Hindutva Unveiled: Tracing its Origins and Influence in Contemporary Indian Politics
The contemporary Indian situation is not worse than it was in the past, this has been for decades that Hindu extremist groups never disappoints their predecessor when it comes to defining a Muslim’s place on Indian soil. The quest for its Hindu Rashtra and the centuries-old hatred for Muslims has made Indian leadership paranoid enough to get rid of its largest minority population no matter what consequence they need to pay.
Hindu nationalism strengthened with time and celebrated as Hindutva, as per Oxford English Dictionary, “originally: is the state or quality of being Hindu; ‘Hinduness”. In later use: an ideology seeking to establish the hegemony of Hindus and the Hindu way of life.
The agenda of Hindutva aims to forge ‘One Nation (in One State), One Culture, One Religion, and One Language, a single ‘Hindu Nation’. it is a set of violent political movements, based on an extremist religious-nationalist ideology, advocating Hindu supremacy across the country along with Jammu and Kashmir. Hindutva’s obsession with fostering the exclusion of the Muslim minority in India has provoked violent hatred between the Hindus and Muslims of India, simply aims to demolish the Indian so-called secular edifice and build its Hindu Rashtra over it.
Within Hindu nationalist discourse, Muslims have historically been perceived as the “threatening other.” Though the Hindutva foundation was laid in the early 1990s, the poisonous ideas regarding Muslim presence and Hindu suppression in India have been strongly linked with Mahmud’s invasion and the Mughal Era. On numerous occasions, the BJP and RSS leadership remind their followers of the crushing of Hindu temples by Muslim rulers during their conquest of India, accompanied by forceful religious conversions of the Hindu masses, and for this Muslims (‘outsiders’ and ‘invaders) must be paid in their own coins.
The term Hindutva — the belief that the Hindu identity is inseparable from the Indian identity, identifying India as a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation), was coined in 1923 by a Maharashtra-based Hindu nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (May 28, 1883 — February 26, 1966). Savarkar is also known as the Father of Hindu Nationalism and the forerunner of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the current ruling party of India. he was a right-wing majoritarian, an Indian freedom fighter, revolutionary, politician, and also the founder of an underground revolutionary society, known as “Abhinav Bharat Society”, against British rule. He remained a huge political influence until his death in 1966.
Savarkar’s ideological pamphlet titled “Hindutva: who is a Hindu?” became the foundational text of the Hindu nationalist creed. His idea of the Hindu nation was broader not just limited to India but covering the entire Indian subcontinent; the dream of the “Akhand Bharat” (undivided India).
‘Hindutva is not a word but a history. Not only the spiritual or religious history of our people as at times it is mistaken to be by being confounded with the other cognate term Hinduism, but a history in full… Hindutva embraces all the departments of thought and activity of the whole Being of our Hindu race.’
Further, Savarkar defines Hindu as:
“a person who regards the land of Bharat Varsha (India) from the Indus to the seas, as his Father-Land as well as Holy-Land.”
“To every Hindu … this Sindhusthan is at once a pitribhu and a punyabhu — fatherland and holy land. That is why in the case of some of our … countrymen, who had originally been forcibly converted to a non-Hindu religion and who consequently have inherited along with Hindus, a common fatherland and a greater part of the wealth of a common culture — language, law, customs, folklore, and history — are not and cannot be recognized as Hindus.
For though Hindusthan to them is Fatherland as to any other Hindu yet it is not to them a holy land too. Their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine. Their mythology and god-men, ideas, and heroes are not the children of this soil. Consequently their name and their outlook smack of a foreign origin”.
The divide cannot be bridged conversion to Hinduism to fulfill except by Hindutva’s demand. Savarkar urges, “Ye, who by race, by blood, by culture, by nationality possess almost all the essentials of Hindutva and had been forcibly snatched out of our ancestral home by the hand of violence — ye, have only to render wholehearted love to our common mother and recognize her not only as fatherland (Pitribhu) but even as a holy land (Punyabhu), and ye would be most welcome to the Hindu fold”.
The reconversion of the converted Hindus back to the Hindu religion is one of the main elements of Hindutva, which is further elaborated by the extremist Hindutva followers, who define the true Indians as those who partake of this Hinduness by embracing Hindu identity and rituals. And those who want themselves to be called Indian need to behave and identify themselves as Hindu, or else they would be suffocate to death.
Theology, interestingly played no part in Savarkar’s Hindutva. He was a self-described atheist. To Savarkar, Hindus were not merely a religious community, but a historical, ethnic, linguistic, and political group — a nation. So shortly, Common state, common race, and common culture are the three fundamental identifying Hindutva nationalism.
In the mid-1990s when the demand for an independent state for Indian Muslims gained momentum, the dream to rule over Indivisible India (Akhand Bharat) was the major obstacle to the way of realization of Pakistan. Hindutva's subtle interference continued till the end, influencing Congress politics and directing it toward the pro-Hindu agenda for sabotaging the freedom movement of the Indian Muslim minority.
Even following the 1947 partition, Hindutva actors played a central role in nation-building and in creating a majoritarian identity in the presence of organized violence against its minorities. After the success of the 2014 election newly elected Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, truly mainstreamed the idea of Hindutva to further Hindu insecurities regarding the Muslim presence in India. Modi constructs an anti-muslim narrative for mobilizing the masses by portraying Muslims as a threat to the Hindu majority of India. As it was important to insert a strong sense of fear and anxiety into the minds of Hindu society, making them see Muslims only as invaders and murderers who need to be put under continuous vigilance.
Savarkar’s ideological pamphlet became the founding document of militant Hindu nationalist organizations Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RRS and Sangh Parivar (RSS-led Hindutva network) and the Bharatiya Janata Party BJP adopt it as its election manifesto.
Hindu Rashtra Sena leader Dhananjay Desai gave his definition of Hindutva:
“A movement to repeal the human animals who have attacked our holy land. To penetrate the evil conspiracy. It is to destroy the green hordes, to smash the Christian conversions. To destroy the caste system. Hindutva is this fight, this revolution, that the pious sons of Mother India have launched — of nationalism, of the desire to preserve Indian culture, of the rise of the saffron flag. Hindutva is the name of this struggle.”
Also, the true nature of nationalism in India was set forth by the RSS guru Golwalker as he wrote in his book “We, Or our Nationhood” addressing the minorities of India that:
“Either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race and may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race.”
The RSS chief and prominent ideologue of Hindutva, M S Golwalkar, inspired by Hindutva coined its synonym, ‘cultural nationalism’, in contrast to ‘territorial nationalism’ in his book, “A Bunch of Thoughts” (1968). Everyone born within the territory of India is not a nationalist; the nation is defined by a common ‘culture’ (read: religion).
Savarkar’s ideology is deeply rooted and is strengthening with time as it continues in Indian politics and reminds people of its subtle existence but became more evident with BJP gained power and since then Indian politics revolves only around the Hindutva ideology of“us versus them”.
