Хиндутва: Үлтшылдық идеология және мәдени гегемония

Form of right wing Hindu nationalism

Hindutva ( ) is a political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar. Inspired by European fascism, the Hindutva movement has been described as a variant of right wing extremism, and as "almost fascist in the classical sense", adhering to a concept of homogenised majority and cultural hegemony. Some have also described Hindutva as a separatist ideology. Some analysts dispute the identification of Hindutva with fascism, and suggest Hindutva is an extreme form of conservatism or ethno nationalism. Its etymology, according to the OED, is: "from modern Sanskrit hindutva (Hindu qualities, Hindu identity) from hindu (from Hindi hindū : see Hindu n.) + classical Sanskrit tva , suffix forming abstract nouns, after Hindi hindupan, in the same sense." According to Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of World Religions, Hindutva is a concept of "Indian cultural, national, and religious identity". According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations, "Hindutva, translated as 'Hinduness,' refers to the ideology of Hindu nationalists, stressing the common culture of the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. Modern politicians have attempted to play down the racial and anti Muslim aspects of Hindutva, stressing the inclusiveness of the Indian identity; but the term has Fascist undertones." According to A Political and Economic Dictionary of South Asia, "One of the main purposes behind the concept of Hindutva was to construct a collective identity to support the cause of 'Hindu unity' (Hindu Sanghatan) and to avoid too narrow a definition of Hinduism, which had the consequence of excluding Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains from the Hindu community. Later, Hindu nationalist ideologues transformed the concept into a strategy to include non Hindus, in order to widen their social base, and for political mobilization. According to Encyclopædia Britannica article on Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a Hindu and Indian nationalist, According to the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Hindutva as defined in the classic statement of its ideology, is the "culture of the Hindu race" where Hinduism is but an element and "Hindu dharma is a religion practiced by Hindus as well as Sikhs and Buddhists". The article further states, "proponents of Hindutva have sought to promote the identification of national identity with the religious and broader cultural heritage of Hindus. Measures taken to achieve this end have included attempts to 'reclaim' individuals judged to have taken up 'alien' religions, the pursuit of social, cultural and philanthropic activities designed to strengthen awareness of Hindu belonging, and direct political action through various organisations, including recognized political parties such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)."

For Savarkar, in Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, Hindutva is an inclusive term of everything Indic. The three essentials of Hindutva in Savarkar's definition were the common nation (rashtra), common race (jati), and common culture or civilisation (sanskriti). Savarkar used the words "Hindu" and "Sindhu" interchangeably. Those terms were at the foundation of his Hindutva, as geographic, cultural and ethnic concepts, and "religion did not figure in his ensemble", states Sharma. According to Christophe Jaffrelot, a political scientist specialising in South Asia, Savarkar – declaring himself as an atheist – "minimizes the importance of religion in his definition of Hindu", and instead emphasises an ethnic group with a shared culture and cherished geography. To Savarkar, states Jaffrelot, a Hindu is "first and foremost someone who lives in the area beyond the Indus river, between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean". He describes Hindutva, states Bhatt, as "one of the most comprehensive and bewildering synthetic concepts known to the human tongue" and "Hindutva is not a word but a history; not only the spiritual or religious history of our people as at times it is mistaken to be by being confounded with the other cognate term Hinduism, but a history in full". Savarkar's notion of Hindutva formed the foundation for his Hindu nationalism. The court adopted Radhakrishnan's submission that Hinduism is complex and "the theist and atheist, the sceptic and agnostic, may all be Hindus if they accept the Hindu system of culture and life". The 1966 decision has influenced how the term Hindutva has been understood in later cases, in particular the seven decisions of the Supreme Court in the 1990s that are now called the "Hindutva judgments". According to Ram Jethmalani, an Indian lawyer and a former president of its Supreme Court Bar Association, the Supreme Court of India in 1995 ruled that "Ordinarily, Hindutva is understood as a way of life or a state of mind and is not to be equated with or understood as religious Hindu fundamentalism it is a fallacy and an error of law to proceed on the assumption that the use of words Hindutva or Hinduism per se depicts an attitude hostile to all persons practising any religion other than the Hindu religion It may well be that these words are used in a speech to promote secularism or to emphasise the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture or ethos, or to criticise the policy of any political party as discriminatory or intolerant." According to Jethmalani, the Supreme Court has properly explained the "true meaning" of the term, and "Hindutva is not hostility to any organised religion nor does it proclaim its superiority of any religion to another". According to him, it is unfortunate that "the communal propaganda machinery relentlessly disseminates "Hindutva" as a communal word, something that has also become embedded in the minds and language of opinion leaders, including politicians, media, civil society and the intelligentsia".

