JK PANORAMA VOL 4 ISSUE 5 MAY

have left most Hindus simply confused:
Identity was determined by a person's family,
village, caste. The very term Hindu is merely a
loanword (most likely from Persian), referring
to “the people who live across the Indus
River.” Until the 20th century, most Hindus
had never felt the need to describe themselves
in any comprehensive way.
It was the colonial experience that created
Hindutva: Why, Savarkar and his comrades
wondered, had India been dominated for
centuries by a relatively small number of
Muslim Mughals and Christian British? Was
Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS—the primary
vehicle for Hindutva mobilization) are both
described as having been atheists or agnostics.
The point wasn't doctrine, but branding.
The only figure who did more to reshape
Hinduism than the Hindutva founders was
Mahatma Gandhi. His vision of the faith was,
in many ways, the absolute inverse of
Hindutva: He cared nothing about branding,
and a great deal about belief. It was an ideal so
familiar today that one can easily forget what a
break from the past it represented. Gandhi's
radical embrace of nonviolence drew not only
monotheism simply better suited for ruling? If
so, what did that mean for a faith with more
deities than days in the year? During the
founding decades of the Hindutva movement,
much effort revolved around making
Hinduism more like its rivals: building a single
shared identity to unite everyone for whom
India was, in Savarkar's words, “his Fatherland
as well as his Holy-land.” This definition
c o n v e n i e n t l y r o p e d i n S i k h s ( a
disproportionate number of whom served in
the army), Buddhists (whose spiritual cachet
helped give the movement credibility), and
Jains (who tended, then and now, to be quite
rich).
What it pointedly did not do was dictate what
this newly lumped-together group of people
should believe. Indeed, very few of Hindutva's
leading lights have been holy men, or even
particularly devout; Savarkar and K. B.
Hedgewar (the founder of the Rashtriya
from Hindu tradition, but, as he famously said,
also from the Sermon on the Mount, from
Buddhist texts, and even from Leo Tolstoy.
After a member of Savarkar's group
assassinated Gandhi in 1948, the entire
Hindutva movement was discredited for a
generation.
Fast-forward to 2019: Gandhi's murderer has
been praised as a “patriot” by a candidate
running on Narendra Modi's ticket, and while
the prime minister has said he disagrees with
the remark, he did not withdraw his party's
backing. (The candidate won.)
Varanasi was not always a Hindutva
stronghold. Instead, it was long held by
Congress, the party of Gandhi and India's first
prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. When Modi
ran for the seat five years ago, he hedged his
bets by simultaneously contesting from a safer
constituency in his native state of Gujarat (you
can do that in India's parliamentary system).
09 May 2019