Language is not a neutral entity
Statements that appear banal can carry dense political force
At the core of this book lies a rethinking of citizenship—not as a fixed legal status, but as a linguistic accomplishment
To treat language as neutral is already to yield ground to power. Political philosophy has long recognised that sovereignty operates not only through law or force, but through the grammar that renders reality intelligible. Words do not merely describe political life; they produce it, delimiting what can be thought, said, and sanctioned. Language, in this sense, is infrastructural—an unseen architecture of legitimacy that precedes institutions and silently conditions their authority.
This insight animates Ila Nagar’s Weaponizing Language: Legislating a Hindu India, a book that argues—quietly but insistently—that the decisive struggles of contemporary Indian politics are fought less in courts than in the semantic fields that precede them. Nagar shows how linguistic manoeuvrings become legislative destiny, how discursive habits, once normalised, harden into juridical outcomes that reorder citizenship itself. The book belongs as much to political theory and philosophy of language as to sociolinguistics or South Asian studies. Its true subject is power as it moves from utterance to institution.
Linguistic Trickery and Political Common Sense
Nagar’s central concept is “linguistic trickery”: the strategic use of presupposition, euphemism, dog-whistling, and repetition to shift political common sense without overt argument. This is not crude propaganda. It is subtler and more durable—a recalibration of
meaning itself. Words are not openly redefined; their conditions of use are altered until what once appeared extreme comes to feel natural, even self-evident.
Drawing on the philosophy of language, Nagar demonstrates how statements that appear banal can carry dense political force. When groups are persistently spoken about rather than to, when their presence is framed as a “problem” to be managed, the ground is prepared for extraordinary legal measures that later present themselves as procedural necessities. Language here persuades not by reason but by habituation: it trains affect before it disciplines thought, shaping political intuition long before formal judgment is required.
From Discourse to Law
The book’s four case studies—the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute, Muslim Personal Law and women’s rights, the revocation of Article 370, and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act with the National Register of Citizens—are read not as isolated events but as endpoints of long discursive genealogies. Each emerges from decades of speech acts that narrowed legal possibilities in advance.
Nagar resists the temptation to frame these developments as sudden authoritarian ruptures. Her argument is more unsettling: that Muslim marginalisation has unfolded largely through democratic procedures, facilitated by language that rendered exclusion reasonable, even benevolent. Courts and legislatures appear not as aberrations from constitutionalism, but as its altered inheritors. Law does not interrupt discourse; it consummates it, translating semantic consensus into enforceable order.
Her analysis of rights discourse is particularly incisive. In examining Muslim women and personal law, Nagar shows how the rhetoric of protection becomes a mode of silencing. The Muslim woman is instrumentalised as a moral alibi for state intervention, her voice displaced even as her “rights” are invoked. What is exposed here is not hypocrisy alone, but the ease with which emancipatory vocabularies can be redeployed for disciplinary ends.
Citizenship as a Linguistic Achievement
At the core of the book lies a rethinking of citizenship—not as a fixed legal status, but as a linguistic accomplishment. Belonging, Nagar argues, is narrated into being. The Hindu nationalist project succeeds by aligning cultural majoritarianism with juridical legitimacy, naturalising Hindu identity as national identity while rendering Muslim presence conditional and perpetually suspect.
The Citizenship (Amendment) Act thus appears not merely discriminatory, but as the endpoint of a semantic transformation in which exclusion is redescribed as correction. Years of rhetoric around infiltration, purity, and security do the work that law later ratifies. By the time statutes are enacted, the semantic contest is already settled, and dissent itself risks appearing as deviance rather than democratic disagreement.
Methodologically, Weaponizing Language is a disciplined interdisciplinary work. Nagar moves fluently across sociolinguistics, political theory, and South Asian historiography without collapsing distinctions. Parliamentary debates, judicial judgments, political speeches, and media discourse are deployed with restraint, not to overwhelm but to illuminate recurring structures of meaning and authority across time.
Equally striking is the book’s tonal discipline. Despite addressing violence, exclusion, and democratic decline, Nagar avoids polemics. Her prose is analytic, controlled, and quietly devastating. The moral argument emerges indirectly, through accumulation rather than exhortation. Power, she insists, rarely announces itself. It arrives as common sense, embedded in idiom, repetition, and institutional routine.
The Politics of Meaning
Weaponizing Language ultimately warns that democracy’s deepest vulnerabilities lie not in institutions alone, but in linguistic drift. Constitutions may endure even as their animating concepts—equality, secularism, citizenship—are hollowed out through altered usage. When words remain formally intact but substantively transformed, continuity itself becomes deceptive, masking rupture behind familiarity.
This is not merely a book about India. It is a meditation on how democracies speak themselves into something else—and how, once that transformation is complete, the language of justice may continue to circulate, authoritative and intact, even as its referents quietly disappear from political life.
The author is a poet and critic in Urdu and English. He teaches South Asian Literature and Culture at the University of Vienna, Austria
Book Review of Ila Nagar’s Weaponizing Language: Legislating a Hindu India Publisher: Cambridge University Press
