Political ascendancy of Hindtva and the attempted capture of sanatan dharma

By Dr. P.K. Gupta* 

Hinduism and Hindutva are not interchangeable. Hinduism is a plural religious civilisation, while Hindutva is a modern political ideology that seeks to consolidate this diversity into a uniform national identity. The ascent of this once-marginal current from the fringes of Indian politics to the commanding heights of state power represents one of the most consequential ideological transformations of the republic. In acquiring legitimacy, organisational reach and mass appeal, Hindutva has also attempted to claim the authority to define Sanatan Dharma itself.

For several decades after Independence, India’s centrist political establishment assumed that constitutional democracy and secular citizenship were sufficiently secure to contain religious majoritarianism. Hindu-nationalist organisations appeared electorally marginal and socially limited, and the broad consensus created by the freedom movement seemed durable. That confidence gradually became complacency. While the institutions of the republic remained formally secular, the ideological contest over the meaning of India was often neglected. Religious nationalism did not disappear; it continued to build cadres, institutions, symbols and narratives of historical grievance. Its advance was slow but disciplined. By the time centrist parties recognised the depth of this work, the vocabulary of Hindutva had already entered everyday political discourse. Opponents repeatedly mistook electoral weakness for ideological irrelevance.

The gravest early assault on the moral foundations of the republic came with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948. Nathuram Godse, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and others were tried for conspiracy; Savarkar was acquitted, though the Kapur Commission two decades later reached a far more adverse conclusion about his circle. The government banned the RSS in February 1948, lifting the ban in July 1949 after negotiations and the organisation’s adoption of a written constitution. The episode revealed both the danger of militant communal politics and the state’s uncertainty. A second decisive episode occurred on the night of 22–23 December 1949, when idols of Rama were surreptitiously placed beneath the central dome of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. Authorities placed the property under receivership, but the idols remained. In its 2019 Ayodhya judgment, the Supreme Court held that the mosque had been desecrated and that Muslims had been ousted through acts contrary to law. Yet the Hindu Mahasabha remained weak in the first general election of 1951–52, contesting thirty-one Lok Sabha seats, winning four and receiving less than one per cent of the national vote. The Jana Sangh won three seats. The Hindu right was marginal, not extinct.

The movement developed through a family of formally distinct organisations. The RSS concentrated on cadre formation and social discipline; the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, founded in 1951, entered electoral politics; and the Vishva Hindu Parishad, established in 1964, sought to bring religious leaders and lay organisations into a common Hindu platform. Over time, this network entered neighbourhood associations, educational activity, relief work and the political imagination of families that had not previously identified with Hindu nationalism.

Rama’s place in Indian civilisation long predates modern politics. Valmiki’s Ramayana, Tulsidas’s sixteenth-century Ramcharitmanas, regional Ramayanas, folk traditions and devotional movements have produced many understandings of Rama. Modern Hindutva did not invent devotion to Rama; it selectively reorganised that devotion around a territorial dispute and a programme of political mobilisation. Many traditional representations emphasise Rama’s composure, ethical restraint and companionship with Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman. Political imagery increasingly circulated a muscular, armed Rama poised for battle, while Hanuman underwent a comparable transformation in popular visual culture. The widely circulated image of a scowling, red-orange Hanuman differs sharply in emotional register from devotional portrayals of strength disciplined by humility. When the divine is persistently represented as aggrieved and battle-ready, aggression can be framed as a religious duty rather than a political choice.

By the 1970s, Congress dominance had weakened, public trust had eroded and opposition to centralised power had widened. Jayaprakash Narayan’s movement against corruption and authoritarianism brought together socialists, centrists, rightists and communists. After the Emergency, the Jana Sangh merged with other opposition parties to form the Janata Party, which came to power in 1977. A tradition kept at the edge of power gained respectability and administrative experience. The quarantine around Hindu nationalism was broken without a debate about its relationship with secular citizenship. Centrist and left parties often responded tactically rather than intellectually, entering opportunistic alliances or avoiding difficult arguments to preserve short-term coalitions. Such compromises blurred the distinction between Hindu faith and Hindutva, weakened principled secularism and created space for the charge of selective appeasement.

