1. Introduction: On the interpretation of dissent as incitement
On 16 February 2022, in the middle of the night, Tara,Footnote 1 a human rights activist from the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, was woken up by ten police officers who barged into his home. They informed him that he would be taken into immediate custody as he had been accused of grievous hate speech under sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc., and doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony) and 295A (injuring or defiling a place of worship with the intent to insult religion of any class) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). In the initial complaint report registered by the police, which is referred to as a First Information Report (FIR) under Indian law, Tara was accused of “promoting enmity” between different religious groups and “insulting the religious sentiments of Hindus.” Tara was stunned. He had no idea what incident the officers were talking about. To make matters more confusing, he himself was a devout Hindu. How, he wondered, could he have insulted the sentiments of his own community of faith?
Tara would soon learn that in the eyes of certain people in his village, his notion of Hinduism and the particular Hindu positionality he inhabited were deeply offensive and insulting. Tara was a Dalit, a self-designation used by a variety of caste groups that have historically been considered “untouchable” within the Hindu caste hierarchy (Mosse, Reference Mosse2018, p. 424) and have faced systematic social and economic exclusion. Even though the Indian Constitution banished untouchability as a practice in 1950, discrimination and violence against Dalits persist in often violent forms (Fuchs, Reference Fuchs2024a, p. 7).
At the police station, Tara was told that his recent demands that Dalits be allowed in a local temple had been insulting to the higher caste Hindu communities in his village of Ramapura. Like many Dalits of the Meghwal jati (sub-caste) in Ramapura, Tara worshipped a local deity, Ramdev Pir—a legendary warrior of the high-ranking Rajput caste who was said to have shared a close bond with his adopted Dalit sister. Due to this legend, Ramdev Pir was revered both by upper-caste Rajputs and Meghal Dalits who practised the Hindu faith across Rajasthan. He was also revered by some followers of the Sufi branch of Islam. However, the Rajputs in Ramapura would not allow Dalits or Muslims into the local temple dedicated to Ramdev.
Determined to change this situation and to remind everyone that the act of prohibiting Dalits from entering places of worship was outlawed under the Constitution and India’s only hate crime law—the 1989 Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act—Tara called on the village council (panchayat) to hold a meeting and address the matter. During the meeting, he publicly proclaimed that Ramdev was a deity who belonged to all Hindus, and even Sufi Muslims. That same night, the police arrived at his door to accuse him of hate speech. According to the police report, some Rajputs at the panchayat meeting had interpreted Tara’s open criticism of the exclusion Dalits were facing at the Ramdev temple as an attempt to spread public disharmony between Meghwals and Rajputs. They argued that his statements might spark violence against Rajputs and thus qualified as incitement and hate speech under IPC section 153A. Under IPC section 295A, they further accused Tara of insulting Hindu traditions by insisting that Meghwals be allowed to enter the temple.
While Tara was scared and shocked by these events, he was not entirely surprised that he had been targeted. He told me that violence against Dalits at the hands of upper castes had gradually increased since the current Indian government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had come to power in 2014 (see also Johnson, Reference Johnson2024). This was especially hurtful to Tara since a central strategy, which had helped the BJP win electoral support in North India, had been its promise to include Dalits within the framework of Hindu religious identity, which the party considered integral to the Indian nation-building project (Pai, Reference Pai2019, p. 355). “It is all so backward,” he complained, “upper caste Hindus now use hate speech law to silence those who point out blatant caste discrimination or express ideas that disrupt upper caste Hindu supremacy. But the real discrimination is the criminalisation of Dalits and other marginalized groups.” Tara was well aware that the principle of non-discrimination was a central pillar of the Indian Constitution (Kannabiran, Reference Kannabiran2012, p. 5). To enforce this principle, the post-colonial Indian state had even introduced special criminal protections for historically marginalised communities. However, Tara observed that in recent Hindu nationalist discourse, the constitutional and criminal discourse around discrimination had been turned on its head. Now, criticism of casteist exclusion or violence was framed as a criminal assault on Hindu tradition and as the victimisation of upper-caste Hindu publics.
Tara was also deeply disturbed by another facet of his arrest: the police officer who had interrogated him had justified the hate speech charge by referring to a social media post. “He forced me to watch a WhatsApp clip of some guru who claims that critique of upper caste Hindu tradition is hate speech,” he frowned. “He seemed to get his interpretation of hate speech law from social media.”
In October 2023, I discussed Tara’s experience with a prominent human rights lawyer in Delhi, where I had conducted ethnographic fieldwork on interpretations of hate speech law within Indian constitutional courts. He too insisted that his story reflected wider shifts in how certain sections of India’s criminal codes had been politically repurposed by supporters of the Hindu nationalist agenda. State and judicial actors, he argued, were incrementally shifting interpretations of hate speech provisions under Indian law with the intention to further socially exclude historically marginalised groups like Dalits and Muslims and target those who raised awareness about the discrimination they experienced at the hands of a state that increasingly constructed Indian citizenship along narrow lines of religious identity.
The policy of Hindu nationalism, also known as Hindutva, promoted by the BJP, aims to “transform Indian public culture into a sovereign, disciplined national culture rooted in […] a superior ancient Hindu past” (Hansen, Reference Hansen1999, p. 4). An essential ingredient of the Hindutva project has been the use of majoritarianism as a strategy of governance. Majoritarianism as a political concept goes beyond the democratic idea of majority rule. Instead, it sets up a particular identity—in this case, Hindus—as a permanent religious, historical, and cultural majority within a nation, into which some are born, while others are not (Palshikar, Reference Palshikar2022, p. 292). Here, religious identity is first reified, then naturalised, and finally politically mobilised to claim that policies, institutions, and ethical frameworks that do not accept the primacy of Hindu identity in India “aggrieve[d]” the majority (Mehta, Reference Mehta2022, p. 33) and are thus inherently against the people who largely make up the Indian nation. Hence, Hindutva policies have not only systematically framed religious minorities as secondary Indian citizens (Chatterjee, Reference Chatterjee2023) but also favoured the maintenance of traditional Hindu caste hierarchies that relegate Dalits like Tara to the bottom of the social ladder.
Criminal “hate speech” provisions like sections 153 and 295 of the IPC, under which Tara was arrested, have emerged as a central political tool, which has enabled Hindutva supporters to embed their vision of caste hierarchy and majoritarianism within the substantive rules of Indian criminal law. Through a dual strategy of digital virality on social media platforms and procedural dismantlement at the judicial level, supporters of the Hindutva project have instigated a process of interpretive legal change, which has given rise to a system I refer to as majoritarian legal hermeneutics: a process whereby majoritarian regimes exploit the indeterminacy of legal terminologies to create public hierarchies of meaning that compel legal representatives to imbue criminal and constitutional provisions with culturally dominant, anti-democratic ideologies. In this system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics, legal actors at multiple scales—ranging from the police to the judiciary—have rewritten the popular phrase “hate speech,” and associated Indian legal provisions around unlawful speech, to signify any critique of Hindu nationalist policies, practices, and ideologies.
