One of the most outspoken critiques of the Hindu far-right establishment, the author Arundhati Roy, made the following statement, “In India the new government - the members of the radical Hindu Right who want India to be a 'Hindu Nation' - they're bigots. Butchers. Massacres are their unofficial election campaigns - orchestrated to polarise communities and bring in the vote.”^[1] Not touching upon the value judgements made clear through this statement, what cannot be ignored is the new paradigm of religious violence that has snowballed in India over the last decade, and the role of Hindutva politics in inculcating such an environment.

To understand this trajectory, one must first understand the basis of Hindutva identity and how it fits into the South Asian context. To sum up a complex understanding of an ideology that has evolved over the past century, Hindutva is articulated as a conceptualisation of the Indian state fundamentally tied to its Hindu history, leading to the demand to establish a Hindu Rashtra that seeks to eradicate all foreign influence from the subcontinent – most notably, Islamic influence. This is pertinent because India is home to the largest Muslim minority in the world – 200 million people, comprising around 15% of the population. As such, the Indian Muslim community has been identified as the primary enemy of the Hindutva project. 

This leads us to the following question that will be addressed through this essay: how does the Hindu identity as reconceptualised by Hindutva within India create the basis for religious violence towards Muslims? This question will be addressed in two parts; the first part will deal with the conceptualisation of the Hindutva-influenced Hindu identity, and the basis for its militarisation and instrumentalisation already set in place before the BJP’s 2014 victory. The second part will address the process through which this paradigm of religious violence became state-sponsored, through an examination of the intersection between Indian political processes and Hindu identity.

Constructed histories that construct a political future: The Hindutva tradition and its militarisation

In his work, The Invention of Tradition, the historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to invented traditions as a means towards "establish[ing] continuity with a suitable historic past.” There is no doubt that that the Hindutva tradition relies heavily upon legitimizing itself by evoking a collective history dating back millennia – from Savarkar’s early works referring to a civilization older than that of the Egyptians, to contemporary Sangh Parivar initiatives portraying “Vedic-Aryan India as the “cradle” of world civilisation and science.” Hindutva as a political ideology was first articulated only about a century ago, but by evoking the idea of a millennia-long continuity for the basis of a civilization, the political outcomes of the Hindutva ideology may be legitimatised in the eyes of Hindus who attach a sense of the sacred to their community’s history.

Halbwachs refers to the idea of reconstructed memories built through collective consciousness at both an individual and community level. With historian Phillippe Ariès touching upon how a historical narrative can be established in much the same manner – reconstructing, rather than truly recollecting, the Hindutva project to manufacture a narrative that feeds into their goals becomes clearer. This is especially the case when analysing the narrative around Muslims and the legacy of Islamic influence in the subcontinent. By framing India as the rightful home of the Hindus (and as Buddhism and Sikhism as derivative religions stemming from Hindu culture), and the Muslim dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire as invaders who superimposed a foreign culture onto the subcontinent, a basis is created for an identity of collective victimisation of the Hindus. The matter of Islamic influence in the subcontinent is a complex, multi-faceted one, but its reduction to a certain narrative with the intention of establishing a pattern of persecution experienced by Hindus at the hands of Muslims can be argued to be attributed to the conceptualisation of Hindu identity by the Hindutva.

Audrey Truschke built upon the idea of the Hindutva self-perception of Hindus as a wounded civilisation – “that India was subjected to repeated defeats over the centuries, including by generations of Muslim conquerors that enfeebled the people and their land. The belief … that Muslim invaders destroyed their culture, religion, and homeland is neither a continuous historical memory nor is it based on accurate records of the past. But… many in India feel injured by the Indo-Muslim past, and their sentiments [are] often undergirded by modern anti-Muslim sentiments.” Once again, this speaks to the practice of reconstructed memories through a certain social lens.

Historian KN Panikkar speaks of “a religious-cultural mould” as the basis for a Hindu nation, with a sacred aspect being ascribed to cultural elements and historical symbols. Therefore, while Hindutva largely remained a politically fringe ideology up until the 1990s, the cultural and social sphere remained open to Hindutva influence. Many aspects of these cultural traditions emphasised upon coalesced well with the upper-caste Brahminical character of the Indian elite intelligentsia, and thus also excluded the cultural practices of lower-caste Bahujan communities. In this manner, a homogenization of the Hindu identity was also taking place, which served as a convenient means of obscuring a pluralistic vision of India through the lens of acknowledging the diversity of the subcontinent.

