In the first part, we saw the development of Hindutva ideology in pre-independent India. In this section, we shall see the evolution of political Hindutva after independence, especially beginning with the assassination of Gandhi by Godse. Political Hindutva has become strong, but a failure to define the basic terms by the Constitution, academia, or the judiciary seems to be causing problems as we struggle with the alleged rise of ‘Hindu fundamentalism’. This allows forces inimical to India to constantly badger India’s reputation by worrying about the rise of ‘fascism’ based on Hinduism and the problems it is causing other religious minorities.

Godse and the Killing of the Mahatma

Nathuram Godse, an ex-member of the RSS, assassinated Gandhi in 1948, leading to a nationwide ban imposed on the RSS until July 1949. There was a ban on the publication of Godse’s defence for more than a decade. Godse, for one, was not a fanatic and was critical of Savarkar’s philosophy too. Godse also never doubted the patriotism of Gandhi, despite having contradictory strands.

Koenraad Elst discusses Godse’s defence in his book, ‘Why I Killed the Mahatma.‘ Gandhi’s repeated fasts mostly against his own followers but never against the Muslim League; support of Ali Brothers; support of Khilafat movement; support to the Amir of Afghanistan when the latter was contemplating to attack British India; asking Hindu refugees to go back to Pakistan even at the risk of death;  appeasing Jinnah by excessive concessions; allowing Sindh and North-West Frontier Province to split away from Mumbai Presidency in 1925; befriending Suhrawardy, who as a Chief Minister of Bengal remained inactive on Direct Action Day;  the opposition to Arya Samaj and his silence on the killing of Swamy Shraddhananda; forcing the Indian government to pay 550 million rupees to Pakistan, who in turn, in all probabilities, used it to attack India; stopping Vande Mataram because it displeased Muslims; avoiding references to Shivaji Maharaj; getting a green stripe instead of pure saffron in the Indian flag; and even proposing a 100% Muslim cabinet were all hard-core Muslim appeasement politics according to Godse.

Gandhi’s recruitment of soldiers during World War I; a letter to Hitler as a ‘friend’ in a bid to change his heart; and asking Jews to peacefully accept killing as an example of supreme non-violence were dents in his image of peace. Elst says Gandhi made a grave mistake in thinking that one could make the enemy disarm by first disarming oneself. Perhaps the most mysterious was Gandhi asking Patel to step down in favour of Nehru (who lost all the votes) as the leader and future PM of the country.

Godse might have had his reasons, but his revenge immensely damaged the Hindu cause. He made villains out of the RSS and simultaneously made Gandhi a martyr. Had Gandhi lived, the horrors of partition might have made people rebel against him. There was a certain construction of his image post-independence, too. The Quit India collapsed in 1942, and our independence had a lot more reasons apart from non-violence: Subhash Bose, the Naval mutinies, World War 2, the friendlier Labour Government in England, and the post-war economic hardships of England.

Political Consequences of the Assassination: Political Hindutva Begins

Following the assassination, the Hindu Mahasabha went out of action, and the government banned the RSS. A year later, the government removed the ban after forcing the RSS to comply with its demands, especially the drafting of a written constitution. It also paved the way for the RSS to start its own political force after a complete lack of support from other politicians. In 1951, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS, or Jana Sangh) came into being. Deendayal Upadhyay, a member of the RSS, was one of the founding members of the BJS and later became its president. The Jana Sangh only had moderate success in politics and remained a marginal presence in Indian politics between 1951 and 1977. However, after poor results in the 1980 election, members of the BJS broke away to form the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.

The Sangh Parivar today is a family of Hindu nationalist organisations with the RSS at its centre. The BJP is the political wing of the Sangh Parivar. The BJP won the 2014 and 2019 general elections with a majority, forming governments under Narendra Modi. The relationship between the RSS and the BJP is that between a mentor organisation and its executive branch (in the field of politics). Hence, Hindutva, beginning as a social revivalist-reformist movement, later took an anti-Islamic stance and finally evolved into a political force. Today, all three elements combine in various proportions.