“Hate speech” is a deeply indeterminate term and carries, what David Lanius has called, a “high level” of legal polysemy (Lanius, Reference Lanius2019, p. 36). Polysemy refers to the idea that a word, symbol, or text can evoke multiple meanings or associations. As words and symbols circulate in use, especially during periods of rapid political and cultural transformation, they undergo a process of diachronic lexical change: they encode new meanings, which then continue to coexist in language with older, established meanings (Bréal, [1897] Reference Bréal1924, p. 60).
However, the multiple meanings associated with a term are neither politically neutral, nor equal in their societal impact. Different forms of mass media and political propaganda projects tend to “proffer some meanings more vigorously than others” (Fiske, Reference Fiske1987, p. 16), resulting in a hierarchised polysemic order, in which some meanings acquire strategic socio-political dominance, while others are silenced. This process has been reinforced through the rise of digital media, which has facilitated the repression, manipulation, and interpretive coercion of national populations by anti-democratic governments; a process some scholars have referred to as digital authoritarianism (Polyakova and Meserole, Reference Polyakova and Meserole2019).
When politically dominant meanings of polysemic terms become part of everyday discourses, they can gradually shift legal interpretations and practices over time. As social and legal meanings evolve in dialogue (Moore, Reference Moore1973, pp. 719–20), influential public understandings of polysemic terms can saturate legal discourse and engender systematic shifts within practices of legal interpretation. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with Dalits and Muslim minorities, as well as Supreme Court advocates in Delhi and Rajasthan, this article shows how Indian state actors and non-state Hindutva supporters have deliberately and incrementally transplanted digitally mediated, viral public discourses of “hate,” which portray religious and ethnic minorities as a threat to majority communities, into the realm of criminal protections against discrimination through a linguistic process called grafting (Gal, Reference Gal2019, p. 16).
In the process, they have begun to rewrite constitutional protections for socially vulnerable groups along authoritarian lines by severing the link to the legislative intent—the visions and purpose of legal implementation (Porscher, Reference Porscher2021, p. 328)—that underpins them: to promote principles of secularism and non-discrimination in the Indian Constitution (Kannabiran, Reference Kannabiran2012, p. 7). In doing so, police and judges have become active participants in the creation of a public of wounded Hindus (Tripathi et al., Reference Tripathi, Kumar and Tripathi2019, p. 33) who perceive themselves as victims of a system that has neglected their safety and needs in favour of the needs of minority and vulnerable populations.
Tracing the emergence of majoritarian legal hermeneutics in India, this article advances theories of majoritarian state-making by bringing into conversation three cross-disciplinary theoretical debates that have hitherto remained separate: socio-linguistic theories of polysemy (Bréal, [1897] Reference Bréal1924, p. 60; Fiske, Reference Fiske1987, p. 28; Gal, Reference Gal2019, p. 16; Hall, Reference Hall, Hall, Hobson and Lowe1980, p. 169; Ibutot, Reference Ibutot2024); analyses of the role of hermeneutics in legal practice (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer2013, pp. 358–9, 470–71; Hemel, Reference Hemel2022; Lanius, Reference Lanius2019, pp. 36, 122) and conceptual debates about relationship between social media and digital authoritarianism and digital majoritarianism (Dutta, Reference Dutta2024, pp. 22–3; Mertia, Reference Mertia and Mertia2020, p. 18; Polyakova and Meserole, Reference Polyakova and Meserole2019; Udupa, Reference Udupa2018, p. 453). By proposing that polysemy can become a political tool for the creation of graded hierarchies of meaning that can be harvested through digital means and enforced through the dismantlement of judicial procedure to entrench majoritarian projects and anti-minority violence, the article highlights the importance of transdisciplinary approaches to understanding authoritarianism.
In the following, I first explore the conceptual link between polysemy and legal hermeneutics before discussing how India’s unique legal history of unlawful expression has enabled the emergence of parallel legal and socio-digital discourses of hate speech. In the final section, I discuss two examples from my fieldwork in North India to illuminate the production of majoritarian legal hermeneutics through quasi-legal discourses around “hate speech.”
2. Polysemy: Tensions, hierarchies, and shifting legal meanings
2.1. Polysemic hierarchies
Polysemy—a term that “owes its origins to the Greek poly + seme meaning multiple signs” (Ibutot, Reference Ibutot2024, p. 31)—refers to the idea that a word, symbol, or text has the capacity to evoke multiple meanings, messages, or associations, and that verbal codes and visual signs can encode new referents as they circulate (Hall, Reference Hall, Hall, Hobson and Lowe1980, p. 169). The concept of polysemy highlights that the same terminologies and rhetoric may be imbued with distinct meanings by different listeners (Nunberg, Reference Nunberg1979, p. 72) even within the same socio-historical space (Aligwe et al., Reference Aligwe, Nwafor and Alegu2018, p. 1020).
While linguists and cultural science scholars have argued that all words are polysemous to some extent (the word “head,” for example, can refer to a part of human physiology or be used to describe a functional leadership position), polysemy is often used in contemporary language theory to describe the diachronic, social process of “lexical, semantic change” (Vicente and Falkum, Reference Vicente and Falkum2017, p. 4); or in other words, the change of language and its meanings over time. At the dawn of the 20th century, a period marked by significant political upheaval in Europe, French linguist Michel Bréal adopted the term polysemy to reflect on two socio-linguistic phenomena. On the one hand, he proposed, words consistently acquire new meanings as they circulate in use: a phenomenon that is accelerated during periods of rapid cultural and political transformation. On the other hand, older understandings or meanings associated with words, phrases, and symbols do not simply disappear as new ones are born. Instead, established and emerging meanings concurrently remain in language at any given time ([1897] 1924).
Bréal neither considered polysemy to be inherently problematic nor did he think of it as a political phenomenon. However, in the late 20th century, analyses of growing mass communication markets began to reflect how the large-scale circulation of symbols, words, and phrases through commercial media could facilitate the creation of dominant political meanings (Hall, Reference Hall, Hall, Hobson and Lowe1980, p. 170), or what I will refer to as graded hierarchies of polysemy. In his groundbreaking volume “Television Culture,” John Fiske argued that different meanings associated with a term or image were neither politically neutral nor equal in their societal impact. Mass media like television, Fiske argued, followed politically and economically dominant structures of interpretation. They tended “to proffer some meanings more vigorously than others” (Fiske, Reference Fiske1987, p. 16), resulting in a hierarchised polysemic socio-political order that reinforced capitalist ideologies.
