“The situation here isn’t very different from Delhi,” Prakash Ram, a kanungo, declared as his fingers carefully traced the round edges of a recent stain left on his desk by a teacup. “You must have seen that video from Delhi which is going viral today.”

“What video?” I asked.

“Jisme chaaku mar diya ladki ko (the one in which a girl was stabbed),” Rama Tiwari, a young patwari, clarified.

“No, I haven’t seen it,” I responded, a bit nonplussed by the turn in our conversation. I had been interviewing the kanungo and patwari, local revenue officials in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, about their experience investigating gender-based violence in mountain villages when Prakash unexpectedly brought up the video.

“Better prepare yourself,” he warned, picking his phone up from the desk. “It will break your heart.”

“Who stabbed the girl?” I asked.

“A Muslim boy,” Prakash said, dropping his voice even though it was just the three of us sitting in his office.

“His name is Sahil, son of Sarfaraz,” Rama added as if she was filing an FIR (First Information Report).

“It’s tragic,” the kanungo said, propping his phone against a paperweight on the desk once he found the video.

The grainy CCTV footage in the news clip showed a young man repeatedly stabbing a young woman who was cowering against a wall.Footnote ¹ The news network had drawn a red circle around the couple, making sure the viewer’s eye was drawn to the scene. Several people walked through the narrow lane, many slowing down or stopping to look at the attack. Only one person tried unsuccessfully to intervene before running off, presumably, or so I hoped, to get help. I looked away, but Prakash urged me to pay attention to how the man, having thrown down his knife, had now picked up a large stone with which he was bludgeoning the woman.

“Just look,” he said. “It’s as if he’s killing a snake. He stabbed her so many times, but he’s not satisfied. He’s using the rock to crush her head. Just like one would kill a snake.”

He made us watch the clip a second time before exhaling deeply and tucking his phone into the pocket of his pants.

“It makes my head reel,” Rama said, dropping her face into her palms.

“Me too,” Prakash responded. “I can’t watch it without feeling wretched. My throat feels as if it’s stuffed with cotton. I want to file a case against everybody who watched and did nothing.”

I was shaken by the gratuitous violence of the video. The red circle flashed ominously when I closed my eyes in a bid to dislodge the violent images imprinted on them.

“The girl was only sixteen, you know,” Rama said. “Sakshi. A Hindu girl. She thought Sahil was Hindu too.” She shook her head. “Love jihad ka clear case tha, sir (it was a clear case of love jihad, sir),” she declared, addressing Prakash Ram.Footnote ²

“If only he had been satisfied with just love jihad,” Prakash sighed. “If all he had done was change her religion (dharm parivartan), it would have been ok. But why did he kill the poor thing? Look at how brazen he is. Crushed her without remorse in front of so many people.”

“People think such events don’t affect us [state officials],” Rama erupted, her voice choking with emotion. “But I can’t even describe how bad I’ve been feeling after seeing that video.” Her face was flushed as she said that cases like this reminded her of the importance of bringing “feelings” into the investigation of complaints of gender and sexual violence.

I was fascinated by her turn of phrase—case ki jaanch-padtaal me apne feelings ko laana bahut zaroori hai—and asked how feelings entered the investigation.

In response, she began to tell me about the cases she usually dealt with. “Girls are the biggest trouble,” she said vehemently, drawing a nod of assent from Prakash.

“She’s right,” he said. “These pati-patni maamlaa (husband-wife matters) don’t have much significance. In most cases, we’ll threaten the husband a little and they’ll go home with each other happily.”

The real problem, Rama continued, was the number of young women caught up in undesirable sexual relations from as early as 15 or 16 years of age. “Some of them are minors. But can one even call them minors when they’re so cunning?”

“Well, they’re minors in the eye of the law,” Prakash added hastily, looking at me out of the side of his eye.

“Yes,” Rama conceded. “Most of the time I feel so angry with these girls that I just want to give them a slap,” she said. “The law has become a means (darya) for them. Pehle marzi se jaate hain, phir baat nahi bani to case kar dete hain (first they go willingly, but then if things don’t go well, they file a case [against their lovers]).”

