The ‘Threat’ of ‘Conversions’: Cultural Violence in the 2008 anti-Christian violence in India
Publication Date
2025
End of Embargo
Supervisor
Rights
© 2025 The Author. Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Peer-Reviewed
Open Access status
openAccess
Accepted for publication
2025-05-30
Institution
Department
Awarded
Embargo end date
Collections
Additional title
Abstract
With the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, a system of anti-Christian violence has emerged. This paper explores the movement’s justifications of physical and structural violence against India’s Christians, casting them as a form of cultural violence. It argues that Hindutva’s broad conception and portrayal of India’s Christians as a demographic, cultural and political ‘threa’t allows justifications for violence to be deployed adroitly and flexibly across varying state contexts, and the national level. The portrayal as an internal and external threat enables the movement to escalate tropes about the Christian ‘threat’, as and when required to justify direct and structural violence. Thus, making the system of anti-Christian violence in India more potent. By examining newspaper archives, civil society and government reports, and documents and speeches of Hindutva-aligned organizations, this paper revisits the 2008 anti-Christian violence, primarily in Orissa and Karnataka, India’s worst episode of anti-Christian violence.
Version
Citation
Selvaraj SM (2025) The ‘Threat’ of ‘Conversions’: Cultural Violence in the 2008 anti-Christian violence in India. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. Accepted for publication.
Link to publisher’s version
Link to published version
Link to Version of Record
Type
Article