In May 2025, several Indian women journalists filed a defamation suit against a popular digital political commentator and far-right Hindu nationalist influencer, accusing him of launching an online tirade of sexist slurs. The petition argues that the slurs “directly attack [their] dignity as women and professionals.” This incident is emblematic of a toxic culture in the online space in India where disagreements—be they political or social—when voiced by women, are increasingly met with digital aggression, gendered abuse, and threats of violence.
The convergence of misogynistic online subcultures and Hindu nationalism (also known as Hindutva) is becoming a visible and defining feature of India’s online ecosystem, characterised by coordinated gendered abuse and disinformation, and the policing of dissenting women’s voices.
While this is not a new phenomenon in India, it does reflect a broader, global pattern in which ideological extremism is becoming increasingly gendered, digital, and intertwined with far-right ethnonationalism. In January 2025, The Guardian reported that a leaked British Home Office report revealed a significant shift in how governments are beginning to understand these hybrid threats. Commissioned by Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in the wake of the 2022 Leicester riots, the report identified Hindu nationalism as a potential ideological gateway to violent extremism. Hindutva was explicitly listed alongside misogyny and the manosphere, placing it within the same framework as other far-right ideologies that radicalise young men through online subcultures of resentment.
Although the document remains unpublished, its contents, especially regarding the fusion of religious nationalism and digital hate cultures, are important to note. While the report focuses on the UK, its implications are far-reaching, revealing how Hindu nationalism and the manosphere are increasingly convergent, transnational and digitally weaponised, reflecting the risks to democracy and plural societies.
Hindu Nationalism Meets the Manosphere
The convergence between Hindu nationalism and the manosphere represents an ideological alliance rooted in patriarchal revivalism and grievance politics. The manosphere, a network of online communities including incels (involuntary celibates), men’s rights activists, and “alpha male” influencers, has long served as a breeding ground for misogynistic extremism.
Hindu nationalism, meanwhile, as a muscular and patriarchal political ideology, seeks to reassert Hindu cultural dominance and hegemony within the Rashtra (nation). Within this convergence, traditional concepts like Pati Paremeshwar (husband as God), are co-opted seamlessly into broader narratives that blame feminism for emasculating men. The manosphere globalises this resentment through a shared vocabulary of male victimhood, the decline of “real” masculinity, and shared rage against women’s autonomy.
Together, these ideologies blend to form a potent narrative in which women are framed as threats, subjects of moral policing, and symbols of national/cultural purity. Both Hindu nationalism and the manosphere promote a return to an imagined past where men ruled unchallenged, and communities were homogenous.
In India, this has manifested in targeted attacks on women dissenters (both online and offline) under the banner of protecting tradition or “Indian culture.” In the West, similar dynamics play out in the demonisation of immigrants, gender equality policies, and LGBTQ+ rights. Both operate by reframing diversity and “strong” women as weaknesses, promoting a muscular, patriarchal, and misogynistic form of politics as the antidote. This ideological blending also lends a veil of cultural legitimacy to misogyny. Within Hindu nationalist framework, women are seen as the carriers of “honour,” and therefore subjected to control, surveillance, and shaming. This overlaps with digital tactics employed by the manosphere, such as doxxing, slut-shaming, and rape threats, which are deployed against dissenting women.
What makes this particularly insidious is the aesthetic transformation of extremism online. Misogyny is often rebranded as personal growth, and Hindutva-coded content as spiritual awakening, despite its ethnonationalist language. Platform algorithms are actively shaping these shifts online, with platforms like YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram designed to maximize engagement through sensationalist and emotionally charged content. Meanwhile, encrypted apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram create closed echo chambers where conspiracy theories and hate speech circulate freely, often unmoderated. Together, these systems streamline and normalize radicalization, making it more difficult to detect.
The UK’s decision to officially name misogyny as one of the gateways to extremism is critical, as it reflects a growing realization that gendered violence is no longer simply a side effect of extremism, but is central to its functioning. In India, this repeatedly plays out in deeply communal and gendered ways. For instance, a 2024 investigative study by The Quint and Meedan examined 450 public social media posts targeting Muslim women journalists, revealing a coordinated disinformation ecosystem that included sexualized abuse and threats of violence. These online attacks were further amplified by platform algorithms that boosted misogynistic and Islamophobic narratives. Within this rising surge of Hindutva sentiment, Muslim women face a doubled burden where they are vilified for their faith and dehumanized for their gender, becoming some of the most vulnerable targets within online digital spaces.
The recent defamation case by the Indian journalists is just one example that illustrates how normalised this behaviour has become, especially in Indian digital spaces. Women who speak out and/or are seen as feminist or as dissenters are routinely silenced through coordinated campaigns of abuse. These attacks are both political and personal, and serve to discourage participation, reinforce patriarchal hierarchies, and maintain ideological purity through fear. This has therefore become a new dialect of hate, where misogyny, religious bigotry, and anti-democratic values actively reinforce one another.
Digital Radicalization and the Global Far-right
This convergence is most visible and potent in the digital sphere, where echo-chambers and algorithmic structures act as accelerants for radicalization. Social media platforms actively function as spaces of ideological transmission. Within these ecosystems, there has been a marked rise in young men, especially in India and its diaspora, who are drawn to content that fuses Hindu cultural revivalism and nationalist pride with deeply entrenched misogyny. Influencers repackage and launder these exclusionary ideas through the aesthetics of “male empowerment.”
This convergence is also understood within the broader architecture of the global far-right, which is no longer confined to the white supremacist Euro-American experience of the West. There is an emerging network of diverse and decentralized actors who are actively finding alignment in ideologies rooted in their specific national and cultural contexts. Like their Western counterparts, Hindu nationalism-linked netizens are part of an evolving transnational ecosystem, which borrows digital strategies, narratives, and tactics from a globally shared playbook of the far-right.
Targeted harassment of women, disinformation campaigns, meme warfare, and the aesthetic repackaging of spiritual practices that seek to define a woman’s place are some of the tactics that are now used by the Hindu nationalist manosphere that mirror far-right networks of the West.
These tactics travel across borders and latch onto local grievances, transforming them into frameworks of resentment and control. Such flexible narratives are especially effective in diasporic communities, where existing anxieties over identity, belonging, and in some cases, a perceived moral decay create fertile ground for radicalization. This dynamic is increasingly visible among South Asian diasporic communities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.
Toward a Transnational and Intersectional Response
The convergence of gendered hate and far-right ethno-nationalist ideologies can no longer be examined in silos as they have become deeply interconnected systems of radicalisation. However, regulating cross-border digital extremism poses serious challenges as extremist content flows across borders and platforms, with inconsistent standards of moderation, legal jurisdiction, oversight, and accountability.
To address this, counter-extremism strategies must evolve to meet the complexity of the threat and go beyond conventional security paradigms to integrate gender-based violence prevention, community resilience, and digital literacy into their frameworks. And as this threat on societies becomes more normalised and prevalent, it is therefore critical that responses from policymakers, civil society, and tech platforms are intersectional and transnational in nature.
Misogyny serves as a gateway into extremist ideologies, making gendered harm not a byproduct but a central feature of how these movements operate and gain traction. It draws individuals into broader worldviews rooted in authoritarianism, cultural supremacy, and anti-democratic values. The growing radicalization of young men through online ecosystems of hate and manufactured grievance can no longer be dismissed as mere digital rhetoric. It signals a rising threat of violence against women and the deepening normalization of exclusionary ideologies within mainstream public life.
(Antara Chakraborthy is a Senior Research Analyst at the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), RSIS, Singapore.)