The country’s now 75-year-old constitution enshrines egalitarian principles, including social equality and non-discrimination. The word “secular” was added to the Preamble in 1976, but the Constitution does not explicitly require the separation of religion and government.
Leaders of the Congress party who fought for independence advocated for an India that recognized all citizens and faiths as equal. A Hindu nationalist assassinated Gandhi, who envisioned a secular state free from discrimination, in 1948. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, believed that secularism was essential to building a peaceful society and avoiding another tragedy like what followed Partition; he saw those trying to divide India along religious lines, especially Hindu groups, as the nation’s greatest threat.
How did Hindu nationalists come to power?
Hindu nationalism was first articulated in the 1920s by Indian author and politician V.D. Savarkar in his book Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?. Hindu nationalists believe Hindus are the “true sons of the soil” because their holy lands are in India, whereas the Christian and Muslim holy lands are outside it. They generally champion policies intended to make India a Hindu state. Many see Indian Muslims as suspect foreigners, despite the fact that most are descendants of Hindus who converted to Islam. Hindu nationalists point to Partition and the creation of Pakistan as the ultimate manifestation of Muslim disloyalty.
Political tensions started to strain India’s secular model in the 1980s. After suffering an electoral defeat in 1977, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi exploited religious divisions to help return the Congress party to power. Her son, Rajiv, who further favoured Hindus, succeeded Indira, who was assassinated by Sikh bodyguards in 1984. “Congress’s sustained move toward Hindu majoritarianism over several decades created fertile ground for the more extreme ideology of the BJP,” pro-BJP journalist Kanchan Chandra wrote in magazine Foreign Affairs.
Founded in 1980, the BJP traces its origins to the political wing of the RSS, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer group. The BJP came to power in 1998 elections, though it shelved its more radical goals to hold together a coalition it led until 2004 when the Congress party regained power. These goals included ending the special status of Kashmir, a disputed Muslim-majority region; constructing a Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya; and creating a uniform civil code so all citizens would have the same personal laws. (There is currently a separate Muslim personal law for issues such as marriage and inheritance.)
In 2014, the BJP won a single-party majority for the first time in the Lok Sabha – the lower house of parliament and India’s most influential political body – making party leader Narendra Modi prime minister. The party again secured a majority in 2019 after a divisive campaign filled with anti-Muslim messaging, and Modi’s government somehow once again retained power after the Parliamentary elections in 2024, reduced majority notwithstanding.
In this background it also becomes important to delve into the interpretation of Who is a Hindu and What is Hidutva, as espoused by the ruling party, RSS and other right-wing Hindu organisations in India, before we proceed to analyse how Islamophobia has pervaded every walk of Muslims’ life in India.
Who Is A Hindu?
The term “Hindu” was first used as a geographical signifier in the fifth century BCE to denote the region east of the Indus River. It only evolved into a religious signifier 1,300 years later in the eighth century CE because Muslim traders and travellers to South Asia – themselves members of a new but relatively coherent monotheistic religion – needed a signifier to overcome the cognitive disarray that came with encountering a gamut of animistic beliefs and practices that, in some instances, were similar to each other, and in others, starkly contradictory. Indeed, far from being a cohesive religion, what is today referred to as Hinduism has been defined as a “conglomeration of sects”. Notably, the term only came to possess religious signification for Hindus themselves in the sixteenth century CE, though the set of traditions it signifies continues to remain diverse. For these reasons, “Hinduism as a religious category” has been described as “a practical signifier . . . scholars of religion” rely on to make epistemic claims, though this does not of course override the fact that it remains a category for thoroughly heterogeneous beliefs. In Hindutva, the signification of “Hindu” loses considerable nuance. Instead, it signifies the coagulation of multiple concepts – land, language, and religion – into a monolithically racialised category.
Hindutva contends that Hindusthan (land of Hindus) encompasses what is today known as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This concept has been referred to as Akhand Bharat (undivided India) since partition in 1947. The dominant language defining the people of this land is deemed to be Hindi, with the dominant religious identification being Hinduism. As such, Hindutva imagines Hindus as a race descendent from those who historically lived in Hindusthan, spoke Sanskrit, the language from which Hindi is mostly derived, and practiced Hinduism. In the context of a Westphalian international system, Hindutva reconfigures the otherwise heterogeneous “Hindu” into a singularised and thus racialised ideological tool for an Indian ethno-nationalist project. While these founding ideas of Hindutva originated in the nineteenth century, the grassroots movements – like the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS – organised formally in the 1920s (1) in response to the Khilafat movement, a pan-Islamist movement which sought the restoration of the caliphate after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and (2) as an independence movement against British colonial rule. Insofar as they were anticolonial in their actions and aspirations, the Hindutva movements have till today adopted the racialised discourse the British produced of the subcontinent. One of the most brutal legacies of European colonialism is the invention of race. Race was constructed to organise and divide colonial subjects who seemingly shared “visible and heritable traits” into discernible groupings to make colonial rule administratively easier.
