The crisis in neoliberalism: a case study of Hindu right-wing nationalism in India

Thesis (M.A., Anthropology) -- California State University, Sacramento, 2010.This work is a critique of neoliberalism, and approaches the subject from the political economic crisis developing in late capitalism. I contend that the expansion of neoliberal policies during the 1980s and 1990s was a contributing factor to the rise of new forms of nationalist struggle that emerged in a variety of countries around the world. The deregulation of the national economy and the privatization of many state sponsored services have eroded the authority of the modernist nation-state, creating a space where the emergence of neonationalist discourse becomes a possibility.\ud The following work will develop a theoretically informed framework that contextualizes the conflict in neoliberalism within the broader crisis existing in capitalism. A discursive analysis of the Hindu Right-wing nationalist party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is provided as a case study to demonstrate how the crisis in neoliberalism has affected the political economic development in India. While the discourse of Hindu fundamentalism has always existed as a marginal discourse since the colonial period, it did not gain traction as a movement until the beginning of the 1980s, a period marking the start of large-scale political economic transformation in India.Anthropolog