The word Hindutva was already in use by the late 1890s by Chandranath Basu, Basu's usage of the word was to merely portray a traditional Hindu cultural view in contrary to the formation of the political ideology by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Savarkar, a right wing nationalist and Indian freedom activist, wrote a book titled Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?" in 1922, The contemporary meaning and usage of Hindutva largely derives from Savarkar's ideas, as does the post 1980s nationalism and mass political activity in India.|title=|source=

The Hindutva ideology borrowed from European fascism. Since Savarkar's time, the "Hindu identity" and the associated Hindutva ideology has been built upon the perceived vulnerability of Indian religions, culture and heritage from those who through "orientalist construction" have vilified them as inferior to a non Indian religion, culture and heritage. In its nationalistic response, Hindutva has been conceived "primarily as an ethnic community" concept, states Jaffrelot, then presented as cultural nationalism, where Hinduism along with other Indian religions are but a part. According to Arvind Sharma, a scholar of Hinduism, Hindutva has not been a "static and monolithic concept", rather its meaning and "context, text and subtext has changed over time". The struggles of the colonial era and the formulation of neo Hinduism by the early 20th century added a sense of "ethnicity" to the original "Hinduness" meaning of Hindutva. Its early formulation incorporated the racism and nationalism concepts prevalent in Europe during the first half of the 20th century, and culture was in part rationalised as a result of "shared blood and race". Savarkar and his Hindutva colleagues adopted the social Darwinism theories prevalent by the 1930s. In the post independence period, states Sharma, the concept has suffered from ambiguity and its understanding aligned on "two different axes" – one of religion versus culture, another of nation versus state. In general, the Hindutva thought among many Indians has "tried to align itself with the culture and nation" axes. According to Prabhu Bapu, a historian and scholar of Oriental Studies, the term and the contextual meaning of Hindutva emerged from the Indian experience in the colonial era, memories of its religious wars as the Mughal Empire decayed, an era of Muslim and Christian proselytisation, a feeling that their traditions and cultures were being insulted, whereby the Hindu intellectuals formulated Hindutva as a "Hindu identity" as a prelude to a national resurgence and a unified Indian nation against the "foreign invaders". The development of "religious nationalism" and the demand by the Muslim leaders on the Indian subcontinent for the partition of British India into Muslim and non Muslim nations (Pakistan and Bangladesh being Muslim majority, and India being Hindu majority) during the middle of the 20th century, confirmed its narrative of geographical and cultural nationalism based on Indian culture and religions. According to Prabhu, such ideas and rationale fuelled the Hindutva narrative for a radical exclusivist Hindu nation, and became "the apologia for the two nation theory of the 1940s". Professor Muqtedar Khan has argued that Hindu nationalism further grew because of the religious divisions between Hindus and Muslims that were fomented by post 1947 Pakistani terrorist attacks in and military conflicts with India. According to Chetan Bhatt, the various forms of Hindu nationalism including the recent "cultural nationalist" form of Hindutva, have roots in the second half of the 19th century. These are a "dense cluster of ideologies" of primordialism, and they emerged from the colonial experiences of the Indian people in conjunction with ideas borrowed from European thinkers but thereafter debated, adapted and negotiated. These ideas included those of a nation, nationalism, race, Aryanism, Orientalism, Romanticism and others. efn|For example, the "writings of Giuseppe Mazzini made a profound impression on Savarkar", states Thomas Hansen.