Post-independent strengthening of Hindutva

Post-Independent India, largely free of the idea of Hindu pride, voted repeatedly for the Congress. However, an influential Marxist-communist academia with political patronage continued the intellectual violence against Indian culture. Important issues over the ensuing decades generally led the Hindus through frustration, anger, and finally, rejection of the Congress. The creation of “minority-ism” instead of “inclusiveness” and the perception of “secularism” as appeasement of minorities and ‘liberalism’ as abusing the majority finally took their toll on the Congress.

The Shah Bano and the Uniform Civil Code issues were some of the first issues that started the rise of political Hindutva. The Uniform Civil Code remained unachievable but was firmly in the background. The Shah Bano controversy reignited the debate over the Uniform Civil Code. Following a Supreme Court judgement to pay alimony to a divorced wife, under pressure from the Muslim Personal Law Board, Rajiv Gandhi’s government passed the Muslim Women Act. This nullified the 1985 Supreme Court judgement and put forward alimony for Muslim women in line with the Muslim Personal Law Board’s interpretation of Sharia. Hindutva organisations saw this as an act of minority appeasement.

Shortly after, the VHP reignited a centuries-old conflict over the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The Rath Yatra of LK Advani (1990) led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. The BJP’s rise to political power and the perception of a growing ‘communalization’ of the Hindu majority followed this event. As Koenraad Elst describes these events wonderfully in his book ‘Decolonizing the Hindu Mind’, the post-demolition riots led to descriptions of Hindutva organisations as para-military fascist organisations to make India an authoritarian Hindu state. Cow slaughter has always been a contentious issue in India, from the 1857 mutiny through the Arya Samaj and Gandhi to the constitutional debates. Many states have implemented restrictions or bans on cow slaughter, but the debate is predominantly on the relationship between religious communities.

Protests following famous painter MF Husain’s nude depictions of Indian devis also led to the characterization of Hindutva as archaic and authoritarian. The Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samithi protested the book of Wendy Doniger on Hindus for malicious depiction and lodged cases against the publisher, Penguin India, in 2010. The publishers, in an out-of-court settlement, recalled and destroyed all remaining copies of the book. This became an indication of the lack of freedom of expression in India. Today, as scholars like Koenraad Elst point out, the debate views the Hindutva movement on the one hand as symptomatic of the Hindu community’s concerns, and on the other, it views the fringe element as at odds with India’s Hindu majority.

Hindutva: defence or offence?

What exactly is this phenomenon of Hindutva? Indian and foreign intellectuals’ hostile and biased reporting has dominated the entire discourse on Hinduism and Hindutva. The view of the Hindu intellectual arguing from the indigenous perspectives rarely comes across in the debates. What does Hindutva entail? Is it some reform process that tries to purify the ‘religion’ of its perceived ills? Is it a manifestation of a defence against the hostile elements attacking Hindus and Hinduism at both the intellectual and physical levels starting in the 13^th century?

The history of attacks on Indian culture and Hindus has been a constant stream where one replaced the other in succession. Islamic rule, colonial rule, the missionaries, the Marxists, and the colonised Indians after independence, have formed one nearly unbroken spectrum of attacks on Hindus. Indology emanating from German universities and now American universities remains the biggest supplier of intellectual ammunition against Hindus.

In understanding Hindutva as a physical or intellectual defence or a matter of Dharma-Raksha, the responses across centuries become clear. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was responding to the colonial-missionary criticisms of an impure religion. Believing whatever they said about us, he went about purifying Hinduism, cleaning off its ‘superstitious’ elements like rituals, idols, and mindless pujas. This was immense intellectual violence, in fact, as he failed to understand the basic learning configuration of Indian culture, which has roots in rituals.

The learning configuration of Western culture remains ‘religion’ and hence, in that framework, they saw religions wherever they went to colonise. For the English, ‘Hinduism’ was another religion, and yet they could not fathom how it fitted into the definition of religion. It is the biggest blunder of Indian intellectuals and academia that, despite having the most severe difficulties in understanding Hinduism as a religion, they still insist on calling the huge diversity of phenomena a ‘religion.’

Balagangadhara’s thesis about religions and traditions is simple. Religions have doctrines at their base, and they divide people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ or believers and unbelievers; traditions have rituals at their base, and they unify people. The overwhelming attitude towards a different opinion in a traditional world is indifference, and this has been the Indian solution to multiculturalism and pluralism.

