Analyzing the Contemporary Relevance of Religious Politics in India

Religion and politics have always had a complicated relationship in India. But in recent decades, that relationship has grown more intense, more contested, and more consequential. With over 1.4 billion people and a population that is approximately 79.8% Hindu, India presents a unique case study in how majority religious identity gets mobilized for political ends – and what that means for a society built on the idea of pluralism. Understanding the current state of religious politics in India requires examining the ideology of Hindutva, the drive to homogenize Hindu identity, the gendering of nationalist narratives, and the real costs these forces impose on social cohesion and inter-religious life.

What is Hindutva, and how is it different from Hinduism? 🔗

The first thing to understand is that Hinduism and Hindutva are not the same thing, even though they are constantly conflated in public discourse. Hinduism is a religion; Hindutva is a political ideology – one that asserts Indian national identity and culture are inseparable from Hindu civilization. The term was coined by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his 1923 work Essentials of Hindutva, at a time when Savarkar was responding to pan-Islamic organizing among Indian Muslims and framing a competing vision of what it meant to be Indian.

Savarkar’s definition was notable for what it excluded as much as what it included. He argued that India must not merely be your “motherland” but also your “holy land” – which effectively placed Muslims and Christians outside the bounds of the true Indian nation, since their religious histories and sacred geographies lie elsewhere. Ironically, Savarkar himself was an atheist; his project was cultural and ethnic, not theological.

Today, Hindutva is most closely associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization that functions as the ideological backbone of the broader movement. Since the BJP’s rise to national power in 2014 under Narendra Modi, Hindutva has moved from the political margins to the center of Indian governance.

The project of Hindu unification: making a monolith out of diversity 🔗

One of the most significant – and intellectually problematic – aspects of contemporary religious politics in India is the attempt to present Hinduism as a unified, doctrinally coherent tradition. In reality, Hinduism is extraordinarily diverse. It encompasses hundreds of regional traditions, philosophical schools, languages, sects, and modes of worship. There is no single Hindu pope, no single scripture, and no single creed that all Hindus share. Hinduism has been described as a religion where the followers of other religions also have their proper place – a tradition historically associated with openness to multiplicity.

The Hindutva project actively works against this diversity. It proposes the obliteration of difference and the development of a uniform culture, expecting minorities to subordinate their identities to the cultural practices of the Hindu majority. The goal, in political terms, is to consolidate Hindu voters across caste, region, and linguistic lines under a single nationalist banner. But the sociological cost is significant: it requires suppressing the very internal plurality that has historically characterized Hindu life.

The promotion of a singular cultural identity compromises the pluralistic ethos that has long been a hallmark of Indian society. When politics flattens the diversity of a tradition as vast as Hinduism into a single ideological package, it distorts both religion and democratic discourse simultaneously.

Masculinizing Hinduism: gender and the politics of strength 🔗

Closely tied to the project of Hindu unification is a deliberate effort to recast Hinduism as a religion of strength, militancy, and masculine power. This is not accidental – it has deep historical roots and a clear contemporary function.

During British colonial rule, Indian men were systematically characterized as passive, effeminate, and unfit for self-governance. Some members of the Indian elite internalized and then resisted this characterization by constructing what scholar Sikata Banerjee calls “masculine Hinduism.” The British had categorized Indian men as the “effeminate other,” using a gender hierarchy rooted in Christian manliness – defined by martial prowess, muscular strength, rationality, and individualism. Indian nationalists like Swami Vivekananda and Savarkar responded by forging an oppositional masculine identity drawn from Hindu warrior traditions.

That colonial-era response has been carried forward into contemporary Hindutva politics. Today’s right-wing politics ensures that men uphold the ideals of Hindu hegemonic masculinity – defined by martial prowess, muscular strength, moral fortitude, and readiness to battle – to strengthen the nation. The warrior and the soldier have become central symbols of Hindu nationalism, embedded in everything from RSS training camps to the iconography of political campaigns.

This gendering of nationalism has consequences for women as well. Women enter this masculine environment through roles such as heroic mother, chaste wife, and celibate warrior – models that appear to empower women politically while simultaneously tying their value to sexual purity and service to the nation. Feminist scholars note that while Hindutva does offer women a pathway into public life, that empowerment operates within a patriarchal framework and does not challenge the underlying gender imbalances within the Hindu family.

The masculinization of Hinduism also shapes how minority communities – particularly Muslims – are portrayed. Minority communities, mostly Muslims, are frequently perceived as anti-national because of their allegiance to religious prophets seen as outside the context of Hindu India. The image of the physically strong Hindu warrior is constructed in explicit opposition to a Muslim “other,” a dynamic that fuels communal tension and makes inter-religious dialogue considerably more difficult.

