A collective work shows how the BJP is fundamentally changing what it means to be Indian, to the exclusion of the country`s Christian and Muslim minorities.

Charlotte Thomas: In May, the Hindu government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Narendra Modi, celebrated the first anniversary of his second term. In this context, the book Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India is an essential read as it provides an understanding of India, which has been emerging for more than six years. Indeed, more than a new government, it is truly a new ideological direction that India seems to have adopted since 2014 by choosing Modi.

Particularly since the landslide electoral victories of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014 and 2019, the consequences of severe polarization have grown ever more worrisome. Partisan attacks on India’s independent political institutions have intensified, opposition parties have become extremely wary of defending pluralism and secularism, and hatred and violence against minority communities have flared up.2 The coronavirus pandemic has eased this polarization on the surface by engendering more unifying political leadership, yet at the societal level the crisis has only amplified intolerance, particularly against India’s Muslim minority community. Although various actors have launched efforts to counter the country’s majoritarian turn and improve civic dialogue, polarization in India is more toxic today than it has been in decades, and it shows no signs of abating.

The divide between secular and Hindu nationalist visions of national identity forms the central axis of polarization in India today. This is not to ignore polarization based on differences in caste, class, language, or region; however, these cleavages are more important at the subnational level because no one group is able to predominate nationally. Polarization along these axes thus has never posed an existential threat to Indian democracy, with the exception of one major episode between 1975 and 1977 when the government of prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended basic rights for twenty-one months—a dark chapter in the country’s astounding democratic journey. The significance of other episodes of polarization notwithstanding, the divide over Hindu nationalism is seriously endangering liberal freedoms and pluralist democracy in India today.

The current wave of polarization has its roots in the colonial period and the two clashing visions of the “idea of India” that emerged then.3 One strain of thinking envisioned India as a secular nation, in which membership was defined not by one’s faith but by one’s place of birth. The most important proponent of this view was Mahatma Gandhi, the principal leader of the Indian independence movement and a president of the Congress Party. Though a devout Hindu himself, Gandhi viewed the Indian nation as a harmonious collection of religious communities that deserved to be treated as equals. Other prominent Congress leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, also firmly opposed Hindu nationalism.

In sharp contrast to Gandhi and Nehru’s vision, Hindu nationalists argued that Hindu culture defined Indian identity and that minorities needed to assimilate by accepting the strictures of this majority culture. In a landmark 1923 book Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, the conservative leader and revolutionary V. D. Savarkar coined the term Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) to challenge the secular conception of Indian nationhood propounded by Gandhi and Nehru. Pro-Hindutva political activists turned Savarkar’s idea into a mass movement in 1925 by founding the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary volunteer organization dedicated to promoting Hindu nationalism. The RSS, which became the fountainhead of the Hindu nationalist movement, rallied support from a network of sister organizations known as the Sangh Parivar. The tension between these competing conceptions of Indian nationhood has continued to drive polarization in postcolonial India.

TRAJECTORY: Even though divisions over Indian national identity have long festered, Hindu nationalism did not become a politically ascendant force until the late 1980s. Since then, political leadership and especially the polarizing tactics of BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi (2014–present) have brought polarization to a dangerous level today.