The Ram Janmabhoomi movement transformed a long-running legal dispute into a mass political campaign. The VHP’s mobilisation, Advani’s Rath Yatra in 1990 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 demonstrated the electoral force of religious nationalism. The violence in Gujarat in 2002 marked another rupture; official figures recorded 1,044 deaths—790 Muslims and 254 Hindus—while other estimates were higher. Perceived impunity emboldened militant groups. As strength increased, street mobilisation, vigilante groups and campaigns concerning cow protection, interfaith couples and conversion made intimidation part of everyday politics. Yet not every supporter of Hindutva endorses violence, nor is every assertion of Hindu identity majoritarian. Without these distinctions, analysis becomes indiscriminate accusation.

Temple-mosque disputes, campaigns concerning churches, the renaming of cities and roads, confrontations over religious processions and interference with minority celebrations have become recurring sites of majoritarian assertion, treating proximity of ancient places of worship as evidence of humiliation and inviting the present generation to avenge acts attributed to medieval rulers. A civilisation is not purified by deleting the evidence of encounter; it is impoverished. The Places of Worship Act of 1991 sought to prevent an endless reopening of historical claims by preserving the religious character of places of worship as it existed on 15 August 1947.

The electoral rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, founded in 1980, was neither sudden nor accidental. It won two Lok Sabha seats in 1984, eighty-five in 1989 and 120 in 1991. It emerged as the largest party in 1996 and led coalition governments in 1998 and 1999. It secured a parliamentary majority with 282 seats in 2014 and expanded that majority to 303 in 2019. In 2024 it remained the largest party with 240 seats, but lost its independent majority and formed a government with its National Democratic Alliance partners. These figures matter because power gives an ideology what marginal movements lack: administrative reach, cultural authority and the ability to define public debate. Ideas once confined to ideological organisations enter textbooks, television studios and bureaucratic priorities.

Sanatan Dharma has never depended upon one prophet, scripture, church or compulsory form of worship. It contains Shaiva, Vaishnava, Shakta, Smarta, devotional, philosophical, folk, tribal and sceptical currents. Political Hindutva seeks a more standardised public identity, elevating a limited set of symbols and narratives into tests of collective loyalty. This is not monotheism in the theological sense; it is political homogenisation. The tension is therefore an internal contest within Hindu society between a decentralised inheritance and a centralising ideology that claims to speak for all Hindus.

Hindutva seeks not merely to represent Hindu interests but to define Hinduism itself, presenting its preferred symbols and grievances as the natural expression of Sanatan Dharma. Yet Sanatan Dharma cannot be captured so easily. Its authority is dispersed across texts, teachers, sects, families, regions, philosophical schools and individual conscience. It has survived precisely because no pope, party or central command could permanently monopolise it. The central struggle is not between Hindus and non-Hindus, but between two ideas of India and, equally, two ideas of Hindu civilisation.

Hindutva’s ascent resulted from disciplined organisation, symbolic politics, centrist complacency, social change and repeated electoral calculation. Its rise cannot be explained solely by conspiracy, nor can it be dismissed as the temporary anger of a fringe. Political power, however, does not confer ownership of a religion. Hinduism is older, wider and more internally diverse than Hindutva. Rama does not belong to a party; Hanuman is not an emblem of rage; and Sanatan Dharma cannot be reduced to an electoral roll call. To defend Hindu civilisation is also to defend its plurality, its traditions of debate and its refusal to submit spiritual life to a single earthly authority. The answer to majoritarianism is not contempt for faith, but the liberation of faith from political monopoly.

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*Contact: guptapradeepkumar698@gmail.com