Savarkar was responding to the perceived Gandhian and Congress appeasement policies that were damaging the cause of Hindus. Whether it was Savarkar, Golwalkar, or anybody else in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, their thoughts were an evolving process. This was indeed a unique phenomenon to some extent because Indian culture peculiarly never critiqued alien cultures the way the latter did in turn. Before the Islamic invasions, Indian culture was largely free of analysis or critique of other belief systems.

There was an intense debating tradition, but it was never a physical attack on opposing views. The debates were on the true nature of reality, the meaning of Vedanta, and other such things. It is a defining feature of traditions as opposed to religion that the former says, “I am right but you are not wrong” and the latter says, “I am right and you are wrong.” The latter thought does not exist in traditional societies. It is now the intense religionization of traditions that makes the Hindu sit up and say that other religions are wrong. This phenomenon is at the core of the more violent forms that Hindu revivalism now takes.

Secularism leading to fundamentalism

Jakob De Roover and Sarah Claerhout, in their books and essays, show how understanding Indian traditions as religions has led to many problems, including the paradoxical rise of ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ (the more aggressive brand of Hindutva). Jakob shows how secularism was a solution especially meant for Christendom in Europe at a specific time in its history when the various denominations of Christianity were clashing on their individual doctrines. Secularism achieved peace as the state separated from religion. However, everyone knew in the background what Christianity, Christ, the state, and religion were. Secularism fails when it deals with non-Christian elements. Individual European countries have their own interpretation of secularism, as Jakob shows elegantly in his book, Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism. The influx of Islam into Europe is presently stressing, and severely so, the secularism model in Europe.

When ‘Hinduism’ becomes a huge amalgam of multiple faiths and traditions, nobody knows what the underlying doctrines are that generally unify them. Hence, the search begins to find some ‘common points’ like belief in karma, reincarnation, or the Vedas, for example. However, that is not helpful, as the field shows completely diverse beliefs in Hinduism, including not accepting the Vedas or not believing in reincarnation. Some common principles like ‘tolerance and acceptance’ of differing viewpoints come to the fore, and when religions (like Islam or Christianity) do not match up to such ideas, the latter become ‘deficient’ or inadequate religions, and thus Hinduism becomes a ‘better’ religion than others.

Conversion also becomes an issue, as Jakob and Claerhout point out. Fundamentally, the clash is on the meaning of ‘freedom of religion.’ For proselytizing religions, it means freedom to convert people to their faith; for the non-proselytizing ones, it implies freedom from interference by outside religions. Traditions in Sanatana Dharma, or Indian culture, lack all the characteristics that allow us to recognize and differentiate Christianity, Islam, and Judaism as religions: a fixed body of doctrine, an ecclesiastical organization or central authority, a holy book, etc. Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions and the religions of Christianity and Islam are phenomena of different kinds.

When religion is a matter of doctrinal truth and different religions are rivals, the freedom to convert becomes of the utmost importance. Since false religion always implies immoral and unjust practices according to Christian and Islamic viewpoints, conversion entails the escape from immorality and injustice. The secularisation of Christian theology translates into the importance of the absolute right to profess, propagate, and change one’s religion.

Where ‘religion’ means the ancestral tradition of a community, like in India, the significance shifts to the freedom to continue one’s tradition without aggressive interference from the outside ripping the social fabric. The dominant liberal principle of religious freedom, even enshrined in the Constitution but which the courts disagree with, privileges Christianity and Islam because it involves the freedom to propagate one’s religion and to proselytize. It implicitly endorses the assumption that religion revolves around doctrines and truth claims, something unknown in traditional cultures. Neither anti-conversion laws nor the principle of religious freedom will do the job since both privilege one of the two sides of the controversy.

As Jakob De Roover insists, historically, Hindu traditions, Indian Islam, and Christianity succeeded in living together in a relatively stable manner. India has a far better record of pluralism and multiculturalism in mostly peace than Europe and the Western world at any time in their histories. We need urgent research to rediscover and reinvent some of the inherent mechanisms in Indian traditions responsible for this vibrant pluralism in India. He points to the work of many scholars who show how local Islamic and Christian traditions lost their aggressive proselytizing drive in India. Hindu attempts to impose anti-conversion legislation aggressively also seemed to be absent. The first and most important step would be to revise our understanding of our traditions as religions.

