HINDU MAJORITY
India, Nepal
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Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) is not Hinduism. Hindutva is pure politics!
The father of the Hindutva, V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) fashioned his ideology from inside a jail cell between 1911 to 1924. A prisoner of the British, the revolutionary Savarkar had been charged with sedition and originally sentenced to serve 50 years.
Savarkar may have detested the Caliphate Muslims with whom he shared a cell, but his Hindutva ideology surely took inspiration from their fundamentalist Sunni Islam, for it adopts many of its elements, in particular its marriage of religion and politics.
According to Savarkar’s Hindutva ideology, “Hindustan” (greater India) is the fatherland and holy land of the “Hindu race”. As such, all Indians are Hindus! The only reason some members of the “Hindu race” practice religions other than Hinduism, is because they or their ancestors were converted through trickery, inducement, deception, or fraud. Hindutva contends that all members of the “Hindu race” should “return” to Hinduism for the sake of Mother India. Those who refuse are essentially deemed traitors; a threat to social cohesion and national security.
Recommended:
Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?
by V.D.Savarkar, originally published in 1923 (now almost impossible to get, although some e-commentaries are available on-line).
[The author of this page owns a copy published in 2009 by Hindi Sahitya Sadan, New Delhi, India.]
Savarkar proposed Hindutva as an ideology around which revolutionaries could rally the majority Hindus against the enemy: the British colonial occupier!
Today, Hindu nationalist use Hindutva to dragnet the votes of the majority Hindus against all political opposition. Today, in post-colonial, “democratic” India, the enemy is the non-Hindu: Indian Muslims and Christians!
The Hindutva Machine
The Hindu nationalist movement in India is collectively known as the Sangh Parivar.
This movement, which advocates for the establishment of a Hindu state, consists of:
· The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteer Corps), possibly the world’s largest paramilitary organisation, combining Hindu ideology and martial arts. The RSS was founded in Nagpur in 1925 (during the era of the British rule) with the mission of creating a Hindu state.
August 1947: Pakistan and India partition and gain Independence.
[Partition: Muslim majority Pakistan (includes East Pakistan, later known as Bangladesh) spits from Hindu majority India to form a “homeland” for Muslims.]
· The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, World Hindu Council), a “cultural” wing formed in 1964 to advance Hindutva through cultural means: i.e. through “safronised” education, media, as well as conferences and festivals. The VHP also runs a massive Ghar Vaspi (literally: “homecoming”) conversion/reconversion campaign, by which it converts/reconverts – often forcibly – Christians into Hinduism.
· the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Sangh’s political wing, founded in December 1980.
· the Bajrang Dal, the Sangh’s ultra-violent youth militia. The Bajrang Dal was formed in 1984 to mobilise Hindu nationalist youths for the Ayodhya campaign to seize control of the 16th century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, on the spurious grounds that it was allegedly the birthplace of the Hindu deity, Ram. On 6 December 1992, the mosque was demolished by rioting Hindus belonging to the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and other RSS-trained cadres. The police did not intervene, and thousands were killed in the ensuing violence.
The Hindu caste system is cruel, compassionless, deeply racist and horrifically repressive. According to the Hindu worldview, suffering, poverty and hardship are a consequence of bad karma (i.e. a bad rebirth: a punishment for bad deeds in a previous life). Likewise, good health, wealth and privilege are a consequence of good karma (i.e. good rebirth: a reward for good deeds in a previous life).
Consequently, those born into poverty or born with a disability etc, are condemned to a life of supposedly deserved hardship and suffering. Likewise, a person born into power and wealth is deemed to be deserving of all they have; their privilege is simply incontestable.
For the poor and downtrodden, low-castes and untouchables/Dalits, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is truly liberating and dignifying. Not only does Christianity affirm them as loved, but it extends a hand, offers opportunity, and provides hope for the future.
[Note: Rejection of Hinduism’s cruel caste system is also the reason why many Indian and Nepalese Dalits/untouchables are attracted to revolutionary Maoism. The attraction has less to do with ideology and more to do with a yearning for equity.]
For the high castes, however, the Judeo-Christian Biblical worldview – that all people are created equal with an inherent dignity – poses an enormous threat to their inherited power and privilege. This threat – as distinct from any genuine religious concern – is the real reason why India’s Hindu elites want to rid India of Christians and Christianity.
INDIA
A nation of many nations, India is home to more than 2,700 people groups and more than 1,600 languages.
Christians in India are estimated to comprise around 5.8 percent of the population (officially 2.3 percent, according to the 2011 census which automatically counts tribals as Hindus) . . . 5.8 percent of 1.35 billion, equals 80.8 million Christians, virtually all of whom are poor, downtrodden, and consequently powerless.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was founded in India in December 1980.
By 1991 it was India’s main opposition party.
In March 1998, the BJP won the Lok Sabha (federal parliament) elections, campaigning on a platform of Hindu nationalism and with the slogan, “one nation, one people, one culture”.
Between January 1998 and February 1999, police recorded 116 incidents of violent persecution against Christians, more than in all the previous 50 years of independence combined. Only when a Western missionary was murdered did the crisis attract any international attention.
The murdered missionary was Australian Graham Staines who, along with his wife Gladys, had served lepers in Orissa/Odisha for some 34 years. Graham (57) was with his two young sons, Philip (10) and Timothy (6), at a remote bush Bible camp when it was invaded at night by militants led by the Bajrang Dal’s Dara Singh. Raging against the supposed threat of conversions to Christianity, the Hindutva militants trapped Graham, Philip and Timothy in their car, under which they lit a bonfire, and burned them to death.
