One of the difficulties we face is how to characterize the current regime headed by Narendra Modi, which has won back-to-back victories in three elections (2014–2024). The terminology within which we understand the regime is important, as what to expect from the regime flows from its nature and how to resist it will emerge from an understanding of its character. What is apparent about the regime is its pronounced authoritarianism, with the regime increasingly unaccountable to any constitutional authority.

The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz called such regimes, in which the leader has arbitrary and unlimited discretion, ‘sultanist’ and a species of authoritarianism. Linz (2000, p. 259) defines an authoritarian regime as ‘ruler-centred’ where the

What ‘sultanism’ implies is captured indelibly by Girish Karnad in his play Tughlaq. Karnad captures Mohammad Bin Tughlaq, who embodied this form of arbitrary and whimsical decision-making, be it the decision to issue currency in brass or the decision to shift the capital to Daulatabad. Clearly, the Modi regime has ‘sultanist’ characteristics, based on the personalized and arbitrary decision-making which characterizes the regime.

Chapter 2 tells the story of how ethnicity came to be known in Kenya through territory, providing an overview of the history of ethnic territorial boundary drawing from its inception with the first colonial administration, to today. The principal motivation for the earliest hard boundaries between purportedly homogenous ethnic groups was to free up land for white settlement and capital accumulation. After independence, the administrative boundaries of provinces and districts were deliberately retained, and ethnic patterns of land settlement were engineered. With multi-party elections in the 1990s, these established ‘ethnic territories’ motivated electoral gerrymandering, the most significant postcolonial driver of ethnic territorialisation. All these practices cemented a profound connection between land, boundaries, identity, rights, power, and security. I show how the 2010 constitution worked within this paradigm, too, but in novel ways that moved toward vagueness to manage the inflammatory, grievance-based politics tethered to boundary drawing in Kenya. In doing so, I show how ethnic territorial population concentration today is less certain than commonly imagined.

This chapter examines the enumeration of ethnic populations in the census, where ‘the tribe question’ has been included since 1948. I trace its evolution – from its origins as self-evidently important with a self-evident list of groups – through numerous changes up to 2019. The powerful social imaginary of ‘42+ tribes’ comes from the 1969 census, despite the numerous changes since then. I show how changes in classifications over time, as well as the way they have been used and narrated by the state, reveal the multiple political purposes of classifying and counting ethnicity. In the colonial period, this centred on ethnic population distribution to support indirect rule via ethnicity, as well as tax collection and labour control. In the postcolonial period, ethnic demographic posturing for electoral purposes or ‘the tyranny of numbers’ became a major driver of interest in ‘the tribe question’. However, since 2009, the census has also been a site of recognition for minorities and of the painting of a portrait of a nation defined by its diversity. In this chapter, I also show how the quintessentially unambiguous nature of ethnic census codes has been rendered ambiguous in useful ways.

From the mid-eighties of the last century, the neoliberal economic model, devised by the anti-collectivist theorists,1 which conceptually elevates competition as a high principle, has been favoured by the ruling classes. It remains nothing but a social Darwinist contrivance for accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2004). Since the collapse of the Soviet system, it has become almost the default model sans alternative. The endemic crises it entails and the alienation it engenders necessitate increasingly authoritative responses and demagogic strategies from the rulers, using existing social divisions in the form of castes, religions, ethnicities, and so on, which lead to the fascization of societies.

While this trend is visible everywhere today, some countries have congenial ideological resources for the fascization of their societies. India, with a hegemonic Brahminist ideology (with its hierarchical ethos and the organizational dominance of its hegemons in the state apparatus as well as in civil society) is uniquely positioned. While fascization has been discernible since the 1990s in the overt majoritarian communalism whipped up by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it was somewhat muted by the lack of political consensus and the moral scruples of constitutional decencies.

This concluding chapter offers some final reflections on the nature of knowledge about ethnicity in Kenya. I argue that if the nature of this knowledge is purposefully vague and makes ethnic categories polyvalent, then the best way to protect against problematic uses of ethnic knowledge is vigilance. This is far less satisfying and reassuring than law or rights as a framework for governing the risks of diversity, but it is far more appropriate, and I briefly consider what this might look like. Finally, I look forward to the digitisation of Kenya’s population register and aspirations to establish a population knowledge architecture so sophisticated that it could render numerous registers interoperable and ultimately replace even the census. I reflect on the nature of ethnic classification in such an architecture and argue that it would lose all the qualities that have made it amenable to solidaristic and pluralistic purposes thus far, while amplifying all its dangers.