As she paused for a moment to take a phone call, Prakash took up where she had left off. “It’s rare nowadays to come across cases involving actual force (zabardasti),” he mused as he told me about a recent case where a girl had filed a “false” rape case against a boyfriend she had run away with willingly. “We’re not against married women who come to us, but we are against young girls who misuse the law. To be honest, I feel very sad when I see them ruining their lives like this.”

I was still wondering how feeling entered the picture when Rama, now done with her phone call, directed the conversation back to my question. “What I mean to say is that one has to be angry with these girls because they don’t understand how much trouble they can get in. Look at this Sahil case. Somewhere, Sakshi was also at fault.”

“No, that’s wrong. How was the poor thing to know he was pretending to be Hindu? How was she supposed to know it wasn’t love, it was deception (pyaar nahin, dhoka tha)?” Prakash interjected, sounding a little miffed.

“Don’t misunderstand me, sir,” Rama said:

As I listened to Rama and Prakash fret over the threat of love jihad, I couldn’t help but reflect on how what was meant to be a broad conversation about gender and law was haunted by the spectre of love jihad, a powerful right-wing conspiracy theory that has fuelled anti-Muslim violence in India (Aga et al., Reference Aga, Shaji and Choudhury2021). This theory, which is given credence by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Indian state, holds that Muslim men are part of a shadowy political campaign to alter the fundamental Hinduness of India by seducing Hindu women through deceitful means and converting them to Islam (Farokhi, Reference Farokhi2024; Frøystad, Reference Frøystad2021; Gupta, Reference Gupta2009; Gupta, Reference Gupta2022; Khatun, Reference Khatun2018; Saluja, Reference Saluja2021).Footnote ³ It is worth noting that Rama immediately asserted the Sakshi kaand was not simply another instance of gendered violence but a “clear case of love jihad” in which Sahil had “duped” Sakshi before murdering her. The intensity of feeling that witnessing “love jihad” evoked in her spilled over into how she understood her broader work as a low-level bureaucrat charged with assessing and registering complaints of gendered violence in the state.

In this article, I take Rama and Prakash’s affective response to the Sakshi kaand as a starting point to trace how majoritarian sentiment creeps into and affects the social world of the law. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from rural Uttarakhand, I suggest that focusing on the sociohistorical production of embodied feeling among bureaucrats allows us to understand the incremental, almost unremarked, remaking of law in a social context marked by ever-growing majoritarian suspicion of and violence against religious minorities, particularly Muslims who have experienced an onslaught of institutional and social violence over the last decade.Footnote ⁴ As Ann Stoler (Reference Stoler2010, p. 2) reminds us, the “sober formulaics of officialese” can often conceal how techniques of governance are constituted by the “febrile movements of persons off balance—of thoughts and feelings in and out of place.” Indeed, the embrace of majoritarianism in legal policy and practice is often anticipated in “fearful visions” and “phantasmic scenarios” conjured up by state actors tasked with establishing rule of law (Stoler, Reference Stoler2010, p. 2).

Beginning, then, from the premise that the state is a feeling actor with its own “sensitivities, moralities, and rationalities” (Babül, Reference Babül2017, p. 7; Fassin, Reference Fassin2015), this article asks the following questions: How might turning our ethnographic attention to the emotive quality of bureaucratic work allow us to understand the emergence of affective regimes of justice (Clarke, Reference Clarke2019)? How are state conceptions and enactments of justice, security, and culpability shaped by particular “values and affects, judgments and emotions,” which, in turn, are moulded by historical regimes of identification and suspicion (Fassin, Reference Fassin2015, p. 8)? Through what socially resonant attachments and disavowals does this “structure of feeling” (Williams, Reference Williams1977, p. 131) come into being? How do the emergent, contingent feelings of state actors shape the everyday acts of storytelling, interpretation, and evaluation that make up “the reading of a case” (Li, Reference Li2023, p. 559)?

As Rama and Prakash talked about the anger and worry that fuelled their responses to women who filed legal complaints, I was struck by how this intensity of feeling worked to place them, though not without friction, alongside some and against others. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004, pp. 25–6) so powerfully observes, emotions play a crucial role in delineating the “bodies of individual subjects and the body of the nation” which are both “under threat from imagined others.” Inspired by Ahmed’s work on white supremacists, I suggest that Rama and Prakash’s sensorial responses—rage, irritation, grief, and anxiety—worked to produce a Hindu collective at risk from Muslims (Govindrajan, Reference Chatterjee2021). The shaking and shuddering of their bodies as they watched the violent video over and over, the clenching of their fists as they talked about the Muslim passersby who did nothing as a Hindu girl was murdered in broad daylight, the cottonwool in their throats (gale me rui) as they thought about Sakshi’s parents, produced a torrent of emotion about Muslim men that shaped how they positioned themselves vis-à-vis the Hindu woman subject.

