Shashi Tharoor’s latest book, Why I Am A Hindu, is a schizophrenic one. The book can neatly be divided into two mutually exclusive parts: the first part is about Tharoor, the Hindu, and focuses on his interpretation of Hinduism’s eclectic pluralism and his own personal understanding of it; the second is Tharoor, the “secular” Congress politician, which brings forth the tired, old polemical view of Hindutva. So there are two Tharoors at work here.

The link to the two parts is tenuous, and one suspects that the need for part one is purely driven by Tharoor, the secular politician’s need to rubbish Hindutva, which is nothing but political Hinduism, something he wants to delegitimise.

But this is where the second bout of schizophrenia surfaces. To delegitimise one strand of Hinduism, you need to do more than just conflate the violent acts of some “gau rakshaks”, and the Lutyens media’s narration of events post-May 2014 (and some pre-2014), with those you deem to be “non-Hindu” by your definition. So, you get nowhere beyond mention of murders like Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, Junaid and Gauri Lankesh, with the blame for the last-named killing being tied directly to her “excoriating attacks on the Sangh parivar”, a charge that is far from proven.

Tharoor’s demonisation of Hindutva focuses on weaving violent fringe groups, the loose cannons in the Sangh parivar, and communal incidents since Independence, and especially 2002, into one quilt of intolerance. Just as some Hindu partisans would like to reduce all of Islam to jihadi Islam, Tharoor does the same hit-job on political Hinduism. He traces all of it to an ideology which was first crafted by Veer Savarkar, expanded on by Guru M S Golwalkar, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) second chief, and given political shape by one of the Jana Sangh’s founders, Deendayal Upadhyaya.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of today is the inheritor of all three streams of thought, though one can hardly call today’s political Hindutva of the BJP as being anywhere close to the radical ideology envisioned by Savarkar. In his own time, Savarkar was disillusioned by the pusillanimity of the Sangh, and he would probably see today’s BJP as a namby-pamby outfit unfit to call itself a party espousing Hindutva. But to Tharoor it does not matter, since the idea is to smear political Hinduism with the blood-lust of those Muslim-hating vigilante groups that have crept out of the woodwork, possibly emboldened by the rise of the BJP to power in many states. So, to restate the obvious: Tharoor’s declaration of his Hindu-ness, or Hindutva, is largely polemical.

A third bit of schizophrenia (or convenient amnesia) is visible when Tharoor thrashes the 2002 Gujarat riots, and the Kandhamal attacks on Christians in Odisha, without once mentioning what provoked them: the burning of a coach full of karsevaks on the Sabarmati Express and the murder of a revered Hindu leader, Swami Laxmananda Saraswati, respectively.

While no one – least of all this writer – can support any kind of violence in the name of cow protection or even a “legitimate” Hindu cause, it is a pity that a public intellectual like Tharoor falls into the same trap of using convenient rogue elements to rubbish the whole of political Hinduism. You can see this tactic in many mainstream TV studios, where some extreme and loud-mouthed elements from the Hindu fringe will be called to represent the Hindu side, while the other side will be represented by people with seemingly sane arguments. If you choose to define Hindutva forces through the activities and voices of the extreme elements, you are essentially refusing to engage with the real issues that bother Hindus today – illegal immigration and changing demography against Hindus in some states (including Tharoor’s Kerala), the ethnic cleansing of the Pandits in Kashmir, the imposition of the Right to Education Act only on the majority community, the takeover of Hindu temples and resources by state governments, et al.

Above all, there is the unmistakable trend among secular parties in search of the minority bloc vote to delegitimise Hinduism itself, by conflating it with Brahminism and caste inequities alone. Hnduism is more than Brahminism and caste, just as Christianity is more than just papism or Islam jihadism. Moreover, Leftist histories have consistently ignored the impact of Islamic iconoclasm and bigotry that have left huge scars on the Hindu psyche. You cannot heal the wounds left behind by history by pretending they were never inflicted. They can heal only with the truth.

Tharoor repeatedly talks of Hindu majoritarianism, but, equally schizophrenically, he believes that Hindus do not constitute one block, given their extreme diversity. Can you be majoritarian without actually being a majority in the political sense of the term? He says: “I have often argued that we are all minorities in India, given our divisions of language, religion, caste, and cultural practices; recognising and managing that diversity is a far better way of promoting unity than imposing one view on the rest a method that will lead not back to a golden age but to certain disaster.” Accepted, but he does not follow up the logic by asserting that even Hindus must benefit from articles 25-30, which seek to protect only minority institutions from state intervention. What stopped him or his party from taking up this Hindu cause of equal treatment with minorities for 70 years?

Tharoor calls Narendra Modi’s 282-seat Lok Sabha seats as a “crushing majority” when crushing majorities were the kinds of mandate Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi once had, complete with even more “crushing majorities” in the Rajya Sabha. Modi’s “crushing majority” has not been adequate to get even sensible economic legislation through the upper house (like the Land Acquisition Act amendments), but Tharoor would like us to believe that this is indeed a crushing majority.

The only issue of genuine Hindu concern he engages with are religious conversions, where he says he would support legislation to ban mass conversions, leaving the right to change one’s faith purely as an individual right. But so far neither he nor his party has done any such thing, and if the BJP were to bring such a legislation, one can be sure Tharoor’s party will denounce it as being unconstitutional since it would contradict the promise of freedom of conscience and religion, including the freedom to propagate. And Tharoor himself has another bout of schizophrenia over this. After making the brave statement (brave for a Congressman, that is) that he would support a constitutional amendment to bar mass conversions, he quotes the Hindu verse, Ekam Sat, Vipra Bahuda Vadanti (There is one truth, but the wise call it by different names) to espouse the opposite.

He asks: “Why, then, are any of my co-religionists unhappy about some tribal Hindus becoming Christians? If a Hindu decides he wishes to be a Christian, how does it matter that he has found a different way of stretching his hands out towards god? Truth is one, the Hindu believes; but there are many ways of attaining it.”

This is ingenuous. To live up to their ideals, Hindus must behave like doormats, allowing the others to stomp all over it. However, one can understand the need for this kind of contradiction in his views. If Tharoor has to seek re-election in Thiruvananthapuram, he cannot do so by espousing a ban on mass conversions that is so dear to proselytising Christianity and Islam.

This schizophrenic attitude lies at the core of the Hindu dilemma today: a liberal religion (or way of life) has to prove itself liberal when rival faiths challenge it, but the rivals don’t have to prove they are equally liberal, since their religion sanctions a narrow view of god, and exclusion of those who don’t believe in him (and it is always a him, never a her, in the Semitic faiths).

Tharoor indirectly brings out this dilemma that Hindus face, where any attempt to strengthen Hinduism or make it more assertive invariably involves using the same techniques that its rivals use to grow the numbers, but, in the process, there will be some loss of what we call Hinduism. This is not an easy dilemma to resolve, for if you choose not to fight your rivals, you can lose; if you choose to fight and seek to counter-proselytise (through the Ghar Wapsi campaign), you become more like them. Tharoor has no answers to resolving this dilemma, which is a genuine one. The Gita had a clear answer: you have to do your duty and fight, and, in some senses, this is what political Hinduism is trying to do.