Policing Bodies, Preserving Power: Biopolitics of the Brahminical Hindutva State

Every nation-state sustains its authority by exercising control over the bodies of its people. The nature of this control determines whether individuals live as rights-bearing citizens or as subjects under coercive power. The French philosopher Michel Foucault described this process as biopolitics, where power operates not only through laws and institutions but also through everyday practices that regulate human bodies and behavior. Similarly, Franz Fanon argued that the human body is a central site of political struggle. For oppressed communities, the body becomes both a target of control and a tool of resistance.

In India, the Brahminical Hindu nationalist state exercises its authority across political, social, cultural, and economic domains by regulating the bodies of Bahujan communities, women, and transgender individuals. This regulation is not incidental. It is central to maintaining caste hierarchy and patriarchal dominance.

Policing of the Bahujan Bodies

The policing of Bahujan bodies—Dalits, Other Backward Classes, Triabal, and nomadic communities—is embedded in the everyday governance of Hindutva Brahminical State. One visible form of this control is the imposition of dietary norms. Vegetarianism is promoted as morally superior, while meat consumption is stigmatized. These norms are not merely cultural preferences; they are enforced through public violence. Lynchings, public beatings, and killings by Hindutva cow vigilante groups reveal how the Hindutva state and its allied non-state actors regulate what Bahujan bodies can consume.

Control also extends to the religious life of the Bahujan masses. Anti-conversion laws enacted in states governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) restrict the ability of individuals to convert to Islam, Christianity, or Buddhism. These laws create a narrative of “forced conversion,” which effectively criminalizes voluntary religious choice of Bahujan individuals. By doing so, the Hindutva state seeks to confine Bahujan bodies within the Hindu fold and prevent them from seeking alternative systems of bodily and emotional dignity in the personal and public sphere.

Policing the Bahujan Bodies in the Public Spaces through Violence

Public spaces are preferred sites where the Hindutva state enforces its caste power on the Bahujan masses. Bahujan individuals who attempt to assert equality in social, cultural, and political spheres often face direct attacks. Incidents such as assaults on Dalit bridegrooms riding horses during wedding processions show how even symbolic acts of dignity are punished. These acts of violence are deliberately public in nature. They send a message to Bahujan bodies to never attempt equal social and cultural dignity vis-à-vis savarna communities.

This form of control is not limited to one political regime. Even governments led by the Indian National Congress have implemented policies that disproportionately harmed marginalized communities by committing gross violence on Bahujan bodies. During the period of the National Emergency in India, forced sterilization campaigns influenced by Sanjay Gandhi targeted the rural and urban poor in India. These communities, largely composed of Bahujan populations, were treated as the cause of population growth and subjected to coercive state-led sterilisation programs. This reflects a Brahminical policy mindset that criminalizes poverty and dehumanizes bodies of marginalised Bahujan sections of Indian society.

Similarly, large-scale infrastructure and mining projects often displace Indigenous tribal communities from their ancestral lands. This forced displacement destroys livelihoods and pushes communities into urban precarity. Loss of food security, health, and severing of the ancestral connection to the land of the Bahujan masses becomes a structural outcome of development policies of the Hindutva state supporting the Brahminical Baniya Indian capitalist class. In this way, economic governance also becomes a tool of biopolitical control of Bahujan bodies.

Patriarchal Brahminical Hindutva State and Policing the Bodies of Indian Women

The control of women’s bodies lies at the core of the Brahminical caste system. In Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar explains that caste hierarchy depends on endogamy, or marriage within caste boundaries. Maintaining this system requires strict control over women’s bodies and their reproductive choices. Social norms, religious doctrines, and cultural practices of the Brahminical caste system work together to restrict women’s bodily autonomy and define their bodies as ‘inferior and impure’.

Ambedkar also discussed the concept of “surplus women,” referring to widows who were historically subjected to extreme violence, including practices such as Sati. While such practices are no longer legal, their underlying logic continues in contemporary forms. Honor killings, where women are murdered for choosing partners outside caste or religion, reflect the same impulse to control female bodily and sexual agency.

In recent years, the narrative of “Love Jihad” has been promoted by the Hindutva state to create fear around interfaith relationships. This narrative constructs Muslim men as sexual predators and Hindu women as meek, vulnerable subjects who must be protected. Legal interventions, such as mandatory registration of live-in relationships in BJP-ruled states, extend state surveillance into the intimate lives of women. Recent statements of the Chief of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Mohan Bhagwat, in promoting more child births among Hindu women, signify the same Brahminical patriarchal logic of the Hindutva state to control the womb of Indian women. The notion of the national character of ‘Hindu Rashtra’ (Hindu Nation), according to the Brahmanical Hindutva state, is directly associated with ‘ideal authentic Indian Womanhood’. This intellectual idea provides the moral and ethical justification to the Brahminical Hindutva state’s subjugation of Indian women. It connects the national and civilisational pride to the notions of the purity of Indian women. Here, one must remember that such an impact of the Brahminical Hindutva state is particularly severe for Bahujan women and Bahujan transgender communities, who experience both caste and gender oppression as a form of state violence.