Specifically, Rama and Prakash’s panicked fantasies about sinister Muslim men—the two hate-filled Sahils who supposedly lurked among every ten men—recast recalcitrant Hindu women as vulnerable subjects whose rights were under threat. As I discuss later in the article, these fantasies were, of course, shaped by widely circulating, historically powerful, and state-sanctioned discourses about a Hindu nation perennially under siege by Muslim outsiders (Sarkar, Reference Sarkar2021). Despite their exasperation with unmarried Hindu women whom they suspected of misusing the law (Govindrajan, Reference Govindrajan2025b), they worried that one of the unexpected consequences of this turpitude was the increased susceptibility of reckless, but ultimately naive, Hindu women to predatory Muslim men. In effect, they were concerned that Hindu women did not realise that their misuse of the law could lead to their death. Unmarried Hindu women were thus simultaneously cast as scheming in relation to Hindu men and gullible in relation to Muslim men. Protecting the rights of the Hindu collective meant undertaking the emotional labour of returning Hindu women to the fold, of enforcing the law with feeling. As in many other ethnographic contexts, the state was articulating and mobilising a form of care that was ultimately “coercive and disciplining” (Mulla, Reference Mulla2024, p. 346; Roberts, Reference Roberts2022; Routon, Reference Routon2021). These everyday technologies of care produced not only the figure of the sly “love jihadi” but also the “Hindu woman” who was at risk (even as state officials often struggled to reconcile this image with their excoriation of the sexual excess of young Hindu girls).

In what follows, I track how majoritarian feeling enters law by focusing on social settings outside courtrooms. I am particularly interested in the production of Hindu sentiment among local state officials who are charged with ensuring the implementation of law in rural social settings. While there is a robust body of insightful scholarship on how the law plays out in relation to historical structures of power in Indian civil and criminal courtrooms (Basu, Reference Basu2015; Baxi, Reference Baxi2014; Mody, Reference Mody2008; Srinivasan, Reference Srinivasan2020) there is relatively less focus on “the working out of law in society” (Baxi, Reference Baxi2008, p. 79) by legal actors who are not lawyers or judges.Footnote ⁵ Low-level state officials are important legal actors because they play a crucial role in deciding which complaints come before the law. In order to understand how majoritarian politics shapes law, we need more ethnographic analysis of how local officials understand the scope of the law in situated social contexts where the intensity of emergent affective attachments positions them beside particular individuals and communities and against others.

One example of how such sentiment might shape the course of law comes from a recent investigative report of cases filed under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act 2012 or POCSO in Uttarakhand (Tiwari, Reference Tiwari2024). In addition to reporting a fourfold increase in cases filed under POCSO between 2016 and 2023, the investigation revealed that in one particular district, every fourth person accused under this act was Muslim, even though Muslims constitute only 14% of the total population of the state (Tiwari, Reference Tiwari2024). An attorney quoted in the report remarked on a “flood of Pocso cases in the state since 2019,” with “many of them against male Muslim teenagers.” Her observation is unsurprising in light of the commitment of officials like Rama to weeding out devious “love jihadis” like Sahil who lurk among simple, ordinary (and needless to say, Hindu) men. Turning our attention to the feverish sentiment of officials like Rama and Prakash might thus shed light on the everyday processes through which Muslims come to be (legally) criminalised in statistically significant ways. Put differently, we should consider how state officials produce certain bodies as under threat from dangerous others not just because of political pressure from above (as many popular narratives suggest) but also due to the sentimental production of a collective at risk.