Processes of digitalisation and the global discursive influence of social media in the political sphere have further entrenched such polysemic hierarchies. The rapid circulation and proliferation of political ideas and opinions through platforms like WhatsApp, X, and Facebook have had the dual effect of fracturing and polarising political discourses on the one hand, while also creating ideologically dominant political publics on the other (Sevignani, Reference Sevignani2022, p. 93). The consolidation of hegemonic meanings is primarily enabled through instances of online virality. Virality refers to episodes of exceptional and rapid dissemination of social media posts, which engender widespread engagement with their themes, as well as a proliferation of similarly themed and structured content by other users (Al-Rawi, Reference Al-Rawi2019, p. 64). While not all moments of virality shift public interpretation and opinion, political news items that achieve exceptional dissemination can activate a public response process that leads to sustained engagement with certain ideas and political belief systems across geographies and institutions (Sangiorgio et al., Reference Sangiorgio, Di Marco, Etta, Cinelli, Cerqueti and Quattrociocchi2025, p. 5).
2.2. Legal hermeneutics: Grafting new political meanings
The rapid circulation of political news, which is enabled through episodes of online virality, can become a fertile ground for the production and transmission of new dominant political worldviews and meanings through disinformation campaigns (Roberts and Oosterom, Reference Roberts and Oosterom2024, p. 864). In some instances, this process can even facilitate “the use of digital information technology by authoritarian regimes to surveil, repress, and manipulate domestic and foreign populations” (Polyakova and Meserole, Reference Polyakova and Meserole2019), and enable the dissemination of majoritarian ideologies (Udupa, Reference Udupa2018, pp. 460–61).
Legal actors can play a crucial role in enabling digitally mediated forms of political exclusion and repression by strategically harvesting viral meanings and narratives as legal labour is inherently interpretive (Hemel, Reference Hemel2022, p. 1073). All legal texts and provisions, like most aspects of language, are to some extent polysemic and indeterminate (Lanius, Reference Lanius2019, p. 122); they are open to competing interpretations, can be differentially applied in accordance with these interpretations, and witness diachronic shifts in meaning. Certain terms, like discrimination, that are highly socially general carry an exceptional level of polysemy (Lanius, Reference Lanius2019, p. 36).
German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer referred to the unique process of isolating meaning from the abstract language of law, prioritising meanings and applying these interpretations in unique and diverse instances, as legal hermeneutics (Gadamer, Reference Gadamer2013, p. 358). Legal actors draw on legislative texts to explain incidents, to ascertain if breaches of legal norms have occurred, and to debate the implications of abstract terms like harm (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017, p. 258). Hence, hermeneutic legal labour also involves the construction of polysemic hierarchies: legal actors prioritise one set of meanings over another. In Indian criminal law, this creation of interpretive hierarchies not only happens within courts but is also an integral part of police work as police officers are in charge of interpreting and translating the stories of victims and complaints into the correct sections of the penal codes (Bhat et al., Reference Bhat, Bajaj and Kumar2020, p. 50; Fuchs, Reference Fuchs2020, p. 179).
The process of interpretive prioritisation, so integral to law, can become treacherous when legal terms are momentarily socially overdetermined (Hemel, Reference Hemel2022, p. 1084). When certain legal terms suddenly emerge as hot-button political topics, legal actors may absorb socially prevalent interpretations of these terms and dominant meanings into their own hermeneutic practices. The more general and, thus, the more inherently polysemic a legal term is, the more discretion legal actors hold to create hermeneutic hierarchies that favour socially and politically dominant meanings and ideologies.
As questions of politics, human rights and social justice are increasingly debated on social media platforms, certain terms—like hate speech—have experienced a surge of online virality that has pushed particular meanings of inherently polysemic idioms to the forefront of public political debates in non-digital spaces (Maarouf et al., Reference Maarouf, Nicolas and Feuerriegel2024, pp. 2–3). In other words, online virality has the power to imbue specific interpretations of terms with, what Nivedita Menon has called, hypervisibility—a structured gaze that highlights certain realities while obscuring others (Menon, Reference Menon2024, p. 28)—in the offline space.
The resulting social ubiquity and discursive dominance of these meanings can precipitate the emergence of interpretive legal practices that prioritise these meanings (Kwame, Reference Kwame2024, p. 53). Sometimes, this may occur gradually due to gaps in systematic reflection, at other times it may be the result of attempts among legal actors to engage in a deliberate process of, what Susan Gal has referred to as “grafting” (Gal, Reference Gal2019, p. 16) in order to project their own “worldview” onto the rules (Dubois, Reference Dubois, Thelen, Vetters and van Benda-Beckmann2018, p. 39). Grafting denotes a practice whereby “linguistic, social, and material practices that are indexical of existing discourses and organizations […]” in one arena of life are transplanted into a second, different arena (Dubois, Reference Dubois, Thelen, Vetters and van Benda-Beckmann2018, p. 454). Gal provides the example of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, during which President Putin invoked the term “responsibility to protect”—rooted in the arena of humanitarian discourse—to describe and justify the idea of aggressive military action. Here, the strategic repurposing of the polysemic phrase “responsibility to protect,” which had a dominant humanitarian meaning, gave rise to a new dominant meaning that signified a narrative of Russian victimhood.
As the remainder of the article shows, in India, the polysemic term “hate speech” has gone through a similar transformation. It has gradually been captured by Hindu nationalist supporters, who mobilise it to manufacture widespread Hindu anxiety around the perceived threat of Muslim takeover and the displacement of upper-caste Hindus by religious minorities and Dalits (Saha et al., Reference Saha, Mathew, Garimella and Mukherjee2021, p. 1110). India’s unique political history, which has shaped its legal definition of unlawful speech as primarily a form of incitement, has collided with a viral socio-digital discourse that highlights Hindu victimhood, while silencing narratives of minority suffering. The result has been a public discourse around “hate speech,” which is polysemic on the one hand, but has also been systematically subject to the creation of polysemic hierarchies. These polysemic hierarchies of “hate speech,” which favour Hindu nationalist interpretations of hate speech, have begun to influence processes of interpretation within Indian political and legal institutions. In turn, these interpretive processes have allowed Indian legal actors to participate in, and create new, Hindu nationalist publics that can push for a wider reinterpretation of legal provisions around unlawful speech as a legal rejection of political dissent. To elucidate this process, it is essential to provide a brief overview of hate speech as a polysemic concept.
3. Hate speech polysemy: An Indian story
3.1. Split definitions
In 2012, the Rabat Plan of Action was introduced as the basis for the development of a comprehensive international approach to defining speech modes that should not be permissible under international law (OHCHR, 2012). Based on the directives contained in the Rabat Plan, the United Nations now classifies hate speech as any form of communication “that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group […] based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor” (United Nations, 2023).
Yet despite this seemingly simple definition, legally and culturally hate speech has become, what Ulrich Baer calls, a “slippery slope” (2019, p. 135) as there is little theoretical and empirical agreement on what constitutes “hate speech” (Gorenc, Reference Gorenc2022, p. 413). For a statement to qualify as hate speech in international law, statements must reasonably carry the potential for the escalation of present and future harm to a person and community beyond simply causing offence (Waldron, Reference Waldron2012; European Court of Human Rights, Fact Sheet on Hate Speech, 2022). However, critics of hate speech law have remarked that all messages and meanings are “inherently polysemic” (Paz et al., Reference Paz, Montero-Díaz and Moreno-Delgado2020, p. 6). The meaning of any statement is not constructed by the speaker alone but also co-constructed by the listeners, who interpret phrases, tone, and bodily expressions in line with the dominant political and social meanings that structure their environments. Hence, a person may decipher meanings in another’s statement that are unintended, rendering the concept of verbal incitement void (Sedlaková, Reference Sedlaková2017, p. 125).