India has certainly been no stranger to religious riots prior to the 1990s; the bloodied memory of the 1947 Partition and the violence that ensued has remained a matter of generational trauma for decades and speak to a tradition of politicised religious violence. However, a certain turning point could be seen towards a new paradigm of violence from the 1990s onwards that represented the militarisation and instrumentalisation of Hindutva political goals in the public arena, with BJP leader L.K. Advani’s famous campaign of 1992 to raze the Babri Masjid (mosque),

As with many sacred elements ascribed to aspects of ‘Hindu’ culture and tradition, there was a sense of reverence around the story of a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Ram at Ayodhya (said to be his birthplace) which had been allegedly destroyed by the first Mughal Emperor, Babur. According to the Hindutva narrative, he constructed the Babri Masjid in its place as a symbol of his domination over the Hindus, and the call for its destruction was intended as a symbolic gesture of vindication for the Hindu community. This demand was carried forth by members of the Sangh Parivar, mobilising their cadres, and propagated in the political realm by the BJP.^[7] On 6^th December 1992, an elaborate rally was organised at the site of the Babri Masjid with over 150,000 Hindutva supporters present. The rally turned violent as members present climbed the mosque and razed it to the ground with their tools and weapons. Given the sacred place that the Babri Masjid held in the consciousness of Indian Muslims, there was an outcry from the Muslim community, met with violent retaliation. Two months of religious rioting followed, with more than 2,000 deaths at the end of it, as Muslims and Hindus across India turned on each other and destroyed homes, shops, and places of worship, across major urban areas of India.

This paradigm of violence would gradually become the norm in the decades to come, and such, warrants an analysis of how it builds upon the doctrine set in place by Hindutva narratives of religious identity in India. Firstly, with symbols such as the Ram Temple having not just a sacred nature ascribed to them, but with communities hedging their dignity on such symbols, every conflict tends to take on a role larger than itself in the moment and is seen through the lens of a grander sacred conflict. In doing so, the violence carried out is far easier for perpetrators to view through a dehumanised lens, building up on their understanding of Hindus as victims of Islamic subjugation.

With much of this conflict also taking place in the cultural realm, cultural symbols would also acquire a sacred connotation in the years to follow, and often escalate into further violence. Prominent examples from recent years include the violence emerging from the Padmaavat controversy, and cow vigilantes and anti-Romeo gangs – self-proclaimed vigilantes policing their local communities based on norms upholding Hindu sacredness, such as cows being sacred, and inter-caste or inter-faith marriage going against ideas of Hindu purity. Many of these groups took the law into their own hands, visiting violence upon those who broke these norms, or even sometimes resorting to mob violence in general as a form of emotional outburst around the sacredness of their ideals. Victims could be lynched, drowned, or brutally killed in such instances – perhaps what Girard would refer to as the scapegoats in such instances, representing the moment of catharsis by the mobs in their religious fervour.

The violence carried out in the years following Babri Masjid can be analysed through a lens of moral disengagement as put forth by Bandura; all acts of violence would be portrayed in an honourable lens, with a reconstruction of moral values having taken place that facilitated a dehumanisation of the out-group, and a displacement of responsibility from such acts of violence. What must be noted is the steep rise in such violence following the victory of the BJP in the 2014 Indian general elections, when Hindutva principles acquired a new state-sponsored form.

From a fringe ideology to being state-sponsored: how religious violence is perpetuated and maintained through contemporary Indian political processes

Secularism was enshrined as a fundamental basis of the Indian state in the Constitution following independence and partition. While there is an extensive constitutional basis protecting the rights of minorities, there are two blind spots in the Indian political conceptualisation of secularism that allowed Hindutva traditions to enter mainstream politics. The first of these is the cultural dimension cultivated by Indian state broadcasts and prominent members of the elite intelligentsia; with multiple state-sponsored productions of adaptations of the Mahabharat and the Ramayan, aspects of Hindu mythology were promoted as essential to the Indian consciousness. The Brahminical caste character of the Indian state as well as that of the artistic ‘elite’ provided a basis to coalesce well with the ongoing cultural project of the Hindutva. The role of caste dynamics in modern Indian politics is a matter warrants its own in-depth study and argumentation, but what must be kept in mind is the transformation of caste privilege into social and cultural capital that could be maintained under a lens of secularism in post-independent India.

The second blind spot is that of the Indian state’s own conceptualisation of national security, integrity, and anti-terrorist rhetoric, serving as a basis for its own violence. William Cavanaugh points out the fallacy in the dichotomy created between progressive secularity and archaic religiosity; in the case of the Indian state, the violence enacted by the state is justified on a basis of national security. Usually most prominent against dissident groups within the state (the Naxalites, separatist forces in the Northeast) or in the turbulent border regions of Kashmir and Assam, and impunity given to institutional bodies such as the army through AFSPA, violence is often carried out against minority groups in the name of national integrity. A vocabulary referring to such groups as ‘separatists’, ‘anti-nationals’ also provides a certain amount of linguistic anaesthesia. The case of Kashmir is a particularly pertinent one – a Muslim-majority state that remains under the occupation of the Indian army, with the conceptualisation of violence in the region portraying the army as a necessary force to eradicate the region extremism, and any resistance from the Kashmiri people as Pakistani-funded terrorism. Thus, a war waged by the Indian state upon a predominantly Muslim region took on the character of a nationalist project, with religious elements being the underlying invisible force.