In rural Uttarakhand, these feeling persons include not just members of the police, but patwaris and kanungos, employees of the revenue department whose other responsibilities include maintaining records of land ownership and cultivation. Uttarakhand was the only Indian state to have a “revenue police system” in place across several districts, which meant that patwaris and kanungos in those areas could investigate both civil and criminal complaints. This unique bureaucratic arrangement, which dates back to the nineteenth century when this region came under British rule, is gradually in the process of being dismantled after a 2024 Uttarakhand High Court judgment redirectedFootnote ⁶ the state government “to abolish revenue police” and to establish “regular civil police stations in all the rural areas of Uttarakhand” (Samadhan vs. State of Uttarakhand and Others, 2024). Despite these administrative changes, however, low-level bureaucratic officials like patwaris remain important participants in the social life of the law alongside police for a variety of reasons, not least of which is their embeddedness in village worlds (Govindrajan, Reference Govindrajan2025b). The heightened feeling that arose through and animated their investigations was powerfully shaped by a sense that they themselves were part of the very collective they sought to protect.

The next section of this article explores how the figure of the dangerous Muslim has come to frame multiple right-wing productions of the “ordinary” as being “in crisis” in Uttarakhand (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004, p. 26). I trace how the ordinary Hindu is imagined as the victim of intersecting forms of jihad, whether zameen jihad, love jihad, or thook (spit) jihad, that seek to violate and ultimately destroy the individual, communal, and national Hindu body. I then turn attention to how such emotive panic about the destruction of a Hindu ordinary produced intense collective feeling among the local state officials I interviewed. I focus on how such feelings were shaped by longer histories and associations that circulated across multiple domains. Finally, I ask how framing legal actors as emotional actors might help illuminate how different political moments can create lasting indentations on legal orders.

****

In June 2023, the small hill town of Purola exploded after rumours of a Muslim man “entrapping” a Hindu woman began to circulate through social media. Within hours, members of right-wing Hindu organisations descended on the town from other parts of the state. Muslim-run shops were plastered with eviction notices calling on all “love jihadis” to leave town or face consequences (Faisal, Reference Faisal2023). Large groups consisting of hundreds of men and women marched through the town, vandalising homes and businesses. Rallies in nearby towns called for the expulsion of Muslims who were accused of settling in the hills to carry out love and land jihad. While the accused in the case was later acquitted by a sessions court, right-wing conspiracy theories about Muslim others continued to gather force across the state. In 2024, Muslim shopkeepers in another small town were forced to abandon their shops and flee after a young Muslim boy was accused of trying to seduce a young Hindu woman (Kazmi, Reference Kazmi2024).

Indeed, over the course of my own fieldwork in rural Kumaon, I found that Hindu women’s interactions with Muslim men—whether shopkeepers or labourers—were hawkishly surveilled by villagers in order to ensure that “local girls” did not fall prey to the machinations of would-be love jihadis. Villagers often shared these anxieties with patwaris and called upon them to register and verify migrant labourers, many of whom, particularly in the construction industry, were Muslims from the plains. On one occasion in 2023, after a young Muslim carpenter was spotted holding the hand of a Hindu Nepali migrant worker, the pradhan of the village in which they were both living at the time asked local authorities to conduct a verification drive of all the labourers in the village. “I told them that it was a Nepali girl today, but it could be one of our girls tomorrow,” he told me when I ran into him soon after the incident. “These boys take Hindu names and seduce Hindu girls,” he blustered. “And then they convert them. Love jihad has spread across Uttarakhand. It won’t be long before it happens in our own village.” A few weeks later, local officials warned migrant workers in the village to stay away from pahari (mountain) girls or face the consequences. This encounter attests to how conspiracy theories like love jihad come to mark certain bodies as “inherently suspicious” in the eyes of everyday actors, whether villagers or lower-level state officials (Bhat and Gupta, this volume).

