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Hindutva

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Hindutva really means, as understood by its advocates, conformity to the idea that India has primarily been a Hindu rashtra. It is not a religious philosophy or a social reform movement. It is a political philosophy based on cultural chauvinism, which insists that the non-Hindus of India accept their place as "minorities", whose safety and security will depend on their ability to earn the "goodwill of the majority". —G. N. Devy

Hindutva (lit. "Hindu-ness") is a Hindu nationalist political ideology. encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism. Formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923, it is primarily espoused by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and other organisations collectively known as the Sangh Parivar.

Borrowing ideas and concepts from European fascism, the Hindutva movement was affiliated with Italian fascism and Nazism during the interwar period and the Second World War. Hindutva has been described as a variant of right-wing extremism and as "almost fascist in the classical sense", adhering to a concept of homogenised majority and cultural hegemony. Some analysts dispute the identification of Hindutva with fascism and suggest that Hindutva is an extreme form of conservatism or ethnic nationalism. Some scholars have described it as a separatist ideology.

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Quotes

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D

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  • "Question: I believe you are acquainted with the ideology of the Sangh Parivar.
    Answer: Yes, indeed, since 30 years. Of course, I have also come across some critical views regarding these organizations. But, at the same time, I find that the Parivar is very much concerned about the preservation of India's national identity and culture. This aspect has impressed me greatly. Frankly, there are in this country people who are infatuated with the western way of life. I have always told my Indian friends that there is no point in neglecting their own rich cultural heritage. As such, any organization working for the preservation of India's traditional values and norms certainly deserves the support of all well-meaning people."
    • Dalai Lama, [Interview conducted by S. Suresh in the ABVP conference in Kanpur which appeared in Organiser, November 22, 1992.]
  • Hindutva really means, as understood by its advocates, conformity to the idea that India has primarily been a Hindu rashtra. It is not a religious philosophy or a social reform movement. It is a political philosophy based on cultural chauvinism, which insists that the non-Hindus of India accept their place as "minorities", whose safety and security will depend on their ability to earn the "goodwill of the majority". At the heart of the Hindutva ideology is the idea that the good of a majority should also be seen as the good for any minority, and that any assertion of minority rights is essentially a threat and a challenge to the political authority of the majority. Such minorities, therefore, are seen by the Hindutva advocates as anti-national and anti-social. Besides, any attempt by a minority to swell their numbers is seen by the Hindutva votaries as aggression. Hence, conversion to Christianity or a Hindu girl’s marriage to a Muslim or a Christian are seen as undesirable and provocative acts.
    • G. N. Devy, "Adivasis and Dalits: Tribal Voice and Violence", in S. Varadarajan (ed.) Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (2002), 262-263. New Delhi: Penguin.

J

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  • The Hindutva of Savarkar was conceived primarily as an ethnic community possessing a territory and sharing the same racial and cultural characteristics, three attributes which stemmed from the mythical reconstruction of the Vedic Golden Age.
  • Such is the grip of the misrepresentation of Hindutva in anti-Muslim terms that (even) its proponents, including some leaders of the Bhartiya Janata Party, themselves, speak of it defensively.
  • The Hindutva forces, in their bid to aggravate religious conflicts in the country, argue that Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam and Christianity in the past and therefore they have to be reconverted so as to take them back into the Hindu fold. But such an assertion has no basis in our history.

M

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  • In India, in the 1990s, the growth of Hindu nationalism brought extraordinary attempts to eliminate parts of India’s heritage and to rewrite Indian history. In 1992, fundamentalists, supported by right-wing Hindu politicians, destroyed a sixteenth-century mosque at Ayodhya in northern India on the grounds that it was built over the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Encouraged, they declared that they would move on to destroy other Muslim sites, including the Taj Mahal. This was part of a larger drive to peg India’s identity as exclusively Hindu or, in the word used by the Hindu nationalists, Hindutva. India’s history inevitably became a key component of this. The standard view, based on the evidence available, had been that the fertile Indus Valley had housed the Harappan civilization between about 3000 and 1700 B.C. It was gradually absorbed or disappeared when horse-borne Aryans moved downward from the north, perhaps as peaceful migrants or possibly as warlike invaders. This did not suit the Hindu nationalists because it implied that an indigenous civilization had given way to one from outside and that their own culture might have foreign elements. As Madhav Golwalkar, the spiritual father of today’s Hindu nationalists, wrote in the 1930s, “The Hindus came into this land from nowhere, but are indigenous children of the soil always, from times immemorial.” Of course, this was an absurdly simplistic view of the ways peoples and civilizations develop and commingle. They are not flies stuck forever the same in amber but much more like rivers with many tributaries.
  • [T]he Hindutva project requires a radical, violent rupture between India’s Hindus and those of the hated “other” that it constructs, India’s Muslims and Christians.
  • It is not that Hindutva supporters equate vastly different phenomena with vastly different consequences, but they also willfully gloss over facts like 80%-90% of VIP (ministers, MPs, MLAs) hate speech has been perpetrated by the BJP, or that the head of the BJP’s IT Cell is the greatest disseminator of the most dangerous and fake communal propaganda. There is simply no comparison between the ruling party and other parties.

