Current Trends in Religion and Politics in Modern India

India is one of the world’s most religiously diverse nations, home to Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and many more communities. Managing this diversity within a democratic framework has never been straightforward. Today, the intersection of religion and politics in India is the subject of intense academic, legal, and public debate – touching on questions of identity, citizenship, governance, and social harmony. Three concepts sit at the heart of this debate: communalism, secularism, and fundamentalism. Understanding how these forces interact in contemporary India is essential to understanding the country’s political trajectory.

The historical roots of religion in Indian politics
What is communalism, and why does it persist?
Indian secularism: a model under pressure
The rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva)
Religious fundamentalism in India
The Citizenship Amendment Act: religion enters citizenship law
Electoral politics and the vote bank problem
The challenge of balancing religious diversity with democratic governance

The historical roots of religion in Indian politics

The entanglement of religion and politics in India did not begin with any single government or party. It has deep historical roots. The 1947 Partition of the subcontinent – which created India and Pakistan along religious lines – triggered one of the largest mass migrations in human history and left a trauma that continues to shape political discourse today. Muslim refugees moved to Pakistan, while Hindus and Sikhs came to India. The communal violence during this period established religion as a politically charged identity marker in ways that proved extraordinarily difficult to undo.

The British colonial administration had already set the stage by using religion as a tool of governance – categorizing populations primarily through religious identities and pursuing a “divide and rule” strategy that strengthened communal consciousness. By the time independence arrived, religion and politics were deeply intertwined in the public imagination. India’s founding leaders, particularly Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar, recognized this danger and sought to build a secular state. But as sociologists note, the relationship between religion and politics in post-independence India has manifested in three persistent forms: communalism, secularism, and fundamentalism.

What is communalism, and why does it persist?

Communalism refers to the politicization of religious group identities, typically in ways that foster antagonism between communities. It is not religion itself, but the use of religious identity as a political weapon. From a sociological standpoint, communalism thrives because religious identities in India overlap with other social cleavages – caste, class, language, and region. Political actors exploit these overlapping identities, converting cultural differences into political hostility.

India’s history is marked by recurring episodes of communal violence. Major events such as the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and subsequent riots in 1992, and the Gujarat riots of 2002 have severely tested India’s secular credentials and exposed the fragility of communal harmony. Political scientist Paul Brass has argued that communal riots are not spontaneous eruptions but serve the interests of particular political groups and organizations – they are often functionally useful for mobilizing voters along religious lines.

The sociologist Harbans Mukhia describes communalism as “organizing an exclusive religious group on the basis of hostility to one or more of the others at the social level.” This hostility, he argues, is not inherent in religious belief, but is constructed and sustained through political competition, particularly when groups are in competition over shared resources, representation, and power.

Indian secularism: a model under pressure

Secularism in India does not mean what it means in the West. The Indian constitutional model, unlike Western models that emphasize a strict separation of church and state, is better described as “equal respect for all religions” – the principle of sarva dharma sambhava. There is no official state religion; Articles 25-28 of the Constitution guarantee freedom of religion and prohibit state favoritism toward any faith. The word “secular” was formally added to the Preamble of the Constitution through the 42nd Amendment in 1976, and the Supreme Court’s landmark 1994 ruling in S.R. Bommai v. Union of India affirmed that secularism is part of the Constitution’s basic structure – a state that pursues unsecular policies acts against the constitutional mandate.

However, Indian secularism has always been contested. In practice, secularism in India was established as a popular ethic of religious tolerance rather than a rigorous program of separating religion from public life. This meant that successive governments – particularly the Congress Party – often accommodated religious interests rather than challenging them. Critics on the right have characterized this approach as “pseudo-secularism,” or the political appeasement of minorities. Critics on the left argue that the state has been far too willing to allow majoritarian religious politics to shape public policy.

Contemporary challenges to secularism include the use of religious rhetoric by political parties to consolidate electoral blocs, judicial inconsistency on issues like religious conversion and state intervention in religious affairs, and the rise of hate speech targeting minority communities. The politicization of one religious group tends to trigger competitive politicization among others, producing a cycle of inter-religious tension that erodes the secular framework from within.

The rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva)

No force has reshaped the religion-politics relationship in contemporary India more than the rise of Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva. The ideology was formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1922 and argues that India’s national identity should be defined primarily by Hindu culture and values. It is the guiding ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliated organizations, including the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The ideology holds that those whose holy lands lie within India – primarily Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains – are the authentic children of the soil, while Muslims and Christians, whose sacred geographies lie elsewhere, are positioned as cultural outsiders.

Since the BJP came to power in 2014, the mainstreaming of Hindutva politics has increased tensions between Hindus and religious minorities. The construction and inauguration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya in January 2024 – built on the site of the demolished Babri Masjid – became both a powerful religious symbol and a political rallying point ahead of the 2024 general elections. Scholars at Berkeley have noted that the RSS leadership framed the event as the restoration of Hindu pride and the movement’s near-total capture of India’s state institutions.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP secured approximately 240 seats – short of the 272 needed for an outright majority – and was forced into a coalition government for the first time under Modi. The BJP’s losses were concentrated in states like Uttar Pradesh, where caste-based politics and disillusionment with the party’s reliance on religious polarization played a significant role. This result was widely interpreted as a signal that while Hindu nationalism remains a powerful political force, it is not electorally invincible, and that pressing socioeconomic concerns – employment, inflation, caste inequality – can override religious mobilization.

