Hindutva in Modern India

For much of independent India’s history, its dominant political ideology has been some variation of Nehruvian socialism, so named after the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This ideology was characterized by secularism, state-sponsored socialism, and control of major industries. Later on, affirmative action for various castes and and other social goals became a part of the ideology. Most other regional parties in India adopted the ideology of democratic socialism and populism to suit their own ethnic or caste-based needs, such as the Trinamool National Congress in West Bengal and the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.

However, the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has injected in full view an alternative ideology into the Indian political discourse: Hindutva. While Hindutva itself has its pros and cons, the very fact that it turned the ideological leaning of Indian politics away from an exclusively leftist or center-left orientation is a good thing for the health of Indian political thinking. The eagerness with which much of the Indian population embraced the development-oriented agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonstrates that India had a great need for an alternative approach to politics.

Hindutva, which roughly means Hinduness, though prominent now, is not a new phenomenon on the Indian political scene. It is a key element of the BJP’s ideology, and that party has held power previously on both the national and state level, though never as spectacularly as it does now. Hindutva is also the major ideology held by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the volunteer and paramilitary organization that is associated with and often considered the parent organization of the BJP, though there is no official institutional tie between the RSS and the BJP.

The official ideology of the BJP is the Hindutva-inspired Integral Humanism, developed by a RSS cadre, Deendayal Upadhyaya, and first adopted by the Jana Sangh, the BJP’s predecessor party, in 1965. It is a traditionalist and nationalist ideology that rejects both socialism as well as Western-style capitalism, which it sees as contributing to the spread of individualism and materialism. Rather, Integral Humanism posits that the individual is both a spiritual being and a material one, and that society ought to be organized in an organic and holistic fashion. Modern proponents of Hindutva, including many members of the BJP, hold these views, especially at the social level. At the economic level, meanwhile, there is a divide between those who are more friendly to capitalism and the free market, like Modi, and those who favor a more traditional economy and are wary of industry.

Hindutva itself originated in the 1920s, partially under the inspiration of “blood and soil” movements in Europe. The term was coined by its chief ideologue, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist and atheist who envisioned Hindutva more as a cultural and ideological force, rather than a religious one. In his 1928 tract, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu, he wrote:

“Hindus are bound together not only by the tie of the love we bear to a common fatherland and by the common blood that courses through our veins and keeps our hearts throbbing and our affections warm, but also by the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilization -- our Hindu culture…”

Hindutva thus has an interest in homogenizing India’s various traditions and customs into a single monolithic ideology that, while not representing India’s historical diversity, has proven to be a resilient ideology in facing the modern world with its various other “isms.” It is dubious if Hinduism could have held its own in the face of more organized political and religious systems without at least some consolidation.

Under this ideology, all people who shared the blood and soil of India, all Indians, were Hindus, in the broadest sense of the term. Hindutva, while generally open toward other Indian religions such as Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism, has been particularly hostile toward Christianity and Islam because those faiths have been seen as directing people away from a focus on India and Indian customs. Because of its long history of conquest and rule in the subcontinent, Islam is especially singled out as the “other” in the Hindutva ideology. As an essay on Hindutva on the BJP’s national website notes, “Hindus never forgot the repeated destruction of the Somnath Temple [by Muslims], the massacre of Buddhists at Nalanda, or the pogroms of the Mughals… It is these characteristics of Hindu society and the Muslim psyche that remain today. Hindus never lost their tolerance and willingness to change. However Muslims, led by the Islamic clergy and Islamic society’s innate unwillingness to change, did not notice the scars that Hindus felt from the Indian past.”

Followers of Hindutva have thus resorted to controversial and violent actions in the past, including opposition to the partition of the “fatherland,” which led to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, a mosque said to have been built on the site of a former temple where the Hindu god Rama was born, was also conducted by RSS and BJP cadres inspired by Hindutva. The demolition led to communal rioting across India. Justifying the destruction of the mosque, the BJP wrote that while “Hindus were humble enough to ask for the restoration of an ancient temple,” they had to hide their “true anger,” which eventually exploded because “so long as freedom to Jews meant that symbols of the Holocaust in Europe were condemned, so long as freedom to African- Americans meant that the symbols of racial discrimination were wiped out...freedom to Hindus meant that they would have to condemn the Holocaust that Muslims reaped on them…[and] would have to mean that their heros such as Rama...would be respected.”

