Chirmuley, Parnal

This chapter notes that political culture in India is currently dominated by the language of a Hindu majoritarian party that draws inspiration from fascism and from the National Socialists in 1930s and 1940s Germany (Casolari 2020). Given that this political formation now constitutes the political mainstream, complicity serves both as a concept and as a rhetorical device for analysing its dominance. This chapter examines how these ways of deploying complicity displace more deeply entrenched ideas of community even as they astutely harness an attendant worldview postulated on an immovable principle of hierarchy. In order to elaborate the deployment of the idea of complicity in an immediate context, this chapter focuses on the sudden prominence of the Jawaharlal Nehru University in the Indian news and social media upon the first election win of the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It first examines how the state’s deployment of complicity as a rhetorical device serves to expose large communities (in this case, students in general) to public critique, thus justifying the state’s penalisation of any political opposition. Second, it probes why the political and ethical concept of complicity seems to remain absent from public discourse. The chapter employs the lens of caste to better understand why the idea of complicity can find space in underhand political rhetoric and not in a reaffirmation of human rights. Through this approach, it is possible to see how such deeply entrenched hierarchies interfere with the “moral” attitude required in acknowledging the implications of complicity.