Inventing Hindu supremacy

Vinayak Savarkar ridiculed Gandhi, preaching that

anti-Muslim violence was the only means to unite
India into a nation

by Mihir Dalal

Mihir Dalal is an Indian journalist and author of the book Big Billion Startup: The
Untold Flipkart Story (2019). He was a 2022 Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia
University in New York, where he studied business, Indian politics and narrative
history.

Edited by Sam Haselby

T o understand Narendra Modi’s India, it is instructive to grasp the ideas of the

Hindu Right’s greatest ideologue, the world of British colonial India in which they
emerged, and the historical feebleness of the present regime.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a polymath who read law in London, enjoyed
Shakespeare, admired the Bible, wrote important historical works, and became an
accomplished poet and playwright. His lifelong obsession was politics.

Savarkar took up political activity in his teens and became a cherished anti-British
revolutionary. While serving a long prison sentence for inciting violence against
the British, he transformed into a Hindu supremacist bent on dominating Indian
Muslims. His pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva (1923), written secretively in jail,
remains the most influential work of Hindu nationalism. In this and subsequent
works, he called for Hindus, hopelessly divided by caste, to come together as one
homogeneous community and reclaim their ancient homeland from those he
considered outsiders, primarily the Muslims. Savarkar advocated violence against
Muslims as the principal means to bind antagonistic lower and upper castes,
writing:

Nothing makes Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self.

Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the
pressure of a common foe. Hatred separates as well as unites.
Savarkar has proven prescient if not prescriptive. Over the past four decades, the
Hindu Right’s violence against Muslims has indeed helped Modi’s Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) to cement a degree of Hindu political unity long considered
unattainable.

Some of Savarkar’s views on Hindus and their religion embarrass the Right. An
agnostic, Savarkar declared that Hindutva – his construction of Hindu
nationalism – was bigger than Hinduism, the actual religion of the Hindus. Later
in life, he railed against Hindus and urged them to become more like Muslims (or
his perception of them). Writing about Muslims in the medieval period allegedly
raping and converting Hindu women any chance they got, Savarkar characterised
it as ‘an effective method of increasing the Muslim population’ unlike the ‘suicidal
Hindu idea of chivalry’ of treating the enemy’s women with respect. He wrote
disparagingly about cow worship and other Hindu practices, and refused to
discharge the funeral rites for his devout Hindu wife. Although Savarkar’s
Hindutva helped inspire the launch of the BJP’s parent organisation, Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a century ago, he was disdainful of its decision to
avoid direct political participation. ‘The epitaph for the RSS volunteer will be that
he was born, he joined the RSS and he died without accomplishing anything,’ he
reportedly said.

Until Modi became prime minister in 2014, Savarkar was known to few Indians,
and those few knew him as a minor freedom-fighter. Since then, the BJP-RSS have
placed Savarkar at the centre of their efforts to rewrite Indian history from a
Hindu supremacist perspective. Today’s BJP positions Savarkar as a nationalist
icon on a par with Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, if not greater. If
Savarkar’s ‘repeated warnings against the Congress’s appeasement politics’ had
been heeded, India could have avoided Partition, the separation of Pakistan from
India, writes Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief.

In fact, this invocation of Savarkar disguises a much more complicated history

that the Right is desperate to suppress.

S avarkar was born in 1883 to a Brahmin family near Nashik, a city in western
India. In the first part of Vikram Sampath’s extensive, hagiographical biography
of 2019, Savarkar is presented as a child prodigy who loved reading and lapped
up Hindu epics, books, newspapers and political journals in Marathi – his mother
tongue – and English. A newspaper ran one of his Marathi poems when he was
12; another published an article of his on Hindu culture.

The Savarkar brothers; from left: Narayan, Ganesh and Vinayak. Courtesy Wikipedia

The second of four siblings, Savarkar lost his mother to cholera when he was nine,
and his father to the plague seven years later. Still in his teens, he formed a secret
society of young revolutionaries against the British. According to Sampath, he
found the constitutional methods of the Indian National Congress – an
organisation gently pushing local interests – unappealing, and instead drew
inspiration from the few revolutionaries who assassinated British officials.
Savarkar would give speeches on historic nationalist movements to his secret
society and extol the 19th-century European nationalist revolutionaries Giuseppe
Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini, who exercised considerable influence on his
thought. After his marriage to a Brahmin girl was arranged by his uncle, Savarkar
enrolled in college in 1902 for a major in the arts. He studied widely, reading
Sanskrit and Greek classics, English poetry, international history and biographies
of revolutionaries.

