The Impact of Resource Dependency of Indian Higher Christian Educators in Constructing the State of Exception

salomi Jacob, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The paper discusses how Christian higher educational institutions in a city in South India navigate their way through Hindu state hegemony and how the actions of the educators of these institutions impact the rest of the Christian community. In the recent past, under Hindu right-wing politics, the social demeaning of the Christian community in India has been exhibitionist. The economic destabilization of the community is more systemic, deliberate, and covert. The present state machinery attempts to criminalize the community using the anti-conversion law that seems to subvert constitutional provisions that protect religious minorities. By focusing on higher educational institutions, this paper intends to understand how criminalization, through the forced conversion narrative, dismantles the decades-long 'goodwill' earned by the community for rendering educational services to the public. For the present Indian state, this criminalization is an excuse to advocate Carl Schmitt's maxim "sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception". Constructing minorities as disturbers of peace, public order, causing disharmony and a threat to the Hindu nation, provides the executive fodder to create the 'state of exception'. I used ethnographic studies, interviews, analysis of historical documents on constitutional assembly debates on minority rights and education, and Supreme Court past and pending judgments on cultural and educational rights to understand how educators advocate for themselves and the impact it has on the larger Christian community in the city and elsewhere. Resource dependency theory provided the framework to understand how they negotiate with state and external agencies by altering their environments by absorbing constraints. The petite bourgeois tendencies of the educators in the institutions prevail at the expense of the rest of the community. The silence and the lack of resistance from them due to dependency provide more ammunition for the Hindu regime to develop confidently the state of exception.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 185. States, Authority, and Institutional Transformation in the Religious Field