Religious nationalism exacerbates the vulnerabilities of socially marginalised groups like women and immigrants. Ironically, it also creates several spaces for social and political engagement for marginalised groups, and recruits them in networks of ideological dissemination. Some of these networks transnationally bring together diasporic members, who create global consent for religious nationalist governments in their home countries. But studying Hindu immigrant women in the USA, we also find some discourses of ‘counter-dissemination’ which emerge between a ‘secular’ rejection of religion and absolute capitulation to religious nationalism. We find that several Hindu Indian immigrant women in the USA are critical of Hindu nationalism in their home country and in the Indian diaspora. They are also critical of Christian nationalism in the USA. They develop overlapping discourses of castigation, correction and conciliation in private and public realms. We draw on a meta-analysis of our prior research and a more recent series of podcast interviews.
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