Policing the Transgender Bodies

Transgender individuals face another layer of biopolitical control by the Brahminical Hindutva state. The recently passed Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, requires Transgender individuals to obtain official certification of their gender identity through state-driven bureaucratic processes. This shifts the authority to define identity from the individual into the state’s sovereign domain. It undermines the principle of self-identification and places transgender bodies under administrative scrutiny and potential criminalisation.

At the same time, the Brahminical Hindutva state uses strategies of co-option and assimilation. It promotes selective traditional ‘transgender friendly’ cultural narratives that align with Brahminical norms while suppressing independent social, political, and cultural assertion of transgender communities. Mythological symbols such as Shikhandi, Ardhanarishvara and the character of Bruhannada are invoked to suggest historical acceptance of gender diversity in Hindutva social and cultural space. However, these representations often confine transgender individuals to ritualistic and marginalized roles rather than recognizing them as equal citizens with equal civil rights and political and social agency in the democratic structure of the modern Indian nation.

This exposes the real political tactic of the Brahmanical Hindutva state towards assertive transgender movements. Transgender communities are tolerated only when they remain within non-threatening social, political, and cultural boundaries of the Brahminical patriarchal Hindutva state. Their roles in ceremonies and rituals are celebrated, but their assertive demands for rights, dignity, and autonomy are often resisted with state-driven violence. Any attempt to build an independent political or cultural identity is met with stigma, legal barriers, and repression. This reveals a broader strategy of censorship masked as cultural inclusion and a classic Brahminical tactic of assimilation in the Brahminical social, political, and cultural fold.

Power Insecurity of the Patriarchal Brahminical State

The persistent regulation of Bahujan, women and transgender bodies reflects a deeper insecurity within the Brahminical patriarchal state. Any assertion of independent identity challenges the ideological foundation of the social, cultural, and political hierarchy of the Brahminical Hindutva state. Control over bodies is also control over thought. When individuals gain autonomy over their physical existence, they develop independent ways of understanding the world. Such autonomy makes them difficult to govern within rigid structures of dominance.

The anxiety of the Brahminical patriarchal Hindutva state is intensified by demographic reality. Upper-caste social groups, whose interests are prioritized in the Hindutva state, have always been numerically a minority. The Brahminical Hindutva social, political, and cultural consciousness is also aware of the long history of resistance led by anti-caste movements and feminist struggles by the non-Brahminical majority section of the Indian society. These movements continue to challenge the legitimacy of Brahminical hierarchical power.

The growing influence of feminist thought and Ambedkarite politics creates the possibility of dynamic alliances among women, Bahujan communities, and transgender communities. Such alliances have a capacity to present an alternate way to envision the Indian society. It holds the potential to transform social, cultural, and political structures as well as public morality in Indian society. More importantly, it can expose the true repressive and violent nature of the Brahminical Hindutva state to the majority of the Indian masses. This explains the intensity with which the Hindutva Brahminical state seeks to police, regulate, and repress these groups.

Conclusion

The sovereignty of a nation-state depends not only on territorial control but also on its claimed monopoly over legitimate violence on the bodies of its citizens. Across the world, patriarchal, authoritarian, and conservative regimes are increasingly asserting control over their marginalized communities. Women, transgender individuals, and historically oppressed caste and racial groups are being regulated in similar ways across different national contexts.

The Indian case must therefore be understood as part of an emerging global political pattern. These regimes often learn from each other and reinforce each other’s strategies of control. In response, resistance must also become global. Marginalized communities need to build solidarities that go beyond national boundaries and resist being absorbed into dominant illiberal patriarchal nationalist narratives, stripping them of their right to human dignity.

The path forward lies in affirming the dignity and autonomy of the individual human body as the foundation of society. The struggle to liberate these bodies is also a struggle to liberate thought, identity, and the possibility of our world. All struggles for freedom in human history were, in their fundamental essence, struggles to liberate the human body from the yoke of institutional exploitation. These struggles have shaped history, and they will continue to shape the future. Only through collective assertion and solidarity can the marginalized claim their rightful place as equal and dignified human beings.