Skepticism toward Hinduism’s own diversity 🔗

Perhaps the most paradoxical dimension of Hindutva’s cultural politics is its suspicion of Hinduism’s own plural heritage. For Hindu nationalists, Hindutva comes first and then Hinduism – meaning that the political ideology takes precedence over the lived, diverse religious tradition it claims to represent.

This creates a peculiar situation where thinkers, texts, and traditions that do not conform to the Hindutva framework are sidelined or reinterpreted. Regional devotional practices, Dalit religious expressions, the philosophical diversity of advaita versus dvaita traditions, the mystical strains of bhakti poetry – none of these fit neatly into the muscular, unified, culturally aggressive version of Hinduism that political Hinduism promotes. The RSS’s vision of “one nation, one people, and one culture” leaves little room for the genuine complexity that scholars of Hinduism recognize as constitutive of the tradition itself.

Critics from within Hindu communities have pointed this out. Hinduism is more a way of life than a religion, no matter what spiritual lineage one belongs to or political affiliation one holds. The diversity of practice and belief that makes Hinduism distinctive is precisely what Hindutva ideology struggles to accommodate.

Consequences for inter-religious relations and social cohesion 🔗

The real-world impact of religious politics on India’s inter-religious relations has been severe and well-documented. The BJP-led government’s discriminatory and divisive policies have led to increased violence against minorities, creating a pervasive environment of fear and a chilling effect on government critics, according to Human Rights Watch’s 2024 World Report.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom found that in 2023, the BJP government reinforced discriminatory nationalist policies, perpetuated hateful rhetoric, and failed to address communal violence disproportionately affecting Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Dalits, Jews, and Adivasis. Attacks on religious leaders, vandalism of places of worship, and state-level legislation targeting minority communities have become recurring features of the political landscape.

Communal violence has a particularly destabilizing effect on social cohesion. These conflicts, often fueled by religious tensions, tear away at the very fabric of Indian social structure, erode trust, and deepen societal divisions. The Citizenship Amendment Act, which offers fast-tracked citizenship to religious minorities from neighboring countries but excludes Muslims, has further sharpened debates about whether India’s constitutional secularism is being systematically dismantled.

At the same time, it is important to note that public opinion surveys in India generally show high levels of interfaith tolerance among ordinary citizens. The gap between the top-down politics of religious polarization and the lived experience of communities that have long coexisted is real. Religious politics thrives by manufacturing and amplifying conflict, often against a baseline of everyday pluralism that resists it.

The 2024 elections: a fractured mandate and what it means 🔗

India’s 2024 national elections offered a significant political signal. The BJP, which had won an outright majority in both 2014 and 2019, was reduced from 303 to 240 seats – 32 seats short of a parliamentary majority, forcing it to depend on coalition allies. The result has been interpreted by many analysts as a partial rejection of the most extreme aspects of the Hindutva project, or at least as a democratic check on its more authoritarian tendencies.

The presence of coalition partners has tempered some of the BJP’s majoritarian impulses, forcing a more nuanced approach to governance and reopening spaces for debate on minority rights and secular governance. Whether this represents a durable shift or a temporary pause in the Hindutva project remains a central question for Indian politics going forward.

The competitive nature of identity-based politics has exacerbated social divisions and hindered efforts towards inclusive governance, and that dynamic does not disappear simply because a coalition government is in place. The structural pressures that make religious politics electorally useful – caste anxieties, economic insecurity, communal memory – are not going away.

The stakes for Indian democracy 🔗

What makes religious politics in India particularly consequential is the scale and the model it offers. India is the world’s most populous democracy. How it navigates the tension between majoritarian nationalism and constitutional pluralism has implications not just for its 1.4 billion citizens but for democratic theory globally.

Polarization rather than reconciliation, and the fear of “the enemy” rather than poverty, ignorance, and disease, drive Hindu nationalist politics – and this dynamic, the Carnegie Endowment warned even two decades ago, risks entrenching communal division as the primary frame of Indian public life. A democracy that continuously mobilizes citizens through religious fear rather than policy debate weakens both its democratic and its developmental foundations.

India’s constitution explicitly guarantees religious freedom to all its citizens, and the country’s founding secularism – however imperfect – was designed precisely to manage a pluralistic society. The central challenge of the current moment is whether those constitutional commitments can be reasserted against the pressures of majoritarian religious politics, and what civil society, the judiciary, and ordinary citizens can do to protect them.

What do you think? If Hinduism’s greatest strength has historically been its openness to diversity, what does it mean when a political movement claiming to defend Hinduism actively suppresses that diversity? And can a democracy the size of India sustain its plural character if religious identity continues to be its primary axis of political mobilization?

References

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