New opinion piece by Suryakant Waghmore

Written By Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

“For past few decades, India has witnessed a dialectical struggle between two competing visions of national solidarity. On one side stands Hindutva, which seeks to construct Hinduism as a civil religion—a public, political faith that unites Hindus across caste lines while creating discursive Others: Muslims, Christians, and secularists. On the other side stands the civil sphere itself—the realm of universal solidarities, individual rights, and constitutional morality that emerged from India's anti-colonial struggle and has been nourished by diverse progressive movements ever since.”

Suryakant Waghmore

Our colleague Suryakant Waghmore has published a new opinion piece, “Cockroaches as Civil Sphere?”, in News9 Live. The article examines the emergence of the Cockroach Janata Party and recent youth protests in India through the lens of Civil Sphere Theory, exploring tensions between civil solidarity, civil religion, constitutional values, and political exclusion.

Waghmore discusses how the movement seeks to build solidarity across divisions of caste, religion, class, and ethnicity, and considers its broader implications for democratic participation and the development of India’s civil sphere.

Read the full article here:Cockroaches as Civil Sphere? – News9 Live

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky is associate professor of sociology at Masaryk University, Brno (Czech Republic), and Faculty Fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology. She is a cultural sociologist in the tradition of the Strong Program, who focuses on the meaning-making process in her research on international migration. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her M.A., M.Phil., and PhD from Yale University. Recent books include The Courage for Civil Repair: Narrating the Righteous in International Migration (with Carlo Tognato and Jeffrey C. Alexander, eds., Palgrave, 2020) and Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice (with Victoria Shmidt, Routledge 2021), Besides civil sphere theory, her current research focuses on in-depth cultural sociological analysis and reconstruction of public issues such as perceptions of migration, and the cultural sociology of conspiracy theories.

https://www.cstnetwork.org/jaworsky-bio
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