Right wing extremism.

Maybe. But then, in the past there has never been as strong of a central political authority in India as there is today. Indians of today are pioneers in many respects; we are forging a new nation on the base of an ancient civilization, and we should promote new movements that are beneficial to nation-building rather than shackle ourselves to the past.

The examples of Turkey and Central Asia have shown that even Muslims can become liberal, secular, and materialistic, given the right conditions and environment.

Correct in western context, but wrong in the context of India, in which the land itself holds a religious significance and it is visualized as Bharat Mata.


In both cases, they were forced to be secular - one by Ataturk and other by USSR. Nothing voluntary about that.

How can secular nationalism evolve from "Hindu nationalism", when "Hindu nationalism" is a totally meaningless phrase in itself? Can you even provide a good definition of a "Hindu" as a basis for this supposed "nationalism"?

civ, I stressed specifically on subcontinental Muslims not Muslims as a whole.

There have been influential Rationalists/Atheists from the "Hindu" community like Savarkar, Ambedkar, Periyar. But none from the muslim community

There were two popular movements by subcontinental Muslims :
1) To restore Islam's supremacy by reverting to 7th century form ---Deoband
2) To restore Islam's supremacy by fusing it with western thought ---Aligarh

An atheist Indian "Muslim" would be ostracized from his own community, beaten and probably lynched too if he tries a mass movement. Things may go differently in the future. But I'm not very hopeful

The definition of western nationalism applies only where there is no historical continuous ethnicity or civilisation, it doesn't apply in India because here we have the oldest alive continuous civilisation while western nationalism is dependent on the concerned Constitutions which needs to be written & enforced. No doubt Indian nationalism is Hindu nationalism and IMO Hindu nationalism comprises with shares of Sikh, Jain and Buddhist ethnicities i.e. native religions of India with the largest share of Sanatan dharma.

Nationalism arises out of historical ethnicity i.e. continuous alive civilisation of a particular area, it exists in India and it is Hindu nationalism, and in absence of it, nationalism has to be arise out of Constitutions made to regulate the policies and governance of the concerned country.

Absence will make it clear, remove Hindus and their religious places from India, now tell what remained here ? nothing ! there remains no question of nationalism then. Saying that India doesn't have Hindu nationalism is merely an effort to take it away from its root.

India was not born on 1947, it existed for thousands of years.

I completely agree with you when you say

I think there is lack of any model or successful experiment of reform within the society which recovers from a Wahabi/Salafi tradition, which is hostile to any other interpretation. I don't think it would happen any time soon as long as there are WEALTHY Gulf countries funding such ideologies.

Nationalism is quite a new concept and for India it becomes relevant mostly on Civilization lines. Life didn't start in India in 1947.
Then, there is another problem of etymology. There was no such things as a Nation before nor was such as religion.
In Indian context, when you start applying these concepts with clearly marked boundaries, you don't reach anywhere and keep going round and round.
I think SC has attempted to define the term "Hindu" and admitted that it is too vague.

You had many communities, rituals, languages, philosophies which have evolved and have been accommodating to co-exist with each other. There may be some strands which attempts to have puritanical approach but stress has always been on conduct.

This is really a classic problem.

Comes religions of book with predefined boundaries and hell breaks loose. The problem with Islam and Christianity is its stress on exclusive rights over divinity. If this difference is not stressed upon, it runs the risk of being assimilated as just another stream of Hinduism in India. And this is the reason of strife, which would have taken place no matter what shape Indian Nation state would have taken. It is going to stay a zero sum game unless Abrahmaic religions dilute their stress on exclusivity. And this will not happen unless there is internal reform (in theology), something like liberal interpretation as dominating interpretation.

There is a billion strong population which believes in Civilazational continuity, and that the philosophies, and other cultural attributes be preserved. This belief was there before independence, even before the birth of idea of Nation state. I don't know what is the Indic term for this, if there was. Majority of people believe in that to this day. Some people call it Nationalism. I think India is one of the unique country in the world where there is a big overlap of the idea of Civiliazation and Nation.

