What is Hindutva?

Hindutva: The dangers of religious chauvinism and fanaticism

Muslim man pleads for his life and begs nearby police to rescue him from murderous mobs as fanatical Hindu fundamentalists murder thousands of Muslims in Gujarat, India (March 2002).

This section deals with Hindutva. The term Hindutva was first coined in the late 1800's by Hindu nationalists in India who preferred to call their religion with an indigenous Indian name, it means "Hinduness". Unfortunately, this term in the modern era has come to exclusively describe Hindu religious fanatics such as groups like Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal, this section will refer only to Hindu nationalists, chauvinists, and fanatics as "Hindutva supporters" or "Hindutva fanatics" for the sake of avoiding confusion.

Hindutva is perceived by intellectuals as a threat to the stability of India due to their increasing influence and their religious fanaticism, a fanaticism which manifested itself in it's most virulent form when the Babri Masjid (Mosque) was demolished by Hindutva fanatics in 1992, justifying their actions on a claim that the Mosque was allegedly built on the site of a temple which supposedly marked the spot where their god Rama was born and was apparently destroyed by the first Mughal Emperor Babar even though this claim originated in the 1800's and has absolutely no supporting evidence.

Articles and links on this site will refute Hindutva claims (which also includes the blatantly false claim that the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple and that Hindus used flying machines 7000 years ago!) and will present the chauvinistic agenda of these people which aims to present a (false) sense of history of Hindu India to the Hindus in order for them to feel pride in their old civilisation and to create a "Hindu Rashtra" (Hindu theocratic state) to restore this "old glory". These claims have had such an affect that communal riots where thousands of people clashed and died have happened between Hindus and other religious minorities in India, most notably the Muslims just because the false sense of history implanted in these people's fanatic minds has stirred up hate for the religious minorities whom these Hindutva fanatics perceive as having had destroyed the Indian civilisations of old.

The kind of hatred espoused by these fanatics can be seen when one visits the official site of the Hindutva fanatic group Bajrang Dal at Hinduunity.org. An example of the paranoid, fanatical hate they teach against non-Hindu minorities in India can be seen by this picture of a woman whose image personifies India called Bharot-Mata (Mother India) being attacked by people who personify Islam, Christians, seculars, and "traitor liberals", it alleges that these people are out to destroy India.

It must be remembered that these fanatics are not small in number, the hinduunity.org site is the official site of the Bajrang Dal which is the political students wing a of a right-wing Hindutva fascist group called the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Banjrang Dal alone (asides from the numerous other Hindu fundamentalist groups) number about 3 million and are trained in armed combat readying themselves against an imagined threat posed by Muslims and other minorities in India who apparently will attempt to destroy the Indian state and wipe out Hinduism some time in the future. They also claim that Christian missionaries are in actual fact Western spies out to cause disruption in Indian society. Their actions and beliefs are fascist in nature. Indeed, many of the early founders of Hindutva did indeed admire fascists like Hitler and Mussolini.

In short, Hindutva is a virulently hateful ideology which survives by instilling false grievances amongst the Hindu population against Muslims and other minorities and then nurturing that anger to incite communal riots with the ultimate purpose of cleansing India of non-Hindus [1] [2]. They distort history and invent history to achieve that goal.

Hindutva is a nationalist ideology, based on a modern day version of centralized intolerant Hinduism. It has nothing to do with a historical tradition of spiritual practices that we call Hinduism. Such a centralized and chauvinistic Hinduism - Hindutva - has been brought to the fore front in today by a group of political organizations called the "Sangh Parivar " (Sangh Family) - consisting of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Association - the mother organization after which the label Sangh Parivar is coined), the Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People Party - Hindutva's constitutional front that fights elections etc.), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP - World Hindu Council - the formations activist front), the Shiv Sena (the fascist front), the VHP of America (Hindutva's overseas arm) and the Hindu Students Councils (VHP of America's student wing). - An anti-Indian Nationalist Ideology

More proof for their fanaticism can be seen by the fact that they have something on their website called The Black List where they put "to trial" certain people for "crimes" ranging from secularism to expressing free speech, they hand out sentences ranging from a thousand lashes, criminal vandalism to the death penalty, it says that all actions possible should be taken to deal with these people. The blatant anti-intellectualism of these people can be seen by the fact that these fanatics deny proven facts of history in order to maintain their fanatical religious agenda, an example would be (spelling unchanged):

"B.N. Pande - Cirme: In The Telegraph newspaper dated 3/1/2001, the imbecilic Mani Sankar Ayer, reported that the historian Vishwanathan Pande had revised Mughal history to show that Aurangazeb did not sack Kashi-Vishwanathan temple because he was a Muslim. B. N. Pande apparently wrote that a Nepalese princess was entrusted to the care of Aurangazeb; he put her in the Kashi temple. But the hindu priests molested her and other hindu ladies with her. To avenge her honour Aurangazeb desroyed the temple. I do not know whether the historian had actually written these things or Ayer is making it up, but someone is lying their heads off. I also hold the newspaper responsible for publishing such lies in the name of secularism."

Of course this claim that the work of Pande is false is in itself self-defeating since they offer absolutely no evidence to the contrary and Pande offers a brilliant critique of the falsified sources which these fanatics use to make claims about Muslims. Pande is one of the most noted intellectually honest Hindu scholars in India, he does not have a Hindutva agenda.

if you want to contribute, report a missing link or enquire about something else, then please do not hesitate to contact me at anti.hindutva@gmail.com.

I have laid out roughly the major parts of Hindutva and it's agenda and now I shall present articles on this subject.

The following link is quite useful in getting a more in-depth idea of what Hindutva is, their goals and their methods:

A Brief Outline of the Hindutva Movement