They call it Shaurya Divas – the Day of Bravery. For nearly 500 years the sun waited for that day. For it was that day that the scion of the sun would receive his first drop of justice. On December 6, 1992, India’s greatest moment of decolonization since the birth of the Republic arrived as thousands of Hindus converged at the birthplace of their God, Lord Ram, in Ayodhya and destroyed the Mosque of Babri built atop it. Yet for so many who harp on about “decolonization” at Adderall-addled academic halls or in 2-minute Instagram reels with no less than 43 cuts, this act was an abomination. How could this be the ideal that they hold above their heads at city protests or on their Twitter timelines?

The great decolonizers of the early 20th century, who brought the Goliathan empires of Europe to their knees and stood for the hope of their wretched and decrepit peoples, quickly found out that agitation was mightily different from administration. Consequently, the birth of many of these countries would prove stillborn. Decolonization, the dreamy castle in the sky that captured the eyes of intellectuals and activists and masses and so many who could not believe they had just defeated the giants of colonialism, would crumble into corruption and stagnation. The reveries of Gandhi, Nkrumah, Fanon, etc… would be shaken by the cold hard fists of reality.

Countries would be decolonized in a strict imperial sense, but not necessarily politically and certainly not culturally. The engorged parasite of colonialism left impoverished masses and deindustrialized markets. Upon freedom, most countries kept previous colonial institutions and laws as they were simply effective at governing. A carryover elite who were brown and black in body but white in taste would now rule. There was a disconnect, and it was this disconnect between ruler and ruled that meant decolonization would only be skin deep. In India, this chasm between the elite and everyman left room for a great churn. That is where Hindutva came in.

Counting the Colonizers

If you want to figure out if an Indian leans left or right, ask them this one question:

How many times was India colonized?

Those that lean left will say once, by the British. No doubt they will bemoan the terrible days of British rule. They admire Mahatma Gandhi and his fellow freedom fighter follower, Jawaharlal Nehru, who infused secularism and socialism into the Indian Republic’s ethos. But secularism and socialism aren’t Indian ethics per se. Similarly, a lot of hubbub about decolonization nowadays continues mistaking niche Western leftist ideals around gender and race for “decolonization.” This deterioration of decolonization is actually a patterned historical phenomenon where:

1. A disconnected elite takes over and tries to impose en-vogue Western ideas onto an unreceptive populace.
2. These elites implement socialism which even Marx notes should require a form of industrialized capitalism to transition from. Though to be fair, capitalism was seen as a brother of colonialism in that era with socialism being the sister to decolonization.
3. State and society begin breaking down with the only saving grace coming from either predatory foreign capital or foreign capitals, feudal strongmen, or domestic corrupt power players.

In an ironic twist of fate, the destiny of many leftists in colonized nations is simply to ape the West and then become unpopular. This is doubly true for India which has quite possibly the most self-loathing post-colonial leftists on the planet. 

On the other hand, the Indian Right, the adherents of Hindutva, believe India was colonized twice. Of course once by the British but also by various Turkic Islamic conquerors before them. Yes, they believe in the blasphemous idea that non-white people can be colonizers as well. But how exactly was this Turkic colonization similar to the British phase? British colonialism was exceptionally extractive siphoning riches from India like a video game with lootbox microtransactions. Contrarily, while the Turks did put a significant dent in Indian GDP metrics, most wealth stayed in India, albeit at some of the most unequal rates amongst contemporary empires. Here we have to delve into the social and cultural elements of colonization, in the minds of these Turks themselves. How did they view this dark subcontinent they came to?

India’s Dark Age

Early Arab Muslims lauded the scientific achievements and advancements of India. The works of Brahmagupta, Aryabhatta, Sushruta, Charak, and other Indian scientists would supply large parts of the bedrock of the Islamic Golden Age. This fount of science and knowledge would desiccate as Islamic invaders raided and soon established themselves in the subcontinent. Al-Biruni, a famous medieval Islamic chronicler, records how science had fled from northern India, and Indians had developed a strong xenophobia due to earlier Islamic invasions, particularly from the raids of Mahmud Ghazni. A few generations of Keralite scholars between the 14th and 16th centuries would eclipse a millennium of Indian Islamic rule in mathematical and astronomical discoveries. The colonization of Islamic invaders, particularly Turks, was primarily rooted in cultural destruction and subjugation with economic extraction being a secondary facet.

