Arundhati Virmani

How is longstanding religious vocabulary shaping contemporary modes of mobilization, loyalty-building, and political identification, and what do these semantic transformations reveal about the changing relationship between religion, authority, and the nation in modern India? Recent years have seen expressions such as Ram Rajya (a divine moral order), Vishwaguru (a spiritual world teacher), Amrit Kaal (a sacred period of immortality), panch pran (five vows), and Pran Pratishtha (an infusion of divine life) migrate into the language of governance as a way of framing the moral temporality of the nation, its destiny, and the social pact that binds citizens to the state. Exploring how religion is instrumentalized and ontologized in the political sphere, the project investigates how the political reworking of religious vocabulary is reshaping the pluralist, secular structure, and what this Indian case offers to wider international debates on religion’s shifting place in democratic politics.