Abstract
In my paper, I would like to show the ethnic, religious and national dimensions of the industrial restructuring in India, where the neo-liberal economic policies have been gradually adopted since the 1990s, and the managerial model of democracy run as a business has found many admirers. At the same time, however, India has a long record of social tensions, which have been supplied with the ethnic and religious dimensions over the last twenty years, with the Gujarat communal riots in 2002 as the most infamous example.
The case of the state of Gujarat, for years considered as a laboratory both of the neo-liberal economic experiment and the cultural-nationalist project of Hindutva, indicates how the issues of neo-liberalism and nationalism can be intertwined and the communal tensions between Hindus and muslims exploited or even incited by the Hindu nationalist government. As the nationalist projects where neo-liberalism plays a vital role have emerged in many European countries lately, the Indian example can show some the risks which these projects bear.