While these debates primarily focus on the possibility of classifying the content of alleged hate speech incidents, the idiom “hate speech” itself is a semiotically ambiguous, non-compositional term that can evoke multiple meanings among different communities (Sinclair and Brown, Reference Sinclair, Brown, Brown and Sinclair2023, pp. 1–41). Though at a fundamental level “hate speech” designates forms of unlawful speech, it also carries a wider meaning that is determined by socio-political discourses around situated experiences of hurt, offence and even dissent” (Sinclair and Brown, Reference Sinclair, Brown, Brown and Sinclair2023, p. 4). Increasingly, the term has become a buzzword with a high level of online virality (Maarouf et al., Reference Maarouf, Nicolas and Feuerriegel2024, p. 3), which describes varied experience of verbal hurt by different actors. As the Indian case reveals, the dual meaning of “hate speech” has turned it into a terminological vessel that enables the creation of new interpretive hierarchies and grafting practices in the legal space.
3.2. India: Colonial visions of public order
Within debates about “hate speech” as a legal category, India has historically occupied a curious role as a democracy, which constitutionally and criminally prohibits certain forms of expression, but does not employ the term “hate speech” in its legislative framework. The unique evolution and the particular limitations of India’s free speech regulations not only exacerbate the polysemic tensions of the term “hate speech” but also facilitate the concentration of interpretive power over what constitutes incitement or hate in the hands of the Indian government of the day.
India’s regulation of free speech finds its roots in the British colonial era (Narrain, Reference Narrain2016, p. 125). Colonial administrators were predominantly concerned that some forms of expression could cause or intensify what political theorists have referred to as communal violence: brutal conflict between non-state groups that are organised through a shared community identity, which is often defined along religious or ethnical lines (Devabalane, Reference Devabalane, Filho, Azul, Brandli, Salvia, Özuyar and Wall2020, p. 2). The worry that communal tensions might make indigenous populations more difficult to control led colonial administration to introduce criminal restrictions on public expression starting in the mid-19th century (Bhatia, Reference Bhatia2016, pp. 45–50).
The IPC, which was introduced by the colonial government in 1860. officially made the “promotion of enmity” between different religious or ethnic groups a criminal offence. IPC section 153 prohibited verbal provocation to riot, while section 295, which was enacted in 1927, forbade verbal expressions that could injure a person’s religious sentiments and cause public religious outrage. Section 504 of the IPC also rendered any words that might lead to a breach or public order punishable by law. Article 124A of the IPC also criminalised the act of sedition, which was defined as words or overt acts that express dissatisfaction and opposition to the government and would threaten state security. Scholars have argued that outlawing sedition sheds doubt on India’s ambition as a true liberal democracy as it contains the seeds for the criminalisation of democratic dissent (Singh, Reference Singh2018, pp. 363–4).
These IPC provisions were carried over into the legal framework of the post-colonial Indian state.Footnote 2 India’s constitution, which came into effect in 1950 assured citizens the right to free speech (Article 19, Constitution of India), barring the articulation of prejudicial views against religious, racial, or caste groups and individuals that could disrupt public order by engendering inter-community conflict (CCG, 2017, pp. 13–6). This constitutional exception to the freedom of expression successfully underlined the IPC’s emphasis on incitement and the production of communal violence. In December 2023, the IPC of 1860 was replaced by the Bhartiya Nyana Sanhita (BNS) as the official criminal code of the Indian Republic. Yet, the substantive limitations on free speech specified in the IPC have largely remained in place.Footnote 3
Critics have highlighted three particularities of the Indian hate speech framework that have the potential to endanger democratic principles of equality: First, the legislative emphasis on the production of future harm rather than the inherent harm of hate speech ignores how the normalisation of everyday modes of discriminatory expression against religious and ethnic minorities can undermine democratic goals in the current political moment (Gupta, Reference Gupta2022).
Second, some have proposed that Indian free speech restrictions fail to consider the role of social power differentials in determining whether hostile speech equates to hate speech. Hostile forms of expression targeted at historically marginalised communities reinforce dynamics of what Hannah Arendt thought of as processes of democratic exclusion (Arendt, Reference Arendt2018, p. 78), while verbal aggression directed at majority groups or socio-political elites by socially vulnerable groups is unlikely to have the same effect (Alam, Reference Alam2022). According to Supreme Court Advocate Sharukh Alam, Indian law had failed to recognise how “hate” or “hate speech” could prevent the democratic participation of minorities and marginalised groups. She posited that hostile expressions should only count as hate speech, if the speaker possessed more political and social power than the listener (Alam, Reference Alam2022).
Finally, due to its colonial genealogy, India’s regulations of free speech concentrate power to define the meaning of “public order,” as well as to circumscribe who counts as the legitimate “people” and social owners of the Indian nation, with the state, and thus, the government of the day. In her nuanced analyses of Indian sedition law, Anushka Singh highlights how colonial administrators mobilised the criminalisation of sedition to stifle India’s nationalist movement (Singh, Reference Singh2018, pp. 157–8). Juxtaposing judicial discussions around sedition with the social life of sedition laws in Haryana, she further traces how, in post-colonial India, accusations of disturbing public order and anti-nationalism were often levelled against vulnerable communities like Dalits who challenged a societal status quo based on caste hierarchies. Singh stresses the role of the police in the production of legal interpretations that equated sedition with “illegal assertion” through anti-caste activities (Singh, Reference Singh2018, p. 229).
Together these analyses shine a stark spotlight on a potentially treacherous dynamic within Indian approaches to “hate speech”: the power to define what counts as inciting, and to create polysemic hierarchies of hate, lies primarily with a state apparatus and a state legal system that has not systematically considered—or has not been willing to systematically consider—how socio-political power differentials between different castes and between religious majorities and minorities show up in the everyday life of the law.
4. Hindu nationalist governance: Police, court, and (social) media politics of “Hate”
This concentration of interpretive power and the lack of engagement with social power differentials in India’s legal regulation of harmful expression have, in many ways, facilitated the weaponisation of hate speech provisions against religious minorities and Dalits by Hindu nationalist forces. In 2014, the BJP, which adheres to a vision of India as a Hindu nation, secured a landslide victory in the national elections. The BJP was formally founded in 1980 and positioned itself as a counterpart to the secular Indian National Congress (INC) that had ruled India since independence in 1947. Advocating for an interpretation of Indian culture that centred on the idea of Hindu-ness and national Hindu rule (Hindutva), the BJP first achieved large-scale electoral success in 1989 when it called for the erection of a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri masjid (mosque) in the town of Ayodhya. Though the party experienced several setbacks over the next two decades, growing popular discontent with INC rule and the nomination of Narendra Modi, former Chief Minister of Gujarat, as candidate for the office of Prime Minister led to a victory for the BJP in the 2014 Indian general elections (Yadav and Patnaik, Reference Yadav and Patnaik2022).
