Hindutva

Drawing on the news reporting of the army's association with Ramdev's organisation for yoga training, a discussion on the potential and possibility of politicisation of the military with Hindutva philosophy.

The present national crisis of violently conflicting communal identities represents a choice between the inclusiveness of Gandhi and the exclusions of Savarkar. Gandhi did not separate religion from politics. He brought a religious ethic to politics rather than political militancy into religious communities. Meanwhile, Savarkar's Hindutva ideology was narrow and exclusivist in its conflation of janma bhoomi (motherland) and punya bhoomi (holy land). In spite of its pretensions to be nationalist and modern, its militant chauvinism and authoritarian fundamentalism make Savarkar's Hindutva the antithesis of Gandhi's Hinduism. Hindutva defines India as Hindu and wants all Indians to be Hindus. In contrast, Gandhi's Hinduism gives space to all. This paper argues that the future of our multicultural, pluri-religious people can only be even bloodier with the preclusions of Savarkar's Hindutva. Only Gandhi's sarva-dharmasamabhava can possibly be an effective basis for a tolerance on which to premise a just inter-religious peace and harmony.

With the taint of the Gandhi assassination, the RSS was truly a political pariah. But after the Emergency, acquiring political power came within reach. The fortunes of secularism, and of Hindutva, were decisively changed thereafter. These changes need not be irrevocable, but they require to be understood.

Though Gujarat has a history of communalism, adivasis were the last to be communalised. This paper attempts to explore the participation of adivasis in the riots that followed the Godhra carnage. It highlights the fact that the character of riots in adivasi areas was different from that in non-adivasi areas and attempts to reconstruct the developmental cycle of communalisation of adivasis from late 1980s onwards. It links this communalisation with the political economy of adivasis whose aspirations and problems are kept distorted and their attention diverted under the garb of religion and party politics.

The rise of Hindutva has often been interpreted as a threat to the secular state. Similarly, the recent outbursts of Hindu-Muslim conflict are said to be related to the decay of secularism. The author argues that the concept of secularism is fundamentally obscure, since it is founded upon an arbitrary distinction between the religious and the secular. The belief that religion should be separated from politics is a normative dogma that precedes all theoretical analysis of the Indian situation. Therefore, this concept of secularism prevents us from understanding the problems of pluralism in contemporary India, instead of helping us to solve them.