ABSTRACT
This physical heritage, however, stands in sharp contrast to the Hindutva vision of India’s nation-space, which is imagined as purely Hindu. This sentiment of national purity is articulated by Atal Behari Vajpayee in the second epigraph. Ironically, the comments are extracted from a speech he gave at a conference for National Integration in 1961. At the time, Vajpayee was a young Turk of the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), but later he would go on to become the premier of India.3 An unabashed supporter of the Hindutva ideology, he would also be in power during the 2002 massacre of Muslims in the western state of Gujarat. In this speech, Vajpayee argued for a pan-Indian identity based on a common Hindu past, emphasizing that the terms ‘India’ and ‘Hindu’ are in fact synonyms, and that differences between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians are contrived and historically baseless. India is thus imagined as a product of a Hindu culture that has remained unchanged from the ancient past to the modern present.
