Research

• Nielsen, K.B., Nilsen, A.G. & Selvaraj, M.S. (Eds.) (Accepted for January 2026). Relocations of Hindutva?: Understanding Hindu Nationalism in the Wake of the 2024 General Election. Forum for Development Studies.

• Selvaraj, M.S. & Nielsen, K.B. (Eds.) (In press, 2025). Hindutva and Violence Against Christians in India. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics.
  In this special issue, we analyse the trajectory and forms of anti-Christian violence in India and its role in the wider Hindu nationalist project today. Inspired by Galtung’s work on direct, structural, and cultural violence, we show how different forms of anti-Christian violence have waxed, waned, and combined in shifting constellations at different moments of India’s postcolonial political history and in different state contexts. At the current conjuncture, however, the imagined threat of ‘the Christian Other’ has acquired an unprecedented centrality to Hindu nationalist politics, producing a systemic escalation in anti-Christian violence across many states. This violence is, we argue, characterised by a strong convergence of direct, structural, and cultural forms of violence, involving vigilante attacks and police complicity, but also an increasingly coercive use of state law, coupled with the production of a wider cultural common sense about the antinational essence of non-Hindu religious minorities.

• Selvaraj, M.S. & Susewind, R. (Eds.) (2024). The Rule(s) of Law Under Hindutva. Social & Legal Studies.
  India is increasingly described as an ‘ethnic democracy’, ‘populist majoritarian autocracy’ or ‘ethnocracy’: a form of rule supported by an electoral majority rooted in ethnic affiliation, with limited and eroding checks and balances that would protect minorities. Over the past decade, constitutional arrangements shifted, ‘dog-whistle’ laws were passed and legal institutions starved of resources. In studying these developments, we want to ground generic studies of populist/majoritarian/autocratic law by unpacking the specific Indian version of it: how does Hindutva as a political ideology and the current dispensation as political agents conceive of the rule of law, its purpose and function? Which rules do they want the law to follow? This special issue combines papers that trace Hindutva's own ideological commitments with those tracking material changes in legislation or jurisprudence and map out their differential consequences for India's minorities, culminating in a wider reflection on the rule(s) of law under autocratic circumstances. 

• Selvaraj, M.S. (Under Review). Karnataka: A Dominant Caste “Revolt” in 2024. Forum for Development Studies.
  This paper explores the changing political dynamics of the southern Indian state of Karnataka following the 2024 general elections. Barring a few pockets of the state, political mobilization along caste lines has historically played a more important role than communal campaigning. In this context, the paper argues that the 2024 election formalizes a dominant caste ‘revolt’ by the BJP and its ally, the JDS, against the Indian National Congress’s AHINDA coalition (a Kannada acronym for Alpasankhyataru or religious minorities, Hindulidavaru or backward classes, and Dalitaru or Dalits). This AHINDA strategy proved to be incredibly potent, delivering a decisive victory in the 2023 legislative assembly elections, a year earlier. While the BJP will remain a significant player in Karnataka politics, its strategy may shift from overt Hindutva rhetoric to caste-based mobilization focused on welfare and affirmative action. 

• Kaisar, N.S., Nielsen, K.B. and Selvaraj, M.S. (In press). A deeper state?: Anti-Christian violence in contemporary Chhattisgarh. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics.63(1)
  This article analyses the violence directed towards Adivasi Christians in Chhattisgarh in India between 2018 and 2023, under the governance of the Indian National Congress (INC). With Chhattisgarh as a case study, this article pursues a two-fold agenda. First, it maps the anti-Christian violence in the state perpetrated by Hindutva groups. Second, it analyses the persistence of such violence under an INC state government. The INC is a supposedly secular party competing electorally with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Engaging with Jaffrelot’s concept of a deeper state, this article demonstrates how Chhattisgarh’s ‘deeper state’ exists even when the BJP is not in power. The interaction between the INC’s ‘soft’ Hindutva and anti-Christian violence at a local level in Bastar district is assessed, foregrounding the interplay of governance, vigilante groups and community members. 

