‘Spectacles of Whataboutery’: Hindutva regimes of historicity and the reinterpretation of Indian Constitutional Law

This paper brings together theories of historicity with conceptual debates on legal and historical consciousness to analyse how India’s Hindu nationalist government employs theatrical performances in Supreme Court hearings to produce a transcript of Hindu victimhood that delegitimizes the constitutional rule of law. During Supreme Court hearings, state officials often draw on a strategy, which advocates in Delhi have termed ‘majoritarian legal whataboutery’. ‘Whataboutery’ describes a courtroom politics that uses rhetoric distraction, and the exploitation of public affects to shift the focus of hearings, and paint constitutional judges as biased champions of religious minorities. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with lawyers and human rights organizations in Delhi, this paper argues that ‘whataboutery’ disrupts established understandings of legality and imbues them with populist meanings. Through deliberate courtroom spectacles, government representatives produce an ideologically infused regime of historicity, which constructs liberal law as an unjust aberration in a teleological progression of mythical Hindu time and thus views constitutional principles and institutions as inherently anti-Hindu. The paper ultimately proposes that ‘whataboutery’ allows state officials to move beyond the need for impunity tactics since Hindu violence against religious minorities is portrayed as a necessary act of self-defence in an Indian state ruled by legal institutions that neglect Hindu safety.