These social and political developments have created a climate of fear among non-Hindu communities who see the arrival of a Hindu nation-state—often referred to as the Hindu rashtra—as an ever-growing, indeterminate threat (Chatterjee, Reference Chatterjee2023, pp. 127–38). The BJP’s political strategy of Hindu majoritarianism has exacerbated structural inequalities in India in two ways. First, it has silenced the polyvocality of dissenting voices among India’s Dalit communities (Schoenhaus, Reference Schoenhaus2018, p. 11) through symbolic acts of acknowledgement, which ultimately have little political or social impact. One example has been the BJP’s systematic attempt to appropriate the legacy of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the most prominent leader of the modern Dalit resistance movement and chair of India’s constitutional drafting committee. Though Ambedkar was a “staunch critic” of Hinduism and Hindu tradition—a fact that was evidenced by his own conversion to Buddhism—the BJP has made “concerted intellectual efforts to represent Ambedkar as the protector of the Hindutva identity” in order to capture the Dalit vote (Bose, Reference Bose2024).
Second, the Hindutva agenda, which portrays India as a mythical Hindu heartland, has positioned religious minorities—particularly Muslims—as a threat to national integrity and Hindu morality (Saha et al., Reference Saha, Mathew, Garimella and Mukherjee2021, p. 1111). Consequently, the use of hostile modes of speech against religious minorities has steeply risen since the BJP came to power (Singh, Reference Singh2025), and data from Amnesty International indicate that lynchings of Muslims at the hands of Hindu nationalist groups have exponentially increased during the same period (Zargar, Reference Zargar2024). Moreover, India’s National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reveals a 45% increase in court cases pertaining to violent incitement against ethnic and religious minorities across India since 2021 (Das, Reference Das2023).
The rise of Hindutva and the dissemination of Hindu majoritarianism as a political strategy have been facilitated by both traditional and digital media at regional, national, and even international levels (Therwath, Reference Therwath2012, p. 555). Sahana Udupa has shown how technology-savvy volunteers have integrated social media platforms like X and Facebook into their strategy of spreading key political and ideological claims that aim to cement a new public majoritarian imagination (Udupa, Reference Udupa2018). Hindutva supporters, as well as elected BJP officials, use social media sites to promote the idea of India as a Hindu motherland (rashtra) defined by Hindu culture (sanskriti), which is under threat by foreign races and religions (Bhatia, Reference Bhatia2021, p. 24). This has produced, what Mohan Dutta calls, a digital “infrastructure of hate” (Dutta, Reference Dutta2024, p. 20), which relies on the production of virality by networks of Hindutva supporters to cement public discourses that equate the concept of “hate speech” or “hate crime” with dissent or criticism of Hindu nationalist frameworks and world views. At the same time, social media ethnographies have also highlighted digital platforms and the production of virality as a site for the emergence of critical collective action among historically marginalised groups (Fuchs and Cearns, forthcoming, p. 3). Social media has thus played an integral role in both “consolidating and disrupting” (Mertia, Reference Mertia and Mertia2020, p. 18) hegemonic political meanings and narratives that aim to entrench notions of upper-caste Hindu supremacy and narratives of Hindu victimhood.
In this climate, the phrase “hate speech” has emerged as a linguistic vehicle within the criminal justice system that carries two competing meanings that diverge significantly from the exceptions to free speech specified under Indian law. On the one hand, Hindu nationalist sympathisers have been able to mobilise viral social media discourses that posit the language and actions of minorities as a threat to Hindu identity to create a new socially dominant meaning that equates “hate speech” with public critiques of the Hindu nationalist project. On the other hand, human rights advocates try to employ the phrase “hate speech” to describe instances of unlawful speech, such as genocidal threat, identity-based insult, and democratic exclusion against minority and socially vulnerable groups and lower castes (Bhat et al., Reference Bhat, Bajaj and Kumar2020, p. 53; Fuchs, Reference Fuchs2024) that threatened constitutional principles of secularism and non-discrimination.
However, this latter, constitutionally rooted meaning of “hate speech” has been gradually pushed to the bottom of the polysemic hierarchy as the viral Hindutva understanding of the term has grown dominant in public discourse (Tripathi et al., Reference Tripathi, Kumar and Tripathi2019, p. 34). State representatives have accused media outlets of hate speech when they have reported on Hindu-led attacks against religious minorities. In January 2024, the police in the state of Manipur filed complaints against the Editors Guild of India for reporting on ethnic violence committed against the Christian minority Kuki-Zo tribes by the majority Hindu Meitei community. According to the complaints, the media’s decision to report on the violence amounted to the promotion of “enmity” between the two communities under section 153 of the IPC (Sitlhou, Reference Sitlhou2022).
Gradually, the dominant meaning has crept into police interpretations of criminal provisions around inciting or insulting speech. Not only do police officers increasingly interpret government dissent or critiques of caste oppression with anti-Hindu hostility or hate, but research has shown that police officers often play an active role in anti-minority violence, colluding with Hindutva vigilante groups (Nizaruddin, Reference Nizaruddin2021, p. 1101). Viral, social media narratives that portray Muslims as dangerous conspirators, who are intent on abducting Hindu women, or as carriers of disease, are increasingly cited by police officers to defend inaction or instances of police brutality (Nizaruddin, Reference Nizaruddin2021, pp. 1103–05).
While the Indian Supreme Court had acknowledged the importance of variable context in hate speech accusations in Amish Devgan v. The Union of India (2020) and has stated that violent speech against vulnerable communities is unconstitutional (Ohri, Reference Ohri2025), it has also often been resistant to discuss socio-religious power differentials between the Hindu majority and religious minorities (Alam, Reference Alam2022). Moreover, it has avoided nuanced analysis of the competing definitions of “hate speech” that are often at work in complaints of injurious speech and incitement by different communities. Overall, Ratna Kapur argues that India’s higher judiciary has endorsed the “Hindu Right’s majoritarian and homogenising” conceptions of religion and injury that “serve[s] the primary objective of establishing the nation’s identity as Hindu” (Kapur, Reference Kapur, Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot2019, p. 354). She proposes that “in and through the discourse of equality, as well as criminal law” the court has helped to embed majoritarian agendas rooted in Hindutva ideology within every day social and political discourses and interactions (Kapur, Reference Kapur, Chatterji, Hansen and Jaffrelot2019, p. 363). Crucially, as the ethnographic data in the next section reveal, what Kapur described as the endorsement of majoritarian ideologies by Indian courts, is not only driven by Hindutva’s own digital infrastructure, but also exacerbated by state-led attempts of procedural judicial dismantlement.