Savarkar's Hindutva ideology reached Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in Nagpur (Maharashtra) in 1925, and he found Savarkar's Hindutva inspirational. He visited Savarkar in Ratnagiri shortly after and discussed with him methods for organising the 'Hindu nation'. Savarkar and Hedgewar discussions led in September that year to Hedgewar starting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, lit. "National Volunteer Society") with this mission. This organisation rapidly grew to become the largest Hindu nationalist movement. Hedgewar's RSS not only propagated Hindutva ideology, it developed a grassroots organizational structure (shakhas) to reform the Hindu society. Village level groups met for morning and evening physical training sessions, martial training and Hindutva ideology lessons. In 1931, B. S. Moonje met with Mussolini and expressed a desire to replicate the fascist youth movement in India. According to Sali Augustine, the core institution of Hindutva has been the RSS. While the RSS states that Hindutva is different from Hinduism, it has been linked to religion. Therefore "cultural nationalism" is a euphemism, states Augustine, and it is meant to mask the creation of a state with a "Hindu religious identity". According to Jaffrelot, the regional heads of the RSS have included Indians who are Hindus as well as those who belong to other Indian religions such as Jainism. In parallel to the RSS, Savarkar, after his release from the colonial prison, joined and became the president of Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha in 1937. There, he used the terms Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra liberally, according to Graham. Syama Prasad Mukherjee, who served as its president in 1944 and joined the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet after independence, was a Hindu traditionalist politician who wanted to uphold Hindu values but not necessarily to the exclusion of other communities. He asked for the membership of Hindu Mahasabha to be thrown open to all communities. When this was not accepted, he resigned from the party and founded a new political party in collaboration with the RSS. He understood Hinduism as a nationality rather than a community but, realising that this is not the common understanding of the term Hindu, he chose "Bharatiya" instead of "Hindu" to name the new party, which came to be called the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.

The cabinet of the first prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru banned the RSS and arrested more than 200,000 RSS volunteers, after Nathuram Godse, a former volunteer of RSS, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. Nehru also appointed government commissions to investigate the assassination and related circumstances. The series of investigations by these commissions, states the political science scholar Nandini Deo, later found the RSS leadership and "the RSS innocent of a role in the assassination". The mass arrested RSS volunteers were released by the Indian courts, and the RSS has ever since used this as evidence of "being falsely accused and condemned". This was, in part, because of its poor organisation and leadership; its focus on the Hindutva sentiment did not appeal to the voters, and its campaign lacked adequate social and economic themes. The RSS continued its grassroots operations between 1947 and early 1970s, and its volunteers provided humanitarian assistance to Hindu and Sikh refugees from the partition of British India, victims of war and violence, and helped disaster victims to resettle economically. Between 1975 and 1977, Indira Gandhi declared and enforced Emergency with press censorship, the arrests of opposition leaders, and the suspension of many fundamental human rights of Indian citizens. The abuses of Emergency triggered a mass resistance and the rapid growth of volunteers and political support to the Hindutva ideology. Indira Gandhi and her party were voted out of power in 1977. The Hindutva ideology based Jan Sangh members such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Brij Lal Varma and Lal Krishna Advani gained national prominence, and the Hindutva ideology sympathiser Morarji Desai became the prime minister of a coalition non Congress government. This coalition did not last past 1980, and from the consequent break up of coalition parties was founding of the Bharatiya Janata Party in April 1980. This new national political party relied on the Hindutva ideology based rural and urban grassroots organisations that had rapidly grown across India from the mid 1970s.

Since the 2014 Indian general election with the BJP winning, the premiership of Narendra Modi and state based BJP governments have pushed parts of the Hindutva agenda.

