Sajida recognised many of the men who came to her house that night and beat her father Akhlaq to death with the bricks that they found under his bed. It was already past ten when the 200-strong lynch mob of young men – her Hindu neighbours – forced its way into the house. Minutes earlier an announcement had been made over the newly installed loudspeakers of the Hindu temple in the village: one of the handful of Muslim families in the village – Sajida’s family – had eaten beef. By the time the police arrived, Mohammed Akhlaq was already dead. Sajida’s brother, twenty-two-year-old Danish, was fighting for his life. The police took away some meat they found in the fridge, saying they were sending it to a laboratory for ‘forensic testing’. Many hours later, when the media descended on the small village just sixty kilometres from Delhi, it was eighteen- year-old Sajida who spoke to them. Her anguished question ‘If it is not beef, will they bring my father back?’ reverberated around the country. Others asked – suppose it had been beef? Is India now a country where a human being can be beaten to death for what they have eaten?

The Hindu supremacists’ Hindutva ideology does not represent a return to ancient Indian traditions as its exponents claim. It is in fact deeply colonial, a product of the nineteenth century. It was informed by the British rulers’ ‘scriptural’ understandings of Hinduism which, in a context of multiple understandings and practices within Hinduism, drew on specifically elite, upper caste, and patriarchal interpretations. Part of the Hindutva project continues to be one of homogenising, Brahmanising and masculinising Hinduism – for example destroying temples to Hindu Goddesses and Gods whose origins are in indigenous religions or those worshipped by Dalits. Despite recent attempts to mobilise Dalit communities against Muslims and to appropriate the legacy of the Dalit leader and thinker – and architect of the Indian constitution – B.R. Ambedkar, Hindutva is deeply invested in the maintenance of the caste hierarchy and in violence against Dalits. The dehumanisation underpinning this has been underlined yet again in a spate of horrific attacks on Dalits in recent weeks. When two young children – three-year-old Vaibhav and nine-month-old Divya – were burnt to death in BJP-ruled Haryana when their home was set on fire by upper caste men as the family slept inside, Modi’s Minister VK Singh absolved the government of responsibility by likening the murder to ‘someone throwing stones at a dog’.

Hindutva was also shaped by the British response to the first war of independence of 1857. This unprecedented wave of uprisings had demonstrated the potential for anti-colonial solidarity between Hindus and Muslims who shared a syncretic culture. The post-1857 British rewriting of Indian history as an age-old struggle between Hindus and Muslim ‘invaders’ – part of a deliberate strategy of divide and rule – was adopted wholesale by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy, and continues to be used to target India’s Muslims as ‘enemies’ and ‘outsiders’. While after independence the RSS adopted the rhetoric of economic nationalism, and continues to do so when convenient, Hindu supremacist forces played little part in the anticolonial movement, focusing their attentions on Muslims rather than the British rulers, and in fact actively collaborated with the British on a number of occasions. It was in the 1990s that the Hindu far right decisively emerged from the political shadows it had occupied since the RSS assassinated Gandhi in 1948 for ‘compromising with Muslims’. Its visibility soared with its national campaign to build a temple on the site of an existing 500-year-old mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in North India. Collections were made in Hindu temples in Leicester and Brent to send gold bricks for the construction. On 6 December 1992, the historic Babri Masjid was destroyed by a crowd of 15,000 Hindu right ‘volunteers’ led by BJP leaders. This was followed by a cycle of orchestrated inter-religious violence across the country, in which 900 people lost their lives. By 1998, the first national BJP-led government came to power. Hindu fascism was well on its way. This rise was inextricably tied to the restructuring of capital in the era of neoliberal globalisation and the Indian state’s adoption of economic liberalisation. Following the first IMF loan to India in 1982, the Congress Party, which had been in power almost continuously since Independence, increasingly sought legitimacy for interlinked policies of economic restructuring and militarisation through Hindu-inflected nationalist rhetoric. The participation of national as well as local Congress leaders in attacks on minority communities including the devastating 1984 pogroms of Sikhs which followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi marked a new phase in which Hindu chauvinism was explicitly visible in the material practices of the state. This was intensified after the second larger IMF loan of 1991. If the last quarter-century has seen all the main political parties in India adopt neoliberal policies, it is the BJP that has embraced neoliberalism, both ideologically and in practice, in its most unadulterated form. Transnational corporations, both Indian and foreign, lauded Modi as ‘India’s CEO’ in-waiting and Washington indicated its preference for the BJP long before Modi’s electoral victory last year, drawn by the vision he offered of a ‘shining’ India effectively shorn of most of the awkward trappings of democracy. Environmental regulations, human-rights concerns and labour laws would no longer matter. The legitimacy for a state that openly sells off the country’s land and labour in this vision would come from an aggressive redefinition of India as an exclusively Hindu nation. A three-day World Hindu Congress last November was sponsored by Jaguar, Dunlop, Jindal and other transnational companies. A pamphlet distributed at the Congress listed the five enemies of Hindu society, five fingers in the claw of the demon Mahasur. Among them were Muslims who are the ‘poisonous fruit of Islam’ and Marxists, ‘the thumb of the demon’s claw’, which has given birth to ‘multiple bastard offspring like Communists, Socialists, Liberals, Maoists, Anarchists and all other forms of Leftists’. British colonialism in India began with a transnational corporation, the East India Company. The new East India Companies are those like the British Vedanta, currently fighting a battle with Adivasi (indigenous) communities determined to protect their sacred mountain and source of livelihood from bauxite mining; or Essar which has funded a murderous paramilitary, the recently revived Salwa Judum, to terrorise and displace thousands from their homes and into camps. If the high pitch of corporate enthusiasm for self-styled ‘Man of Development’ Modi has been tempered somewhat in recent months it is not because of the escalating bloody wars of displacement and dispossession, the multiplying bans of books and burnings of human beings. It is not because of the assassinations of rationalist thinkers and activists, or the wave of writers, artists, scholars and scientists who have returned government awards in protest. It is not because of the lynchings of elderly Muslim men in small villages, and of young Muslim men in cybercities. The corporates are merely anxious that Modi is not going far enough fast enough.

Modi’s meetings with Ministers will be only part of the story of his visit to Britain. The Hindu right has a network of organisations in Britain, and they have been promoting him as a ‘superstar’ politician and, never short on hyperbole or shy of evoking historical parallels others might think better avoided, have promised to showcase him in a massive ‘Olympics style’ event at Wembley Stadium (tagline: ‘Two Great Nations – One Glorious Future’).