‘Rising Hindutva and its Impact on the Region’

The book was launched last month and comes at an important time, when India, motivated by Hindutva is making the region unstable. In the wake of the Pulwama attack, which could be a False Flag Operation, India launched surgical strikes, which failed. Since it had violated Pakistan’s airspace, Pakistan responded and in the melee two Indian Air Force fighter aircraft were shot down. Seething with anger Narendra Modi is threatening with dire consequences.

S. M. Hali’s latest ‘Rising Hindutva - and its impact on the Region’ is a very useful historical and contemporary political record and analysis of Hindu chauvinism evolving from the margins of Indian politics to its mainstream. From being an Indian aberration in response to Muslim and colonial rule it has now become the Indian norm and India’s main vehicle for the realization of its great power aspirations.

With the upcoming Indian elections of 2019, Narendra Modi’s use of extremism to gain victory at the polls the book provides insight into the dubious means to win at any cost. If Prime Minister Modi is again able to win a majority on his own, as he did in 2014, it will tend to confirm the credibility of Hindutva as a longer-term political phenomenon at the heart of Indian politics. If, as many pundits expect, Modi will at best head a coalition government because the BJP after 5 years of his leadership will fail to win a majority on its own, the more liberal and secular segments of Indian political society, as well as many of India’s neighbours, will heave a sigh of relief in the belief that fascism has failed to develop deep and permanent roots in the political soil of India. This could be too optimistic a conclusion.

It is within this context Mr. Hali’s book takes on added significance and is a must read for all those seeking to understand an important aspect of the politics of contemporary India. Beginning naturally enough from the early 20th century origin of the concept of Hindutva as part of the emergence of Indian nationalism, the desire for independence, and the political belief that only a Hindu with an extreme sense of his or her unique identity could be an Indian nationalist and freedom-fighter, the book goes on to discuss the decade by decade development of Hindutva under various leaders from a political cultural ideology to an outright fascist ideology influenced by European fascism and Nazism.

Hali’s book shows in detail how political history - or history written with a political agenda in mind - distorts objective history, creates self-satisfying myths, and erects enemies and dangers with which to whip up a macho emotional frenzy against vulnerable targets to avenge centuries of imagined and real humiliations against “outsiders,” especially those who have long settled and become fellow-Indians but who have clung to the faith their ancestors brought to India, or to which they were later converted. This feeling was not just confined to members of the RSS or Sangh Parivar (the Hindutva family.) Self-styled secular socialists, like the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi exclaimed after the fall of Dhaka in 1971 that India had avenged a thousand years of history!

“Rising Hindutva and its Impact on the Region” is a must read not only for Pakistanis but Indians, who should be made aware of the threat extremism poses to their very existence as the RSS parcharak (activist) Narendra Modi is taking India to the brink of war, which can devastate humanity.