In South Asia, a critical manifestation of colonial racialisation was the grouping of people into mutually antagonistic and indeed, monolithic religious categories of Hindus and Muslims. To construct a racialised cartography of South Asia, the colonial administration gathered historical data and interpreted it through the lens of a pseudo-scientific racial logic. This was a fourfold process which entailed (1) the reduction of a person’s diverse identities into an all-encompassing singular identity, (2) the abstraction of those defined and anchored in terms of that singularised identity into a monolithic group, (3) the deduction that a person’s every action can be understood as a manifestation of his singularised identity, and (4) the notion that those actions could then be treated as defining characteristics of the entire group of people who have been anchored in terms of that singularised identity. The consequence of this logic was the division of pre-colonial South Asia by the British into two distinct, and indeed, mutually hostile epochs defined by religion – the Hindu civilisation (i.e. Ancient India, pre-thirteenth century CE) and the Muslim civilisation (i.e. Medieval India, thirteenth century CE to nineteenth century CE). Notwithstanding the ahistorical quality of such a characterisation of South Asia – “counting numbers and giving them religious labels was unheard of prior to the nineteenth century,” indicating that South Asians did not just identify with their religious affiliations – the production of racialised knowledge has had damning consequences for the religio-political composition for colonial and post-colonial India. Not only did it provide the historical justification for the British colonial state to define, act toward, and govern South Asians in terms of their apparent all-encompassing religious identifications, both Hindu nationalists and Islamists have derived their divisive political ideologies from the monolithic significations of the colonial categories of “Hindu” and “Muslim”.
In the context of Hindutva, colonial definitions of “Hindu” and “Muslim” became and remain foundational to an ethno-nationalist vision of a distinctly Hindu India. Hindutva actors have appropriated the problematic notion that Ancient India was a coherent and cohesive Hindu civilisation to argue that Hindu predominance over the region coincided with India’s golden era – as global leaders in political innovation, economic development, and the creative arts. The golden era came to an end after what is deemed to be the Muslim invasion of Hindu India.
The BJP’s outline of a Hindutva vision of India characterises the decline of the country with the arrival of the “Islamic sword,” and indeed, refers to the “era of Islamic invasions” as “the bloodiest period in the history of mankind”. Hindus were thus deemed to have been trapped in a state of “enslavement” since the commencement of Muslim rule. By labelling Muslims as invaders – thus, fundamentally foreign to the region – Hindutva actors (1) assume the historical people and polities of South Asia to have been held together by a collective consciousness of shared Hinduness, (2) imagine the contemporary nation-state of India as possessing an essential relationship with those polities, and thus (3) characterise contemporary Hindus as the natural “inheritors of the past and claimants to dominance in the present” because, to them, India has always been Hindu.
Thus, to Hindutva actors “Hindu” mutates into a signifier that delineates the parameters of belonging in the Hindu nation of India. By virtue of its ethno-nationalist quality, it is a project that privileges and safeguards majoritarian groups through the de-minoritisation of public space. To do so, Hindutva must project itself above and against other forms of identification that do not fit into the rubric of its conception of a Hindu. Identities often on the receiving end of sub-alternisation include (1) Christians, because they are deemed to be reminiscent of colonialism, (2) leftists, because they contest the ideology’s ahistorical narration of South Asian history, and (3) as is the subject of this article, Muslims, because they are deemed to be the unrivalled threat to the Hindu nation of India.
