Aspiring for Abstraction: The Promise of Law Amid Political Dispossession in Majoritarian India

ABSTRACT With conventional avenues of civic participation increasingly unavailable to religious minorities in contemporary India, this article follows community workers developing new strategies for articulating political claims. Based on ethnographic research in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, I document three key shifts in their advocacy: toward constitutional education, women's participation, and capacity‐building. These strategies draw upon the abstraction of legal form to engage the state while circumventing the challenges posed by religious identity. Contrary to the longstanding anthropological critique of legal abstraction as flattening social realities, I argue that it provides a productive mode of political embodiment in a milieu where religious difference has become a disqualifying mark. This analysis invites a revaluation of abstraction in anthropological thinking, suggesting its potential to challenge a politics of visibility while offering an alternative to withdrawal from representation.