ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, India witnessed the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in the political sphere. The Hindu nationalist movement is motivated by the goal to build a united India by “Hinduizing” the Indian polity. Since the 1980s, the electoral manifestation of the Hindu nationalist movement, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has emerged as a potent force on the Indian political landscape. The BJP is both ideologically and organizationally connected to the broader Hindu nationalist movement. Ideologically, the BJP is committed to Hindutva – in its literal translation, “Hinduness” – equating religion with an exclusive conception of the nation. At one point in its political career, the BJP supported calls for the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya, and the construction of a Hindu temple in its place. It has also been an ardent critic of India’s form of secularism, claiming that it panders to religious minorities. More specifically, it has taken aim at Muslim personal status law and has pushed for the development and implementation of a Uniform Civil Code.1
