With the election of the Hindu nationalist BJP government in 2014 and its following electoral victories in 2019 and 2024, the demand for protection against threats from minorities has only increased in recent years. Despite the cultural domination of the Hindu majority population in India, espousal of constitutional secularism, and a clear majority demographic position, the Hindu nationalists take the lack of a uniform ethnic Hindu identity in India as a basis for creating a siege mentality. It mobilises Hindus through fears of disintegration, takeover, and suppression at the hands of minorities. Even though the abundant literature on Hindu nationalism shows the existence of these themes in mobilisation strategies, there remains an omission of a systematic study of victimhood. I address this gap in this paper and examine the effects of such mobilisation by asking how everyday Hindu nationalists position themselves, using collective victimhood, to make sense of their lived experience, and in the construction of a collective Hindu identity. The data for this research were collected via 20 semi-structured interviews, conducted in Delhi, between December 2023 and April 2024, through a mix of purposive and snowball sampling methods, to select only those who positively identify with central tenets of Hindu Nationalism. I take these interviews as a specific form of social interaction and use critical discourse analysis for analysis and interpretation.