The solution then would be in the direction of “traditionalizing our religions’ rather than “religionizing our traditions’.

Hindutva as Colonial Consciousness: Balagangadhara’s Hypothesis

Balagangadhara explains that the Hindutva phenomenon may in fact have been a manifestation of ‘colonial consciousness’ all along, a barrier denying the colonised access to its own experience. Orientalist discourses provided ‘facts’ for social science disciplines to make their explanations about Indian society. For the Orientalists, a description becomes an explanation of Indian society. In the European experience, certain practises, rituals, stories, devis, and devas appeared to be interrelated parts of a larger experiential entity, namely, Hinduism, the religion of most Indians. The ‘patterns’ experienced, however, do not explain anything about the practises and traditions in India. The explanations, in fact, turn out to be severe intellectual assaults on Indian culture, to which most respond with silence.

The Shiva Linga becomes the phallus, symbolising a fertility cult; Ganesha’s trunk becomes a limp phallus, suggesting a repressed sexuality; puja becomes worship; devas and devis become gods and goddesses (or, in a theological framework, many forms of the Devil or false gods); dharma becomes duty, ethics, truth, and religion.
In these descriptions, other cultures transform into flawed versions of the original Western culture. The clusters that require making sense of notions such as idolatry, excommunication, worship, and corrupt priests are absent in Indian culture and its traditions. The result is an argument using Christian theological language to express Indian cultural intuitions. More crucially, Indian participants distort common-sense and intuitive notions about murthipujas or other traditional practises by mapping them onto “scientific” Oriental ideas.

The aspects of colonial consciousness in Hindutva are the repetition and distortion of Orientalist discourse. Arya Samaj accepting the story of Brahminical degeneration and using words like ‘excommunication’ or ‘popes’ (for Brahmins); even Swami Vivekananda and modern pro-Hindu activists accepting murthipuja as idolatry are examples of this colonial consciousness. Whether it was the Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, Grant, or James Mill, the description of degraded and condemnable Brahmins was a standard Orientalist discourse, which the Arya Samaj swallowed completely. Political leaders and intellectuals in India and abroad, before and after independence, repeated the story with uniform consistency.

What is the relationship between the category of jatis referred to as Brahmins and the notion of “Brahmana” as debated in different traditions of India, (such as within the Buddhist and Chaitanya Vaishnava traditions)? These questions can only arise when one rejects Orientalist descriptions of Brahmins and the theological basis of these descriptions. Arya Samaj did not pause to check the Orientalist discourse of ‘Western education removing the accumulated filth produced by Brahmins’ in its reformist strategies.

Thus, Hindutva propagates belief in phenomena that do not exist in Indian culture but have deep roots in a Christian framework. However, it does so without having access to this framework or even a minimal understanding of it. This is exactly colonial consciousness. The colonial and ‘post-colonial’ experiences of Indians remain the same. The fact of colonisation acts both as evidence for this ‘theory’ and its ‘conclusion’ (the backwardness of the colonised culture). It is in this sense of psychological attitudes that Hindutva is a colonial force. Acceptance of Orientalist discourse as a true description of Indian society leads to the repetition of Orientalist descriptions of Hinduism as corrupt, immoral, idolatrous, and false, in desperate need of reform.

The remarkable similarity in the rhetoric of the Sangh Parivar and of Orientalism with regards to denouncing the caste system, eradicating superstitions, and searching for a pure Hinduism in the quest for a Hindu nation shows that the Sangh has been unable to discover a non-colonial, non-western framework to understand India. Colonisation (both Islamic and European) broke the access that Indians had to their own traditions; post-independence, colonial consciousness maintains this barrier. The Sangh, like an overwhelming majority of Indians, has only a limited knowledge of Indian traditions, which are basically common-sense ideas and intuitions.

