The arrival of Narendra Modi in Indian politics as the 14th prime minister of India inaugurated a new debate in international academic circles. It dragged the attention of global intellectual communities toward Indian domestic politics, where an overwhelming wave of violence has jeopardized the status of non-Hindu communities in India. All across Indian society, the direct and indirect support of the Modi government to fanatical religious trends has given impetus to a new wave of violations of minority rights. Modi’s strong association with the two mainstream Hindu extremist political parties, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the fundamental reason behind the rise of such violations in India. The combination of socio-religious and socio-political attributes of the Indian nation has heated communal violence across Indian society. In response to the dramatic rise of communal violence in Indian society and its increasing acceptance in different segments of Hindu believers across India, the Modi regime proved reluctant in addressing and preventing frequent occurrences of massive religion-specific violence in the society. This factor has compelled authors from around the world to rationally study the failure of the Modi government in securing the status of various religious minorities in India. In the list of degrading status of religious minorities in Indian society, the positions of Muslim and Sikh populations cannot be ignored because both minorities live under miserable social conditions across India. The support to Muslim communities mainly arises from Pakistan because Pakistan is the only state in the Islamic world determined to talk about the massive violations of Muslim communities in India. In contrast to Pakistan’s support of the Muslims living in India, the condition of the Sikh community is highly depressing because the Sikh population of India has become a prime target of Hindu nationalist policies.
Writers from around the world have started giving sufficient attention to the sufferings of the Sikh people living in India. The book under review is a brief survey of Indian politics under the influences of Hindu nationalism and its dramatic rise in Indian society. The book is an edited volume compiled by two authors, Thomas Blom Hansen and Srirupa Roy. Hansen is a Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, whereas Roy is a Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies, University of Göttingen. Hansen is a founding director of Stanford’s Center for South Asia and remained director from 2010 to 2017. He has his expertise in the areas of ethno-religious identities, violence, and urban life while having a specific focus on the Southern parts of Asian and African continents. As a political anthropologist, he has an appreciable academic strength in the theoretical domains of political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion, and contemporary urbanism. As a professor at Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Roy is the leading researcher of a group working on State and Democracy at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS). She is an advisory board member of the Inter-Asia Program at the Social Science Research Council (New York). Analogous to Hansen, Roy holds her expertise in the areas of politics of identity, comparative-historical dynamics of state formation and transformation, and democratic politics and economic liberalization. Both authors have tried to explore the question of Hindu nationalism cemented in the widespread trends of Hindu extremist ideas against non-Hindu communities. The main focus of both authors is on the role of Hindu nationalism in marginalizing the status of non-Hindu communities in Indian society, which reflects Modi’s Hindu-centric politics under the BJP’s broader anti-minority agenda.
The book is a collection of thirteen short essays contributed by different authors under four main themes Rules, Articulation, Inclusion, and Violence. Apart from having a short introduction about the main theme in the first chapter, the debate in the subsequent chapters revolves around the new formats of Hindutva ideology and its political manifestations under the Modi government. The first chapter is comprised of the views of both editors of the book, Hansen and Roy while other authors have written subsequent chapters under the stated four themes. In this way, the first theme of the book consists of four chapters written by Ashwin Subramanian, Amrita Basu, Srirupa Roy, Srirupa Roy and Thomas Blom Hansen. The second theme of the book encompasses two chapters authored by Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay and Thomas Blom Hansen, and the third theme has three chapters composed by Arkotong Longkumer, Suryakant Waghmore, and Lalit Vachani. The last three chapters, under the fourth theme of the book, involve the intellectual contributions of Irfan Ahmad, Mona Bhan, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi. In this way, it will be appropriate to say that this book is a collection of different scholarly viewpoints collected from authors of diverse backgrounds, and their analytical positions on the contemporary phase of the Hinduization of Indian society. The book is a comprehensive study of Hindutva ideology and its alternations under the Modi region – the Modi government has made religious ideology a political tool in Indian domestic politics. The hostile manifestations of Hindu ideology in society and its supportive role in domestic politics have changed the outlook of Indian politics in world politics because many international research organizations and independent think tanks have published their report on the massive human rights violation in India. The details of these reports have been quoted and highlighted by various media channels with proper citational references. A comprehensive detail of all these sources has given in the second chapter of the book New Hindutva Timeline: September 2013-October 2020. Chapter five, New Hindutva and the ‘Up Model’: An Interview with Neha Dixit and Nakul Sawhney, contains an interesting account of an interview conducted by both book editors. The specific question-based interview with an independent journalist working on Hindu Nationalism (Neha Dixit) and an independent documentary filmmaker working on human rights (Nakul Sawhney) created a symmetry between the inclusion of primary and secondary data sources in the book.
Various arguments were developed by other book contributors on the new model of ideology-driven politics in India and its promotion in the contemporary regime of the BJP. All authors tried to maintain their independent positions on the discussion of Hindu nationalism or new Hindutva and its association with Indian domestic politics. It is proved to be the driving principle of contemporary Indian politics against the non-Hindu population. This principle could be treated as the main objective of BJP’s government under the leadership of Modi’s version of Hindutva and its effort to make India a Hindu-only nation. Thus, this book echoes the dominance of Modi’s version of Hindutva in Indian politics and its dramatic promotion in the mainstream state structure of the Indian state. Based on the features mentioned above, this book could be considered an appropriate study to understand the role of BJP’s fanatical ideology in Indian politics generally and its dramatic advancement in the mainstream Indian state structure. It could also be considered suitable reading for academicians interested in studying the nature and evolution of Hindutva ideology in the Indian state and society.
