourism frontier: the clean-slate-as-treasure-chest fiction; the tenancy-free land fiction; the zoning fiction; and the forest fiction. These land fictions, we argue, in crucial ways underpin material practices that remove a series of barriers to the commodification of land. By seeing land fictions as operating in conjunction with and being conditioned by state structures, economic logics, class interests, and forms of ideological justification, the article also seeks to contribute to ongoing debates on regimes of dispossession and the land broker state in the Indian context.

In this article, we analyse the trajectory of Hindu nationalist politics in Goa, using the 2024 Indian national elections as our entry point. While the electoral performance of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has fluctuated over time, we argue that the overall trajectory of Hindu nationalism in Goa has been one of progressive entrenchment, with the BJP consolidating its widespread electoral support from a large cross-section of Hindu castes and communities in most parts of the state. This consolidation has, in turn, been accompanied by a hardening political rhetoric that, as in other parts of India, increasingly targets the state's non-Hindu minorities, and Christians in particular. We find little in the 2024 elections and the period following it that would indicate any reversal of this trajectory.

This article analyses the consolidation of Hindu nationalist politics in the Indian state of Goa, with a particular emphasis on political transformations occurring over the last decade. Unlike in many other parts of India, where Indian Muslims have been cast as the prime 'antagonistic other' of Hindu nationalism, the article shows how in Goa it is Goan Christians who have increasingly come to occupy this position. This argument is substantiated through an analysis of recent Hindu nationalist mobilisations centred on anti-Christian tropes and issues. Building on this, the article suggests that Hindu nationalism in contemporary Goa may be understood as a form of assemblage politics that is highly attuned to the local context and coarticulates with regional histories, circumstances, and symbolic registers. This politics, crucially, advances through a flexible alignment of organisations, institutions, and actors across the political and civil society divide, effectively connecting mainstream and so-called 'fringe' Hindu nationalist groups in the pursuit of a shared political mission across scales.

This article analyses the violence directed towards Adivasi Christians in Chhattisgarh in India between 2018 and 2023, under the governance of the Indian National Congress (INC). With Chhattisgarh as a case study, this article pursues a two-fold agenda. First, it maps the anti-Christian violence in the state perpetrated by Hindutva groups. Second, it analyses the persistence of such violence under an INC state government. The INC is a supposedly secular party competing electorally with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Engaging with Jaffrelot's concept of a deeper state, this article demonstrates how Chhattisgarh's 'deeper state' exists even when the BJP is not in power. The interaction between the INC's 'soft' Hindutva and anti-Christian violence at a local level in Bastar district is assessed, foregrounding the interplay of governance, vigilante groups and community members.

In this special issue introduction, we analyse the trajectory and forms of anti-Christian violence in India and its role in the wider Hindu nationalist project today. Inspired by Galtung's work on direct, structural, and cultural violence, we show how different forms of anti-Christian violence have waxed, waned, and combined in shifting constellations at different moments of India's postcolonial political history and in different state contexts. At the current conjuncture, however, the imagined threat of 'the Christian Other' has acquired an unprecedented centrality to Hindu nationalist politics, producing a systemic escalation in anti-Christian violence across many states. This violence is, we argue, characterised by a strong convergence of direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence, involving vigilante attacks and police complicity, but also an increasingly coercive use of state law, coupled with the production of a wider cultural common sense about the anti-national essence of non-Hindu religious minorities.

In this viewpoint article, we analyse the consolidation of Abhishek Banerjee as the future leader of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the dominant political party in West Bengal and one of the most influential opposition parties at the pan-Indian level. While the TMC has gone from strength to strength for over a decade under the leadership of Mamata Banerjee (who is also Abhishek's aunt), it has recently found itself in an unprecedented crisis, mired in allegations of corruption and misgovernance. Yet, every crisis presents new opportunities, and in this contribution, we show how the TMC has worked to simultaneously rejuvenate the party's orientation while taking forward a long-unfolding project of political dynasticism whereby 'the nephew' Abhishek is being positioned to take over the party leadership. Our analysis proceeds from an overview of the crises that have engulfed the TMC, to a discussion of how it has been used as a window of opportunity for raising Abhishek's standing. Towards this end, we focus on a series of recent party initiatives - particularly a mass outreach programme called Nabo Jowar (new wave) - as well as the recent 2023 panchayat elections where Abhishek played a key role in securing a landslide victory for the TMC.