Beyond the massive damage these invasions did to institutions such as temples and universities, we get to see changes in the Indian psyche as Turks became the elite class in the Delhi Sultanate. These Turks saw themselves as very different from the dark heathen natives of India and instituted an ethnicity-based caste system in their administration. Light-skinned Turks were at the top. Other Middle Easterners were below them. While recently converted Indian Muslims were just a peck above their Indian Hindu brethren.

Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits there is none; of genius and capacity none; of manners none; in handicraft and work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality; there are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no hot-baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.

-The First Mughal Emperor, Babur, the Baburnama

As the Delhi Sultanate fell, it was replaced by a new crop of Turks, the Mughals. The Mughals did not see themselves as Indian despite later generations being mostly Indian in blood. Rather they saw themselves as Chagatai Turks, native to the Ferghana Valley of present-day Uzbekistan. Like other Turks of their era, they held Persianate culture in the highest esteem while native culture was seen as inherently inferior and uncouth compared to the refinement of Fars.

So they weren’t big fans of Indians, who cares right? Join the line of chronically online 4chan posters and Big Tech DEI activists. But this is where we have to face the reckoning of reality. 

In the northern two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent, no pre-Mughal Era temples remain that have not been defaced or destroyed. Hinduism is about twice as old as Islam at least, so you can gain a scope for the damage caused by Islamic rule. Even amongst the defaced temples, you will see a certain precision in the mutilation of idols where breasts are chopped off, faces smashed in, or heads are missing from beautiful ancient sculptures of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. There is a tenor of deliberateness that is captured in these defacings. A message to be sent. A humiliation to be signaled. One of the most effective methods of humiliation was building mosques atop the most sacred sites in Hinduism after the temples were destroyed. This is the origin of Babri Masjid and why it inspired so much fury rather than faith. Yet Babri is not alone. This practice is commonplace across the northern two-thirds of the subcontinent, many at the holiest lands of Hinduism. This still hurts Hindus today.

Across the accounts of Islamic invaders, these destructions and killings are recounted with pride and glee. Many of these cruel invaders are now held as the heroes of a large mass of subcontinental Muslims today. Indeed, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, recounted how the old heroes of Muslims are almost always the enemies of Hindus and vice versa. This is precisely why Hindutva was born. Hindutva was a reaction not just to British colonization, but to Islamic intransiency.

Savarkar’s Vindication

Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League would play a spoiler in the Indian Independence Movement. Mahatma Gandhi’s wide-eyed grand dream of a united India was ripped apart in a blood-curdling partition. In the final chapter of the cataclysm of Islamic rule in India, the Muslim League successfully agitated and convinced enough Muslim Indians to secede from their Hindu brothers in blood. While many Gandhians and foreigners alike claim this was all due to the British, the truth is that the British simply threw a spark onto a mountain of tinder. The Muslim League eagerly collaborated with the British to enflame Islamic consciousness and separation amongst India’s Muslims. At every turn, actions would be taken to separate Muslims from Hindus politically, socially, and culturally. Those Muslims that joined Gandhi’s secular unitary vision of India were labeled as traitors, apostates, and idolaters. That romantic notion of Hindus and Muslims holding hands into a bright Indian future was dashed against the jagged rocks of hatred. The rivers of communalism that flowed from those rocks would vindicate a now-disgraced freedom fighter, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.

Savarkar was one of the first thinkers to push the idea of Hindutva. To Savarkar, Hindutva initially was a cultural and national consciousness of “Hinduness.” Those who regarded India as the land of their ancestors and as a divine land would be those who adhered to Hindutva. Of course, this definition meant an inclusion of all Dharmic faiths as well as even some syncretic or particularly patriotic Muslim and Christian Indians. But Savarkar would sour on this magnanimity as the Muslim League rose and the Congress appeared to take Hindus on the troublesome ride of secularism. His association with Gandhi’s assassin would lead to his ideology being locked away, deep in the grottos of Indian discourse for decades.

In a great rhyme of history, it would be a series of overreaches that rekindled the fire of Hindutva for its comeback into Indian consciousness. Policies such as control of only Hindu religious institutions and schools, separate legal codes for Muslims, devoting an excess amount of resources to minority institutions and schemes, as well as a lax policy towards Islamic extremism evoked an organic, bottom-up reaction from Hindus. 

