Totalitarian law and communal ghettoisation: an Arendtian perspective

Zuberi, Fahad and Susewind, Raphael ORCID: 0000-0003-1022-4748 (2024) Totalitarian law and communal ghettoisation: an Arendtian perspective. Social and Legal Studies, 33 (5). 748 - 766. ISSN 0964-6639

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Abstract

How are legal institutions and frameworks exploited to create ghettoised communities in contemporary India? Across three case studies – the Disturbed Areas Act in Gujarat, the ‘bulldozer justice’ phenomenon of 2022, and the BJP's electoral ‘land jihad’ rhetoric – we argue that law, far from being a liberal bulwark against majoritarianism, increasingly comes to encapsulate raw power, unencumbered by either morality or fact. We theorise this phenomenon through Hannah Arendt's argument that the seeds of totalitarianism lie in the hollowing-out, depoliticising effect of ‘juridification’, paving the way for totalitarianism to fill the affective void. But what happens to law once the threshold to totalitarianism is crossed? In contemporary India, we argue, the depoliticising, technocratic kind of law that Arendt described is not the only legal pathology; we also witness the emergence of a novel kind of hyper-politicised, performative, signalling, ultimate meaningless law that she didn’t quite anticipate. It is the dialectic between these two legal pathologies – juridification as bureaucratisation and hyper-politicised signalling – that cements Muslim Indians’ increasingly precarious ghettoisation.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Methodology
Subjects:	H Social Sciences K Law J Political Science
Date Deposited:	04 Sep 2024 14:06
Last Modified:	19 Nov 2024 21:36
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/125343

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