Muslims As The Other
Hindutva frames Muslims as antagonistic to Hindu India in a number of ways. As has been mentioned earlier, the period of Muslim predominance is viewed as a foreign invasion. Hindutva narrations of historical wars that occurred between different kingdoms tend to be amputated from their spatio-temporal contexts and become reframed as a series of wars between heroic indigenous Hindus and barbaric foreign Muslims. Three notable examples of this include narrations of the 12th-century battles between the Rajput Prithviraj Chauhan and Sultan Muhammad Ghaur, the 16th-century battles between the Rajput Maharana Pratap and the Mughal emperor Akbar, and the seventeenth-century battles between the Maratha ruler Shivaji and the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Claimed to be the final Hindu Emperor, Prithviraj Chauhan is depicted (1) as having lost to Muhammad Ghaur’s devious warring tactics and (2) as having been captured, blinded, and executed – though not before assassinating Muhammad Ghaur as a blind prisoner of war. Prithviraj Chauhan receives even greater veneration because he courageously refused to convert to Islam. Maharana Pratap is characterised as having defended Hindu India (i.e. Hinduism) from Akbar’s territorial expansion (i.e. expansion of Islam) even though historical evidence indicates that “both sides had the support of both Muslims and Hindus”. Finally, while Shivaji was a pragmatic leader willing to enter into alliances with and against Hindus and Muslims alike, Hindutva ignores his embracement of realpolitik and instead describes him as a bastion of Hinduism who valiantly defended Maharashtra from Aurangzeb’s Islamic tyranny. Through the re-historicisation of these conflicts as examples of the endemic Hindu – Muslim conflict, Hinduism became conflated with courage and righteousness, while Islam became equated with barbarism and wickedness.
It has been noted that Hindutva regards the period preceding Muslim predominance as the golden era of Hindu civilisation. Beyond the political, economic, and cultural achievements of Hindu kingdoms, it appears that Hindutva conceives of Hindu civilisation as glorious because of the absence of a significant number of Muslims in the region. Consequently, the numerical growth of Muslims is regarded with suspicion. Since Muslim rulers were regarded as barbaric and wicked, the implication was that Islam could only spread through barbarism and wickedness.
Thus, Hindutva rationalises the numerical growth of Islam and Muslims to be a function of conversions enforced en masse by ruthless Muslim rulers – though this too is an ahistorical account. It has been empirically demonstrated that Islam spread gradually, over a period of some 400 years, because of geological changes (e.g. the way rivers flow) and the resultant economic contingencies (e.g. implications for irrigation and agriculture), rather than in a sudden massive wave that Hindutva actors claim. Nonetheless, the origins of the 500 million or so Muslims in South Asia today (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) are treated to be a product of a vicious Medieval Muslim policy: convert or die. The logic of Hindutva dictates that (1) Muslims only became Muslims out of fear, (2) all Muslims in the region were originally Hindu, and thus (3) Muslims today can and should be reconverted to Hinduism since their Hindu ancestors only became Muslim as the alternative was death.
Beyond invading the subcontinent, brutalising the Hindu Kingdoms, and forcibly converting Hindus to Islam, Hindutva claims that Muslim rulers were zealots because they repeatedly destroyed Hindu temples across South Asia. While Muslim rulers and their representatives no doubt destroyed numerous temples, they also patronized and funded many. What is more, Hindu rulers too were responsible for destroying the temples of their Hindu rivals. Hindu and Muslim rulers alike destroyed temples because they were sites of political and economic power, not just religious symbolism. Temples signified a sovereign’s control over the region and also functioned as a storage facility for wealth. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that regardless of their religious convictions, aspiring hegemons would seek to assert their control by destroying spaces of power associated with their rivals. Nonetheless, Hindutva imposes a modern understanding of temples as purely religious spaces onto the past, zeros in exclusively onto incidents of temple destruction by Muslims, and rationalises it through the lens of Hindu-Muslim religious irreconcilability. Consequently, temple destructions become framed as an Islamic – and indeed, sacrilegious – assault on sites of Hindu worship, and thus the Hindu Gods themselves – rendering Muslim rulers as embodiments of Rakshasas (the demon enemies of the Hindu Gods). As such, Muslims are conceived of as barbaric, wicked, and demonic in opposition to the courageous, righteous, and Godly Hindus. One of the most devastating implications of this discourse was the series of Hindu-Muslim riots which claimed over 2,000 lives in the aftermath of the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, by Hindutva militants who argued that the 460-year-old mosque ought to be destroyed to avenge the hitherto unverified claim that a Hindu temple dedicated to the God-King Rama was demolished to make room for it. Their interpretation of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana, has also led them to conclude Rama’s birthplace to be Ayodhya – thus elevating not just the perceived sacrosanctity of the space, but their hostility toward the very presence of a mosque there.
Hindutva also characterises Muslims as bandits for having (1) stolen land and dividing Hindusthan into India and Pakistan, and (2) robbing India of secularism and religious equality.