• Selvaraj, M.S. (2025). The ‘threat’ of ‘conversions’: cultural violence in the 2008 anti-Christian violence in India Commonwealth and Comparative Politics. 63(1)
  With the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, a system of anti-Christian violence has emerged. This paper explores the movement’s justifications of physical and structural violence against India’s Christians, casting them as a form of cultural violence. It argues that Hindutva’s broad conception and portrayal of India’s Christians as a demographic, cultural and political ‘threat’ allows justifications for violence to be deployed adroitly and flexibly across varying state contexts, and the national level. The portrayal as an internal and external threat enables the movement to escalate tropes about the Christian ‘threat’, as and when required to justify direct and structural violence. Thus, making the system of anti-Christian violence in India more potent. By examining newspaper archives, civil society and government reports, and documents and speeches of Hindutva-aligned organisations, this paper revisits the 2008 anti-Christian violence, primarily in Orissa and Karnataka, India’s worst episode of anti-Christian violence.

• Selvaraj, M.S. (2024). Acts of Violence ?: Anti-conversion laws in India. Social & Legal Studies. 33 (5).
  Extant scholarship on anti-Christian violence in India is scant and predominantly focuses on physical violence. To address this gap, this article explores Freedom of Religion laws (also referred to as anti-conversion laws) as an example of structural violence faced by India's Christians. Thus far, scholars have studied these as a constitutional violation that denies a Christian's freedom of religion. Using Johan Galtung's violence framework, this article seeks to recast these laws as a form of structural violence against Christians. In doing so, it will show how Hindutva's anxieties about the demographic and political ‘Christian threat’ have become embedded into the law. Through an exploration of the southern state of Karnataka, where the Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion was passed in 2022, this article seeks to show how this structural violence interacts and reinforces forms of direct and cultural violence, creating a system of anti-Christian violence designed to maintain India's ‘Hindu majority’. 

• Nielsen KB, Selvaraj MS and Nilsen AG (2023).  Hindu nationalist statecraft, dog-whistle legislation, and the vigilante state in contemporary India.  kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology. 6(2): 19-37

The ideology and politics of Hindu nationalism has always been predicated on an antagonistic discursive construction of ‘dangerous others,’ notably Muslims but also Christians. This construct has served to define India as first and foremost a Hindu nation, thereby de facto relegating religious minorities to the status of not properly belonging to the nation. However, under the leadership of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has acquired an unprecedented political force. A key consequence of this has been that the discursive construction of dangerous others is now increasingly being written into law, through a process of Hindu nationalist statecraft. The result is, we argue, not just a de facto but increasingly also a de jure marginalization and stigmatization of religious minorities. We substantiate this argument by analysing the intent and effect of recent pieces of legislation in two Indian states regulating, among other things, religious conversions, inter-faith relationships, and population growth. Conceiving of such laws as dog-whistle legislation, we argue that they are, in fact, geared towards the legal consolidation of India as a Hindu state. We also analyse the intimate entanglement between these laws and the collective violence of vigilante groups against those minorities that Hindu nationalists frame as dangerous, anti-national others.

• Selvaraj, M.S. and Choukar, M. (In press, 2025). Unpacking the "Hindu Male Protector": Hindutva's "Protection" of women, Dalits and Adivasis in Contemporary India. In Tedros, M. and Sinnamon, G. (Eds.) Ideologically Motivated Sexual Grooming. Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. 

• Selvaraj, M.S. (2024). Intersectional Marginality: Compounding Structural Violence against Dalit Christians in India. In Prakash, A., Gupta, S.B., and Bochkovskaya, A. (Eds) Interrogating Marginalities Across Disciplinary Boundaries: Colonial and Post-Colonial India. Routledge. 

• Selvaraj, M.S. (In preperation). 'Playing Around?: Reflections on using Play Readings in the Teaching of Politics'. Politics

• Grimaldi, A.I & Selvaraj, M.S. (2022). ‘Teaching the Teachers: Reflections from two Graduate Teaching Assistants’, Postgraduate Pedagogy. 2(1):102-123. 

• Evaluation team for: Zahra, F.S. (2023). 'Pedagogies for flourishing in uncertainty and complexity: Exploring leadership, trust, and conflict resolution with clinical undergraduates via arts-based learning approaches', Towards creative wellbeing: Codeveloping Mulitmodal Pedagogical Approaches in Higher Education. 25-35.