The Origins of the Hindu Nationalist Movement in India

On the 22nd of January this year, the Prime Minister of India, Narenda Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple where the Babri Mosque, built in 1528, was razed to the ground by Hindu radicals in 1992 (Ellis-Petersen and Hassan, 2024). For many in the West, this was the beginning of a more overtly religious version of nationalist populism in India than we were accustomed to. All the more shocking is that the rise in Hindu nationalism is taking place in an international ally, often seen as the less politically controversial emerging country to economically and politically ‘invest’ in compared to its larger neighbour: China. 

The recent history of the Babri Mosque has become a defining marker of the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and more importantly, its electoral success. In 1990, L. K. Advanni, a co-founder of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), announced a march from Somnath temple in Gujarat, one of the westernmost points in India that would travel through Delhi and large swathes of India to arrive at the mosque (Bose, 1997). Although Advanni was arrested before he could reach the mosque, his inflammatory calls to replace the mosque with a temple propelled the Babri mosque and its potential replacement to become a national political issue. 

Though Advanni’s unfinished march to the Babri Mosque is the most famous case of elite instrumentalism with regards to the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and with it the BJP, it was certainly not the first. The idea at the heart of the Hindu nationalist movement is Hindutva which originated in 1923. The Hindutva project’s ultimate goal is to create a Hindu nation that is unified under the religion's common identity, which in itself is a fallacy due to the non-homogeneous nature of Hinduism (Natrajan, 2022; Salam, 2018; Hansen, 2001). Attempting to recast Hinduism as a homogenous religion has an important benefit to Hindu nationalists as it reforms the religious identity as one suited for majoritarian politics. 

What this idea means for Indian politics will sound familiar to anyone with an interest in populism. For, just as originally described by Mudde (2019), a defining feature of populism is creating an ‘us vs them’ or split within politics to exploit. Once this ‘us vs them’ dynamic has been created within the political arena, the threats to ‘us’ will be identified, threats which only the nationalists will protect ‘the people’ from. To this end, the narrative of India being a ‘pseudo-secular’ state was formed. The term pseudo-secular was first used as a reaction to the intervention of Rajiv Gandhi, against a Supreme Court ruling, who placed sharia law related to alimony payments after a divorce above India’s civil code (Hansen, 2001). This allowed for Hindu nationalists to claim that the Indian state had moved from being a secular state to a pseudo-secular one, where the interests of minority groups such as Muslims are placed above Hindus. 

Of course, the Indian people cannot be directed to have particular political viewpoints. In much the same way when one discusses other populist issues such as Brexit or the rise of Donald Trump, it is a mistake to lay the blame entirely at the feet of political entrepreneurs. There is no doubt however that when Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple on the site of the old Babri mosque in January, it rested on the foundations of the enormous efforts by many Hindu nationalist political entrepreneurs spanning decades.  

Bibliography

Bose, S., (1997). Hindu nationalism and the crisis of the Indian State: a theoretical perspective. Nationalism, democracy and development: State and politics in India, pp.104-64.

Ellis-Petersen , H. and Hassan , A. (2024) Modi inaugurates Hindu temple on site of Razed Mosque in India, The Guardian. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/22/modi-inaugurates-hindu-temple-on-site-of-razed-mosque-in-india (Accessed: 01 March 2024). 

Hansen, T.B. (2001) The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu nationalism in modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Mudde, C. (2019) “2. Populism: An Ideational Approach ,” in Kaltwasser Rovira Cristóbal et al. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Populism. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, pp. 27–47. 

Natrajan, B. (2022) “Racialization and ethnicization: Hindutva hegemony and Caste,” Rethinking Difference in India Through Racialization, pp. 128–148. 

Salam, Z.U. (2018) in Of saffron flags and skullcaps: Hindutva, Muslim identity and the idea of India. New Delhi, India: SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, pp. 3–26.