In her work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt conceptualises the banality of evil, whereby perpetrators of violence detach themselves from their violent acts in favour of contextualising their violence as simply carrying out their duties – a “patriot fulfilling nationalistic duties,” as she stated. With a strong basis to nationalistic violence already in place prior to 2014, the BJP’s political victory in the general elections in that year marked yet another paradigm shift in the violence enacted by the state taking on an explicitly religious role. The Hindutva political project was longer a fringe ideology; it was in the mainstream of national political dialogue. This vindication of ideology in the political realm validated the already large social communities of Hindutva supporters enough to escalate the call for their demands.

Robert Pape analyses religious violence through a political lens in his work, Dying to Win. According to him, religious violence is always political in that it has a prime political goal – to consolidate and expand territory. This holds true in the case of the Hindutva political project – the desire to establish a Hindu Rashtra, consolidating India as a Hindu state, and even expand its boundaries to its imagined historical territory on the subcontinent in an idea conceptualised as Akhand Bharat under a Hindu umbrella speaks to this political goal. The most explicit embrace of this goal has been the introduction of the CAA/NRC in 2019 – a combination of laws that requires Indian citizenship to be proven through historical documents, but for non-Muslims in India to be granted a direct pathway to citizenship. In doing so, a political process has been put into place that allows for Muslims to be stripped of of their citizenship status, falling in line with a Hindu homeland that must be eradicated of the ’Islamic invaders.'

In fact, it must be noted that many instances of mob violence targeting Muslims as well as judicial processes providing impunity to instigators of this violence, but withholding bail for dissenters from minority groups, often Muslims. Police and security forces were reported to have turned on dissenters with brutal force, while the instigators of the Muslim pogrom of Northeast Delhi in January 2021 were given impunity.

In the meantime, however, a new linguistic and cultural battle was waging as Hindutva narratives of history began being introduced in government textbooks, and curriculums modified to fit such narratives. Simultaneously, a new vocabulary developed to dehumanise the enemies of Hindutva and legitimise violence against them even more. The head of the BJP, Amit Shah referred to Indian Muslims as ‘termites,’ while the terms ‘Love Jihad’ and ‘Economic Jihad’ came into use to refer to Muslims marrying outside their religion or conducting business of any sort. The normalisation of this discourse made such violent rhetoric a commonplace aspect of Indian politics that could not be ignored, and in doing so, began to desensitise the population towards violent rhetoric overall. This could be understood as reverse linguistic anaesthesia; oversaturating political dialogue with violent rhetoric to the point that the implication of violence seems to lose all meaning.

This would be a stepping stone towards the events of 2022, when members of the Sangh Parivar began openly calling for Hindus to take up arms against Muslims, BJP members sometimes being present at such meetings while the party stayed silent about such developments overall. Annapurna Ma made the statement, “Even if just a hundred of us become soldiers and kill two million of them, we will be victorious … If you stand with this attitude only then will you able to protect ‘sanatana dharma’ [an absolute form of Hinduism].” What has followed is the month of Ramadan witnessing numerous instances of religious violence targeting Muslims across major metropolises growing more frequent by the day and following largely the same patterns each time.

Conclusion

Dr Gregory Stanton, President of Genocide Watch (renowned for having predicted the Rwandan genocide five years before it took place) stated in 2022 that, “We are warning that genocide could very well happen in India.” The escalation of religious violence in the last decade has been exponential, and even more in the last few years. An analysis of the process through which Hindutva conceptualistions have reshaped the Hindu identity in the mainstream demonstrate the process through which violence carried out by Hindus is legitimized both in the eyes of the community, and that of the state. Hinduism, being vastly diverse in its interpretations and its experiences, is also being homogenised in favour of a nationalist rhetoric, seeking to assimilate Hindus into this fold.

However, the political goals of Hindutva have been clear since its conception – it was never intended to be a solely ideological or cultural project, but a nationalist one. The success of this project has led to an institutional redefining of Indian nationalism and the Hindu identity within this nationalist framework along Hindutva lines. The violence needed to achieve the success of this project is considered as legitimate through the culmination of the many forces determining the trajectory that Hindutva has followed.

One of the notable incidents in the past few weeks being the demolition of a low-income neighbourhood in North Delhi primarily dominated by Muslim Bengalis. Indeed, the demolition was halted by the Supreme Court, but continued for an hour following the release of the statement. This hints at a new paradigm whereby the violence once endorsed by the state has gone beyond the control of the state.

Therefore, the Hindu religion in itself may not be the source of violence, but its reconceputalisation that seeks to legitimise itself by tapping into the sacred ideas of the religion has certainly created the basis for paradigms of violence that seem to be escalating rapidly by the day.

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