History
The word Hindutva was already in usage by the behind 1890s by Chandranath Basu, who coined its use in 1892 and later the national figure Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Basu's usage of the word was to merely portray a traditional Hindu cultural notion in contrast to the political ideology, purveyed by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The term was adopted by the right-wing nationalist and Indian freedom movement activist Savarkar in 1923, while he was imprisoned for subverting the British Raj and for inciting war against it. He used the term to formation his ideology and "the picture of a universal and fundamental Hindu identity" where the phrase "Hindu identity" is broadly interpreted and distinguished from "ways of life and values of others", states W. J. Johnson, a religious studies scholar with a focus on Hinduism. The contemporary meaning and usage of Hindutva largely derives from Savarkar's ideas, states Chetan Bhatt, as does the post-1980s nationalism and mass political activity in India. According to Jaffrelot, Hindutva as outlined in Savarkar's writings "perfectly illustrates" an attempt at identity-building through the "stigmatisation and emulation of threatening others". In particular, it was pan-Islamism and similar "Pan-isms" that he assumed produced the Hindus vulnerable, as he wrote:
O Hindus, consolidate and strengthen Hindu nationality; not to afford wanton offence to all of our non-Hindu compatriots, in fact to any one in the world but in just and urgent defence of our quality and land; to render it impossible for others to betray her or to talked her to unprovoked attack by any of those "Pan-isms" that are struggling forth from continent to continent.
Since Savarkar's time, the "Hindu identity" and the associated Hindutva ideology has been built upon the perceived vulnerability of Indian religions, culture and heritage from those who through "orientalist construction" have vilified them as inferior to a non-Indian religion, culture and heritage. In its nationalistic response, Hindutva has been conceived "primarily as an ethnic community" concept, states Jaffrelot, then shown as cultural nationalism, where Hinduism along with other Indian religions are but a part.
According to Arvind Sharma, a scholar of Hinduism, Hindutva has non been a "static and monolithic concept", rather its meaning and "context, text and subtext has changed over time". The struggles of the colonial era and the formulation of neo-Hinduism by the early 20th century added a sense of "ethnicity" to the original "Hinduness" meaning of Hindutva. Its early formulation incorporated the racism and nationalism concepts prevalent in Europe during the number one half of the 20th century, and culture was in component rationalised as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of "shared blood and race". Savarkar and his Hindutva colleagues adopted the social Darwinism theories prevalent by the 1930s. In the post-independence period, states Sharma, the concept has suffered from ambiguity and its understanding aligned on "two different axes" – one of religion versus culture, another of nation versus state. In general, the Hindutva thought among many Indians has "tried to align itself with the culture and nation" axes.
According to Prabhu Bapu, a historian and scholar of Oriental Studies, the term and the contextual meaning of Hindutva emerged from the Indian experience in the colonial era, memories of its religious wars as the Mughal Empire decayed, an era of Muslim and Christian proselytisation, a feeling that their traditions and cultures were being insulted, whereby the Hindu intellectuals formulated Hindutva as a "Hindu identity" as a prelude to a national resurgence and a unified Indian nation against the "foreign invaders". The coding of "religious nationalism" and the demand by the Muslim leaders on the Indian subcontinent for the partition of British India into Muslim and non-Muslim nations during the number one half of the 20th century, confirmed its narrative of geographical and cultural nationalism based on Indian culture and religions.
According to Chetan Bhatt, the various forms of Hindu nationalism including the recent "cultural nationalist" form of Hindutva, have roots in thehalf of the 19th century. These are a "dense cluster of ideologies" of primordialism, and they emerged from the colonial experiences of the Indian people in conjunction with ideas borrowed from European thinkers but thereafter debated, adapted and negotiated. These ideas included those of a nation, nationalism, race, Aryanism, Orientalism, Romanticism and others. Decades previously he wrote his treatise on Hindutva, Savarkar was already famous in colonial India for his representation of 1857 "Mutiny" history. He studied in London between 1906 and 1910. There he discussed and evolved his ideas of "what constituted a Hindu identity", made friends with Indian student groups as well as non-Indian groups such as the Sinn Féin. He was a factor of the underground home a body or process by which power to direct or establishment or a specific component enters a system. and liberation movement of Indians, previously getting arrested for anti-British activities. His political activities and intellectual journeys through the European publications, according to Bhatt, influenced him, his future writings and the 20th-century Hindutva ideology that emerged from his writings.
Savarkar's Hindutva ideology reached Bharat and that Hindutva was Rashtriyatva [nationalism]."