This is integral. Unlike many other ideological movements, Hindutva was reborn from the soil listening to rustic village discussions rather than the clouds humoring the peans of Indian high society. It is pragmatic. Just as evolutionary as it is revolutionary. Rather than lightning in a bottle, it is the fractal sky show of a monsoon thunderstorm, born of natural causes. A small party called the BJP would ride the tiger of Hindu grievances eventually ending up at that monument of mockery we discussed prior.

Hundreds of years prior, the great Maratha, Shivaji Bhonsle implored the Hindus of Hindustan to throw off the shackles of the Turks, to free their ancient holy lands and sites rotting under the twin humiliations of Islamic rule and roofs. In December of 1992, what no Hindu king could ever do was finally done by a nameless, face-full mass of Hindus as Babri fell and Hindutva was reborn standing in that crucible of reclamation.

1000 Years of Slavery

There is a reason I keep going back to that fateful moment. The breaking of Babri was an emancipation. “A thousand years of slavery” is a common trope heard bristling in Indian newspapers and ringing at election rallies. And that slavery did not end with the British; for Hindutvadis, rule by the Congress was essentially rule by Brown Englishman. And like their white counterparts before them, Congress strategically appeased and used a Muslim bloc to stay in power.

A core idea of Hindutva is born from this scenario. Muslims have an ironclad unity compared to Hindus in the subcontinent. Markers like caste, ethnicity, language, etc… are much more salient for Hindus than their Islamic brethren. Thereby, a standard method of ruling India was allying with a strongly united Muslim bloc and a few wayward Hindu castes. This is the story of so many empires and governments in India since the time of the Mughals themselves. Hindutva, however, wants this to end, forever.

The alloys of Hindudom must be bound together like a pillar of iron. Caste, a storied and deep facet of contemporary Hinduism, is seen as a handicap, a great fissure present across the Hindu body that every enemy has exploited to shatter and scatter Hindus to weakness and meekness. This means that the reduction of caste identity in politics and society is paramount for Hindutva.

This is where decolonization starts to become complex. For decolonial activists in the West, pre-colonial lands were at worst an idyllic Garden of Eden populated by noble savages and at best a hyper-competent can-do-no-wrong traditional state. Often, exclusively Western ideas around race and gender are thereupon thrust dubiously and arbitrarily across this paradisal image.

Thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah approached decolonization with a bit more grass-touching. Revival of indigenous traditions, national consciousness transcending ethnic divides, and economic self-sufficiency were realistic pillars in their analysis. However, extremities in their approaches towards diplomatic isolation, conflating capitalism with colonialism, and an overemphasis on a societal overhaul to return to an age that was either fantasy or incompatible with modernity prove a less sharp aperture in their analysis. 

Hindutva does not call for a return to pre-modern India where deindustrialized villages dominate the state and the caste system domineers society. It does not shy from economic pragmatism, whether that means embracing welfare, dancing with privatization, or flirting with chaebols. And it certainly does not concur with ruminating in an isolationist cave far flung from the world’s conflicts and trades. The alchemy of Hindutva relies on balancing the ratios of traditionalism, modernity, and paranoid realism.

Due to the organic element of Hindutva, it was never bound by Savarkar’s ideas or other thinkers and adjacent intellectuals. Like its religious precursor, Hinduism, Hindutva is comfortable with dichotomies, heterodoxy, and pluralistic thinking. But unlike Hinduism which did not develop in an environment of persecution, Hindutva was incubated firstly under British colonialism and secondly under Nehruvian hostility. Historically, Hindutva was an ideology of political untouchables after the assassination of Gandhi in 1948. A decades-long acid test occurred in the cauldron of Indian politics. In this hostile and unforgiving environment, Hindutva was forged by pressure and evolution. In 1984, the Orwellian grip over how Indians viewed Hindutva began to loosen. The Bharatiya Janata Party, harbingers of Hindutva, opened an account in the Indian Parliament to the humble tune of 2 seats out of 543. They now rule with 301 seats.

Beyond Babri

Hindutva is reclamation. That is the aura that emanated from the BJP’s 2014 campaign with Narendra Modi storming into parliament as India’s newest Prime Minister and the first to have been born in a free India. Already controversial from his handling of deadly riots during his tenure as Chief Minister of Gujarat, India’s secularists bemoaned a dark cloud of fascism arriving on the horizon. With Modi’s victory, journalists conjured visions of a saffron-shaded Nazi Germany, mass religious civil wars, and an intellectual degradation beckoned by WhatsApp forwarding uncles. Look, it’s been like a decade since that win, and the Indian economy is amongst the best in the world, India just landed on the dark side of the moon, and communal riots are way down. 

