Clip the blue bird: Discursive strategies of Hindutva digital mobilization against Twitter in India

Abstract

Though early research suggested that right-leaning groups were a radicalized monolith, recent shifts in research are producing far more nuanced accounts. Our article contributes to this effort by spotlighting novel discursive strategies of right-leaning groups in India that leverage decolonization rhetoric, democratic governance, and other seemingly left-leaning rationales to mobilize right-wing groups against global technology companies, especially Twitter (now X).¹ We collected and analyzed publicly accessible data from Koo—an alternative social networking platform populated with discourses of India’s ideological right. We then used critical discourse analysis to identify the discursive strategies of right-leaning users on Koo deployed to challenge the power of global technology companies – calls for data localization, veiled suppression, and paternalism and responsibility.

Keywords:

• Digital mobilization
• Hindu
• Hindutva
• ideological right
• Koo
• right-wing groups
• Twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We also join the recent academic activism efforts to decenter American, European, and Chinese (often taken to be emblematic of the Global South) sites and discourses by focusing on Koo in India.

2 According to news sources, “The blocking was triggered because Twitter had reportedly received a notice for violations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), filed by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the content in question being A.R. Rahman’s song Maa Tujhe Salaam” (The Hindu 2021).

3 Data localization is a set of policy measures restricting data flow to entities within the specified jurisdiction’s boundaries (Chander and Lê 2015).

4 This act is discriminatory toward Muslim immigrants. Citizens have contested this act on the grounds that it provides citizenship status on a religious basis (Bhatia 2021; Bhatia and Gajjala 2020).

5 Tukde is a Hindi word and means ‘pieces’. The phrase tukde tukde here refers to a group of people accused of trying to break India into small pieces because these dissenters refuse to accept that India is one big Hindu nation. The hashtag tukdetukdegang is imposed on people who critique the exclusionary politics of the BJP and challenge the idea of #Hinduunity and #Hindunation. (Bhatia 2022, 8)