This chapter examines how the rhetoric of achievement books is crafted through images and numbers as well as words. I argue that these media have two purposes. On one hand, they act as symbolic fragments of the nation, constituted by a recognisable Nasser-era iconography. Peasants and workers, students and soldiers, factories and machines, land and buildings – all these elements are marshalled to depict a cohesive national mosaic. On the other hand, each photograph and statistic acts as an index of the state’s achievements; the picture and the number become, on their own, an inarguable demonstration of the state’s ability to achieve. After describing the typical content of Nasserist iconography, the chapter moves to analyse it in relation to the master narratives of industrial modernisation and revolutionary responsibility. The chapter concludes with an analysis of what images exclude, what lies beyond their frame, and how these exclusions are telling about what constitutes ‘the state’ under Nasser. Governmental images and numbers are not a peripheral epiphenomenon to Nasser-era politics, but they are symbolically and indexically central to the state’s construction.

No figure did more to promote the myth of blood and soil than Richard Darré, the Nazi minister of agriculture. Darré’s environmental legacy is disputed; current scholarship recognizes his racial obsessions while typically denying any substantive ecological orientation. This chapter takes a different perspective, arguing that Darré’s views on race and on care for the soil were inseparable ideologically as well as in practice. Moreover, his environmental allegiances shifted significantly over time, reflecting a series of fierce debates about the politics of nature that involved competing Nazi factions. Peering below the level of famous Nazis, the core of the chapter presents a detailed appraisal of often neglected mid-level officials in interaction with conservationists, organic adherents, and life reform activists, with particular attention to the increasingly influential biodynamic representatives on Darré’s staff. The resulting profile of blood and soil principles in action casts Nazi environmental efforts in a new light: never fully at the center of power but never entirely marginalized, ecological politics played out in tandem with conflicting economic priorities and overarching racial objectives.

The only form of knowledge about ethnicity that officially and permanently attaches to individuals in Kenya is the register of citizens kept by the National Registration Bureau, which issues ID cards. In this chapter, I briefly trace the history of the ID card in colonial labour control practices (not civil registration), but focus on the deeply ambiguous role of ethnicity in registration over recent years. I show how there is a disconnect between the lack of a place for ethnicity in law or regulation surrounding IDs, yet its continued presence in practice. I then examine several cases of minority ethnic community leaders engaged in what I call ‘code seeking’, where they successfully lobbied for recognition as ‘tribes of Kenya’ as a path to securing ID cards – de facto proof of citizenship for people otherwise stateless. However, I also show that other people, in this example, the Galje’el people, a sub-clan of Somalis, have not been and likely will not be successful with this strategy. This chapter draws our attention to the benefits of both classification and vagueness, while remaining vigilant about their risks.

With the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in India in 2014, and over the following years, questions around the nature of this regime and its increasingly close links to large Indian corporates have drawn attention. That these links exist is beyond dispute. However, their specific nature and what they can tell us about the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)–BJP combine, the Sangh Parivar (the family of organizations led by the RSS, including the BJP), is less clear, as in what they might mean for its future trajectory and for the future trajectory of Indian politics.

This chapter, a preliminary exploration of these questions, is largely confined to specific aspects of this government's economic policies. In this context, it will argue that these links are embedded within a specific political trajectory and that this trajectory may lead to eventual possibilities that are neither easy to predict nor necessarily in line with intuitive expectations. Indeed, I will argue that, instead of the apparent stability and supposed strength of the corporate–BJP–state nexus that currently exists, the years to come are likely to see more challenges to this nexus than are usually expected— and a key reason for this is the dynamic produced by this nexus itself.

The historical relationship between the Sangh Parivar and Indian big capital

The relationship between Indian big business and the Sangh Parivar is not a recent one, but arguably such a relationship also did not characterize the RSS's history for most of its existence.