5. The narrative of Hindu victimhood
In the following, I first return to Tara’s story to explore how social media-informed police work weaponises the term “hate speech” against individuals who criticise upper-caste Hindu privilege. I then describe a hearing at the Indian Supreme Court to trace how state actors perform spectacular performances for courtroom media that portray judges’ willingness to hear hate speech complaints by Muslims as anti-Hindu bias.
Together, this ethnographic data reveal how the creation of a polysemic hierarchy, in which the expression “hate speech” carries a dominant social connotation as Hindu nationalist critique, has systematically marginalised constitutional understandings of “hate speech” rooted in principles of non-discrimination, secularism, and equality among police stations and in courts. Hindutva supporters and state representatives have mobilised a dual strategy of digital virality and procedural dismantlement at the judicial level to create a system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics, within which “hate speech” can only ever signify Hindu victimhood.
5.1. Tara: Hate speech and the policing of ideological dissent
In March of 2023, I returned to Rajasthan’s capital of Jaipur to build on my previous research on caste atrocities by studying popular interpretations of hate speech among law enforcement and judicial actors. A friend, whom I had previously worked with, immediately suggested that I talk to Tara. A few days later, I met Tara for tea at the Jaipur Office of the Legal Human Rights Collective.Footnote 4 Over the course of multiple conversations between spring and autumn 2023, he revealed that he still found it difficult to sleep at night, for fear the police would return and take him away to prison again “I am on bail now” he told me:
but I am scared of getting arrested again. I can’t go to prison again, and these days you go to prison just for pointing out injustice. The fact that Dalits are discriminated against by upper-caste Hindus is not new but what we are seeing now under this Hindu nationalist government is that sections of the criminal code are being interpreted in new ways to further exclude Dalits. Now sections like 153A and 295 of the IPC are being used by higher-caste Hindus to claim that marginalized groups who point out discrimination are insulting ‘real’ upper-caste Hindus. And police are using social media clips to make this argument.
Indeed, recent research data show that supporters of the Hindutva agenda have increasingly used accusations of hate speech to undercut the democratic “freedom to criticize” government (in-)action in relation to the protection of the rights of religious minorities and historically marginalised groups (Basu and Sen, Reference Basu and Sen2024, p. 45). This has been especially apparent on social media where posts—criticising government policies like the introduction of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act that denies Muslim immigrants in India the same citizenship pathways as other religious groups (Fuchs, Reference Fuchs2024b)—have gone viral and been attacked by Hindutva supporters for employing anti-nationalist hate speech (Basu and Sen, Reference Basu and Sen2024).
The use of the term hate speech to describe dissent against the Hindu religious figures, or even against artistic expression that may paint an unfavourable picture of Hindu culture (Quint Entertainment, 2020), is also reflected in the increase of sedition accusations. While the law of sedition was originally intended to curb speech that specifically targeted the state (Singh, Reference Singh2018, p. 157), recent years have seen the reinterpretation of sedition as any public expression of criticism against the ideology of Hindu nationalism. A report by the independent news organisation Article14 highlighted that since Modi’s election in 2014, accusations of sedition under section 124A of the IPC increased by 28% by 2020 (Sitlhou, Reference Sitlhou2022). Many of these accusations were levelled against protestors or journalists, who criticised government policies such as the CAA or simply raised concerns about the impact Hindu nationalist governance may have on the human rights of minorities. The 2023 Freedom in the World Report for India concluded that Indian authorities have systematically used the language of “security, defamation, sedition, and hate speech laws, as well as contempt-of-court charges, to quiet critical voices in the media” (Freedom House, 2023).
Together, these developments have generated a new polysemic hierarchy of “hate speech,” in which Hindutva critique has emerged as the dominant public meaning of the term. My own research into Tara’s case revealed that discursive equivalence between “hate speech,” the ideological critique of Hindu nationalism, and dissent of government policies, which is so widespread on social media, has systematically taken root in policing practice.
After Tara was taken into police custody, he had been interviewed by the Deputy Inspector of Police (DPI) at his local police station (thana). Tara told me that the DPI, who was a member of the high-ranking Brahmin caste, immediately displayed a hostile attitude towards Tara. “So, you think you can walk around and insult our Hindu traditions?,” he asked Tara while towering over him in a threatening manner, “you think you can just demand that we break with temple traditions (sanskar) because you have some radical anti-nationalist agenda?” Tara had tried to defend himself, “No Sir, I am a Hindu too,” he had apparently told the DPI:
“I respect Hinduism. That is exactly why I spoke up. I too want to be able to go to the temple of Ramdev and so do all my Dalit brothers from the Meghwal community who worship him and all our Muslim brothers who also revere him. All I said was that excluding Dalits from worship is illegal and wrong!”
His words had angered the DPI even more. “So, you think our traditions are wrong then?” the DPI had demanded, smacking his hand on the table. “This temple has been run by Rajputs for centuries, they have cared and worshipped the temple and here you are wanting to undo it all, besmirching sacred traditions and even suggesting it is a place of Muslim faith. This is hate,” he reportedly exclaimed, “you are insulting the Hindus who have dedicated their life to the Ramdev temple and you are inciting violence!”
According to Tara, the DPI had then pulled out his phone and forced him to watch an Instagram reel by holding his phone directly before Tara’s face and holding his head in place so that he could not look away. The reel showed a guru from the Shekhawati region of Jhunjhunu district giving a speech to a crowd of hundreds of people. “These days Muslims and Christians all insult us Hindus,” the guru addressed the crowd, “they make fun of our traditions. But this is hate speech and we must not accept it!”Footnote 5
When Tara had stopped watching the DPI put his phone away. “See what Guru Maharaj says,” he told Tara, “you might not realize it yet, but what you are saying about the Rajputs at the temple, about their traditions is hate speech against Hindus and it will cause bad feelings and lead to violence!”
The police officer’s use of the Instagram reel was intended to forcefully direct Tara’s understanding and interpretation of what constituted hate speech. In addition to physical violence, the use of verbal intimidation and coercion to elicit confessions or agreement has become increasingly widespread and normalised technique in Indian custodial interrogation (Majruddin and Singh, Reference Majruddin and Singh2022, pp. 37–8). In Tara’s case, the officer combined physical force and the aggressive presentation of viral social media material in order to coerce him into adopting and internalising a definition of hate speech that fell in line with a broader social narrative of upper-caste Hindu victimhood.
After watching the clip, Tara told me, he had simply fallen silent. He noticed that the DPI had equivocated the term Hindu with upper-caste communities like the Rajput caste and that, at best, he saw Meghwal Dalits like himself as second-rank Hindus. He also realised that there was no point trying to prove he had not committed hate speech since his own definition of hate speech was so very different from the DPI’s. He smiled sadly, when he explained his thoughts to me:
I realized that to this Brahmin DPI I was better than a Muslim, but I was still not a real Hindu, only upper castes are truly Hindus. Therefore, any critique of caste exclusion by upper castes was anti-Hindu to him. And if it was anti-Hindu it was anti-national, and if it is anti-national it was hate speech! To me hate speech is something else. To me incitement under section 153 of the IPC means you go out there and tell people that another religious community is bad or you tell people to attack them. But critiquing upper caste Hindus for enacting casteism, which is illegal under Indian law, isn’t hate speech in my world.
