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Friday March 29, 2024

Hindutva slowly taking over Indian society

By Zahoor Khan Marwat
March 21, 2017

Hinduvta is the ideology of Hindu nationalism that was coined before the Partition in 1947. It was introduced by V D Sarkar in 1923 in an essay titled “Hinduvta: Who is a Hindu?” While he claimed that Hinduvta and Hinduism were two separate things, today Hindutva has become the ideology of the dreaded Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the terrorist organization that is out to eliminate the minorities in the so-called largest democratic country. The political front of the RSS is known as Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP that has wholly adopted the concept, trying to turn India into an extremist Hindu state where the minorities would have little or no rights. In short, both the BJP and RSS seek a new India minus democratic ideals and tolerance but full of militant, bigoted, brutal and aggressive Hindu nationalism.

According to MS Golwalkar, the founder of RSS, “... here was already a full-fledged ancient nation of the Hindus and the various communities which were living in the country were here either as guests, the Jews and Parsis, or as invaders, the Muslims and Christians. They never faced the question how all such heterogeneous groups could be called as children of the soil merely because, by an accident, they happened to reside in common territory under the rule of a common enemy … The theories of territorial nationalism and of common danger, which formed the basis for our concept of nation, had deprived us of the positive and inspiring content of our real Hindu nationhood ...”

Savarkar, the man who coined the ugly term, implies that only Hindus and those following Sikhism, Jainism and Buddhism can be true citizens of the country while Zoroastrian, Christianity, Islam and Judaism originated outside the Subcontinent and thus their followers have no rights. They are aliens and will remain so.

A senior leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) Praveen Togadia has even declared that the percentage of Hindus in India should be raised from 82 percent to 100 percent. Yes, he talks about forcibly converting or eliminating the minorities altogether.

The BJP, RSS and other hardline Hindu organisations continue to implement their agenda by hook or crook. The objective, if not fully eliminate them, is to push the minorities against the wall. What is the ban on cow slaughter about? Why Christian nuns are being assaulted? Why are Muslims being lynched in India on fabricated charges? Why are Sikhs being suppressed in the name of Khalistan? Why are churches being burnt down? Why is the face of Muslim parliamentarians in IOK being blackened? There is no end to inhuman treatment of minorities at the hands of growing extremist Hindu majority that is led by the Modi Sarkar. 

The threat to religious minorities in India is compounding day by day; as the world watches, the secular outlook and democratic credentials in India are drowned in cacophony and actions of fanatic Hindu fundamentalism. But as secularism erodes, the Western support for the Modi Sarkar, or the Hindu fanatics, will pose serious challenges to regional security and the world in the times to come.