In case of Muslims and Christians, Identity almost inadvertently is linked to complete rejection of the ancient civilizational values in a theological sense because of stress on exclusivity.
But these assumptions fail to explain for the devout Indian Muslims and Christians who are staunch Nationalists.
Though, in practice, Muslim and Chritians still share the same cultural values as Hindus but that is because they have to live in Hindu majority society. I won't take Pakistan's example as it is a bad example either way. Any Islamic dominated society over the period of time either has lost its old cultural attributes or is on the way of loosing it.

I am sure there is no end to this debate but I hope some good points are made.

Useless rhetoric. If India holds such a special religious significance for "Hindus", why was there never something similar to the Crusades or the Reconquista that took place in India against the invading Turkic Muslim hordes? Political disunity is no excuse. Tens of thousands of Christians from hundreds of Western European principalities and fiefdoms answered Pope Urban II's call for the First Crusade in the winter of 1095. For Christians (as well as Muslims and Jews), the religious significance of the Holy Land was so great that even former feuding states temporarily joined forces; not only knights and professional soldiers, but even peasants, women, and children were swept up by religious fervor and joined the march to Jerusalem.

But why didn't anything similar to this happen in India? Surely, if Hinduism placed such spiritual significance on the Indian subcontinent, and given the atrocities said to be committed by the invading Turkic Muslim hordes and the numerous temples that were ransacked, there would have been a pan-Indian Hindu resistance movement with tens of thousands of Hindus from all corners of the subcontinent joining forces in a holy war to protect Bharat Mata? Yet nothing even remotely similar to this took place. The only coalitions that were formed against invaders were by petty kshatriyas who wanted to preserve their own power; when defeated, most simply accepted the Muslims as their overlords and usually fought with them against other "Hindus". And, unlike in the Ottoman conquests in Europe or the Mongol conquests in China, the "Hindu" peasants put up hardly any resistance whatsoever. There was not a single peasant revolt during the whole history of Muslim rule in India, which could compare to the peasant revolts that took place Europe and China during the same time. As a result, a few thousand Turkic slaves could rule over one of the most populous areas of the world for hundreds of years (and later, a few thousand Britishers). Compare this to Mongol-ruled China, where the Chinese masses led by the peasant leader Zhu Yuanzhang rose up and overthrew the Mongols after less than a hundred years of rule. Indeed, from the examples provided by history, it seems that Hinduism has done a pretty crappy job of promoting the "spiritual significance" of this land to its followers.

Now, no one is denying that India is the spiritual home of Hinduism and Hindus; what I am saying is that Hinduism has ultimately failed India and is an outdated and archaic religion with little hope for the future. Although I admire the ability of the Brahmanical system to justify and perpetuate class divisions through religious sanction, and thereby promote long-term social cohesion and stability, too much stability can lead to stagnation, narrow-mindedness, and backwardness, as it has in the case of India. Although you and many others will never accept it, the Brahmanical or so-called "Hindu" system is quite culpable with regards to India's fate of foreign domination and social exploitation and backwardness, with consequences that last to this day. The bottom line is that "Hinduism" has failed to provide the people of this land with an effective unifying ideology that could allow it to compete effectively against other civilizations, which is why I find modern "Hindu nationalism" to be inherently laughable.

Moving past that, your statement about the "spiritual significance" of "Bharat Mata" does not answer my previous point regarding the nature of nationalism, which is to be inclusive. Regardless of what individual "Hindus" may believe (or what you would like them to believe), by defining nationalism in religious terms - in a country where large religious minorities exist - you are making nationalism exclusive in nature and hence going against its basic tenets. Full stop.

