ABSTRACT
The Rise of Hindutva Politics The Sangh Parivar’s Hindutva ideology has its roots in the early-twentiethcentury writings of D.V. Savarkar, who argued that the Aryans who settled in India had formed a nation, and that this is today embodied in Hindu culture. Savarkar coined the term Hindutva to describe their Hindu-ness, which he conceived as resting on three pillars: geographical unity, racial features, and a common culture (Jaffrelot, 1996, p. 26). Christophe Jaffrelot explains that although the importance of religious criteria was minimized by Savarkar in his conception of Hindu-ness, his notion of a common Hindu culture included the idea that India was the fatherland of the Hindu nation. India’s Christians and Muslims could not be part of this nation because they did not look upon India as their holy land, thus making their loyalty to it suspect (Ibid., pp. 28-31).1 Hindutva’s territorial imagining of India as a Hindu nation is thus founded upon the exclusion and threat of the religious Other – particularly Muslims, whose threat is magnified by their construction of a precolonial Indian history that emphasizes the Muslim (Mughal) invasion (Bhatt, 2001, pp. 92-93), as well as by the postcolonial identification of Indian Muslims with Pakistan – and more recently, with a militant transnational Islam.