Today, the Hindutva movement continues this Arya Samaj tendency of ‘reform’ and continues to accept Orientalist discourse of Indian traditions as a true description. Hindutva ends up mounting an attack on practises that it does not understand (caste systems, religious superstitions, blind rituals, and so on) and has no grounds to condemn except from a Christian theological standpoint. An influential Hindutva movement actively seeks to transform Indian traditions into flawed variants of Christianity through this colonial consciousness. As a result, Balagangadhara says, what damage was not possible under centuries of colonial rule, the Sangh Parivar might do in a matter of decades. Thus, the Sangh Parivar may just become Orientalism 2.0.

Concluding Remarks

We are in the grip of constructed entities, ‘Hindu’, ‘Hinduism’, and ‘Hindutva’. The Persians, Arabs, and Greeks originally used ‘Hindu’ (or its phonetic equivalent) as a geographical and historical entity for people on the other side of the Indus River. This later assumed the identity of a group of people standing separate from Muslims and Christians. The colonials saw a multitude of traditions in Indian society and constructed a certain framework to understand them better. This understanding was rooted in their own understanding of the Christian religion. This led to the formation of ‘Hinduism’.

In the continuing scholarship process, they created many other religions like ‘Buddhism’, ‘Sikhism’, and ‘Jainism’. The scholarship also created fights and revolts against mainstream Hinduism, like the intra-Christian and Christian-Muslim encounters of the European and Middle Eastern worlds. A position of power helped in sustaining and internalising the discourses. Hindutva was a further construct of Indians to define their identities even sharper. The semantics got extremely confusing in the bargain. The words themselves remain empty to some extent and are capable of a wide variety of interpretations, from extremely positive to extremely negative. Each word now means religion, philosophy, culture, tradition, heritage, practices, or simply a word of abuse, depending on the context and the user.

There is a huge difference between traditions and religions. Traditions are based on rituals; arguably, the uniting factor across most traditions would be the goal of enlightenment. Traditions are the many route descriptions to reach the destination, depending on the individual’s temperament. There are many routes to enlightenment (Karma, Bhakti, and Gyana), and only in the Indic traditions (Hinduism for convenience), even atheism could be a potential route to enlightenment. Hinduism as a ‘religion’ existed only in the minds of the colonials, and we perpetuated the story after independence. There were very few intellectuals who questioned the existence of an organized religion in India. The post-independent colonized social sciences simply presupposed the narrative of Hinduism in India.

The confusion on semantics has been severe, which even our Supreme Courts have not been able to address. In an indirect manner, through some related acts, the Constitution does try to define the Hindus but leaves gaping holes in the interpretations. As all legal entities, the Constitution, and academic scholarship act in concert to make traditions into religions, friction rises in society as an outcome. The sharpening of ‘Hindutva’ is one such consequence.

The proponents of Hindutva see it as a component of Hinduism that resists, or simply the kinetic component of Hindu Dharma (Gurumurthy) involved in organization and even re-conversion from other faiths. The opponents see Hindutva as a disturbing force extending to even ‘fascism’, a fashionable word to beat the opposition into silence. The proponents look at Hindutva to preserve self-respect, and the opponents pontificate, ‘Hinduism is good; Hindutva is bad.’ However, Hindutva, as seen earlier, could possibly be a continuing colonial force.

Traditions have the important characteristic of an indifference to differences, and this has been our greatest strength in dealing with multi-culturalism without major conflicts. A superimposed narrative of Hinduism as a religion and a later Hindutva, by force of circumstances, is responsible for the friction, anger, and debate on all sides today. The West’s concepts of religion do not apply to us. As part of routine inter-traditional mixing and evolving, there would even be space to understand the syncretism of Hindu-Muslim or Hindu-Christian traditions in an Indic context. The biggest strength of Indian pluralism is the acceptance of other traditions and rituals without feeling threatened. The Abrahamic religions in India also became part of the hundreds of such traditions. We should relook at all our social sciences and all our textbooks to first decolonize ourselves.

Our great country is in the trap of false semantics. Hinduism and Hindutva are perhaps the same; they are two sides of the same coin. If one exists, the other exists too. Like most understandings regarding India (caste, secularism, Aryans and Dravidians, its nationhood, its philosophies, and so on), this also requires working upon, but one must be ready to throw off the heavily colonised intellectual baggage we have been carrying since independence. We need to develop a proper understanding of the terms before deciding whether they are good, bad, or ugly.