On 5 August 2019, the Modi administration revoked the special status, or limited autonomy, granted under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir.

On 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court of India passed resolution on creation of Ram Mandir on the disputed land of Ayodhya. The verdict also stated to provide for creation of a mosque on another part of the land. The land was given to the Sunni Waqf Board. On 5 August 2019, Narendra Modi held the Bhoomipujan at the Ayodhya. He became the first prime minister to visit Ram Janmabhoomi and Hanuman Garhi. On 22 January 2024, the Ram Mandir was completed and inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi. In a speech he said, "Ram is the faith of India, Ram is the foundation of India, Ram is the idea of India, Ram is the law of India. Ram is the prestige of India, Ram is the glory of India Ram is the leader and Ram is the policy."

Many BJP ruled states, such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Karnataka, have considered laws designed to prevent forced conversions from Hinduism to Islam through marriage. Hindutva advocates call this "love jihad", and it is widely considered to be an Islamophobic conspiracy theory. On 31 October, he announced that a law to curb "love jihad" would be passed by his government. The law, which also includes provisions against "unlawful religious conversion", declares a marriage null and void if the sole intention was to "change a girl's religion" and both it and the one in Madhya Pradesh imposed sentences of up to 10 years in prison for those who broke the law. The ordinance came into effect on 28 November 2020 as the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance. In December 2020, Madhya Pradesh approved an anti conversion law similar to the Uttar Pradesh one. as of 2020, Haryana and Karnataka were still in discussion over similar ordinances. In April 2021, the Gujarat Assembly amended the Freedom of Religion Act, 2003, bringing in stringent provisions against forcible conversion through marriage or allurement, with the intention of targeting "love jihad". The Karnataka state cabinet also approved an anti conversion bill, making it a law in December 2021.

The RSS established a number of affiliate organisations after Indian Independence to carry its ideology to various parts of the society. Prominent among them is the Vishva Hindu Parishad, which was set up in 1964 with the objective of protecting and promoting the Hindu religion. It subscribed to Hindutva ideology, which came to mean in its hands political Hinduism and Hindu militancy. A number of political developments in the 1980s caused a sense of vulnerability among the Hindus in India. This was much discussed and leveraged by the Hindutva ideology organisations. These developments include the mass killing of the Hindus by the militant Khalistan movement, the influx of undocumented Bangladeshi immigration into Assam coupled with the expulsion of Hindus from Bangladesh, the Congress led government's pro Muslim bias in the Shah Bano case as well as the Rushdie affair. The VHP and the BJP utilised these developments to push forward a militant Hindutva nationalist agenda leading to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. The BJP officially adopted Hindutva as its ideology in its 1989 Palampur resolution. It is "India's identity", according to the RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat. According to the anthropologist and South Asia Politics scholar Thomas Hansen, Hindutva in the post Independence era has emerged as a political ideology and a populist form of Hindu nationalism. The campaign language of the Congress Party leader Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s mirrored those of Hindutva proponents. The political speeches and publications by Indian Muslim leaders have declared their "Islamic religious identity" being greater than any "political ideology or national identity". These developments, states Hansen, have helped Hindu nationalists spread essentialist constructions per contemporary Hindutva ideology.

The Hindutva leaders have sought a Uniform Civil Code for all the citizens of India, where the same law applies to all its citizens irrespective of the individual's religion. They state that differential laws based on religion violate the Indian Constitution and have sowed the seeds of divisiveness between different religious communities. Under the current laws that were enacted in 1955–56, state John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, the constitutionally directive principle of a Uniform Civil Code covers only non Muslims. The Uniform Civil Code is opposed by the Muslim leaders.

Since the mid 2010s, there has been a notable increase in violence motivated by Hindutva ideology, particularly towards Muslims, and includes acts of extremist terroristic violence. This has principally been perpetrated by or has implicated members, or alleged members, of Hindu nationalist organizations such as the RSS or Abhinav Bharat. The violence has also been condoned by the BJP politicians and used as an electoral strategy to garner support from the far right Hindu population. The veneration of cows as deities and restrictions on meat consumption have also been used by to justify violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and lower caste Hindus.

