Work

Totalitarian Law and Communal Ghettoisation: An Arendtian Perspective

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: How are legal institutions and frameworks exploited to create ghettoised communities in contemporary India? Across three case studies – the Disturbed Areas Act in Gujarat, the ‘bulldozer justice’ phenomenon of 2022, and the BJP's electoral ‘land jihad’ rhetoric – we argue that law, far from being a liberal bulwark against majoritarianism, increasingly comes to encapsulate raw power, unencumbered by either morality or fact. We theorise this phenomenon through Hannah Arendt's argument that the seeds of totalitarianism lie in the hollowing-out, depoliticising effect of ‘juridification’, paving the way for totalitarianism to fill the affective void. But what happens to law once the threshold to totalitarianism is crossed? In contemporary India, we argue, the depoliticising, technocratic kind of law that Arendt described is not the only legal pathology; we also witness the emergence of a novel kind of hyper-politicised, performative, signalling, ultimate meaningless law that she didn’t quite anticipate. It is the dialectic between these two legal pathologies – juridification as bureaucratisation and hyper-politicised signalling – that cements Muslim Indians’ increasingly precarious ghettoisation.

Source: Social & Legal Studies

DOI: 10.1177/09646639241266756

Authors: Fahad Zuberi, Raphael Susewind

Institutions: University of Oxford, London School of Economics and Political Science

Language: English

Topic: Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,450