Talk:Achin Vanaik

By Rutvi Dattani

Achin Vanaik is associated with Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, as of November 2022. He was a retired professor of international relations and global politics from Delhi University. According to his university profile, his research interests include Nuclear disarmament, Indian security & foreign policy, Indian communalism.

In 2021, he along with Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, co-signed a letter supporting "Dismantling Global Hindutva" Conference, as an academic and scholar and made the allegation

"the current government of India [in 2021] has instituted discriminatory policies including beef bans, restrictions on religious conversion and interfaith weddings, and the introduction of religious discrimination into India’s citizenship laws. The result has been a horrifying rise in religious and caste-based violence, including hate crimes, lynchings, and rapes directed against Muslims, non-conforming Dalits, Sikhs, Christians, adivasis and other dissident Hindus. Women of these communities are especially targeted. Meanwhile, the government has used every tool of harassment and intimidation to muzzle dissent. Dozens of student activists and human rights defenders are currently languishing in jail indefinitely without due process under repressive anti-terrorism laws."

Publications related to India

Book Publications

1. Vanaik, Achin. The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities. Verso. 2017

   Achin Vanaik believes that India is a non-secular state because the majority of it's population are Hindus. According to Achin, Hindu nationalist glorification of specific historical periods and figures aims to foster a unified Hindu identity, selectively ignoring or revising aspects of history that demonstrate the complex, pluralistic interactions that have shaped Indian civilization.

   The author characterizes the competition among individuals and companies, which is common phenomenon across the globe as a conflict between two distinct communities (Hindus and Muslims in India), each vying against the other: "Communalism, then, is a modern phenomenon; but if modernity is its necessary condition, it is not a sufficient one. [...] Here a ‘materialist’ analysis of the sources of communalism would reveal the role of the colonial state in deliberately exacerbating the communal divide. Competition for jobs created tensions between the Hindu and Muslim urban middle classes and elites. In post-independence India, attention would no doubt be focused on the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in many Indian towns possessing a sizeable Muslim population, as a result of Gulf remittances, the growing export demand for handicrafts and artisanal products, and other expressions of uneven development that have clearly disturbed traditional patterns of dependence between Hindu traders and Muslim artisans"

   The author cites false information on the role of reformer like Swami Vivekananda to address social issues of their times as to to homogenize Hinduism to fit the modern era.

   • "The most important process that has been taking place over the last few centuries, greatly accelerated since the twentieth century, has been the construction of a more singular Hinduism, or what Thapar has called a ‘syndicated Hinduism’. This syndication process is not the monopoly of any single cultural or political ‘syndicate’. It has had a number of sources, and those participating in its construction have had different understandings of how it had to be done, and why. But the most chauvinistic construction of monolithic Hinduism existing today can trace an important part of its lineage to earlier currents of reform Hinduism and neo-Hinduism"​.
   • "But the most chauvinistic construction of monolithic Hinduism existing today can trace an important part of its lineage to earlier currents of reform Hinduism and neo-Hinduism."

   Achin Vanaik makes the following unsubstantiated claims:

   • "given the reality of the rise of Hindu communalism to the point where the BJP has secured an absolute majority to rule at the centre, Indian secularism is currently in crisis. "
   • "Emerging nationalisms invariably invent a past for themselves. The first phase is the stipulation of a strong and enduring cultural nationalism. [...] Many Indian nationalists, to a greater or lesser degree, saw Hinduism as a vital, indeed decisive, part of Indian culture, and therefore of an Indian cultural nationalism. [...] The differences did not centre on the issue of Hinduism and how best to understand it. The first important synthesizer and proponent of Hindutva, Veer Savarkar, saw this as a racial, cultural, religious–spiritual unity – a unity of culture and territory. [...] Figures like Vivekananda and Gandhi, whose views, lives and teachings are in so many ways markedly different from – indeed opposed to – political Hindutva, can nonetheless be appropriated, with a degree of plausibility, to serve Hindutva interests. While such figures never subscribed to Hindutva’s full chain of reasoning, they did implicitly or explicitly endorse some links in that longer chain."​

2. Vanaik, Achin. After The Bomb: Post-Pokharan II Essays. Orient Black Swan. 2015

Journal Articles

1. Vanaik, Achin. Future Perspectives for the Mainstream Indian Left. Economic and Political Weekly, Oct 5, 2012
2. Vanaik, Achin. India's paradigmatic communal violence. Socialist Register, Mar 19, 2009
3. Vanaik, Achin. Regional and Global Nuclear Disarmament: Going Beyond the NPT. Economic and Political Weekly, 2009
4. Vanaik, Achin. Myths of the Permit Raj. New Left Review, 2004
5. Vanaik, Achin, & Bidwai Praful, . New Nukes: India, Pakistan, and Global Nuclear Disarmament. Oxford: Signal Books, 2000. xxix, 312 pp. The Journal of Asian Studies, 2002
6. Vanaik, Achin. India's intentions. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1997
7. Vanaik, Achin. Examining the Ayodhya Conflict. Economic and Political Weekly, 1991