Towards a Hindu Rashtra: Hindutva, religion, and nationalism in India

ABSTRACT

This contribution, in answer to the question posed in this collection ‘right-wing nationalism, populism, and religion: what are the connections and why?’, attempts to account for the development of Hindu nationalism in India as articulated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Hindu nationalism represents a fusion of conservative right-wing nationalism and religion, which has proved highly successful at the ballot box. It aims at the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra or state. Central to Hindu nationalism is the idea of Hindutva, which interpellates all Indians as belonging to a Hindu civilisation based on a common pan-Indian Hindu national identity. Muslims occupy the position of a ‘constitutive outside’ enabling the construction of a Hindu Rashtra; they remain ‘enemies’ to be either excluded or assimilated to a Hindu national culture. Consequently, they remain targets of government legislation. This will be illustrated with reference to the recent abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, the building of a temple to the Hindu God Ram in Ayodhya, the Citizen Amendment Act, and the government of India’s responses to COVID-19. India under Modi, it concludes, is on the way to becoming a Hindu Rashtra.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• nationalism
• India
• Hindutva
• populism

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Jeff Haynes for the invitation to contribute to this collection, and two anonymous referees for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This contribution draws on sections of Shani (2014, 2016, 2019). However, the sections have been substantially revised, updated, and rewritten so no permission is needed. See Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay ‘Why the 2019 election may be the most crucial in India’s history’. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2019-election-crucial-india-history-181120160323155.html. Accessed 1 June 2019.

2. Although they campaigned as part of a National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the BJP won an outright majority of seats – 282 out of 543 – in the lower house, the Lok Sabha, which was the most since 1984. In comparison, the Indian National Congress (INC) won just 44 seats. See http://www.indianelectionsdb.com/. Accessed June 1 2019.

3. See BJP 2018.

4. See Shani (2008, 13) for its application to the construction of a Sikh nationalist discourse.

5. Saffron refers to the colour adopted by the Sangh Parivar. Hansen (1999) coined the term the ‘saffron wave’ to refer to political mobilisation by the BJP and Jaffrelot (2017, Anderson and Jaffrelot 2018) has applied the term to the public sphere in India, which is increasingly dominated by the discourse of Hindutva.

6. Narendra Modi has been compared to the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in his reformist zeal (The Economist 2013) and enjoyed the support of, and donations from, India’s business elite and diaspora in the 2014 elections.

7. ‘Both “nation” and “religion”’, as van der Veer (1999, 419) points out, ‘are conceptualised as universal categories in Western modernity and their universality is located precisely in the history of Western expansion’.

8. Governmentality refers to a series of specific governmental apparatuses (appareils) through which ‘populations’ are governed. It also refers to the development of a complex of knowledges (savoirs) which underpin those apparatuses of government (Foucault 2007, 108–109). Colonial governmentality in South Asia differed from governmentality in Europe in that it introduced a ‘double discourse’ whereby colonial subjects were considered both individuals with property rights and members of collectivities defined in terms of religion and caste (Hansen 1999, 34–35).

9. Orientalism refers to the way in which western discourses on the Orient constitute the Orient and deprive it of agency. See Said (1978) for the seminal account of the development of European Orientalism and Inden (1990) for its application to South Asia.

10. Dirks (2001) argues that ‘caste’ was an invention of colonial administrators who interpreted Brahmanical texts selectively in order to legitimise and reproduce hierarchy within the Raj.

11. A jati is a localised sub-caste group, usually organised around occupation. However, it is used in Hindu nationalist discourse to refer to ‘race’ (see Savarkar [1923] 1989, 89).

12. See Shani (2005, 104–110) for an analysis of Nehru’s Discovery of India.

13. Before the 2019 elections, there were an estimated 56,859 shakas (Vanaik 2017, 49), although this number may have subsequently increased.

14. The RSS does not keep official membership records but membership has more than doubled in the past ten years and the total membership may range from a minimum of 500,000 to six million. This makes it the largest civil society organisation in the world, effectively ‘a state within a state’. See ‘RSS membership doubled in 10 years, says its official,’ The Hindu 15 August 2019. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/rss-membership-doubled-in-10-years-says-its-official/article29101108.ece. Accessed 26 June 2020.