Religious fundamentalism in India

Fundamentalism, in the sociological sense, refers to movements that seek to organize social and political life around a strict or literal reading of religious doctrine. India has experienced fundamentalist currents across multiple religious communities. The Indian experience with fundamentalism has been historically traumatic: Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fundamentalist; Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguard in the aftermath of the Sikh fundamentalist movement that swept Punjab in the 1980s; and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a Tamil fundamentalist group. These events illustrate how fundamentalism – across all its religious forms – can strike at the very center of democratic governance.

Today, rising Islamic fundamentalism or revivalism in certain pockets seeks to establish social organization based on religious law, creating a direct conflict with the principles of a secular democratic state. On the Hindu side, vigilante groups affiliated with the Sangh Parivar have been linked to violence against minorities, cow-protection lynchings, and anti-conversion campaigns. The Australian Institute of International Affairs reports that Christian communities have also been targeted, facing accusations of forced conversions and attacks on churches. Fundamentalist currents, regardless of their religious source, share a common feature: they regard any pluralist or secular arrangement as a threat to their vision of a religiously ordered society.

The Citizenship Amendment Act: religion enters citizenship law

One of the most consequential legislative developments at the intersection of religion and politics in contemporary India is the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019. The CAA provides a route to citizenship for members of six religious minority communities – Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians – from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but explicitly excludes Muslims. For the first time in independent India’s history, religion was formally introduced as a criterion in the country’s naturalization process.

The law triggered mass protests across India and internationally. Legal scholars at Oxford have argued that the CAA, read alongside a proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), functions not merely as immigration policy but as an instrument that reshapes the social and political landscape along religious lines – deepening the marginalization of Muslim communities and eroding India’s foundational commitment to secular equality. The UN Human Rights Commission described the CAA as “fundamentally discriminatory in nature.” The Indian government, by contrast, has framed it as a humanitarian measure to protect persecuted religious minorities from neighboring countries.

Survey data from India itself reveals a complex public opinion landscape: an overwhelming majority of Indians (91%) say they feel free to practice their religion, and six in seven consider respect for all religions important to being truly Indian. Yet nearly two-thirds of Hindus also say that being Hindu is an important component of being Indian – a view that sits in tension with a pluralist secular identity. These numbers capture the central paradox of contemporary Indian democracy: widespread everyday religious tolerance coexisting with structural political exclusion.

Electoral politics and the vote bank problem

A recurring critique of Indian politics across the ideological spectrum is the use of religion for vote bank politics – the strategy of appealing to specific religious communities as consolidated blocs of votes. Research on Indian electoral cycles shows that political parties have strategically aligned themselves with specific religious groups, consolidating votes along religious lines rather than around policy platforms. This is not unique to any one party – Congress has historically been accused of appeasing Muslim and minority voters, while the BJP has consolidated the Hindu vote through Hindutva messaging.

According to research published by the London School of Economics, Muslim political representation in the 18th Lok Sabha (elected in 2024) fell to a record low of 4.41% – the lowest in six decades. None of the 24 elected Muslim MPs came from the BJP’s platform. This statistical underrepresentation is not just a numbers problem; it reflects a broader pattern of political exclusion that has sociological consequences for how Muslim citizens relate to the Indian state and its institutions.

The challenge of balancing religious diversity with democratic governance

India’s sociological challenge is not simply to choose between “religion” and “secularism” in politics. The reality is more complex. Religion is deeply embedded in Indian public life – it shapes culture, social organization, caste relations, and personal identity in ways that make complete separation from politics practically impossible. From a sociological lens, religion in India has served both as an integrative force – uniting communities, sustaining social solidarity, and providing platforms for justice movements – and as a divisive one, fueling communalism and exclusion.

The path forward identified by scholars involves a combination of strengthened interfaith dialogue, impartial governance, constitutional literacy, and reforms that address the socioeconomic roots of communal tension. The goal is not to remove religion from public life – an unrealistic and arguably undesirable aim in a country as spiritually diverse as India – but to ensure that religious identity does not become the dominant lens through which citizens access rights, representation, and resources. That is the balance that India’s secular constitution was designed to strike, and that contemporary politics continues to test.

What do you think? Can a democracy as religiously diverse as India sustain a genuinely secular politics, or is some degree of religious mobilization in elections inevitable? And when does religious identity in politics cross the line from cultural expression into communal exclusion?

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Table of Contents

The historical roots of religion in Indian politics 🔗

What is communalism, and why does it persist? 🔗

Indian secularism: a model under pressure 🔗

The rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) 🔗

Religious fundamentalism in India 🔗

The Citizenship Amendment Act: religion enters citizenship law 🔗

Electoral politics and the vote bank problem 🔗

The challenge of balancing religious diversity with democratic governance 🔗