I wonder if anyone can doubt the nationalism of the Sikhs, Muslims, atheists, and agnostics of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army like Bhagat Singh and Asfaqullah Khan, who performed the Supreme Sacrifice in their fight for this nation's freedom. Indeed, I would go further and say that they were far more nationalistic than most "Hindus" of the past and present.

Are you telling me that Indian Muslims as a whole are more reactionary, fundamentalist, and backwards in ideology than typical non-Indian Muslims? Is an Indian Muslim more likely to be a fundamentalist than an Afghan, Pakistani, or Saudi Muslim?


I will answer these two points by you and KS together because I think they are asking about essentially the same thing.

I do not believe that any kind of mass reformist movement among Indian Muslims is likely to emerge; I agree with you on that. Instead, there should be a movement among Indian Muslims driven by an intellectual social and political elite, similar to what happened in my aforementioned examples of Turkey and Central Asia. A chosen crop of popular and influential Muslim leaders, espousing secular nationalism and an ideology similar to Turkish Kemalism, can do wonders for the Indian Muslim community. Indian Muslims have unfortunately lacked good leaders in the past few years.

Such a reformist movement will proceed slowly, but will pay dividends in the long run. In 1920, when the first Muslim woman performed on a theater stage in Tashkent, she was murdered. During those early days of Soviet rule, women who even removed their veils in public were stoned to death. By the 1980s, Uzbek women were wearing bikinis and mini-skirts and participating in Soviet sports teams. Almost all were literate, and many had college degrees and worked jobs outside the home. These things can happen, given the right conditions and environment.

Um, no. Nationalism emerged in the West because there was historical continuity among certain groups of people in Europe. The Germans and Italians, for example, did not have a united, centralized state until the 19th century, but the people that we today call "Italians" and "Germans" have lived in the same region for hundreds of years, and over the course of these hundreds of years there emerged a certain degree of cultural and ethnic homogeneity among them, which facilitated the rise of nationalism. On the other hand, you will be hard-pressed to find any nationalists in Papua New Guinea or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, because these are not "nations" but just a collection of diverse tribes speaking numerous, often mutually incomprehensible languages and associating themselves with different ethnicities. It is almost impossible to develop a national identity in these countries because a shared consciousness and sense of historical continuity among these tribes is basically non-existent.

India is a special case because we are as diverse and heterogeneous as these tribal countries, yet we are also the the heirs of a very unique and distinct civilization. Therefore, it is still possible to build a sense of national identity among Indians, but it cannot be the same kind of nationalism that exists in the West, since we are not just one ethnicity and we do not speak just one language. Instead, our nationalism should be more broad, flexible, and inclusive to accommodate the many different groups that live in this country and regard it as their motherland.


Do you realize that Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism all reject the core doctrine of 'Sanatan dharma'?

All three of these religions have their origins as protest movements against the prevailing customs and religion.

Also, you have not actually answered the question posed in my post, which is to provide a clear definition of a "Hindu" to use as a basis for this so-called "Hindu nationalism".

Actually I didn't compare Indian Muslims and Pakistanis, but used an umbrella term for the Muslims of undivided India.

Ideology and fundamentalism are irrelevant, fundamentalism itself is a powerful tool which can be used to promote national interest (like Iran).

The lack of good leaders is more to do with history than luck. Islam in India is a copycat culture, the tendency to ape Iranians, Turks, Arabs is not merely Pakistani phenomenon. This distinct lack of identity was widespread right from historical times.

Anyways, I'll stop with the pessimism

I'm expecting a reply on the lines of "Hindus were peaceful and not zealots, like those barbarian Islamics. And this is a Nehruvian/Marxist/Sickular version of history"

Let me answer the question in your last line first :-
Hindus are those, whom the constitution of India wants to be called "Hindus" in modern British or European sense, because the constitution has been written in western fashion, yet it doesn't define who is a Hindu. Moreover a person that considers himself a Hindu is a Hindu even if he follows any religion of the world. While if you ask me I will say that the term “Hindu” used in the constitution is a substitute for the people who follow the Sanatan Dharma, who have faith in and follow the dharmic traditions and texts of Bhagwad Gita, Puranas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Vedas, Upanishads etc. who consider the land of Bharat as a sacred land.

