Hindutva: In all but name

The Indian State is under the shadow of the majoritarian creed, but it is not yet official

Hindutva is the proverbial elephant in the room, but everyone refuses to recognise it. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) pretend that they do not know anything about it, and all that the two organisations are interested in is nationalism, national culture, national security. The never-say-die secular critics refuse to accept that Hindutva has emerged as the dominant ideology of the government.

They continue to speak as though they are engaged in a fight to stop Hindutva from taking over the reins of power when as a matter of fact it is the ruling ideology. The secularists would need a different strategy to fight Hindutva when it is in the saddle compared to the time when it was trying to get into the saddle.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi gets the credit for establishing Hindutva as the reigning creed without, of course, using the label. There is indeed the irony that the advocates and partisans of Hindutva are quite embarrassed to admit that they have succeeded in replacing secularism with Hindutva, which was indeed the goal. Instead, Prime Minister Modi still chants ‘secularism’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘open society,’ and there is the nagging feeling in his mind that it is still not respectable or decent to utter the word Hindutva and equate it with democracy, freedom, and open society.

Modi and others seem to be acutely aware of the negative fallout if the RSS-BJP were to declare Hindutva as India’s ideology because that would equate India with the many Muslim-majority countries that are constitutional Islamic states, and it would be difficult to sustain the argument that Hindutva is not a sectarian creed.

In its second term in office, the Modi government has scored undeclared Hindutva victories in the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya at the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, with the Supreme Court ruling in favour of the temple, the criminalisation of triple talaq which many Muslims wrongly defended, the reading down of Article 370, which had given special status to Jammu and Kashmir, followed by the state’s bifurcation into two Union Territories, which is an undeclared triumph over a Muslim-majority state.

There is a move to push for a uniform civil code, which is an ideal without religious leanings but which the RSS and BJP see as a way of checking the privileging of Muslims. The population policies in Uttar Pradesh and Assam are again indirectly directed against Muslims. This is the fulfilment of the long-held demands of Hindutva agenda since Independence.

The ideological thrust of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat that Muslims in India share the same DNA with the Hindus is a way of saying that Muslims in India were originally Hindus, a way of disrespecting the religious beliefs of people other than Hindus. The Sikhs have always resented the argument of right-wing Hindus that there is no difference between Hindus and Sikhs, and that the Sikhs were Hindus by another name.

Many of the Hindutva ideologues argue rather sheepishly that Hindutva is secularism by another name because Hinduism as interpreted by British-Indian Indologists and English-educated Indians of the 19th century was the most tolerant religion and it accepted other religions and other sects within Hinduism in a spirit of bonhomie.

The fact was that Indians were arguing that Hinduism was tolerant, unlike the Abrahamic religions, even as they poured contempt at other faiths for being intellectually inferior. It was not an act of deliberate hypocrisy or villainy. Labelled uncouth natives by the colonialists, the English-educated Hindu was forced to hit back. The dialectic had its own traps. What was said in self-defence soon became the war cry of indignant right-wing nationalists, imitating the Western model of virulent nationalism.

An underlying theme of Hindutva is that Hindus, being 84% of the population, should have the final say in all matters and that this is indeed the logic of democracy, the rule of majority. English political thinkers like Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill readily recognised the dangers of dominance of the majority in full-fledged democracies and the dangers involved in it. In his famous address to voters in Bristol, his parliamentary constituency, Burke told them that he would not do what they wanted him to do, but that he would tell them what is right because he was morally obliged to do so.

Mill raised the alarm when he spoke about the tyranny of the majority. Interestingly, there was no universal suffrage in England at the time. The 1832 reform had just opened the door to voters who owned property and paid taxes. The 1867 expansion of voting rights was still in the future, and women were to get the voting right only in the next century.

The Modi government professes to support science and technology, though it leaves enough room for social belief systems that are anti-rational. There is also the recognition that what gives India the edge is its science and technological base, though it is on a modest scale compared to the West, China and Japan. Hindutva’s nationalist pride can be satisfied only through achievements in scientific and technological fields whose foundations had been laid in the secular, Nehruvian era. Though Modi is proud of spreading yoga as India’s gift to the world, the justification for yoga is derived from its rational benefits. But Hindutva’s basic thesis of ‘Hindus first’ creates the mood of intolerance, especially against Muslims, the largest religious minority. The Indian State today is under the shadow of Hindutva hegemony, but it is not yet official.

(The writer is a New Delhi-based political commentator)