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Abstract
Policy hybrids, which combine marketizing and liberalizing reforms with social welfare programmes and state support to boost domestic production, are fast becoming the norm globally. How are neo-liberal and national-developmentalist agendas reconciled as governing practices, and what are their national and international outcomes and implications? This article focuses on the understudied case of India, arguing that a paternalist political rationality, which melds paternalist logics in neo-liberalism and the government's Hindutva civilizationalist politics, underpins its flagship economic policy, the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan (Self-reliant India Mission). This policy, through production-linked incentives, aims to boost Indian manufacturing. India has benefited from a global push to diversify supply chains and forge new geopolitical partnerships, such as the Quad, to undermine China's manufacturing dominance and geopolitical assertiveness. Yet, its current approach consolidates the dominance of large firms, producing an elitist political economy, and does not address structural weaknesses through public investment in areas like research and education. This has implications for India's development, global trade and geopolitics. These arguments are made by identifying the paternalist logics in the theories and practices of neo-liberalism, and in Hindutva civilizationalist politics; assessing the aims of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan as elaborated by government officials; and evaluating the early outcomes of production-linked incentive schemes.

Since 2017, India has introduced an increasing number of protectionist economic policies including higher tariffs, import duties and production subsidies while also rejecting and reviewing free trade agreements and imposing new regulations on foreign companies. This paper seeks to make sense of India's recent foreign economic policies and their potential impact on its relations with East Asia. It does so by analyzing the economic, political and geopolitical drivers of these policy changes and placing their emergence within a broader historical context. It is argued that India is entering a new period of "neo-mercantilist" economic nationalism that simultaneously seeks to protect and nurture industries while attracting foreign investment and integrating India into global value chains. This is the outcome of the consequences of "liberal" economic nationalist policies and a changing geopolitical environment — including a broader global impetus toward neo-mercantilist policies and conflict with China. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified this pre-existing turn toward neo-mercantilism. India's new economic nationalism has the potential to produce significant changes in India's relations with East Asia but also faces significant challenges in its implementation in the post-COVID era.

The promotion of conservative gender values has been a feature of the rise of authoritarian populism globally. This paper argues that India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) uses populist strategies to promote a political project of marketized Hindutva, which melds neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism and appeals to men and women in distinctive ways. This reflects the gendered nature of neoliberalism, electoral imperatives and the patriarchal gender values of Hindu nationalism. Using populist discursive and mobilizational strategies, the BJP aims to suture together a broad social base, represented as "the people," through the creation of an aspirational identity. Concurrently, it stokes resentment against establishment elites and religious minorities for holding back the people's aspirations. This politics of resentful aspiration underpins an empowerment agenda of marketized social policies targeted at turning poor and lower-middle class women into virtuous market citizens who embody neoliberal rationalities and Hindu nationalist social values. It also drives a protection agenda mobilizing young, lower-middle class men and the strong arm of the state to protect women's capacity to become virtuous market citizens. These agendas claim to empower and protect women but are deeply disempowering for the women and men they target and contain inherent contradictions. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

AbstractThe embrace of markets and globalization by radical political parties is often taken as reflecting and facilitating the moderation of their ideologies. This article considers the case of Hindu nationalism, orHindutva, in India. It is argued that, rather than resulting in the moderation of Hindu nationalism, mainstream economic ideas are adopted and adapted by its proponents to further theHindutvaproject. Hence, until the 1990s, the Hindu nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), its earlier incarnation, the Jana Sangh, and the grass-roots organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), adopted and adapted mainstream ideas by emphasizing the state as the protector of (Hindu) society against markets and as a tool of societal transformation for its Hindu nationalist support base. Since the 1990s, Indian bureaucratic and political elites, including in the BJP, have adopted a view of the market as the main driver of societal transformations. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, in particular, the BJP has sought to consolidate a broader support base and stimulate economic growth and job creation by bolstering the corporate sector and recreating the middle and 'neo-middle' classes as 'virtuous market citizens' who view themselves as entrepreneurs and consumers but whose behaviour is regulated by the framework of Hindu nationalism. These policies, however, remain contested within the Hindu nationalist movement and in Indian society generally. The BJP's discourse against 'anti-nationals' and the use of legal sanctions against dissent is an attempt to curb these challenges.

This article argues that power transitions generate not just physical security concerns for states, but also 'ontological' insecurity, as established identities, hierarchies, and relationships are revised and challenged. It is suggested that seeking out 'special relationships' with others is one way in which states seek to mitigate this uncertainty. Through an analysis of the discourse on the 'rise of India' from policymakers and commentators in the United States, it is shown that recent US representations of India seek to consolidate a particular US identity, based on the notion of American exceptionalism, and attempt to construct a new 'special relationship' with India in order to ameliorate the challenge posed by the rise of China to a US-dominated world order and the assumption of the universality of US ideas and institutions. However, while India-US relations have improved, the relationship continues to be hampered by their differing world-views and self-perceptions, which, as in the past, undermine each other's sense of ontological security. Adapted from the source document.