Tara’s reflection on his interaction with the police reveals two things. First, they highlight that despite the BJP’s promise to abandon caste hierarchies and welcome and integrate Dalits into the Hindu fold (Pai, Reference Pai2019, p. 34), the term “Hindu” remains reserved for upper castes in the eyes of many Hindutva supporters. Tara’s experience reflects what Sukhadeo Thorat and Nidhi Sabharwal have termed the game of partial or selective inclusion: a process whereby Dalits are nominally integrated into a social and political system under unfavourable and often harmful conditions (Thorat and Sabharwal, Reference Thorat and Sabharwal2014, p. 15).
Second, Tara’s encounter with the DPI highlights how social media has conflated the term “hate speech” with sentiments of Hindu victimhood that have filtered into practices of police interpretation. From urban all the way to remote rural Indian areas and into the Indian diaspora, the use of the phrase “hate speech” to describe perceived sentiments of Hindu victimisation at the hands of religious minorities has spiked in online and offline discourses (Dutta, Reference Dutta2024, pp. 22–3). In Tara’s case, the DPI based his own characterisation of “hate speech” on a viral social media video, which claimed that Hindu traditions were systematically under threat from insults by religious minorities. He then infused the legal definition of unlawful speech with this dominant discourse to argue that Tara had committed such hate speech. As stated at the start, Tara had been charged with “insulting the religious sentiments of Hindus” under section 295 of the IPC. The DPI thus argued that Tara’s critique of caste discrimination by the Rajput castes who managed the Ramdev temple was an insult to Hindu tradition and practice. Tara had also been accused of “promoting enmity” between different religious groups under section 153A of the IPC. Therefore, the DPI argued that Tara’s insult of the Rajputs would inevitably lead to violence. By making this claim, he not only implicitly asserted that Dalits like Tara did not belong to the same religious group as upper-caste Hindus, but also that any attempts to point out and stop caste discrimination would be violently retaliated by the “real” Hindus.
According to political scientist Jayanth Deshmukh, “several commissions have reported biases in police actions and arrests” against religious minorities, as well as against marginalised groups like Dalits (Deshmukh, Reference Deshmukh2021, p. 325). However, Tara’s story highlights something more subtle and insidious. It reveals how popular narratives of Hindu victimhood have garnered increasing public dominance through processes of social media virality. New, digitally mediated, socio-technical relations (Mertia, Reference Mertia and Mertia2020, p. 18) have created polysemic hierarchies of meaning that shape legal understandings of hate speech, which now inform the work of police officers in cases involving accusations of unlawful speech. Consequently, legal concepts like religious insult and incitement are now formally reinterpreted to criminalise demands for inclusion by socially marginalised groups.
5.2. Spectacles of judicial distraction
However, Tara’s story still begs the question: How do popular and viral discourses that equate hate speech with anti-Hindu rhetoric seep from everyday discourse and police practice into judicial interpretations? Data from my fieldwork at the Supreme Court in Delhi suggest that government interference in judicial proceedings and the creation of court-room media spectacles, exact pressure on judges to align themselves with polysemic hierarchies and enact the dominant Hindu nationalist interpretation of hate speech as an inherently anti-Hindu act of dissent.
In March 2023, I was at my South Delhi apartment, when a human rights lawyer I had previously interviewed urgently directed me to watch a livestream of a Supreme Court hearing. The hearing in a case entitled Shaheen Abdullah vs. the Union of India took place before a two-judge Supreme Court bench consisting of Justice K.M. Joseph and BV Nagarathna. The bench heard a contempt plea against the Government of Maharashtra for repeatedly failing to curb hate speeches against Muslims by a Hindu religious organisation called the Sakal Hindu Samaj (hereafter, SHS).
The counsel for the petitioner, Advocate Pasha, first presented a list of the dates and events to the bench, which detailed which SHS members had publicly encouraged attacks against Muslim properties, livelihoods, and lives. Pasha then told the bench that the same few SHS members had been repeatedly involved in public calls for violence against Muslims in the state of Maharashtra without facing legal repercussions (Chowdhury, Reference Chowdhury2023a). Therefore, Pasha implored the court to order the police of Maharashtra to produce a status report to show what, if any, steps they had taken to stop inflammatory speeches by these repeat offenders. He clarified that the Supreme Court could no longer afford to be silent as SHS members blatantly disregarded constitutional and criminal provisions against incendiary speech.
However, before the presiding judge, Justice Joseph, could reach a decision, the proceedings were interrupted by the Solicitor General of India (SG), the country’s second-highest legal officer, who appeared on behalf of the state. The SG announced that if the bench was going to act on Mr. Pasha’s request, there were additional “statements, which should be added to [the] petition!” He explained his request by mentioning a recent political event in Kerala, at which “[the] Leader of DMK party [said] that if you want equality, you should butcher all the Brahmins (Bar and Bench, 2023).” Though the recording, which the SG wanted the bench to hear, did not pertain to the contempt plea at hand, he seemed adamant that the bench should hear it then and there: “Please hear this clip from Kerala […] It should shock the conscience of this court. A child has been used to say this, we should be embarrassed…he says Hindus and Christians should prepare for final rites…” (Bar and Bench, 2023).
What ensued was an hour of procedural chaos, which largely centred on the question of whether the state should be allowed to discuss an entirely different instance of hate speech in the current hearing. Advocate Pasha repeatedly tried to remind Mehta of the need to adhere to procedural guidelines: “such submissions cannot befit the office of the Solicitor General, and we cannot engage in such whataboutery” (Bar and Bench, 2023), he announced, attempting to get the hearing back on track. Justice Joseph agreed: “Let us not make this into a drama. This is a legal proceeding,” he argued (Bar and Bench, 2023). However, Mehta resisted: “Why are you shying away from looking at the clip?” he asked the bench (Bar and Bench, 2023). “Because there is a method to see this. […],” Justice Joseph explained, “you can include this in submission for the next hearing” (Bar and Bench, 2023). In response, the Solicitor General accused the bench of being “selective” (Press Desk, Reference Desk2023).
Justice Joseph ultimately steered the hearing to a successful end (Chowdhury, Reference Chowdhury2023b). However, this was not the story told by national news outlets the next day. Because, at one point in his procedural combat with the Solicitor General, Justice Joseph—India’s only Christian Supreme Court Judge at the time—had smiled at a potential historical inaccuracy in the SG’s argument. And so, newspapers across India shared one headline the following day: “Justice Joseph allegedly ‘smiles’ at SG’s reference to brahmin genocide calls made by DMK Leader” (NewsBharati, 2023). When another matter of genocidal speeches against Muslims was listed before Justice Joseph two weeks later, he delayed the hearing.