Sanatana Dharma is the overarching philosophy of Indic culture, which transcends and permeates Hindu, Hinduism, and Hindutva and can even accommodate the other conventional religious systems of India. Maybe, just maybe, Sanatana Dharma and Sanatanis would better define the traditions and the people of India, respectively. In the metaphor of a tree representing Sanatana Dharma, the different traditions, inaptly called religions, would be branches having their own identity yet connected to the rest. The alien religions, becoming more like traditions and developing an indifference to differences, would get equal space by embracing the Sanatana tree. Maybe utopian, maybe simplistic, but our country needs some beginnings to achieve that elusive unity and harmony. The present understanding will never achieve that. A correct exposition of Sanatana Dharma is our greatest but forgotten solution to harmony at all levels, from the individual to the universal.

SELECTED REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

1. Hindutva: The Kinetic Effect Of Hindu Dharma by S. Gurumurthy (https://cpsindia.org/index.php/art/132-articles-by-s-gurumurthy/179-hindutva-the-kinetic-effect-of-hindu-dharma)
2. Decolonizing the Hindu Mind by Koenraad Elst
3. Hindu, Hinduism and Hindutva, as understood by Supreme Court by Dhananjay Mahapatra (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/hindu-hinduism-and-hindutva-as-understood-by-supreme-court/articleshow/89081806.cms)
4. Essentials of Hindutva by V.D. Savarkar
5. (https://www.indianculture.gov.in/ebooks/letter-hinduism) Letters on Hinduism by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
6. (https://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/17/does-hinduism-exist/) Does Hinduism Exist? By Dr S.N. Balagangadhara
7. The Heathen in His Blindness: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion by S. N. Balagangadhara
8. Do All Roads Lead to Jerusalem?: The Making of Indian Religions by S. N. Balagangadhara and Divya Jhingran (A simplified version of the above book)
9. Who is a Hindu? Hindu Revivalist Views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Other Offshoots of Hinduism by Koenraad Elst
10. What does it mean to be ‘Indian’? by S.N. Balagangadhara and Sarika Rao
11. Why did the Ramakrishna Mission say they are not Hindus By Sanjeev Nayyar (https://www.esamskriti.com/e/National-Affairs/For-The-Followers-Of-Dharma/Why-did-the-Ramakrishna-Mission-say-they-are-not-Hindus-2.aspx)
12. Are Tribals Hindus? (https://pragyata.com/are-tribals-hindus/)
13. Buddhism versus Hinduism: Encounters of The Imagined Kind (https://pragyata.com/buddhism-versus-hinduism-encounters-of-the-imagined-kindpart-i/)
14. India: The Land of Traditions, Not Religions (https://pragyata.com/india-the-land-of-traditions-not-religions/)
15. Lingayats As Minorities: Why It Is Near-Impossible To Remain A Hindu And Run A School Or College In India in Swarajyamag (https://swarajyamag.com/politics/lingayats-as-minorities-why-it-is-near-impossible-to-remain-a-hindu-and-run-a-school-or-college-in-india)
16. Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism by Jakob De Roover
17. Conversion of the World: Proselytization in India and the Universalization of Christianity by Sarah Claerhout And Jakob De Roover
18. (https://www.academia.edu/1246720/Conversion_of_the_World_Proselytization_in_India_and_the_Universalization_of_Christianity) Religious Conversion: Indian Disputes And Their European Origins By Sarah Claerhout And Jakob De Roover
19. Awakening Bharat Mata: The Political Beliefs of the Indian Right by Swapan Dasgupta
20. Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 by Vikram Sampath
21. Idolatry and the Colonial Idea of India: Visions of Horror, Allegories of Enlightenment by Swagato Ganguly
22. Why I Killed the Mahatma: Uncovering Godse’s Defence by Koenraad Elst
23. The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer of Empire by Goolam Vahed and Ashwin Desai
24. Hindutva: Origin, Evolution, and Future by Aravindan Neelakandan