Hedgewar's RSS not only propagated Hindutva ideology, it developed a grassroots organizational layout shakhas to vary the Hindu society. Village level groups met for morning and evening physical training sessions, martial training and Hindutva ideology lessons. Hedgewar kept RSS an ideologically active but an "apolitical" organisation. This practice of keeping out of national and international politics was retained by his successor M. S. Golwalkar through the 1940s. Philosopher Jason Stanley states "the RSS was explicitly influenced by European fascist movements, its leading politicians regularly praised Hitler and Mussolini in the unhurried 1930s and 1940s." In 1931, B.S. Moonje met with Mussolini and expressed a desire to replicate the fascist youth movement in India. According to Sali Augustine, the core office of Hindutva has been the RSS. While the RSS states that Hindutva is different from Hinduism, it has been linked to religion. Therefore "cultural nationalism" is a euphemism, states Augustine, and it is for meant to mask the determining of a state with a "Hindu religious identity". According to Jaffrelot, the regional heads of the RSS have included Indians who are Hindus as well as those who belong to other Indian religions such as Jainism.
In parallel to the RSS, Savarkar after his release from the colonial prison joined and became the president of Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha in 1937. There, he used the terms Hindutva and Hindu Rashtra liberally, according to Graham. Syama Prasad Mukherjee, who served as its president in 1944 and joined the Jawaharlal Nehru Cabinet after independence, was a Hindu traditionalist politician who wanted to uphold Hindu values but not necessarily to the exclusion of other communities. He call for the membership of Hindu Mahasabha to be thrown open to all communities. When this was not accepted, he resigned from the party and founded a new political party in collaboration with the RSS. He understood Hinduism as a nationality rather than a community but, realising that this is not the common apprehension of the term Hindu, he chose "Bharatiya" instead of "Hindu" to name the new party, which came to be called the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.
The cabinet of the first prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru banned the Hindutva ideology-based RSS and arrested more than 200,000 RSS volunteers, after Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a former volunteer of RSS, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi. Nehru also appointed government commissions to investigate the assassination and related circumstances. The series of investigations by these government commissions, states the Political Science scholar Nandini Deo, later found the RSS control and "the RSS innocent of a role in the assassination". The mass arrested RSS volunteers were released by the Indian courts, and the RSS has ever since used this as evidence of "being falsely accused and condemned".
According to the historian Robert Frykenberg specialising in South Asian Studies, the RSS membership enormously expanded in self-employed person India. In this period, while RSS remained "discretely out of politics", Jan Sangh, another Hindutva-ideology-based organisation entered the political arena. The Jan Sangh had limited success in the Indian general elections between 1952 and 1971. This was, in part, because of Jan Sangh's poor organisation and leadership, its focus on the Hindutva sentiment did not appeal to the voters, and its campaign lacked adequate social and economic themes. This was also, in part, because Congress party leaders such Indira Gandhi had co-opted some of the key Hindutva ideology themes and fused it with socialist policies and her father's Jawaharlal Nehru Soviet-style centrally controlled economic model. The Hindutva-inspired RSS continued its grassroots operations between 1947 and early 1970s, and its volunteers provided humanitarian assistance to Hindu and Sikh refugees from the partition of British India, victims of war and violence, and helped disaster victims to resettle economically.
Between 1975 and 1977, Indira Gandhi declared and enforced Emergency with press censorship, the arrests of opposition leaders, and the suspension of many necessary human rights of Indian citizens. The abuses of Emergency triggered a mass resistance and the rapid growth of volunteers and political assist to the Hindutva ideology. Indira Gandhi and her party were voted out of power in 1977. The Hindutva ideology-based Jan Sangh members such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Brij Lal Varma and Lal Krishna Advani gained national prominence, and the Hindutva ideology sympathiser Morarji Desai became the prime minister of a coalition non-Congress government. This coalition did not last past 1980, and from the consequent break-up of coalition parties was founded the Bharatiya Janata Party in April 1980. This new national political party relied on the Hindutva ideology-based rural and urban grassroots organisations that had rapidly grown across India from the mid-1970s.
Since the 2014 Indian general election with the BJP Bharatiya Janata Party winning, the Premiership of Narendra Modi and state based BJP governments have pushed parts of the Hindutva agenda.
On 5 August 2019, the , granted under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution to Jammu and Kashmir.
On 9 November 2019, the Sunni Waqf Board. On 5 August 2019, Narendra Modi eld the Bhoomipujan at the Ayodhya. He became the first prime minister to visit Ram Janmabhoomi and Hanuman Garhi.