Key Points
From about 1880 to 1965, each of these states saw grave democratic backsliding as elected legislative bodies and executive authorities ignored or circumvented the citizenship, due-process, and equal-protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868); deprived African Americans of the voting rights they had been guaranteed under the Fifteenth Amendment (1870); and directly or indirectly supported extralegal vigilante violence against blacks, especially in the form of lynchings...
Allowing for historical differencesIndia never had a system of racialised chattel slavery such as held sway in fifteen of the then-34 US states plus several US territories at the time the Civil War broke out in 1861it remains fair to say that if Jim Crow was about the severe marginalisation of black Americans on the ground of their race, then Hindu nationalism under Modis Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is about the attempted marginalisation of a minority, namely, Muslim Indians, on the ground of their religion...
Just as a key aim of Jim Crow was to blunt the Reconstruction Amendments and turn blacks into second-class citizens, Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims and turn them into marginalised, less than fully equal citizens..
Just as in the Jim Crow South a combination of state-level election victories and extralegal methods was deployed to deprive blacks of their rights, Hindu nationalism is using both legislative power and extralegal methods to subdue Muslims..
And if Indias post-independence constitution has made Hindus and Muslims legally equal, such equality, according to Hindu nationalists, must be reversed, just as the racial equality imposed by Reconstruction required backtracking..
