The Rise of Hindutva

Right is dominantly pro-hindu and has enjoyed broad support among members of the higher castes and in northern India. It has attempted to attract support from lower castes, particularly through the appointment of several lower-caste members to prominent party positions. After BJS (political wing of RSS) government collapsed in July 1979, BJS subsequently reorganised itself as the BJP under the leadership of Vajpayee, Lal Krishan Advani, and Murali Manohar Joshi. BJP advocated hindutva (“Hindu-ness”), an ideology that sought to define Indian culture in terms of Hindu values, and it was highly critical of the policies and practices that should be of a secular nation.

The BJP began to have electoral success in 1989, when it capitalized on anti-Muslim feeling by calling for the erection of a Hindu temple in an area in Ayodhya considered sacred by Hindus but at that time occupied by the Babri Masjid. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 by organizations seen to be associated with the BJP caused a major backlash against the party. The mosque’s destruction also led to violence throughout the country that left more than 1,000 dead. The party was regarded with skepticism and suspicion by many.

The term “Hindutva” was adopted by the right-wing nationalist and Indian freedom movement activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (also called Vir Savarkar) in 1923, while he was imprisoned for subverting the British and for inciting war against it. While imprisoned he wrote Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923), coining the term Hindutva. Savarkar though pro-hindutva wasn’t really setting out to create a Hindu nation. India was, he asserted, a nation based on hindu-ness in an organic sense.

Vir Savarkar

The topic of Hindutva has now become disputed at much larger scale more or less because of the unclear facts about what the term truly means and what is being imposed on the people. The time we are in, the term is thrown vaguely almost everywhere. And politicians because they know about the level of clarity people have are now using it as much as they can to be in power by literally brain washing and creating the fear of non-hindus in the minds of the people of this nation. People of India are either mostly not educated enough to even have a proper understanding about many topics or just not care about these topics and if you add poverty to the mixture you’ll get a set of people who may do anything just earn a sum of money to aid their survival.

Hinduism and Hindutva are very different topics. Shashi Tharoor probes the fundamentals and complexities of Hinduism, presents both its ancient texts and the modern beliefs of Hindutva descriptively and on their own terms to offer a lucid but brilliant account of one of the world’s “oldest and greatest” faiths.

“Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion which has always been able to assert itself without threatening others. But this is not what destroyed the Babri Masjid, nor that spewed in hate-filled diatribes by communal politicians,” — Tharoor writes in the book “The Hindu Way — An Introduction To Hinduism”

Hindutva ideology is a malign distortion of Hinduism, which is a religion of astonishing breadth and of awe-inspiring tolerance. Tharoor asserts that the Hindutva politics must be resisted for presenting a view of Hinduism that is at odds with everything the eclectic religion has sought to stand for. Hindutva seeks to refashion Hinduism as something it has never been. The Hindutva project seeks to reinvent Hindu identity with a new belief structure and a new vocabulary.