ABSTRACT
The election of Narendra Modi in May 2014 as Indian Prime Minister with a landslide majority has raised once again the spectre of religious nationalism in South Asia. Although relations with India’s neighbours in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) appear to remain unaffected, the commitment of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the principle of Hindutva remains undiluted – at least at grass-roots level – by the exigencies of ruling 1.25 billion people of diverse faiths, languages, and regional identities. As a form of cultural nationalism, Hindutva may be seen as a discourse of ‘Hindu-ness’ which interpellates2 all Indians as belonging to a Hindu civilization based on a common pan-Indian Hindu national identity. The BJP point out in their Web site that Hindutva is a ‘nationalist, and not a religious or theocratic, concept’ (Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP], 2014). It, therefore, can be contrasted with Hinduism, the polytheistic and multivalent faith of almost a billion people in South Asia. The violence that occasionally has been carried out in its name should thus be seen as more ‘cultural’ than religious in inspiration since it is motivated by a desire to assimilate – or, in the words of one of its most important advocates, M. S. Golwalkar, ‘digest’ (Sharma, 2011:176) – India’s ethno-religious ‘Others’ into the Hindu ‘Self ’.