The creep of majoritarian sentiment into policing and law impressed itself on me in the course of a conversation with a policewoman whose beat included some of the villages in which I had conducted fieldwork for over a decade. She told me how she had once spotted a young woman she knew from a nearby village “canoodling” with a Muslim boy in Nainital. “Every hotel, every restaurant in Nainital has Muslims working in it now,” she said, echoing a popular talking point of regional right-wing groups. “Even in our villages, the contracts (thekas) for fruit orchards [that is, the right to pluck and sell villagers’ fruit in return for a fixed sum] are now going almost entirely to Muslims. Some of the older men are decent, but many of the younger ones are here just to hunt for girls. Village girls are especially at risk because it’s so easy to delude them.”Footnote ⁷ After she finished sharing her thoughts on what she described as a Muslim takeover of the economy of the mountains, I asked what she had done after spotting the couple in Nainital.Footnote ⁸ “Ladke ko to khoob lagaye, ladki ke bhi teen chaar maare (I slapped the boy roundly, but I gave the girl a few as well),” she said. She recounted how she then took them to the Nainital police station, where she handed the boy over to her contemporaries before calling the girl’s parents. “The girl was underage,” she said. “It was a clear case of POCSO.” She went on to tell me how “love” and “land” jihad would destroy Hindus if left unchecked. “People say the police are not doing anything, the Bajrang Dal says we are not doing anything, but that is not true,” she said. “Police across the state are keeping a close eye on these Muslims boys. We know how deep this conspiracy runs. We too are angry, afraid for our girls.” I was struck by her insistence that the state was not distant or dispassionate but racked by the same emotions as members of (Hindu) society. Her account of this “failed case of love jihad” revealed how much feelings of fear, anxiety, insecurity, and anger—fuelled by conspiratorial media that circulated widely in everyday life—shaped her treatment of Muslims as legally suspicious. As Mohsin Alam Bhat and Arushi Gupta (Bhat and Gupta, this issue) note, such everyday judgments (legal and otherwise) produce a constant “suspicion” of minorities that then becomes a “key modality through which majoritarian legal culture is entrenched.”

The elected state government lent credence to this excess of feeling (Sharma, Reference Sharma2023a). In 2023, soon after the violence in Purola, the Chief Minister of Uttarakhand told the media that while the state government was not against members of any one community, it would not allow Uttarakhand to “become a soft target for love jihad, incidents of which have been on the rise over the last few months” (Arnimesh, Reference Arnimesh2023). In February 2024, he told the anchor of Aap ki Adaalat, a popular television show, that “love jihad” would not be condoned in the pure devbhumi of Uttarakhand. In 2022, as part of its efforts to curb alleged cases of love jihad, the state government amended its Freedom of Religion Act 2018 to increase the prison sentence for “forced religious conversion”—which is widely believed to be the aim of love jihad—from five to ten years.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, theories about love jihad have now firmly entered the “state’s language and policy” (Javed and Das, Reference Javed and Das2024).

Love jihad is not the only anti-Muslim conspiracy theory putting down strong roots in the region. It is closely linked to what the Hindu right describes as land jihad. In November 2024, video footage of a group of men destroying what looked like a grave on the grounds of an elite boarding school in Uttarakhand’s capital Dehradun started circulating on social media. While it was unclear as to who exactly had carried out the demolition, several local right-wing Hindu groups hailed it as an important step in the ongoing battle against what the Chief Minister of the state has described as “mazaar jihad,” a Muslim conspiracy to defile the essential Hinduness of Uttarakhand, which is often referred to as a devbhumi or land of Hindu gods (Mishra, Reference Mishra2023). In January 2026, the shrine of an eighteenth-century Sufi saint Baba Bulleh Shah located in the town of Mussoorie was vandalised by individuals allegedly belonging to a Hindutva organisation (Srivastava, Reference Srivastava2026). Over the last few years, the state government has systematically demolished thousands of mazaars (tombs of Muslims that serve as shrines for ordinary worshippers) across the state, claiming that these structures were constructed by “anti-social elements” (Sharma, Reference Sharma2023b) with the explicit aim of encroaching on and grabbing state land rather than for any genuine religious purpose (Govindrajan, Reference Govindrajan2025a). While the Chief Minister took to X to insist that these “anti-encroachment drives” did not target any particular religious community, the repeated claim that such religious structures had been constructed as part of an orchestrated “land jihad” to alter the “demography” and “fundamental character” (mul swaroop) of the devbhumi (land of gods)—home to some of the most important Hindu pilgrimage sites—left little doubt as to the religious identity of the supposed culprits.Footnote ¹⁰

In recent years, the land jihad conspiracy theory has circulated widely and with force in the mountain villages where I have conducted fieldwork over multiple years beginning in 2009. In 2023, I received a viral WhatsApp forward from a friend, featuring a recording of a local “citizen journalist” accusing a local builder of having cut down an old pine tree that dominated one of the highest ridges in my friend’s village. While their phone conversation began with a discussion of illegal tree-cutting, it quickly moved to another, arguably more dangerous, accusation: “I’ve heard you are selling land to people from other religions (doosre dharma ke logon ko),” the citizen journalist said, his tone censorious. “Is that true?” The builder was enraged and denied the accusation vociferously, claiming that he would never settle Muslims in the region because he himself was a pahari (literally, of the mountains) Hindu and would never sully the sacred geography of the devbhumi. The video was forwarded with a note that warned Hindus to act against land jihad now or resign themselves to losing their devbhumi in the future.

