"The World's Largest Democracy": Hindu Nationalism, Indian Statecraft, and the Indian-American Diaspora

This dissertation takes up two linked questions. Why do a majority of Indian-Americans support Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), despite supporting the center-left Democratic party in the US? And why does the BJP expend disproportionate effort courting the diaspora when it cannot offer the party electoral support? In other words, how does the BJP make partisans out of Indian-Americans, who are otherwise disconnected from the realities of Indian politics, and how do they translate that partisanship into political success when the diaspora cannot vote? This dissertation uncovers, describes, and historically traces the cultural and state processes that allow for such puzzling politics. To make sense of the diaspora's role in the BJP's national and global ambitions, I develop the concept of diasporic nationalism to describe nationalist projects that derive their political power from the strategic re-drawing of national boundaries to include emigrant and transnational populations. I then elaborate the contours of this process across four empirical chapters, drawing on an original dataset of 24 months of transnational ethnographic fieldwork across Chicago and in Ahmedabad and New Delhi, centered around the Gujarat State and Lok Sabha elections in 2022 and 2024, as well as historical analysis of documents from public and private archives across both sites, including over 11,000 pages of state documents. First, using new archival data, I show that the Indian State has worked to actively cultivate Indian-Americans' homeland political engagement since independence, much earlier than other scholarly accounts contend (Chapter 1). I then leverage my ethnographic data to show how the BJP, and Modi in particular, have been able to effectively exploit these ties to partisan ends: they craft discourses that resonate in Indian-Americans' transnational lives. These discourses align in different ways with their political sense-making in the US and in India. Chapter 2 examines the Indian-American diaspora at home in the US and shows how Indian-American Hindus, experiencing ethnoracial marginality despite attaining high socioeconomic and political standing in the US, may lean into Hindu Nationalism as a response. I show how the BJP channels this response into partisan support through a variety of proxies that interpenetrate Indian-American community life. Chapter 3 then follows Indian-Americans out of the US during their regular journeys to India, where they downshift their explicit support for ethnonationalism. As they encounter a new, modernized urban landscape, they find resonance with the BJP's self-styling in India as the party of development. Chapter 4 follows the diaspora on the campaign trail in India to illustrate how the BJP benefits from the support it has cultivated from the diaspora in three key ways: it uses the diaspora as a public relations machine, as a political action committee, and as an important symbolic resource allowing the party to expand its reach to otherwise closed-off constituencies. I conclude with reflections on how, in enrolling the diaspora in its national project, the BJP is fundamentally reshaping the Indian polity and the very idea of India.