N

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  • People ask me about the forces of Hindutva in India. I got into trouble a couple of years ago when I said that with this new kind of self-awareness in India, the Hindu idea is almost a necessary early, stage. It contains the beginnings of larger, new ideas: the idea of history, the idea of the human family, of India. I hope this self-awareness doesn't stay there, and I don't think it will, but it's necessary. We are dealing with a country that has started from a very low point, a very low intellectual point, a low economic point. When people start moving, the first loyalty, the first identity, is always a rather small one. They can't immediately become other things. I think that within every kind of disorder now in India there is a larger positive movement. But the future will be fairly chaotic. Politics will have to be at the level of the people now. People like Nehru were colonial-style politicians. They were to a large extent created and protected by the colonial order. They did not begin with the people.
    • V.S. Naipaul, A Million Mutinies, V.S. Naipaul, India Today Date: August 18, 1997 [1]

P

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  • The Mahatma was a harmonizer of communities and people. Inclusion and not separation was his way. Hindutva disagreed with Gandhi on his interpretation of Hinduism. The agendas of Hindutva though strong on the issues of self-identity and self-definition, have tended to be separatist. The Vaishnava that he was, Gandhi believed in treating "the suffering of others as his own." From such a point of view, it seems clear that the intolerance of Hindutva will not permit the people of India to build a compassionate and just social order.
  • The Hindutva movement as it has emerged is, almost in a classical sense, Fascist in its ideology, Fascist in its class support, Fascist in its method, and Fascist in its program. All the ingredients of a Fascist ideology are present in it: the attempt to unify the majority under a homogenized concept, 'the Hindus'; a sense of grievance against alleged injustices done to this homogeneous group in the past by an excluded homogeneous minority; a sense of cultural superiority vis-à-vis this minority; a reinterpretation of history exclusively in these terms; a total rejection of contrary evidence, of dispassionate analysis, of the scientific method, indeed of rational discourse; and above all an appeal to the so-called homogeneous majority in passionate, blood-curdling, and essentially male chauvinist terms to 'stand up', 'assert their manhood', 'show that it is blood and not water that flows in their veins', all of which amount to an incitement violence, and result in actual violence, against the minority group. … Its appeal is based not on the dreams of a better or more prosperous or meaningful future, but upon hatred.

S

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  • Central to Hindutva as a mass phenomenon (or for that matter to Fascism) is the development of a powerful and extendable enemy image through appropriating stray elements from past prejudices, combining them with new ones skillfully dressed up as old verities, and broadcasting the resultant compound through the most up-to-date media techniques. The Muslim here becomes the near-exact equivalent of the Jew. … Racist attitudes, finally, are neatly encapsulated in the very recent coinage of the formula 'Babar ki aulad'. Alleged descent from Babar is sufficient to damn, no overt misdeed is really required… just as once in fanatical Christian circles all Jews stood condemned because of what their ancestors had supposedly done at the time of the crucifixion of Christ.
  • Hindutva is not a word but a history. Not only the spiritual or religious history of our people as at times it is mistaken to be by being confounded with the other cognate term Hinduism, but a history in full. Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva. … Hindutva embraces all the departments of thoughts and activity of the whole Being of our Hindu race.
  • In the fascist Hindutva imagination, the Indian Muslims are continuously reviled as Pakistani "fifth columnists," as "enemies of the nation" and so on, and their patriotism is said to be suspect. The Muslim as the menacing "other" occupies a central place in Hindutva discourse, and this has been used to legitimize large-scale anti-Muslim violence.
    • Yoginder Sikand (2006). Abu-Rabi', Ibrahim. ed. The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought. p. 88. 

T

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  • Pre-modern Hinduism had its warts—big and small—as do all religions, but its subtleties were richer than what is now being thrust on its believers. Hindutva is in many ways the antithesis of Hinduism, and aims to create a society that is narrow, bigoted and inward looking, in which the co-existence with those that differ, such as the minority communities of various kinds, is becoming increasingly impossible, as demonstrated by the frequency of communal riots.
    • Romila Thapar, The Past as Present : Forging Contemporary Identities Through History (2014)
  • Hindutva claims to represent indigenous Indian thought opposed to western interpretations of Indian religion, traditions and culture. The claim is that colonial scholarship used its understanding of Indian culture for political purposes to justify colonialism. Yet Hindutva is doing precisely the same by reformulating Hinduism along the lines suggested by colonial interpretations in order to facilitate its use in political mobilization. It uses colonial constructions of the Indian past such as the theories of James Mill and Max Mueller to further its programme of political control. The exploitation of history becomes a significant dimension of its attempt to appropriate the understanding of the past.
    • Romila Thapar, The Past as Present : Forging Contemporary Identities Through History (2014)

See also

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Encyclopedic article on Hindutva on Wikipedia

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