This article examines how Indian diplomacy at the 2023 G20 Summit, using Critical Caste Studies, highlights upper-caste ideologies while promoting civilisational narratives.
This article analyses Indian diplomacy at the 2023 G20 Summit, which India hosted. It uses a Critical Caste Studies approach to foreground the role of caste in Indian diplomacy, focussing on four prominent discursive tropes at the Summit – the naming of India as Bharat, the promotion of a ‘Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas, Sabka Praya’ associated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s philosophy of Integral Humanism, the philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbatakam (the world is a family/the world is home) and the portrayal of India as the Mother of Democracy. By analysing these tropes, we argue that Indian diplomacy at the G20 Summit constituted civilisation-washing: the external projection of an apolitical and antipolitical civilisational transcendence to obfuscate and naturalise an upper-caste Hindu supremacism. We suggest that civilisation-washing serves a tool of illiberal authoritarianism, justifying the undermining of accountability and individual rights in the name of cultural authenticity and moral superiority.
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Chacko et al. (2025) studied this question.
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