Advocate Pasha’s futile attempts to safeguard the legal procedures, which the Solicitor General appeared to be disregarding, and the backlash against Justice Joseph’s determined efforts to stick to the matter at hand, reveal how representatives of the Hindu nationalist government have begun influence court hearings involving accusations of hate speech by Hindus. The procedural dismantlement on display in Justice Joseph’s courtroom, and the subsequent attacks on his identity and integrity, aim to bring judicial interpretations of “hate speech” in line with dominant Hindu nationalist meanings through two strategies: rhetoric distraction and accusatory spectacle.
In the first instance, the Solicitor General unceremoniously interrupted a hearing that was focused on the issue of incendiary hate speeches against Muslims. Rather than engaging in the case at hand and providing evidence for or against the claim that SHS members had repeatedly called for genocidal activities targeted at Muslims, Mehta demanded that the bench look at the issue of anti-Hindu incitement instead. Every time the bench attempted to return to the scheduled case, he then accused the judges of anti-Hindu bias. These repeated acts of rhetoric distraction rendered discussion of the ways Muslim communities may have been verbally victimised by the SHS almost impossible.
In a second step, the Solicitor General then mobilised deeply emotive language and verbal accusation to cast doubt on the neutrality and credibility of the presiding justices. By openly accusing Justice Joseph of being selective and claiming, the Solicitor General used courtroom performance to sow the seeds for an alternative and emotive public narrative around the hearing. In this narrative, Indian Hindus live in a country whose Supreme Court cares little for their safety while openly favouring religious minorities.
These performances of distraction then escape beyond the courtroom and result in a media narrative, which claims that as a Christian judge, Justice Joseph is blatantly biased against Hindus. Francis Cody shows how media reports on legal proceedings shape public sentiment, ensuring that “the law’s tentacles spread deeply into the recesses of everyday life” (Cody, Reference Cody2023, p. 69). In turn, public sentiments and interpretations then influence how judges interpret and adjudicate subsequent cases (Cody, Reference Cody2023, p. 85).
The events in Justice Joseph’s courtroom are no exception. Justices at India’s Supreme Court and at High Courts across the country have been facing increasing pressure from government officials to bring their judgments in line with Hindu nationalist ideologies (Roche, Reference Roche2025, p. 998). An analysis of Supreme Court data from 2004 onwards conducted by India’s Campaign for Judicial Accountability found that the number of Supreme Court justices who draw on sources outside of the constitution, including religious documents, has risen over the past decade (Sharma, Reference Sharma2023).
In part, this shift in interpretive practice has been the result of a systematic government campaign to fill open positions on the Supreme Court bench with Hindu nationalist sympathisers (Sharma, Reference Sharma2023). However, the above example also reveals something more insidious: State actors systematically use tactics of disruption, emotive rhetoric, and delay in courtrooms to paint advocates and judges who try to mobilise constitutional and criminal provisions around unlawful speech for the protection of religious minorities as displaying anti-Hindu bias. These courtroom performances and tactics create a tense socio-legal climate, in which judicial actors who refuse to align their interpretive approach with the dominant meaning of “hate speech” as Hindutva critique are portrayed as anti-nationalists (The Wire Staff, 2023).
6. Conclusion: The birth of majoritarian legal hermeneutics
The ethnographic data presented above highlight how the legal concept of “hate speech” has emerged as a central site for the construction of a majoritarian complex of legal interpretation, which aims to set up India’s upper-caste Hindu majority as a perpetually victimised community, while simultaneously portraying religious minorities, lower castes, and government critics as inherently dangerous to Hindu well-being.
Within the Hindutva state, “hate speech”—a digitally viral expression, which carries an exceptionally broad array of possible associations and meanings (Lanius, Reference Lanius2019, p. 36)—has become subject to the political construction of a polysemic hierarchy. In this polysemic hierarchy, the Hindu nationalist interpretation of “hate speech” as any moment of expression that implies critique of Hindutva policies and actions, especially by religious minorities and Dalits, has emerged as its dominant political meaning. Meanwhile, constitutionally rooted understandings of “hate speech” as inciting language that threatens the foundational, constitutional principles of pluralism, secularism, and non-discrimination of the post-colonial Indian state have been increasingly silenced.
This polysemic hierarchy is created through a dual strategy of digital virality and procedural dismantlement at the judicial level and has increasingly begun to shape interpretations of unlawful speech and incitement among police officers and judges. On the one hand, Tara’s story highlights how hostile, viral digital discourses, which rewrite public dissent against the Hindu nationalist vision of India as an act of criminal incitement have become embedded in policing practices. Law enforcement actors draw on aggressive Hindu nationalist social media posts to construct their own conception of what constitutes “hate speech.” This highlights how online virality, defined as episodes of exceptional and rapid digital dissemination, can lead to a diffusion of political ideas and ideologies across different arms of the state. On the other hand, state actors use strategic courtroom performances to produce media narratives, which depict advocates and judges, who consider the possibility that “hate speech” may be a form of violence that can be directed against religious minorities like Muslims, as biased and uncaring towards the Hindu public. By disrupting hearings, creating an emotional spectacle that pushes judges into a defensive position in their own courtrooms, state actors both direct judicial interpretation in the moment and limit the scope of judicial interpretation in the future.
Together, the dynamics described above have produced a nascent system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics: a self-reinforcing apparatus of interpretive practice and political pressure, through which supporters of the Hindutva project imprint their own polysemic hierarchies onto the working of law and weaponise multi-scalar structures of legal interpretation against minorities and socially vulnerable groups. Here, legal hermeneutics—the task of delineating how the broad, abstract language of law, which is inherently polysemic, should be read, delineated, and applied in varied instances—emerges as a technical site for the reproduction of exclusionary, anti-democratic political ideologies.
The establishment and habitual entrenchment of majoritarian legal hermeneutics hinges on two strategies: online virality and offline courtroom disruption. By engaging both strategies, Hindu nationalist supporters facilitate the creation of new dominant public meanings associated with certain criminal provisions, which then shape the hermeneutic labour of legal actors. The reproduction of these dominant meanings through the legal system allows supporters of the Hindu nationalist project to rewrite democratic ideals along majoritarian lines.
As police officers and judges become embedded in the system of majoritarian legal hermeneutics, legal notions of unlawful speech and incitement transform into a political tool that systematically drives a narrative of upper-caste Hindu victimhood. By bolstering this narrative, legal actors ultimately become active participants in the making of a new public (Warner, Reference Warner2002, p. 65) of wounded Hindus, whose dominant experience is one of perpetual victimisation. What is at stake in the proliferation of “hate speech” discourse is thus not merely competing narratives, but the creation of graded polysemic and hermeneutic hierarchies, which further obfuscate marginalised lives. As the language and interpretations of the law embed themselves in everyday life, majoritarian legal hermeneutics create an interpretive loop, in which the experiences, perceptions, and understandings of minorities can never find space.
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