After graduation, Savarkar moved to London to read law but also to continue his
political activity in the enemy’s bastion. He stayed at a boarding house for Indian
students, where he met many co-conspirators, not a few of whom he helped to
radicalise. Abhinav Bharat, Savarkar’s secret organisation, would smuggle arms
and bomb-manuals to India; in 1909, the group assassinated William Hutt Curzon
Wyllie, an aide to the Secretary of State for India, in London. Savarkar had already
worried the British enough that, by the time he arrived in London in 1906, they
had put him under surveillance. In 1910, he was arrested and deported to India to
be tried. By this time, India had endured British colonial rule for more than a
century. Colonial narratives greatly influenced the worldviews of Savarkar and
other Indian nationalists.

Over a 70-year period starting in the 1750s, the British East India Company
defeated both European and local rivals and turned the Mughal dynasty that had
ruled India for more than 200 years into its puppet. Britain’s barbaric traders
carried out their conquest through loot and rapacity, while its scribes,
missionaries and historians provided the moral justifications by portraying India
as a degenerate civilisation that British rule might redeem. Some European
thinkers, Orientalists and Romantics valorised ancient Hindu India as the cradle
of civilisation, but they too lamented its decay.

Under British colonialism, elite Hindus often accepted the British narratives for
colonial rule. They were especially tortured by the question: how could a vast
nation like India be conquered by a distant island a fraction of its size and
population? Such musings about Indian or Hindu history furthered the
development of Indian nationalism. By assuming that a ‘national’ Hindu-Indian
identity had existed since time immemorial (it hadn’t), elite Hindus felt driven to
recover their Hindu-Indian identity in the present. In fact, until British rule,
people in the subcontinent hadn’t seen themselves as Hindu (or Muslim) in the
modern sense. They balanced various identities, including those of place, caste
and family lineage; religion merely provided one among several, as the political
theorist Sudipta Kaviraj and others have written. However, in the 19th century,
some upper-caste Hindus, awed by the power of Britain’s military and industrial
superiority, launched vigorous movements to ‘purify’ their religion and make it
more like Christianity. They moved to cast off what they saw as the appendages
dragging down Hinduism – the inegalitarian caste system, the large diversity of
gods, sects and practices – believing this reformation would make India great
again.

British historical narratives portrayed Hindu-Muslim enmity as a fundamental,

self-evident feature of Indian history. In reality, religious pluralism and toleration
– not fanatical religious hatred – had been the norm among people of various
religions in South Asia. In The Loss of Hindustan (2020), the historian Manan Asif
Ahmed writes that, before British rule, many elite Hindus and Muslims had
thought of Hindustan as a homeland not only of the Hindus, but of the ‘diverse
communities of believers’ including Muslims and Christians. British colonialism
constructed a different narrative, one in which Hindus had been subjugated in
their home for 1,000 years by Muslim invaders. This distorted the South Asian
experience of Hindustan into claims of immutable enmity between Hindus and
Muslims.

The British census aggregated Hindus and Muslims across India into
homogeneous groups and facilitated the creation of solidarity – and belligerence
– among them. Towards the end of the 19th century, colonial influences
combined with what the historian Christopher Bayly in 1998 called ‘old
patriotisms’ to contribute to the invention of a pan-Indian Hindu nationality, and
a more inchoate Muslim nationality.

W orking in this legacy, Savarkar made his first lasting contribution to Indian
politics in 1909, with the publication of a historical work, The Indian War of
Independence of 1857. In 1857, large numbers of Indian soldiers and gentry in
northern and western India had risen under the banner of the fading Mughal
dynasty in the largest armed uprising against the British Empire by a ruled
people. British historians had played down this war as a ‘sepoy mutiny’, restricted
to disgruntled soldiers rather than a polity – a view Savarkar set out to correct. In
Hindutva and Violence (2021), an authoritative work on Savarkar, the historian
Vinayak Chaturvedi shows that Savarkar was a master at reclaiming Indian
history from the British by reading colonial records and works of scholarship
‘against the grain’. Drawing inspiration from the French and American
revolutions as well as the ultranationalism of Mazzini, Savarkar reconstructed
1857 as the ‘first war’ for Indian independence. To this day, 1857 is understood as
such in India. His passionate, romantic account glorified Indian war heroes with
the intent of inspiring a revolution against the British.

