Role of Civilizational Populism in Shaping Religious Othering: A Comparative Analysis of India and Pakistan

Abstract

Civilizational conflicts have been the center of debates since Huntington’s thesis; Clash of Civilization which claimed that cultural and religious identities are the prime source of upcoming wars. In the backdrop of emergent advancement of populism which is largely associated with authoritarian form of politics and discourses, civilizational superiority is used to aggressively discard all other perspectives which apparently are anti-thesis to the respective civilization. The civilizational populism proceeds with dividing society while shaping categories by identifying their ‘people’ and perceived ‘enemies’. The emergent propensities of civilizational populism in Israel and India are not merely the populist rhetoric and radical policies of respective governments but reflected by persistent representation of state as a brainchild of their civilization project. This civilizational hate carried through imagination and identity of state merely as an extension of civilization which downrightly discards the idea of democracy treating people as equal individuals. The populist states like India while asserting civilizational superiority based on religion of majority instigate profound insecurities among their populations which make them obsessively conscious of ensuring their security at the cost of religious others. The notion of civilizational hate conditions their existence to inevitably destruction of symbols and people of other religions.