What Does Hindutva Stand For, Outside Of Resentment?

What happens when a dog catches a car?

This is one of my favourite questions of all time. Once a dog chased an auto-rickshaw I was occupying with two men of greater bulk than me, one of whose legs hung out for lack of space. A dog gave chase. The auto-driver slowed down to ask which road we wanted to take. The bewildered dog, panicking bulky friend’s leg now within easy masticating reach, also slowed down, as if to give the impression that it was still chasing. Kindly contemplate its confusion. One moment dog is chasing leg. The next moment dog has caught leg. What to do?

We got away, and my bulky friend with escaped leg called me the other day to wonder why there are suddenly so many new biographies of Vinayak Savarkar. As it happens, I am glad that more people are writing about Savarkar. Both these books are worth reading. Vaibhav Purandare’s Savarkar: The True Story of the Father of Hindutva is a useful guide to the man’s life, while Vikram Sampath’s Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924 has deeper research and is more comprehensive. I’ve read Purandare’s book and am halfway through Sampath’s, and I’ve learnt not to evaluate Savarkar through the easy binaries of Coward/Hero. People contain multitudes, and Savarkar is an especially complex character.

The Resentments Of Savarkar

The term ‘Hindutva’ was popularised by Savarkar’s 1923 book, Essentials of Hindutva, later republished and better known as Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? In his book, Savarkar defined a nation based on ‘Hindutva’ to which Muslims do not belong, and are outsiders. This was actually a curious departure from Savarkar’s earlier writings and speeches.

The young Savarkar had consistently spoken out for Hindu-Muslim unity, and considered the Raj the enemy. Purandare’s book recounts an event in London in 1907, at which Savarkar met Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi later spoke of his “pleasant relations” with Savarkar, praising his “selflessness and patriotism.” Savarkar delivered a 45-minute speech in which he said: “Hindus are the heart of Hindustan. Nevertheless, just as the beauty of the rainbow is not impaired but enhanced by its varied hues, so also Hindustan will appear all the more beautiful across the sky of the future by assimilating all that is best in the Muslim, Parsi, Jewish and other civilizations.”

All of Savarkar’s actions until 1910 indicate that he really meant this. Then why the change? The reason lies in that second decade of the last century, which Savarkar spent imprisoned in the Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Both books have detailed descriptions of the kinds of horrific torture that prisoners endure, but that wasn’t the end of it.

“The first thing one noticed in the jail,” Sampath writes, “was the distinction made between the Hindu and non-Hindu prisoners with regard to their religious traditions. On entry into the cell, the first act that was committed for a Hindu prisoner was that his sacred thread was cut off. However, Muslim prisoners were allowed to sport their beards, as were Sikhs with regard to their hair. It was [the jailor] Barrie’s idea of creating discord between the Hindus and Muslims and hence he placed the Hindu prisoners under the most bigoted of Muslim warders and jamadars. Most of them were fanatical Pathans, Sindhis and Baluchis from Sindh and the North-West Frontier Province. It gave these men a special thrill to brutalize a Hindu kafir.”

Savarkar went into the Cellular Jail a believer in communal unity, and came out hating Muslims. The many years of torture by Muslims certainly contributed to that. “To Savarkar,” Purandare writes, “these overseers appeared fanatical and over-zealous, and not just in their mistreatment of the prisoners. They also converted non-Muslim prisoners to the Islamic faith by way of threats, coercion and inducements. Savarkar described the Pathans, Baluchis and Sindhis as the most fundamentalist of Muslims he met in prison, followed by the Punjabis.”

Purandare believes – and it seems likely to me as well – that Savarkar’s “change of heart” happened due to his “personal experiences in the Andamans.” His ideological tract was, thus, influenced by personal resentments. That raises the fascinating counterfactual question of how history would have proceeded if Savarkar had been imprisoned somewhere else, and had managed to evade prison altogether. Even if his conception of Hindutva would have been different, though, he was just one individual. There was no shortage of resentment within the larger movement for a Hindu Rashtra.

The Resentments Of Hindutva

Look back over the history of political Hindutva and consider the major issues that have persisted for decades: cow slaughter, love jihad, ghar waapsi, the temple in Ayodhya, repealing Article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code. All of these are centred around resentment against Muslims. Dalits and Christian missionaries play a bit part, but it’s mainly Muslims who constitute the other. These are emotive issues, some of them made more emotive by personal sacrifice. Syama Prasad Mookerjee died in custody in Srinagar while protesting Article 370.

I am not making a judgement call on whether these resentments were justified or not. But even through the lens of the atheist rationalist that I am, they’re not all ridiculous. Consider the Uniform Civil Code, for example. When the Hindu Code Bill was first proposed, Hindu nationalist politicians were up in arms. They argued that this was an unnecessary imposition by the state on Hindu society and customs. What really angered them was that this civil code was only being imposed on Hindus, and Muslims were being pandered to. Their argument: Either impose it on nobody, or on everybody.

It is hard to argue with the rationale behind that. The constitution should treat everyone equally. That this rational position carries such a baggage of resentment behind it complicates the matter further. But my larger question, and the point behind this column, is as follows.

Now that the BJP is in power, and Hindutva dominates our politics, what will the BJP do beyond its politics of resentment? Sure, they will act according to all these issues that have historically been important to them: cow slaughter will be fought, Article 370 is gone, they’ll bring about the UCC once they have the numbers, they might even build that temple in Ayodhya. But, once the resentment is out of the way, what’s left?

Woof Woof! Oh No… Caught The Car!

Apart from the historical resentments (or bigotry, if you prefer), what is there of Hindutva? One could say they might consolidate Brahminism – but on the issue of caste, the Hindutva right does not speak with one voice. Savarkar was anti-caste – his position was closer to Ambedkar than Gandhi – and political Hindutva has crossed the caste barrier: that is why more Dalits voted for the BJP than the Congress in both 2014 and 2019. You could argue that Hindutva is misogynistic, and sees women as subservient to men, but in this globalised, urbanised age, that genie is surely out of the bottle.

In terms of economics, also, there is nothing to distinguish the BJP from other parties. Narendra Modi combines the top-down, central-planning mindset of Jawaharlal Nehru with the statism and authoritarianism of Indira Gandhi. Arun Shourie’s famous pithy summation rings true here: NDA=UPA+Cow. If you take cow out of that equation, what’s the difference?

This raises the interesting prospect of what the BJP will be in future. Once these resentments are out of the way, they will be indistinguishable from other parties. They will also stand for nothing but the will to power, just like the Congress always has. That will represent an opportunity for new political forces to emerge. What will those stand for? I have no idea – but it will surely be something better than this.

Amit Varma is a writer based in Mumbai. He has been a journalist for a decade-and-a-half, and has won the Bastiat Prize for Journalism twice. He writes the blog India Uncut and hosts the podcast The Seen and the Unseen.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.