In the book, Savarkar introduced the central motif in his historical works:
violence as mystical unifier. He held that Hindus and Muslims had become united
for the first time ever during the war through the means of violence. The literal
‘shedding of [British] blood’ together had forged the Hindu-Muslim bond, as the
political theorist Shruti Kapila characterises Savarkar’s idea in Violent Fraternity
(2021). Savarkar’s conception of Hindu-Muslim history had been partly shaped
by the long tradition of religiopolitical enmity against the Mughals in his
homeland of Maharashtra, as the historian Prachi Deshpande shows in Creative
Pasts (2007). But Savarkar, always the innovative thinker, borrowed only what
suited his purposes. He wrote that, since Hindu kings had avenged centuries of
Muslim oppression by defeating the Mughals in the 18th century, the ‘blot of
slavery’ had been ‘wiped off’. Having re-established their ‘sovereignty’ at home,
they could now fraternise with Muslims. And finally, such was the power of the
violence in 1857 that India now became ‘the united nation of the adherents of
Islam as well as Hinduism’. Indian War and its author were admired across the
political spectrum.

The book was the high point of Savarkar’s youth. Soon he lost his infant son to
smallpox, and his elder brother was arrested for treason. In 1910, Savarkar
himself was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Andamans, a brutal penal
colony in the Bay of Bengal. He had become notorious on account of the violent
activities of his secret society. But more than this, it was his ‘seditious’ writings
with their potential to sow widespread disaffection that had threatened the
British, the historian Janaki Bakhle wrote in 2010.

Prison broke Savarkar. In his autobiography, Savarkar writes about frequently

suffering from dysentery, lung disease and malaria. He was put in solitary
confinement for months, and for eight years was denied permission to see his
wife. The Irish jailor was sadistic, and Muslim warders were cruel to Hindus.
Nearly driven to suicide, he filed mercy petitions, abjured revolution, and
promised to serve the empire (the issue most debated about Savarkar today). The
petitions were rejected but in the early 1920s Savarkar was moved to a less harsh
prison in western India.

By then, Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian National Congress had revolutionised

Indian politics. His religiosity and asceticism attracted the masses to the
independence movement, which had been limited to a tiny section of educated
Indians. But, unusually, Gandhi emphasised nonviolence, ethical conduct, social
reform and Hindu-Muslim unity as much as political independence. He also often
upset fellow nationalists. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, some Indian
Muslims launched a movement to compel the British to preserve the institution of
the Islamic Caliphate, a symbol of international Muslim solidarity. Gandhi
encouraged Hindus to join in, even though they had no stake in the cause.

Savarkar had met Gandhi, and had disdain for the man and his politics, which
seemed to him anachronistic and effeminate. The Caliphate movement also
triggered Savarkar’s fears about India being invaded again by Muslims. This
wasn’t simply Islamophobia. Many elite Muslims resisted the slow
democratisation unfolding through the colonial period, for fear of losing out to
Hindus. They saw themselves as India’s historical rulers whose say in its affairs
‘could not be merely proportionate to their numbers’, as the political scientist
Christophe Jaffrelot writes in The Pakistan Paradox (2015), a history of Pakistan.
Some Muslim leaders used the rhetoric of pan-Islamism and threats of violence to
push their claims with the British. After the Caliphate movement, Savarkar felt
that Indian War’s paean to a composite nationalism had been rejected by Indian
Muslims because of their ‘divided love’ (the other interest being Muslims outside
India); he reacted like a ‘spurned lover’, writes Bakhle in 2010.

I n Hindutva, Savarkar applied the European framework of nationalism – that a

nation needed a homogeneous community, a common culture, a long history – to
the subcontinent. In western European nations and the United States,
Christianity, race and language had offered the basis for a common history and
identity (or so their nationalists claimed). But what could work for India?
Hinduism, the religion of the majority, seemed unfit since it lacked a unifying
mechanism of one book or church. India’s resident Muslims, Christians, Sikhs,
Jains, Buddhists and others also bitterly resented attempts to hitch an Indian
nationality to Hinduism. Hinduism thus posed ‘the main obstacle’ in Savarkar’s
quest for a big-tent Indian identity, as Kapila notes. To resolve this conundrum,
unlike religious nationalists, Savarkar strove to secularise Hindus – instead of
Hindu scriptures, he chose as the foundation of his ideology the discipline of
history, the paradigmatic secular form of the enlightened political thinker.

