Hindutva

Seemingly benign yet insidious, the Hindutva pop playlist includes songs set to hypnotic beats with lyrics that hint at an Islamic takeover of India, or which claim to tell the truth about India’s freedom struggle. Some of these are filled with conspiracy theories and historical inaccuracies meant to stoke communal tensions. In H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, journalist Kunal Purohit begins by conducting a post mortem of a riot in Jharkhand. A truck with loudspeakers blaring vitriolic songs targeting…

Till the turn of the last century, most scholars of Indian politics did not seriously entertain the idea of Right-wing politics and ideology becoming dominant in India. Yet, that is what happened and the Right-wing takeover of Indian politics looks almost complete. Now, scholars of all shades have taken to analysing the hows and whys of this. Arkotong Longkumer’s The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast can be seen as a part of this scholarly effort to understand the phenomenon. Catholic…

Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Modi are the two most ideological Prime Ministers of modern India. While Nehru made concerted efforts to turn the country towards the Left, Prime Minister Modi has been consistently pushing it towards the Right. In my view, scholarly comparisons between Nehru and Modi are more apt than those between Modi and Indira Gandhi, which have been the staple for many commentators ever since PM Modi took up the reins of power in New Delhi in 2014.India is in the midst of ideological warfare, which is…

Editor's Note: The excerpt below has been taken from the chapter The New Credo of Hindutva, of the book, Savarkar: The true story of the father of Hindutva written by senior Times journalist and historian, Vaibhav Purandare. Savarkar had entered the Cellular Jail a passionate promoter of Hindu–Muslim amity, having, among other things, lavished fulsome praise on the Muslim heroes of 1857 such as Awadh ruler Wajid Ali and Rohilkhand rebel chieftain Khan Bahadur Khan. But he came out of prison driven by a desire to…

As the first prime minister of independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru had a slew of difficult decisions to make. Only a few months in, India had already witnessed several incidents of communal violence, incited by the colonial rulers, including the bloody Partition riots. Therefore, despite being a secularist in the Western mode, Nehru knew that the ideals of Western secularism wouldn't work for India. As debates over secularism in India are once again raging in Parliament, the streets and social media, an essay titled…