The fact that the prophecies of doom have not been fulfilled has caused the Indian Left to grow more and more unhinged. Much of their rhetoric resembles the most derisive British colonial propaganda as they blame India’s condition on its native culture, traditions, and religions. Filled with Anglophile elites and having an outsized influence across high society and state, the Indian Left’s commendable defense of India’s Muslim and Christian minorities, both being major legacies of prior colonizations, has morphed into a form of self-hatred, an oikophobia. All that is good in India has come from outside. In an eerie resemblance to William Churchill’s polemic against Indians, the Indian Left talks about Indians as if they are beasts that should be tamed and broken into obedience. The way of India should not be Dharma, its native tradition and method of millennia, but rather whatever is in fashion in an Ivy League safe space or New York Times South Asia Editorial. 

The Left’s perniciousness has allowed the BJP to become India’s Big Tent Party and both moderate as well as simultaneously push the Overton Window to the right as a result. Hindutva has gone beyond that climactic revolutionary force seen at Babri; it is now becoming a reformist movement that rebuilds after reclaiming. This is how decolonization progresses, and this is what it looks like:

• Self-Rule Through Self-Designation: Renaming of cities, institutions, & locations from Mughal & British names to native Sanskritized Indian names.
• Reincarnation of Icons: Installing of various statues related to less heralded Indian Independence figures, many of whom lean closer to a Hindutva idea of India, as well as other historical Indian heroes & heroines with a bit more Hindu tinge.
• Revival of Temples: Renovations to old temples & building of new temples across India to encourage more people to make pilgrimage to them; with the most “decolonizing” being Ram Mandir built atop the ruins of Babri Masjid in a picture of pure karma.
• Dharma Rashtra: Synergizing native tradition with Indian government processes. From the induction of the Sengol in the new Indian Parliament to more pujas for various development initiatives to the red bahi-khata pouch for the Indian government’s budget announcements to the use of “Bharat” more often to refer to India in official capacities, tangible aesthetic & ritualistic changes to how the Indian government operates and presents itself are integral to decolonization.
• Indian Knowledge System Integration & Evangelization: From yoga to Ayurveda to medicine to investing in traditional Indian artisanship, crafts, knowledge creation, etc… These millennia-old traditions are being invested into by the government itself in order to preserve and hopefully spread these great Indian contributions to the world.

This is very different from the notion of decolonization now in the West which mostly revolves around the 10/7 Hamas terror attack with Leftists saying “It’s good because it’s decolonization,” and Right-Wingers saying “It’s bad because it’s decolonization.” But still, we can even go further than this.

Nonetheless, India is still in the process of reclamation. Besides Lord Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya, Lord Krishna’s birthplace in Mathura also partially stands under a mosque. Another supremely holy Hindu site, Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi, is partially under a mosque as well; the most ironic element of this is that the mosque itself still retains the walls of the previously destroyed temple. These are two among most likely hundreds of similar cases if not more if we include the entire subcontinent or even just outside of north India. There is unfinished business here that ideally should be handled via legal methods with a peaceful transfer.

Hindutva 2.0

VS Naipaul describes India as a “wounded civilization.” Indeed it is in Naipaul’s writings that one sees a scintillating critique of India’s destitute state, the hopelessness and corruption of Indian people, and the volcanic reckoning that exploded once Indians confronted the paper-thin contradictions of their past. This is the final element of India’s decolonization. There’s a lot of India’s present-day state that can be blamed on the prior two colonizations, but the last step of decolonization is to stop putting ire onto outsiders and instead reflect within.

India is finally developing. More infrastructure was built in the past 10 years than the previous 67 years combined. A small group of devotees prayed at an ancient temple in Andhra Pradesh in August before landing an Indian spacecraft on the dark side of the moon, a first for not just Indians but also for humanity. India has built the most advanced FinTech stack on the planet with a robust digital payments and identification system used for everything from street food to banking to donations to medicine. Glowing economic reports and record investments in India are igniting a fire in the bellies of its citizens and well-wishers alike for India’s future. This is also decolonization, for it has primarily been conducted under the tenure of a government and leader who place decolonization, that is Hindutva, at the forefront of their vision of India. Hindutva has given Indians a uniting pride and a defiant voice around the globe. What else can decolonization be but this?