By turning to history, Savarkar wanted to show that followers of all religions born
in India – Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism – owed allegiance to a common
genealogy: Hindutva, or Hindu-ness. ‘Hindutva is not a word but a history,’
Savarkar wrote in his pamphlet. He also seized the chance to redefine who is a
Hindu. Essentially anyone whose ‘fatherland’ and ‘holy land’ resided within the
subcontinent qualified as Hindu, he concluded. Not only followers of Hinduism,
but Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists counted as Hindus – a novel interpretation.
Muslims and Christians, however, were outsiders as their holy lands lay beyond
India, he emphasised. The influence of social evolutionism was clear. Hindus must
remember that ‘great combinations are the order of the day,’ Savarkar wrote. ‘The
League of Nations, the alliances of powers Pan-Islamism, Pan-Slavism, Pan-
Ethiopism, all little beings are seeking to get themselves incorporated into greater
wholes, so as to be better-fitted for the struggle for existence and power.’

Savarkar believed that Hindu India needed to assimilate audaciously as well as

exclude ruthlessly to recover its lost glory.
He theorised that Hindu identity had been formed chiefly through violence,
Chaturvedi notes, whether it was in the Islamic period that lasted more than a
millennium starting in the 8th century or even earlier. In the long war with the
Muslims, ‘our people became intensely conscious of ourselves as Hindus and
were welded into a nation to an extent unknown in our history,’ Savarkar wrote in
Hindutva. He ridiculed nonviolence – to negate Gandhi’s ideas – which, along
with Muslim hatred, became his lifelong obsession.

Eloquently written with a clear sense of urgency, Hindutva became The Communist
Manifesto of the Hindu Right. Soon after its publication, K B Hedgewar, a former
Congress member from Savarkar’s homeland, founded the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in 1925. He conceived it as a sociocultural
organisation that would transform the character of Hindus through
indoctrination and paramilitary training, and make them masculine in order to
defeat ‘outsiders’. Hedgewar thought RSS would stay away from direct politics. It
would operate in the shadows to avoid backlash from the British, and build Hindu
unity from the ground up to realise a Hindu nation in the future.

I n 1924, Savarkar was released from prison after 13 years inside. Still banned
from political activity and put under house arrest, he launched social-reform
initiatives and became a prolific writer of plays, poetry, articles and historical
works. Despite opposition from orthodox Hindus, he campaigned aggressively
against untouchability and in favour of intercaste dining and marriage. ‘A national
foolishness’ that created ‘eternal conflict’ among Hindus, the caste system
deserved ‘to be thrown in the dustbins of history,’ he wrote. His aim was to
dissolve barriers enough for Hindus to realise political unity; caste discrimination,
not caste itself, was his target. Despite Gandhi’s emergence, Savarkar still burned
to become the leader of the Hindus. In his autobiographical works, blissfully free
of modesty, Savarkar presented himself as a great Hindu in an ancient line of
civilisational warriors. After his death, it emerged that one of his adulatory
‘biographies’ may have been authored by Savarkar himself.

In 1937, after he was allowed to re-enter politics at the age of 54, Savarkar
assumed the presidency of the Hindu Mahasabha, a former wing of the Indian
National Congress that broke out as a militant Hindu party. Anxious to stay away
from prison, he greatly tempered his anti-British stance. Instead, he took aim at
his two obsessions: Gandhi and the Muslims. But Savarkar, whose strengths lay in
literary writing and polemics, lacked the energy and vision to mount a serious
challenge against the Congress. His health had never fully recovered from the
prison ordeal, and help from the RSS was inconsistent. Even though its members
sometimes participated in Congress-led campaigns against the British, the RSS as
an institution largely stayed out of the independence movement. RSS leaders and
Savarkar were ambiguous about the Congress-led struggle partly because of their
hatred of Gandhi’s politics of nonviolence and his pursuit of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Flailing around on the periphery of power, Savarkar could only lash out at
Gandhi’s ‘appeasement’ of Muslims. When in the 1930s the Muslim League
began to demand a separate nation carved out of India for Muslims, he was
appalled (as were other Hindu politicians including Gandhi and Nehru, although
for different reasons). Desperate to avoid conceding land to Muslims, Savarkar
called for one secular state with equal rights for everyone, where minorities would
be free to practise their religion. But he revealed his hand by accusing Muslims of
anti-Indian activities; meanwhile, on the ground, his party stoked communal
polarisation and organised violence against Muslims. Unlike Gandhi, Savarkar
agreed with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, that Hindus
and Muslims constituted ‘two nations’; but, obsessed with establishing Hindu
supremacy, he opposed the creation of Pakistan.

