Hindutva: The Dominant Face of Religious Nationalism in India

Abstract

This chapter shows how Hindu nationalist ideology blurs the distinction between religion and state politics. Religious sentiments are subsumed into the national and cultural discourse to the extent that for many contemporary Hindus, nationalism has overtaken the function of faith as a perspective through which to understand the world. The chapter traces the current hospitable space in India for religious nationalism to the cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth century among both Hindus and Muslims that emerged in defense of self and identity against colonial cultural values. However, nationalism and faith have never bifurcated completely, and exclusivity became a defining feature of Hindu nationalism. Further, the chapter traces anti-Muslim violence to “the primary ingredients of the Hindutva ideological apparatus” and describes how the apparatus is used to incite communal violence. The chapter presents a penetrating analysis of how the Hindutva uses religion in intra-Hindu politics and how Hindutva’s accommodation of Hinduism’s diversity insidiously maintains primacy of particular rituals and myths employed to promote the concept of a monolithic nation with a “national soul” and in the service of uniting all Hindus in the name of the “Nation-God,” while leaving the internal inequalities intact.