Notes: Christophe Jaffrelot - State Formation vs State Building | Sociology Mains Optional for UPSC 2024 PDF Download

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Summaries of Christophe Jaffrelot's 3 important articles on Religion 
Hindu rashtra, de facto 
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/hindu-rashtra-de-facto-bjp-rss-gau-rakshak-
mob-lynching-5301083/ 
The media often presents cow-related lynching cases as spontaneous reactions of 
the mob. But this is not that spontaneous. the perpetrators' ideological orientation 
could be surmised from the fact that they often make their victims raise slogans 
such as jai shri ram , gau mata ki jai etc. 
Most visible organisation in this domain - Gua raksha dal (GRD), has its presence in 
many states.  
Haryana -one of the strongholds of movement, the GRD emblem is a cow's head 
flanked by two AK47S. 
In Haryana, the GRD and police arrived at a division of labour.  
GRD has a huge network of volunteers and informants and act very fast whenever 
they receive information, volunteers set up joint nakas with help of local police. The 
GRD thus acts as a COMMUNITY CULTURAL POLICE. 
In Haryana, cow task force has been created within the state police (convergence of 
two types of policing - official and unofficial). 
The national vice president of the GRD sat on the board of the Gau Seva Ayog, a 
Haryana Govt.'s institute for cow welfare. 
These developments showing a new dynamics of state formation, as defined by 
Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, in their study The Unhappy Valley.  
Berman and Lonsdale distinguish the formation of the state as a social institution 
and state-building as an administrative process.  
Reasoning solely in terms of state-building tends to reduce authority only to official 
agents and their actions.  
Berman and Lonsdale take into account private actors who work their way into the 
process of state formation through the “vulgarisation of power”, which involves 
Page 2


 
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Summaries of Christophe Jaffrelot's 3 important articles on Religion 
Hindu rashtra, de facto 
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/hindu-rashtra-de-facto-bjp-rss-gau-rakshak-
mob-lynching-5301083/ 
The media often presents cow-related lynching cases as spontaneous reactions of 
the mob. But this is not that spontaneous. the perpetrators' ideological orientation 
could be surmised from the fact that they often make their victims raise slogans 
such as jai shri ram , gau mata ki jai etc. 
Most visible organisation in this domain - Gua raksha dal (GRD), has its presence in 
many states.  
Haryana -one of the strongholds of movement, the GRD emblem is a cow's head 
flanked by two AK47S. 
In Haryana, the GRD and police arrived at a division of labour.  
GRD has a huge network of volunteers and informants and act very fast whenever 
they receive information, volunteers set up joint nakas with help of local police. The 
GRD thus acts as a COMMUNITY CULTURAL POLICE. 
In Haryana, cow task force has been created within the state police (convergence of 
two types of policing - official and unofficial). 
The national vice president of the GRD sat on the board of the Gau Seva Ayog, a 
Haryana Govt.'s institute for cow welfare. 
These developments showing a new dynamics of state formation, as defined by 
Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, in their study The Unhappy Valley.  
Berman and Lonsdale distinguish the formation of the state as a social institution 
and state-building as an administrative process.  
Reasoning solely in terms of state-building tends to reduce authority only to official 
agents and their actions.  
Berman and Lonsdale take into account private actors who work their way into the 
process of state formation through the “vulgarisation of power”, which involves 
 
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commandeering public authority to further private ends.  
This approach has obvious heuristic advantages for the analysis of Hindu vigilante 
groups and their relationship to the state. 
Collusion between police and Hindu nationalist movements is indeed evidence of 
the start of a transition from a state-building process, in which the administrative 
and coercive apparatus is supposed to treat all citizens equally, to a state-formation 
process wherein majoritarian non-state actors impose a social and cultural order.  
What adds a layer of complexity to Berman and Lonsdale’s model is that in India, 
these non-state actors enjoy state protection.  
Though the authority they exercise is illegal, it is nevertheless seen as legitimate by 
the state in that it is inspired by the values and interests of the dominant community 
to which the government is accountable.  
In that sense, the Hindutva forces are more of India’s deep state than a parallel 
government, all the more so as the ruling BJP is part of the Sangh Parivar.  
This shift from a neutral state to an ideological Hindu Rashtra illustrates a form of 
violent majoritarianism that can be observed in all countries where vigilantes bring 
minorities to heel with the more or less tacit agreement of shadow forces that share 
their biases or ideology (the relationship between white supremacists’ militias and 
the police in the US could provide other examples). 
If the executive, legislature or judiciary do not effectively oppose lynchings, India 
may remain a rule-of-law country only on paper and, in practice, a de facto 
ethno-state.