With Narendra Modi at the helm, the BJP not merely won the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it won an absolute majority (a difficult thing to do in multi-party systems). For the first time in Indian history, India would be ruled by a Hindu nationalist party no longer constrained by alliances. . . all thanks to the “Modi Magic”.
See:
Hindutva!
By Elizabeth Kendal, Religious Liberty Monitoring, July 2014
Hindu nationalists’ weapon of choice is anti-conversion legislation, the very existence of which inflames Hindu sentiment and fuels intolerance, discrimination, and violent persecution.
Anti-conversion laws are in force in eight out of India’s twenty-nine states: Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand.
These laws – often known as freedom of religion laws – generally make it illegal to use “force, allurement, inducement or fraud” to coerce another person into changing their religion.
That might sound fine, but the devil is in the detail – or more accurately, in the interpretation.
While “force” is said to include the “threat of divine displeasure”, “allurement, inducement or fraud” are all undefined, leaving the door open for education, health care, and humanitarian assistance to be viewed as allurement or inducement, while virtually any mainstream Christian teaching – such as “Jesus rose from the dead” – could trigger an accusation of fraud.
Hefty fines and prison terms apply – terms that are doubled if the convert is a minor, a woman, or a member of the less educated classes, such as Dalits.
Furthermore, anti-conversion laws usually also require that both the person wanting to convert and the person doing the converting (i.e. baptism) first seek permission from their Hindu nationalist-dominated state government officials!
Examples:
1) India, Madhya Pradesh: anti-conversion law ramped up.
By Elizabeth Kendal, 2 Feb 2021
2) The Battle for Himachal Pradesh
By Elizabeth Kendal, 2 Oct 2019
See also:
Hindutva, Conversions and Violence
By Elizabeth Kendal, Religious Liberty Monitoring, 4 Nov 2015
As 2018 came to a close and India headed into an election year, it seemed the BJP might struggle to retain a majority in parliament. Unemployment had risen to its highest rate since 1972 (year of earliest comparable data) and the BJP had lost power in the key states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
But if Narendra Modi is anything, he is a brilliant campaigner, and the BJP knows how to win an election.
Not only did Narendra Modi out-campaign the arrogant and lack-lustre Congress Party at every turn but, more critically, the BJP ran a subversive campaign of mass manipulation through social media, unprecedented in its sophistication.
After analysing all available data, the BJP covertly “microtargeted” individuals and groups with custom messages delivered primarily through Facebook and WhatsApp. As former BJP data analyst Shivam Shankar Singh explains, “[the BJP’s] strategy is about creating a customised enemy for every group”, after which it posits the BJP as the solution.
See:
Former BJP data analyst on how the party wins elections and influences people
The Caravan, 29 January 2019
Recommended:
How to Win an Indian Election: What Political Parties Don’t Want You to Know
by Shivam Shankar Singh (Ebury Press, Feb 2019).
By this means, the BJP was able to lure even tribal non-Hindus/animists – who have traditionally allied with Christians – into voting BJP, supposedly the only party that can save tribals and tribal culture from the supposed threat posed by conversions to Christianity.
By this means the BJP not merely won the 2019 elections, it actually increased its majority, winning 304 of the 542 seats, up from 282 seats in 2014.
While it might be a winning formula for the BJP, this strategy of “creating a customised enemy for every group”, has fuelled communalism and shredded the fabric of Indian society.
Along with lawfare, loss of benefits, boycotts and banishments, violent persecution with impunity has become the order of the day for Indian Christians. It is a Christian crisis of monumental proportions.
Additional information source on India:
The Religious Liberty Commission (RLC) of the Evangelical Fellowship of India (EFI)
https://efionline.org/category/rlc-reports/
NEPAL
It is unsurprising that the Hindu nationalism of India has bled into Hindu-majority Nepal, also an emerging democracy.
In September 2015, Nepali lawmakers passed a new constitution which defined Nepal as a “secular” state, while appeasing Hindu nationalists with the inclusion of anti-conversion measures.
Though Article 31 enshrines the right to profess and practise one’s own religion, it also enshrines anti-conversion legislation which renders that right null and void.
Clause 3 of Article 31 reads: “In exercising the right entrusted by this article, any act which may be contrary to public health, public decency or morality or incitement to breach public peace or act to convert another person from one religion to another or any act or behaviour to undermine or jeopardise the religion of each other is not allowed and such act shall be punishable by law.”
As Nepal advocacy officer for Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), Martin Dore, rightly observed, 'That would make it “illegal” to change religion, evangelise, or even explain one’s religion.” Lokmani Dhakal, one of the four Christians in Nepal’s 601-member Constituent Assembly, was left asking, “Without freedom to speak about one’s faith, what is the meaning of religious freedom?”
Then, on 8 August 2017 the Nepali parliament passed a bill criminalising religious conversion and the “hurting of religious sentiment”. Clause 158 of section 9 bans the hurting of religious sentiment and is similar to Pakistan’s blasphemy law. Clause 160 in section 9 severely restricts religious conversion and is similar to Indian’s various anti-conversion laws.
Christians fear the law will foster intolerance and provide anti-Christian forces with a weapon to use against them.
And indeed, it already has!