Modern Hindutva is somewhat more relaxed, as many of its proponents--particularly members of the BJP--have to rule over a diverse nation and cannot resort to rigid ideological purity. Moreover, as Hindutva has found increased acceptance in a well-educated, global Hindu middle class, many of its ideological aspects have been cherry-picked. While the idea that Muslims in India often get special treatment and the caste-blind Hindu ideology of the movement are widely accepted, many Indians, who have become more individualistic, bristle at Hindutva-inspired movements to ban beef, bars, or even Valentine’s Day.

Moreover, the idea of a traditional, non-industrial economy lacks broad appeal. Having met pushback with these ideas, it is possible that much of the rank and file of groups such as the RSS know they have gone as far as they can. In fact, perhaps to differentiate themselves from Islamic groups, Hindutva organizations seem to be adopting more socially liberal views on some issues, such as homosexuality, with several high-ranking RSS and BJP members calling for its legalization. While most Hindus want to take pride in their past and appreciate their ancient heros, at times contrary to the ideology of liberals and the left in India, they also want the material and social fruits of a globalized world that rejects the parochialism that defines much of traditional Hindutva ideology.

Certainly there are still many extreme views propagated by believers of Hindutva that are contrary to logic or fact; for example, the fact that unfertilized eggs are non-vegetarian and should not be consumed. This has led to a no-egg policy in state schools in the state of Madhya Pradesh, depriving malnourished children of a cheap source of protein. Historical conspiracy theories are rampant as well, including allegations that the Mughals committed a “holocaust,” that the magical weapons of the ancient Hindu epics “prove” ancient India had nuclear weapons, and that many of the world’s achievements and cultures are derived from Hinduism. One particularly peculiar example is a theory that the Kaaba in Mecca was originally a temple to the Hindu god Shiva. While these alternative and extreme elements don’t have much political influence, they’re prominent enough to cause trouble and grab headlines from time to time.

While it is important to see both sides of the argument and for Hindus to take pride in their past, it is also important to note that the world has changed since the first millennium BC. The past ten centuries cannot be denied--the influence of Mughals and the British, their food, their music, their languages, and institutions are all an integral part of the Indian cultural mosaic now, and many of their customs are embraced in today’s India.

Nevertheless, despite all this, Hindutva has managed to consolidate ideologically the non-socialist streams of thought in India, similar to the way the Republican Party in the United States has brought together the religious right, business friendly individuals, and foreign policy hawks. Indian society is generally open to entrepreneurship and personal economic betterment. Social changes, meanwhile, occur gradually, as evidenced by the persistence of caste distinctions at the societal level and the perseverance of cultural practices like arranged marriages. This is in many ways the opposite of the package offered by the Congress Party, which touts social liberalism and economic socialism, and whose mismanagement is partly a reason for the current success and relevance of the BJP. But such a level of homogeneity as offered by Hindutva cannot hold for long: India is a diverse and heterogeneous country. In addition to the various customs followed by its many religions, within Hinduism alone there are thousands of different traditions and customs when it comes to food, clothing, and marriage practices. Individualism and industrial capitalism may now be too deeply rooted in the country to easily dislodge.

Perhaps elements of the BJP, and Hindutva advocates more broadly, may evolve toward a position more similar to center-right classical liberalism, favoring a market economy, property rights, freedom of expression, and free trade. Much of the middle class and youth certainly seem to be leaning this way, and Hinduism is largely a non-political religion--pro-market, patriotic, but also globalized and socially liberal--although populist policies are more popular among the urban poor and in rural India. Classical liberalism is not unheard of in India: it was the guiding ideology of the Swatantra Party, a fairly successful Indian political party in the 1960s. It could well undergo a revival in the near-future, but for now Hindutva is the ideological glue that holds together most of the center-right elements against the ideology of Congress and other left or socialist parties in India.