Savarkar and other Hindu extremists blamed Gandhi for the bloody Partition of
1947, the division of India into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority
India overseen by the British. They were incensed by the fast the old man
undertook to compel India to give money owed to Pakistan. In 1948, Nathuram
Godse, one of Savarkar’s acolytes, assassinated Gandhi. Savarkar’s reputation was
irredeemably stained. He was put on trial for allegedly conspiring to murder
Gandhi. His fear of returning to prison was so intense that in court he distanced
himself from Godse, who was hurt by his mentor’s ‘calculated, demonstrative
non-association’. After his acquittal, Savarkar withdrew from politics and spent
the rest of his life in anonymity.

I n the first three decades after independence, the Indian National Congress
dominated Indian politics. Drawing on the legacy of the freedom struggle, Nehru
and his successors attempted to cultivate a secular democratic culture. In this
period, the Hindu Right struggled politically even as the RSS multiplied its
presence across India. Godse had been an RSS member and the organisation was
widely seen as culpable in the murder. Banned for 18 months after the
assassination and fighting for its survival, the RSS was compelled to enter politics
directly. It decided to people a new Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Jana
Sangh, with its members. The safeguard turned into a permanent feature, as the
allure of political power proved to be too seductive.

In 1963, Savarkar – hobbled by old age and ailments – published his final
historical treatise, Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History. The ‘glorious epochs’
referred to those eras when civilisational warriors freed the Hindu nation ‘from
the shackles of foreign domination’. In this ambitious work, Savarkar excavates a
triumphant Hindu will to power in history so as to furnish a guide to establishing
a Hindu nation. He spends a majority of the book on the Hindu-Muslim
encounter, which he characterises as an ‘epic war’ that lasted more than a
millennium.

Six Glorious Epochs is striking for its vicious polemic – against Hinduism,
Buddhism and, most of all, against Hindus. Reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
hatred of Christianity and lay people, Savarkar rants at the ‘perverted sense of
virtues’ of the Hindus, like nonviolence, religious tolerance and ethical conduct in
war. Hindus, according to Savarkar, had been corrupted by Buddhism and its
nonviolent creed (like Christianity-corrupted Roman culture in Nietzsche’s
telling). He writes that nonviolence ‘emasculates human beings’ and that it
‘should at times be killed by cruel violence!’ Savarkar castigates past Hindu rulers
for their ‘suicidal’ practices; he moans that they did not massacre Muslims en
masse after winning battles, avoided raping Muslim women, refrained from
enacting forcible conversions, and did not destroy mosques. According to him,
this is precisely what Muslims did to Hindus, an attitude he praises as ‘highly
pious and thoroughly sound’ in war. But their ‘perverted sense of virtues’ had
made Hindus ‘slovenly and imbecile, and insensible to all sorts of shameful
humiliation’.

The Hindu will to power was manifest only in a few ‘heroic men and women
warriors’; the rest suffered from the Savarkarist version of false consciousness. He
was clear that, in order to realise their latent Hindu-ness, Hindus would have to
relinquish the values they held dear. Savarkar essentially prescribed ‘permanent’
war for Hindus within their homeland, as Kapila and Chaturvedi both note.

Written in the aftermath of Partition, Gandhi’s martyrdom, the unrelenting

dominance of the Congress and Savarkar’s own disgrace, his bitterness in Six
Glorious Epochs is a giveaway: the lover first spurned by the Muslims had been
rejected by his Hindus too. In 1966, the ailing Savarkar died by suicide, aged 82.
I n 1975, the prime minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, suspended
democracy and imposed authoritarian rule, which later drew great public anger.
Within two years, the Indian National Congress was voted out of power for the
first time and a makeshift grouping of parties that included the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Jana Sangh formed the union government. The Congress soon bounced
back but its dominance had ended.

In the 1980s, the erstwhile Jana Sangh, now reinvented as the BJP, spearheaded
the Rama Temple movement that permanently changed Indian politics. Riding an
old myth, the BJP and its allies claimed that a mosque in the northern city of
Ayodhya had been built by 16th-century Islamic invaders over the ruins of a
Rama temple at the deity’s alleged birthplace. The desecration of his birthplace
was a living symbol of Hindu India’s historical oppression by Muslims, the BJP
thundered, as it feverishly mobilised the masses to restore the temple.
Worshipped devoutly by hundreds of millions of Hindus, Rama proved to be
irresistible: in 1992, the mosque fell to a Hindu mob. The BJP went from winning
just two seats out of more than 500 in 1984, to the head of the ruling coalition by
1998. Since 2014, Modi, who played a minor role in the Rama temple campaign,
has dominated Indian politics.