15. In addition to the BJP and RSS, the Sangh Parivar also include a myriad of other smaller organisations which are increasingly important actors in Indian politics. These include the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (trade union), the Kisan Sabha (farmers’ union), the Vidya Bharati (educational network), the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (student union), and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram (‘tribal welfare’ organisation). See Anderson and Longkumer (2018, 372) and Vanaik (2017, 46).

16. In 2006 the government-appointed Sachar Commission estimated the Muslim population to be 13.4% of the population. It concluded that Muslims were the most marginalised community within India in terms of literacy and employment and that ‘the abysmally low representation of Muslim OBCs suggests that the benefits of entitlements meant for the backward classes are yet to reach them’ (Sachar 2006).

17. Other Backward Class is a term used by the government of India to refer to socially disadvantaged castes that form a significant part of the Hindu population.

18. See Bhatia (2017) for more on ‘love jihads’.

19. As of February 2021, there are over 11 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 resulting in over 150,000 deaths. https://covid19.who.int/ Accessed 26 February 2021.

20. See Scroll.in. 2020. ‘Following authoritarian regimes around the world, India is using Covid-19 pandemic to crush dissent’, May 15. https://scroll.in/article/961431/delhi-police-is-making-arbitrary-arrests-and-crushing-dissent-under-the-cloak-of-lockdown. Accessed 25 May 2020.

21. Estimates of those arrested in north-eastern Delhi alone number 800, according to The Indian Express, 13 April 2020: https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/ne-delhi-riots-800-arrests-made-as-mha-intervenes-6359541/) . Accessed 25 May 2020.

22. The Kumbh Mela is the largest Hindu festival and takes place every 12 years. Despite the global pandemic, it was brought forward one year as it was deemed to be astrologically more auspicious. The Kumbh Mela culminates at Hardiwar, Uttarakhand, where over nine million pilgrims congregated to bathe in the holy waters of the Ganges between 14 January and 27 April 2021. See https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/dehradun-news/91-million-thronged-mahakumbh-despite-covid-19-surge-govt-data-101619729096750.html. Accessed 20 May 2021. This led to an exponential increase in COVID-19 cases nationally that has been blamed for India’s ‘second wave’. See https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-miscellaneous/tp-others/kumbh-mela-cited-as-reason-behind-covid-surge-says-jain/article34562127.ece. Accessed 20 May 2021. As of May 2021, there have been over 25 million reported cases of COVID-19 resulting in almost 300,000 fatalities according to official statistics. https://covid19.who.int/. Accessed 20 May 2021. However, the real numbers are estimated to be far higher.https://science.thewire.in/health/the-reasons-to-believe-indias-tragedy-is-worse-than-it-looks/. Accessed 20 May 2021.

23. Sikhs have also been ‘othered’ in the wake of the farmers’ protests by government narratives which represent the mass protests as threats to national integrity posed by Sikh separatists (see Shani 2021).

24. In the West Bengal Legislative Assembly held in 2021, the BJP lost to the All-India Trinamool Congress by a significant margin (77 seats to 213 seats). https://results.eci.gov.in/Result2021/partywiseresult-S25.htm?st=S25. Accessed 20 May 2021.

25. An editorial in The Lancet was scathing about the Modi administration’s handling of the crisis concluding that ‘[d]espite warnings about the risks of superspreader events, the government allowed religious festivals to go ahead, drawing millions of people from around the country, along with huge political rallies – conspicuous for their lack of COVID-19 mitigation measures’ (The Lancet 2021, 1683).

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Giorgio Shani

Giorgio Shani is Professor of Politics and International Studies at International Christian University, Tokyo. He is the author of Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age (Routledge 2008) and Religion, Identity and Human Security (Routledge 2014) and co-editor of Protecting Human Security in a Post-9/11 World (Palgrave 2007), Rethinking Peace (Rowman and Littlefield 2019), and Religion and Nationalism in Asia (Routledge 2019). His articles have appeared in International Studies Review, International Political Sociology, International Studies Perspectives, The Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and Postcolonial Studies.