Such claims that the purity of Hindu bodies—human and natural, individual and national—was imperilled by the presence of Muslims carried an undeniable affective charge. Such narratives circulated through word of mouth, the news, and, above all, social media. This was a “mediatized form of Hindu nationalism” (Udupa, Reference Udupa2018, p. 453) shaped by contemporary digital infrastructure. Images, reels, and videos played a crucial role in producing and “animating” the ordinary Hindu subject at risk (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004, p. 26).Footnote ¹¹ For example, at the height of the Uttarakhand government’s campaign against “land jihad” in 2023, I received a WhatsApp forward from an acquaintance who routinely shared right-wing conspiracy theories about Muslims in Uttarakhand. The cartoon he shared showed several green caterpillars munching away at a leaf. The leaf was labelled Bharat and was painted in the colours of the Indian flag. Each of the caterpillars, all of whom sported Muslim prayer caps and beards, had labels that identified the nature of the threat they posed to the country: Waqf (referring to the legal entity that acquires and manages land dedicated to Muslim religious or charitable purposes), dharamantar (religious conversion), jihad, illegal mazaars (avaidh mazaarein), population explosion (abadi vispot), and masjid/madrassa. Accompanying the image was a warning that the devbhumi was in peril (sankat) because of mazaar jihad and that ordinary Hindus needed to awaken before it was too late.

Right-wing narratives like these worked to produce nostalgic fantasies of an ordinary bygone time from which the presence of Muslims, who had long histories of material connection to the mountains, was actively erased (indeed, quite literally, through the destruction of their homes and places of worship). Instead, Muslims now loomed large in visions of a nightmarish future marked by the impending death of the Hindu ordinary. Many pahari Hindus I knew expressed feverish anxiety about a Muslim takeover of the devbhumi, with some even speculating that “Muslim mafia organizations” were behind the purchase of agrarian land in the mountains (Govindrajan, Reference Govindrajan2015). They spoke with anger and sadness of how mountain villages—home to hundreds of deities whose powerful presence defined the rhythms of everyday Hindu life—would soon look like the “besieged” (ghera hua) city of Haridwar, a so-called Hindu heartland where mosques now supposedly outnumbered temples.Footnote ¹² Videos of mazaars located in the mountains circulated widely on social media, with the warning that these structures were encroaching on forest land and constituted a threat to pahari (mountain) culture and heritage. Such affective narratives about the loss of the Hindu everyday compelled emotional response from a wide range of quarters, including the state. In the next section, I return to the question of how such sentiment entered into the domain of law by looking at how local officials were moved by such fantasies of the ordinary.

****

“Have you seen ‘Kerala Story’?” Prema Bisht asked me. When I said I hadn’t seen the film, she insisted that I do so as soon as possible. It was only a few weeks after The Kerala Story, directed by the filmmaker Sudipto Sen, had released across the country to much controversy.Footnote ¹³ The film, which claimed to offer an authentic account of the “forced conversion” of Hindu women in Kerala to Islam, portrayed the story of three “forcibly converted” women who joined ISIS before ending up in a prison in Afghanistan. In interviews, the filmmaker claimed that he had spoken to hundreds of “re-converted” women who were rescued after “being taken away and converted to Islam as part of an international conspiracy” (Sharma, Reference Sharma2018).

Prema, a young patwari, had just watched the film, and it had clearly left a deep impression on her. After narrating the plot to me, she mentioned that even senior politicians had requested ordinary people to watch the film.Footnote ¹⁴ “They want people to be alert,” she said. “The same thing is happening here in Uttarakhand as well.” She went on to tell me about two recent instances of what she described as “fraud with the aim of religious conversion.” In one case, she had been visiting a village under her charge to look into a land dispute when an old man told her that a Muslim boy from Almora had been coming frequently to the village on the pretext of visiting his uncle, who had a mattress shop on the main road. Apparently, the boy had been seen talking to a young village woman on at least two occasions. The old man had asked Prema to “warn” the boy before things got out of hand.

