Chapter 2 delves into the primary actors and socio-historical events that have led to producing Hindu nationalism’s multiple political imaginaries and policy imperatives. It chronologically follows how Hindutva and discourses of economic development have interacted in post-Independence political regimes. I show how the BJP has been able to build multiple narratives, using both technocratic organisations and populist mobilisation, to gain several forms of legitimacy, many of which contradict one another. Scholars have written entire books on Hindutva’s ideological basis and its interaction with economic development. My intention is to give people an overview so they can appreciate how my specific research and argument fits into existing conversations and concerns. This chapter introduces how the BJP adopts two distinct forms of persuasion, making claims about the (sometimes magnificent, sometimes repugnant) past and the future to different degrees: (1) returning to an ancient, mythic, and strategically changing cultural unity; and (2) ‘cleaning up’ persisting economic and moral decadence in pursuit of invulnerable national glory.

Chapter 3 shows how Prime Minister Modi’s government oscillates between populist anti-elitism and forms of technocratic expertise to produce a distinct form of nationalism that is both seemingly pragmatic and extremely ethnocentric. It starts off by looking at how policy organisations channel dominant policy debates in certain directions, enable particular classifications of target groups, and legitimise certain policy solutions while marginalising others. In opposition to scholarship that sees technocracy and populism as contradictory forces (see Laclau 2005; Rosanvallon 2011), this chapter argues that they have emerged as two complementary arms of governance in contemporary India: (1) populist politics, which appeals to the masses/majority by defining nationalism through rigid boundaries of caste, class, and religion; and (2) technocratic policy, which produces a consensus of pragmatism and neutralises charges of hyper-nationalism. I emphasise the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content, yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement.

Consensus-building legitimacy has to do not just with reason but also, of course, emotion – what feels right. We think something is right and good based on what ‘feels’ that way, appealing to normative ideas and sentiments behind rationales (to paraphrase one of my interviewees, in combining the prose of policy with the poetry of politics). Whether this book speaks to students or scholars of populist movements, technocratic managerialism, policy elites, or Indian politics, it contributes to a growing corpus of knowledge on strategies of the powerful. Studying the politicisation of expertise provides invaluable understanding of how the right wing is able to construct effective narratives and be convincing of its multiple, potentially contradictory, formations.

Chapter 1 examines India’s dominant technocratic paradigms of expertise in relation to the flurry of anti-intellectual movements in a global context that includes Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. While in many of these instances a distaste of intellectuals emerges from mass anti-elitism or religious anti-rationalism, anger against intellectuals also stems from wanting to replace the disconnected ‘eggheads’ with the pragmatic businessman and rational technocrat. Cultural commentators have made pronouncements of ‘the end of politics’ as the result of capitalist instrumentality and economic rationalism in a range of political contexts. Significantly, however, I urge readers not to diagnose a depoliticisation, or ‘disappearance’, of politics in everyday life. Rather, I determine that it is incumbent upon social scientists to pay attention to what Havelka (2016) calls hérrschaft: ideas about how political life is organised, and how possibilities of social, cultural, and political futures are reframed.

Chapter 4 traces a rising market of professional consultants and think tanks in policymaking and political activity. Upper-caste and elite-educated men have long filled positions of power, including parliamentary seats, administrative services, business groups, advisory boards, and chambers of commerce. Despite some shifts towards caste-based affirmative action since the 1980s, the political classes remain predominantly elite (Verniers and Jaffrelor 2020). In 2014, anti-incumbent sentiment led to widespread distrust in existing experts, such that elite intellectuals and Western-educated economists holding political and policymaking positions were replaced by technical professionals: engineers, business managers, and consultants. As an alternative to intellectual and insular elites, this group of professionals projects itself as politically agnostic, rational, and a practical source of business-minded knowledge. This group, however, is no less insular or exclusionary: one set of intellectual experts has merely been replaced by a more elite, deracinated group of professional consultants situated in global management consulting firms.

Chapter 5 examines the BJP’s attempt to build centres of elite, traditional intellectuals to legitimise its identity politics. While dismantling advisory committees, quashing dissent, and attacking universities and established research institutions, the BJP has built think tanks to bring together stakeholders in government and civil society and give its political ideology a footprint in already established policy networks. Some scholars have characterised the BJP’s think tanks as institutions of ‘soft Hindutva’ (see Anderson 2015), that is, organisations that avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu-nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda nevertheless. Through an ethnographic study of the BJP’s two most prominent think tanks, this chapter demonstrates how manifestations of Hindutva can be both explicitly political and anti-political at the same time: advocating for political interventionism while eschewing politics and forging an apolitical route towards cultural transformation.