BY-MOOL RAJ
The India he built was avowedly secular, not in the Western sense of hostility to religion, but in the Indian sense of equal respect for all religions.
It defines Hindu identity not through spiritual practice but through territorial and ancestral belonging and it explicitly positions India as a Hindu nation in which minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, are guests at best and threats at worst.
India’s minorities, particularly its 200 million Muslims, live with a palpable anxiety that was not part of Nehru’s India.
There is a question that hangs, heavy and unresolved, over the world’s largest democracy. It is not merely a political question; it is a civilizational one. What is India? Is it the pluralist, secular republic that Gandhi dreamed of and Nehru architected? Or is it Bharat, a Hindu homeland, ancient and assertive, reclaiming its identity after centuries of what its proponents call civilizational suppression? The tension between these two visions has defined Indian politics for decades. But in the era of Narendra Modi and the Bhartiya Janata Party, it has burst into the open with a force that can no longer be politely ignored.
To understand where India stands today, one must first understand where it began, or rather, where its founders intended it to begin. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was, in every fiber of his being, a man of faith. Yet his faith was never exclusionary. He drew from the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, from Islamic poetry and Buddhist thought, with equal reverence. For Gandhi, India’s strength lay precisely in its diversity, the fact that a Hindu, a Muslim, a Sikh, and a Christian could share the same soil, the same grief, and the same aspiration. He did not want a Hindu state. He wanted a moral state. And he paid for that vision with his life, assassinated in 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a man steeped in the ideology of Hindu nationalism. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s intellectual heir, translated that moral vision into constitutional architecture. The India he built was avowedly secular, not in the Western sense of hostility to religion, but in the Indian sense of equal respect for all religions. The Preamble to the Indian Constitution, amended in 1976 to explicitly include the word “secular,” reflected this founding compact. Nehru’s India invested in science, in institutions, in a mixed economy, and above all in the idea that no citizen’s belonging to the nation could be conditional upon their religion. Minorities were not merely tolerated, they were, in principle, equal. This was the India that stood at independence. Imperfect, poor, and fractured, but anchored in an idea larger than any single faith.
Hindutva is not Hinduism. This distinction matters enormously, and its blurring is one of the great political sleights of hand of our era. Hinduism is a religion, ancient, syncretic, philosophically vast, and deeply personal. Hindutva, coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1923, is an ideology. It defines Hindu identity not through spiritual practice but through territorial and ancestral belonging and it explicitly positions India as a Hindu nation in which minorities, particularly Muslims and Christians, are guests at best and threats at worst. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, became the organizational spine of Hindutva. The RSS was not a political party, it was a cultural and paramilitary organization, building cadres of ideologically committed Hindu nationalists through daily shakhas, physical drills, and nationalist mythology. It admired, in its early decades, the disciplined nationalism of Mussolini’s Italy. It stood apart from Gandhi’s independence movement, which it considered too accommodating of Muslims. The BJP, founded in 1980, is the RSS’s political arm, its electoral face. For years it remained a secondary force in Indian politics, overshadowed by the Congress party’s secular consensus. But the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, carried out by a mob energized by BJP leaders, marked a turning point. Communal violence followed. And the BJP discovered that Hindutva could win votes.
When Narendra Modi swept to power in 2014 on a wave of anti-incumbency and development promises, many observers hoped the governance imperative would temper the ideology. It did not. Under Modi, Hindutva has moved from the margins to the mainstream of Indian state policy. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offered fast-tracked citizenship to persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries but explicitly excluded Muslims. The abrogation of Article 370, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its special status, was celebrated in the language of national integration but executed through a communications blackout and mass detention. The construction of the Ram Mandir on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, inaugurated by Modi in January 2024 in a ceremony that blurred the line between state and temple, was presented as a civilizational restoration. The renaming of cities, Allahabad to Prayagraj, Faizabad to Ayodhya, is not merely administrative. It is a rewriting of the landscape’s memory. The elevation of Hindi and the sidelining of Urdu carry similar symbolic weight. Textbooks have been revised. History is being retold. The very name “Bharat,” drawn from ancient Sanskrit scripture and now increasingly preferred in official contexts over “India,” signals a civilizational repositioning, away from the Nehruvian, outward-looking republic and toward a self-consciously Hindu nation.
The question I pose is if India is going the right path? This deserves an honest answer, not a diplomatic one.
India’s minorities, particularly its 200 million Muslims, live with a palpable anxiety that was not part of Nehru’s India. Mob lynchings over alleged beef consumption, bulldozers deployed against Muslim properties as collective punishment, the marginalization of Muslim voices in public life, these are not isolated incidents. They are a pattern. And patterns, in politics, are policy by other means. India’s press freedom rankings have collapsed. Its independent institutions, the judiciary, the Election Commission, the universities have faced sustained pressure. The space for dissent has narrowed. Journalists, academics, and activists critical of the government have faced sedition charges, UAPA detentions, and social media pile-ons orchestrated with remarkable coordination. Yet, India votes. It debates. Its courts occasionally push back. Its civil society, battered but not broken, continues to resist. The 2024 general elections delivered Modi a third term but denied him the outright majority he had previously enjoyed, suggesting that a significant portion of the Indian electorate is not fully sold on the Hindutva project.
Gandhi was killed by the idea that Hindutva eventually became. Nehru feared it enough to build constitutional walls against it. That both men are now invoked, selectively, strategically by the very movement they opposed is one of history’s crueler ironies. India is not yet a theocracy. But it is drifting, deliberately, ideologically, and with considerable popular support away from the secular republic its founders envisioned. Whether it corrects course depends not on politicians alone, but on ordinary Indians; teachers, journalists, voters, and the young generation that will inherit whatever India becomes. The soul of a nation is not fixed. It is a living argument. India’s argument is far from over.
THE AUTHOR IS A REGULAR COLUMNIST AND FREELANCE WRITER