“I found out the boy was calling himself Vicky,” Prema said. “A false name. A name that made him sound like a Hindu,” she explained, making sure I understood the import of the boy’s choice of name. She recounted how she had called the boy, and warned him never to talk to the village girl again. “I said I would let the thana (police station) in-charge in Almora know if I received any other complaints about him,” she said. “And I warned him to stop calling himself Vicky if he didn’t want to end up in jail.”

I responded that lots of young people, including many Hindus I knew, used short “modern” nicknames with friends. Vicky, I said, might not have intended to commit fraud.

Prema did not seem pleased by my intervention. She frowned slightly, and reminded me that I had grown up in Delhi. Her assumed intimacy with me—an unmistakably savarna Hindu woman—was momentarily interrupted.

“It’s different in big cities,” she insisted. “Maybe this doesn’t happen in your class, but this is a village, and our mountain girls are easily trapped.” Her tone was acerbic. “These boys deliberately use fashionable names, drive the latest models of bikes, wear these fancy jeans. The girls lose their minds. As it is they’ve become a little too free. But they don’t know how bad things can get.”

I was struck by how Prema oscillated between representing pahari girls as either wild or victimised. Like almost all the patwaris and kanungos I had spoken with, she was also convinced that young village girls in Uttarakhand were misusing the law to avenge failed relationships and make a quick buck. However, she worried that this excess of freedom was precisely what would make these girls vulnerable to potential predators like Vicky. Her job, she explained, was to be strict with young women who attempted to misuse the law.

“First, the stick,” she said, waving an imaginary baton through the air before smiling ruefully. “Gussa to aata hi hai (it’s hard not to feel angry). But afterwards I tell them what’s happening in the world nowadays so that they understand what we’re afraid of. I think parents make a mistake by sheltering their daughters. One needs to be direct with these girls.”

“What do you say to them?” I asked.

“I tell them frankly about what girls go through nowadays,” she responded. “And recently I’ve started telling them to watch The Kerala Story.”

I asked if she had come across many inter-religious relationships. In my experience, I said, most romantic relationships in the village were between Hindu men and women. It was still rare to come across inter-religious relationships.

Prema acknowledged this was true, but insisted that cases of “love jihad” were becoming more common. “Believe me, love jihad is the biggest problem we have to deal with now,” she said, fervently. “Ordinary people in Uttarakhand are still not aware of the extent of the conspiracy (shadyantra) to trap Hindu women, but we know what a dangerous issue this is.”

I was reminded of Prema’s fears a year later when I fell into conversation with Rohit Arya, a young policeman, at a naamkaran in Haldwani. He had been recently transferred to a police station in the plains after a posting in Almora, and was still adjusting to life in the city. When I asked him what was most unexpected about this posting, he immediately declared that he had not expected as many “Bangladeshis” and “Rohingyas.” “My room is close to Banbhoolpura,” he said. “It’s a dangerous area. Do you know what happened there a few months ago?” I nodded. Banbhoolpura been in the news in when state authorities demolished a mosque and madrassa as part of an “anti-encroachment drive,” leading to protests by Muslim residents of the neighbourhood, who were swiftly labelled “land jihadis” by many Hindu locals, state officials, and right-wing media.Footnote ¹⁵ The area remained under curfew, with police authorised to shoot at sight, for several days.

Rohit went on to tell me how (Hindu) people in the area were racked with fear about their daughters falling prey to love jihad. His voice shook with anger as he painted a vivid image of young Muslim men on flashy motorbikes roaming the streets in the evening, looking for opportunities to make conversation with Hindu girls on their way back from tuition, work, or shopping. According to him, these men were now going up to the mountains to seduce young village girls who were more naïve than their urban counterparts. He told me about a recent case involving a Muslim man who had been beaten by an irate village mob for concealing his identity and seducing a young Hindu woman under false pretences. He dropped his voice and apologised for his words as he told me that the poor girl had been “used” and was shattered. The police, he said, were now constantly receiving appeals from people in villages located around Haldwani (not to mention Hindus living in neighbourhoods in Haldwani) to protect their girls.

“The government is not doing enough,” he said.