The Rama temple evangelism was manufactured by an insurgent BJP primed to

knock over the decrepit ancien régime of the Congress. It is the same former
insurgent – now a dominant but deeply insecure incumbent, haunted by its
discreditable past – that orchestrates the Savarkar propaganda. Both campaigns
share a common feature: the Right’s felt need to locate its legitimacy in history.
The BJP has carried on Savarkar’s legacy of turning to history instead of Hindu
religious texts for validation. It’s not the Vedas or the Bhagavad Gita, the greatest
Hindu scriptures, that ordained the BJP’s rule, but the civilisational history of the
Hindus that did. Positing an unbroken chain stretching back thousands of years,
the BJP-RSS present themselves as the guardians of the great Hindu civilisation,
successors to iconic kings like Chandragupta Maurya (reign c322-298 BCE),
Prithviraj Chauhan (c1178-92) and Shivaji (1674-80).

The significance of their success in appropriating Indian history cannot be

overstated. The appropriation allows for the exclusionary politics of the BJP-RSS
to subsume, even replace, religious belief. For example, the inauguration of the
Rama temple by Modi this January, one of the biggest events in modern Indian
history, incited a national frenzy among Hindus. But the spectacle wasn’t mainly a
celebration of Rama bhakti (religious devotion). It was about a politically united
Hindu community declaring its pre-eminence in its homeland.

If the BJP-RSS have worked very hard to make history – admittedly, partly a
colonial one – their strength, it is also their weakness. The RSS is hypersensitive
to its shaming non-participation in India’s freedom movement. (This is what
Congress party members meant when they called Right-wing leaders ‘anti-
national’, which, now, unsurprisingly, is one of the Right’s favourite labels for its
critics.) There is no escaping the fact that Indian independence came under
Gandhi using Gandhian methods, and the Hindutva antipathy for Gandhi and his
methods is hard to hide, indeed central to their formation and history. The Right
cannot fundamentally alter public perception of these facts all at once. Savarkar is
the one figure who cannot be claimed by the Congress and who has genuine links
with the anti-British struggle. His revolutionary past and later marginalisation
yield a counterfactual interpretation that can cover somewhat for the Right’s
embarrassing absence. In the Right’s telling, Savarkar was sidelined by Gandhi
and Nehru while the Hindu polity foolishly rejected Hindutva – Partition was the
calamitous outcome of these two decisions. If Hindus had chosen Savarkar’s (and
the RSS’s) macho Hindutva over Gandhi’s ‘Muslim appeasement’, they would
have reigned supreme in undivided India, it is implied.

The icon of Savarkar thus reminds Hindus: without Hindutva, India’s national
security is perennially under threat. Only by heeding ‘the man who could have
prevented Partition’ can you secure Hindu India, especially when Islamic
terrorism is perceived as a threat, and Muslims constitute 14 per cent of India’s
population. Muslims oppressed Hindus for centuries and won a nation for
themselves by expropriating Hindu territory – why shouldn’t Hindus become
masters in whatever was left of their own ancient homeland? Gandhi had
dedicated his life to fighting such realpolitik, a struggle carried on by Nehru after
independence.

Hindutva now, however, enjoys wide legitimacy among Hindus of all castes. The
BJP won about 37 per cent of the votes cast in the last national election of 2019,
but that number greatly understates the public’s approval of Hindutva. Rival
parties can criticise the BJP, but they dare not oppose Hindutva. The self-
professed secular Congress party, for instance, tends to respond to the BJP’s
Savarkar propaganda by questioning his lack of machismo for filing mercy
petitions with the British, instead of contesting his Hindu supremacism lest it be
seen as anti-Hindu.
 As BJP and RSS leaders have brought Savarkar to prominence in Indian politics
and thought, a cult of Gandhi’s assassin Godse has flourished among party
loyalists. In recent years, statues and even temples dedicated to Godse have
cropped up, while Gandhi memorials are defaced.

As resurrected Hindutva icons, they stand in death as they did in life: Savarkar,
the guru, behind the pulpit; Godse, the disciple, on the streets. Savarkar would
have thought that India’s Hindus today are finally being cured of what he hated as
their perverted virtues of nonviolence, tolerance and respect for adversaries.

aeon.co 27 February 2024