Introduction

This book consists of a re-worked version of my doctoral thesis entitled Locating the Internal Emergency 1967-1977, and later research interests on Indian secularism and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), undertaken in the late 1990s. As such, this work brings together two apparently diverse literatures on India: deinstitutionalisation and political centralisation, with debates on the nature and scope of secularism and Hindutva (a term first used in 1923 to describe movements advocating Hindu nationalism). It brings them together in the conviction that they are in fact wider parts of the same dynamics, namely the prolific mobilisation of Indian society since the late 1960s, especially 1977, and then onwards through the 1990s; and the changes that this has brought about regarding the nature of the Indian state.