ABSTRACT
The scholars specialising in the history of the Hindu religion and tradition claim it to be the world’s oldest religion based on textual evidence from the Rg Veda. Some believed that there was an ambiguity in Gandhi’s “soft Hinduism” that resulted in communal conflicts and dissatisfaction among Muslims and Dalits in the 1920s and onwards. David Page, discussing the communal conflict of the 1920s, observes how the political reforms of 1919 “gave way to communal antagonism.” However, being a Hindu and adhering to Hindutva idealswere two different things. For Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hinduism was a religion with many sub-sects, belief systems and traditions, and his idea of Hindutva was based on a political and nationalistic ideology highlighting all Indians, regardless of their religious identities, as “Hindus” because of the geographical construct or a unifying geographical boundary.