There has been a rise in the number of incidents of cow vigilantism since the election of a BJP majority in the Parliament of India in 2014. The frequency and severity of cow vigilante violence has been described as "unprecedented". Human Rights Watch has reported that there has been a surge in such violence since 2015. The surge is attributed to the recent rise in Hindu nationalism in India. Many vigilante groups say they feel "empowered" by the victory of the Hindu nationalist BJP in the 2014 election. According to a Reuters report, there were 63 attacks in India between 2010 and mid 2017 resulting in 28 deaths, 24 of them Muslim, and 124 injuries. Most attacks occurred after Narendra Modi took office in 2014. Many BJP states have passed laws against cattle slaughter such as (2017), Gujarat, 6 June 2017, Uttar Pradesh's Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath directed the state police to take action against cow slaughter and cattle smuggling under the National Security Act and the Gangster Act, and in (2021) Assam Assembly passed a bill that prohibits the slaughter or sale of beef within a radius of any temple. The legislation seeks to ensure that permission for slaughter is not granted to areas that are predominantly inhabited by Hindu, Jain, Sikh and other non beef eating communities or places that fall within a radius of a temple, satra and any other institution as may be prescribed by the authorities. Exemptions, however, might be granted for certain religious occasions.

The Hindutva ideology of organisations such as RSS have long been compared to fascism or Nazism. An editorial published on 4 February 1948, for example, in the National Herald, the mouthpiece of the Indian National Congress party, stated that "it [RSS] seems to embody Hinduism in a Nazi form" with the recommendation that it must be ended. Similarly, in 1956, another Congress party leader compared Jana Sangh to the Nazis in Germany. After the 1940s and 1950s, a number of scholars have labelled or compared Hindutva to fascism. Marzia Casolari has linked the association and the borrowing of pre World War II European nationalist ideas by early leaders of Hindutva ideology. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations, the term Hindutva has "fascist undertones". Many scholars have pointed out that early Hindutva ideologues were inspired by fascist movements in early 20th century Italy and Germany. The Indian Marxist economist and political commentator Prabhat Patnaik calls Hindutva "almost fascist in the classical sense". He states that the Hindutva movement is based on "class support, methods and programme". According to Patnaik, Hindutva has the following fascist ingredients: "an attempt to create a unified homogeneous majority under the concept of "the Hindus"; a sense of grievance against past injustice; a sense of cultural superiority; an interpretation of history according to this grievance and superiority; a rejection of rational arguments against this interpretation; and an appeal to the majority based on race and masculinity". and Kahanism. According to Jaffrelot, the early Hindutva proponents such as Golwalkar envisioned it as an extreme form of "ethnic nationalism", but the ideology differed from fascism and Nazism in three respects. According to Achin Vanaik, several authors have labelled Hindutva as fascist, but such a label requires "establishing a fascist minimum". Hindu nationalism, states Vanaik, is "a specific Indian manifestation of a generic phenomenon [of nationalism] but not one that belongs to the genus of fascism". According to Mark Juergensmeyer, a number of writers in India and outside India have variously described Hindutva as "fundamentalist" and "India's flirtation with native fascism", while others disagree. Sociologists Chetan Bhatt and Parita Mukta have described difficulties in identifying Hindutva with fascism or Nazism, because of Hindutva's embrace of cultural rather than racial nationalism, its "distinctively Indian" character, and "the RSS's disavowal of the seizure of state power in preference for long term cultural labour in civil society". They describe Hindutva as a form of "revolutionary conservatism" or "ethnic absolutism". According to Thomas Hansen, Hindutva represents a "conservative revolution" in postcolonial India, and its proponents have been combining "paternalistic and xenophobic discourses" with "democratic and universalist discourses on rights and entitlements" based on "desires, anxieties and fractured subjectivities" in India.