The spiritual relationship of the Hindus with the land of India is the real glue which has kept the people of this country united, and through that spiritual relationship a Hindu identifies himself as a Hindu which is bound with the land of India. No matter how diverse we Hindus are, how different languages we use but the core teachings of Hinduism is basically same in all the sects of Hindus and Hindus know this fact from the heart, which gives us a Hindu identity. And this is why you see a “Unity in diversity” in India which is basically due to the above Hindu identity, and “the sense of this Unity” gives birth to a nationality that we call “Hindu Nationality”. And it has nothing to give or to take from the Constitution of India or Islamic and Christian ideologies.

By saying so you have already agreed with me. The nationalism of the “Modern sense” emerged in the west, when you look at India i.e. Bharat its name itself speaks up of nationality of its people which emerged at the time when western people did not know the meaning of nationalism.

Well ! I do not look at the west to define the nationality in India, you see, the people of Gujarat are living there from hundreds of years still we had Gujarat riots of 2002 and many more in the past, the question of nationality disappears there and religion acts as the sole unifying factor there, there is no united or centralized sense of unity among the rioting people of Gujarat i.e. Hindus and Muslims there. So by merely living there for hundreds of year does not produces nationality, it needs a common interest and love for the land where they have lived for hundreds of years which was there in Italians and the Germans although it was there in a modern sense, but as I have already said Indian boundaries have a dharmic and spiritual bond with the Hindus, so the Italian or German nationality is quite different from Hindu nationality.

Religion and different ethnicities under the same religion are still relevant which has gave birth to the various nationalities around the world, only athiests or religious minorities derive their nationality from the concerned constitutions in a given country!

Yeah! They lack nationality because they do not have common religious or dharmic ties with their land as we do see in Hindus in India.

Yes! India is diverse and heterogeneous yet we have some common interest and dharmic ties with its land, and so we are not like those “tribal countries”, our sense of diversity is different than their.

Off course I do ! But Indian constitution and laws see Sikhs, Jains, and Bushists as Hindus in some provisions and Not Muslims or Christians. And by that definition Sikhs, Jains and Budhists are also Hindus.

They share some common traditions of dharmic origins.I do have a photo of Guru Nanak in my puja room, my mom has a copy of Guru Granth Sahib, she has also taken a name from a Sikh Guru, Sikh Gurudwaras often tell stories of Ram-Sita to Sikh devotees, they sing Bhajans, and in the same manner Hindus visit Gurudwaras as pilgrims, if you have visited Vaishno Devi you can remember that hundreds of Sikhs also go there, and so a sense of Unity is already there in Hindus, Sikhs, Budhists and Jains, even after these religions originated by rejecting some bad practices of Hinduism. And that is why Indian constitution and laws see Sikhs, Jains, and Bushists as Hindus in some provisions. Although in the near future these religions will have separate personal laws and they will cease to be seen aside with Hindus by the point of view of law. Yet they will continue to share the common background and traditions.

There is right wing extremism where virulent statements are given that are not called for.

And that starts the communal game.

At the same time, it is also vice versa.

RSS and VHP and such people were never so prominent as they became after the Babri Mazjid issue.

I wonder if this backlash that we see these days is because of faulty approach to unify the nation as one entity where nation comes first, always and every time.

The historical truths become virulent and communal by modern sense of nationalism. We are seeing the problem in Assam, Kerala and Gujarat only due to this modern sense of nationalism which wilfully closes it's eyes from the misdeeds of non-native people of the land for the sake of political correctness or vote bank politics.

The so called RWE IMO is more of a reactionary movement, due to the policies followed by certain class of politicians.

In this atmosphere of distrust, rhetoric extolling nationalism aligned with religion finds resonance amongst a large section of society.