The pragmatism of Hindutva where it focuses intensely on its aims like Arjun aiming his arrow at the eye of Drona’s bird ages ago has caveats. Hindutva hurtles at modernity at a rapid pace. Constant evolving and compromising risk it eventually becoming a Ship of Theseus where all the parts have been exchanged creating an entirely new ideology, perhaps one very divorced from those Indian values and traditions it sought to preserve and promote initially.

Hindutva has been a key reason why the BJP has become the first choice for all Hindu castes. The unity and egalitarianism amongst Hindus that Hindutva promotes are integral to securing electoral victory and societal peace. One can surely parse theological roots for these concepts amongst Hindu philosophies such as Vedanta or concepts such as the Atman, but in expression, these ideals are fairly new in Indian society. Caste has presented diversity and hierarchy as defaults for hundreds of years in India. Even today, Hindutva’s political opponents use a strategy I call Jatitva to enflame caste conflicts and indeed consciousness as a bulwark against Hindu unity and Hinduism itself. Constructing balanced and broad caste coalitions today for elections and grinding away cumulatively at the consciousness of caste is a difficult equilibrium to manage.

Likewise, the clash of a global Anglo-American super-culture, that of charity dinners in Manhattan and film festivals in Mumbai, is in fair contrast to traditional Hinduism. Hindutva has a much less confrontational relationship with 20th-century Western ideas on gender, ethnicity, and individual rights than certain strains of traditional Hinduism, serving in a way as a midpoint between the 2 poles. But even this midpoint is far away from large sections of the conservative Indian masses. Sometimes in the pursuit of reform, Hindutva resembles more of the Manhattanite than the Marathi. As Hindutva tries to standardize and centralize how the Indian state deals with different people, it runs into various traditions of different types of Hindus.

All the above is primarily a conversation of Hindus amongst Hindutva. What about minority groups and India’s vaunted idea of secularism? Decolonization will mean the end of Indian secularism as we’ve known it in the past – that is a lopsided, ham-handed, paternalist version of the government supporting and favoring certain religions over others. Hindutva’s decolonization will most likely mean India upholding and preserving Dharmic religions first and foremost, that is Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. There are 19 countries that have Christianity as their official state religion. 27 countries have Islam as their official state religion. Four countries for Buddhism. One country for Judaism. None for Hinduism, Jainism, or Sikhism. Whether India declares itself as a Dharmic State or not is a debate for another day, but it will certainly continue the previously mentioned policies in promoting, preserving, and propagating Dharmic faiths. This is indeed decolonization and a tradition of Indian polities since time immemorial.

How about the rights of non-Dharmic Indian citizens? They will most likely remain the same. I do not see any legal chicanery to make them second-class citizens. The biggest reason why it won’t happen is simply due to the fact that there are hundreds of millions of Indian minorities who will protest and riot if their citizenship is relegated to a secondary tier, and rightly so. But there is also another reason as to why it won’t happen – Hinduism itself.

India practices a form of plural secularism today precisely because the majority of the population is Hindu. Religious pluralism is a very ancient idea embedded in the Vedas and core attributes of Hinduism itself. That is why prior to the advent of Indian Islam, religious violence between Indians was relatively rare. There is an implicit social contract here – Ekam Sat: that all paths lead to a singular divinity.

I think it is this implicit social contract that should be made more explicit in Indian society for communal relations to simmer down (after a potential initial flare-up though). This idea that all paths lead to the same destination and that all prayers are heard by the same divinity is a soothing balm for society. It simultaneously allows diversity and promotes a relatively peaceful unity considering the gargantuan level of diversity India possesses. Hindutva 2.0, much like Hinduism ∞, will be about managing and balancing the dualities of India as well as revitalizing Dharma and India itself. How does it become that enabler of revitalization? Well, let’s leave that meal for another day. I think I’ve given you enough to chew on for now. 

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“Just as every fighter clung to the nation during the period of armed struggle, so during the period of nation building every citizen must continue in his daily purpose to embrace the nation as a whole, to embody the constantly dialectical truth of the nation, and to will here and now the triumph of man in his totality.”

-Frantz Fanon