When Prime Minister V. P. Singh launched the Mandal Commission to broaden reservations in government and public university jobs to a significant portion of the Shudras who were officially branded the Other Backward Classes (OBC), the mouthpiece of the Hindutva organisation RSS, Organiser magazine, wrote of "an urgent need to build up moral and spiritual forces to counter any fallout from an expected Shudra revolution". According to social scientist and economist Jean Drèze, the Mandal Commission angered the upper castes and threatened to distance the OBCs, but the Babri Masjid's destruction and ensuing events helped to reduce this challenge and reunified Hindus on an anti Muslim stance. He further claims "The Hindutva project is a lifeboat for the upper castes in so far as it promises to restore the Brahminical social order" and the potential enemies of this ideology is anybody whose acts or might hinder the process of restoring the Brahminic social order. Drèze further claims that although Hindutva is known as a majoritarian movement, it can be best expressed as an oppressive minority movement. According to Jaffrelot, the Sangh Parivar organisations with their Hindutva ideology have strived to impose the belief structure of the upper caste Hindus. According to sociologist Amritorupa Sen, the privileges of the upper caste and especially Brahmins have become invisible. There has been a cultural norm that Brahmins take care of the lower castes out of a moral responsibility but also out of human kindness. This creates an intrinsically unequal social structure.

According to Jaffrelot, the Hindutva ideology has roots in an era where the fiction in ancient Indian mythology and Vedic antiquity was presumed to be valid. This fiction was used to "give sustenance to Hindu ethnic consciousness". Hindutva organizations have been criticized for their belief in statements or practices that they claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Hindutva ideology is also described to be separatist in its form. Siddharth Varadarajan writes that Hindutva separatism seeks to depart from the "philosophical, cultural and civilization mores of the country, including Hinduism itself". The premises of early Hindu nationalist thought, states Chetan Bhatt, reflected the colonial era European scholarship and Orientalism of its times. Chakravarthi Ram Prasad, a Fellow of the British Academy and a scholar of Politics and Philosophy of Religion, states that Hindutva is a form of nationalism that is expounded differently by its opponents and its proponents. The Hindutva ideology according to Savarkar, states Ram Prasad, is a "geography, race, and culture" based concept. However, the "geography" is not strictly territorial but is an "ancestral homeland of a people", and the "race" is not biogenetic but described as the historic descendants of the intermarriage of Aryans, native inhabitants and "different peoples" who arrived over time. The proponents state that in the Hindutva thought, there is a kernel of coherent and justifiable thesis about the Indian culture and history. For instance, in 2011, Hindutva activists successfully led a charge to remove an essay about the multiple narratives of Ramayanas from Delhi University's history syllabus. Romila Thapar, one of India's most eminent historians, has faced repeated Hindutva led attacks. The Hindu right has been responsible for pushback against scholars of South Asia and Hinduism based in North America, including Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock. Under BJP leadership, the Indian state has been accused of monitoring scholars and denying some research access. Audrey Truschke is one such example who remains frequent target of their threats. In 2021, a group of North American based scholars of South Asia formed a collective and published the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual to, they argue, answer the Hindutva threat to their academic freedom. The Association for Asian Studies noted that Hindutva, described as a "majoritarian ideological doctrine" different from Hinduism, resorted to "increasing attacks on numerous scholars, artists and journalists who critically analyze its politics". A number of scholars and participants withdrew from the conference following the threats they received from ultranationalists and Hindutva supporters.

Hindutva pop is a subgenre of Indian pop promoting Hindutva ideas. It openly calls for violence against many non Hindu minorities, especially Muslims. Hindutva pop artists defend their music as neither xenophobic nor Islamophobic, arguing it promotes truth. Popular Hindutva pop artists like Laxmi Dubey and Prem Krishnavanshi mainstream the xenophobic values of the genre.