Later that evening, as I thought back to Rohit’s emotional narration of what he described as an “awakening,” I found myself dwelling on his insistence that all Hindus wanted to do was live their ordinary lives in peace. As Paolo Heywood (Reference Heywood2022) notes, the category of the “ordinary” often assumes extraordinary significance in fascist discourse (cf. Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2004). Mussolini, Heywood (Reference Heywood2022, p. 95) observes, was represented as exemplifying the “quality of ordinariness, whose very everydayness was itself taken to be exemplary.” For Rohit too, the Hindu ordinary held an extraordinary nostalgic appeal. The perceived loss of that world and what he feared was its impending death filled him with dread, anger, grief, and yearning. Importantly, the affective attachments that were generated by this crisis of the ordinary were crucially shaped by longstanding right-wing Hindu discourses that framed Muslims as invaders who had been chipping away at the Hindu ordinary for centuries (Bhan and Govindrajan, Reference Bhan and Govindrajan2024; Sarkar, Reference Sarkar2003; Thapar, Reference Thapar2003; Thapar, Reference Thapar2020).Footnote ¹⁶ Several times during our conversation he reminded me that Muslims had invaded India with the intention of rooting Hinduism out from the land of its birth. Modern Muslims engaged in jihad, he declared, were simply attempting to fulfil the violent ambitions of their ancestors. His embodied, sensory response to local Muslims was thus mediated by older and broader histories of anti-Muslim sentiment and racism.

“This assault on Hindus can’t be tackled at a societal level,” he mused towards the end of our conversation. “These people [referring to groups he had previously named as Muslims/Bangladeshis/Rohingya] are too cunning. This has to be tackled at a legal and political level. The Uniform Civil Code is a good step…[but] what we really need is the death penalty for love jihad. The law will have to provide a jaw-breaking response (kanoon ko muh-tod jawab dena padega).” Struck by his emphasis on the importance of law in protecting the Hindu quotidian, I was reminded of Mohsin Alam Bhat’s (Bhat, Reference Bhat2024, p. 692) assertion that “law is central to the majoritarian project in India today” (cf. Chatterjee, Reference Chatterjee2023). Indeed, what local officials like Rohit desired was nothing less than a fundamental reconfiguration of the relationship between law and society, a transformation of the socio-legal rooted in Hindu sentiment.

***

“Such things never used to happen in the mountains earlier,” Rama, the patwari, mused as our conversation slowly came to an end. She was still talking about love jihad. “Life used to be so simple earlier. We never knew such levels of deception (dhoka) existed, that people could plan such elaborate conspiracies (shadyantra). Pahar ki haalat dekh ke dukh bhi hota hai aur gussa bhi aata hai (one feels both sadness and anger at the condition of the mountains). That’s why we need more laws like the anti-conversion law. We have to handle this problem in a legal way.”

Rama’s parting words were a powerful reminder of the growing intimacy between law and majoritarianism in India. This intimacy, I have argued here, is, in many ways, an outcome of the contingent production of right-wing sentiment among legal actors who are relationally embedded in the societies they govern. The affective intensity of this “structure of feeling” (Williams, Reference Williams1977, p. 131) hinges on nostalgia for a once-innocent Hindu ordinary. Following Sara Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2004), I suggest that this nostalgia works to produce the ordinary Hindu subject, although, as Rama’s mistrust of young Hindu women reveals, this process is not without its tensions. Anxiety that a Hindu ordinary is imperilled by sinister Muslim men helps paper over these cracks, fuelling majoritarian sentiment that slowly creeps into the law through everyday bureaucratic labours. These labours position the ordinary Hindu as an innocent subject in need of protection from the law. Indeed, one might argue that they serve to make the “ordinary Hindu” a legally meaningful category at the same time that they position Muslims as always and already guilty.

Turning our attention to this affective nature of bureaucratic work allows us to glimpse how the law becomes incrementally more majoritarian through the situated practices of local legal actors. Ethnographic analysis of how the state is embedded within broader society can illuminate how majoritarian feeling sharpens and intensifies as it moves across these intersecting domains. Tracing the everyday production of affective states across time and space permits us to grasp how feelings become crucial to the project of governing social life and relations. At a time when majoritarian states increasingly rely on the law to define the bodily boundaries of communities and nations, it is ever more urgent to understand how the social life and scope of the law is shaped by these conjunctures.