‘Bhakt’ and ‘Liberandu’ as polarized categories: The making of a Hindutva digital sphere on Indian Twitter (X)

In this chapter, I forward a membership categorization analysis informed approach to examine what is usually considered a ‘macro-phenomenon’: political polarization. I do so with the particular aim of contributing knowledge to studies in language and social media from a context in the Global South that has received considerable attention, in comparison to several other contexts: contemporary Hindu politics in India. Several studies have been undertaken in the last few years to examine the growth of Hindu politics in India (Basu 2017, Udupa 2018, 2019, Ray and Dube 2020, Ray 2022). What I wish to do in this chapter is to consider one aspect of this politics, namely the use of ‘polarized’ categories on Twitter. I do so with a view to identify linguistic practices of category construction and use that are trans-lingual (Androutsopoulos 2007, Tagg 2020), their relevance for political polarization, and what these mean for the intersections of language, politics, and social media.