<i>Bandh</i>politics: crowds, spectacular violence, and sovereignty in India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2002, in Gujarat, India, the Hindu nationalist organization, VHP (World Hindu Council), called for a state-wide bandh – a shutdown of shops, offices, businesses, and transportation – to protest the death of Hindu activists by a Muslim mob. During the state-endorsed bandh, Hindu activists and the wider public, supported by the police and politicians, attacked Muslims with impunity. While the ruling Hindu nationalist regime claimed that the violence was spontaneous rioting, activists and survivors emphasized the organized nature of the massacre. If crowds are understood as a performative, and not simply a political tool, then the bandh is a form of political drama when crowds perform claims to sovereignty. Bandh politics entangle multiple audiences, anticipate public violence, invite participation from state and non-state actors, and symbolize popular sovereignty. Bandh politics transformed state-backed public violence against Muslims in 2002 into a mass protest that enabled new forms of solidarity between the Hindu nationalist regime, state officials, and the wider public. Bandh politics is neither instrumental nor spontaneous, but more like a wager that enables political actors to seize, stage, and frame crowd violence as the will of the people.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".