Something that just struck me as I’m prepping for a lecture. The Indian state right now has trouble reading people as rational, choice-making entities. It finds it easier to read people as ethnic entities because that’s how it has shaped its own discourse.
If you present yourself as a non-ethnic entity, it has massive trouble with you. Anyone who wants to transcend their worldview becomes a problem. Just a thought. Still working on it.
So when Sikh farmers come forward with a policy/economic issue, the state has to crunch it into an ethnic issue before it can respond.
That’s a vulnerability that I can spot. The BJP has barricaded itself into its own narrative because it cannot process the fact that people can be neither or be both- people with identity and people with non-identity political choices.
Again this is just something that came up in my mind today. Consider it a theory in progress.
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