Can India Survive as a Hindu State?
Abstract
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India, under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been progressively moving India in the direction of a theocratic Hindu state, known in Hindi as a “Hindu Rashtra.” This move to the religious right is extremely popular in India, and Mr. Modi faces no real opposition and faces no hurdles in his path.
However, is such a Hindu Rashtra viable as a single entity? The historical evidence of 2,500 years in India shows us that India has never remained united as a single entity for any significant length of time, despite its Hindu majority. History therefore informs us that Hinduism is an insufficient glue by which to unite the country. Furthermore, an attempt to force-fit a Hindu state on the heterogeneous population of India, in place of the inclusive, pluralistic state envisaged by the founders of India, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, has the potential to accelerate the breakup of what is actually a fragile social experiment that has never before been conducted in the world — a nation with a large population formed of such a large and diverse group of communities.
The Kashi-Vishwanath Complex Inauguration
On December 13, 2021, I watched live on television, along with hundreds of millions of other Indians, the Indian Prime Minister (PM), Mr. Narendra Modi, performing religious ceremonies inaugurating the newly built temple complex around the old Kashi Vishwanath temple in the city of Varanasi, also known as Kashi or Benares, in the state of Uttar Pradesh in north India, one of the most important Hindu temples in India.
Mr. Modi was not present at the function in the role of a distinguished dignitary, a PM, who was watching the ceremonies unfold. He was present in the traditional role of a Hindu king. In the days of yore in India, when India was a patchwork of monarchies, whenever a Hindu temple was inaugurated or renovated in any Hindu kingdom, it was the king who performed the rites of worship to propitiate the Gods in order that the project would be long lived and a success. So it was on this day. Mr. Modi performed the pooja, chanting the religious mantras after the priests.
This is not the first time that Modi has doffed his hat of being an elected Prime Minister representing Indians of all faiths and put on the crown of a Hindu king. He did the same thing in August 2020 when he presided over the laying of the foundation stone of the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, on a site that had been granted to Hindus by the Indian Supreme Court after decades of litigation.
Along with PM Modi on this day at the religious inauguration function of the Kashi temple complex was the Chief Minister (CM) of the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Varanasi is located, Yogi Adityanath. The renovation of the Kashi Vishwanath temple is one of Mr. Modi’s pet projects, and has been carefully shepherded by CM Adityanath, a Hindu monk, who gave the project prime importance in the state’s priorities. Both the CM and the PM gave speeches highlighting the glory of the reigning deity of Kashi, the Lord Shiva. Mr. Modi concluded his speech by chanting thrice the Hindu religious slogan proclaiming the glory of the god Shiva: “Har Har Mahadev!”
The Rightward Tilt Since 2014
Since Mr. Modi swept to power seven years ago, with an absolute majority in Parliament in 2014, which he consolidated with an even more emphatic win in 2019, the lines between the state of India and the Hindu religion have become quite blurred. India has become a de facto Hindu religious state. It is quite possible, even likely, that it could become a Hindu state de jure as well in the near future.
If that were to happen, India will go back on 75 years of its independent history, for it was conceived in the ruins of the partition of British India as a resounding rebuff to the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who was a believer in the “two-nation theory” — the idea that a secular state was not possible in the Indian subcontinent, that one could only have a theocratic Hindu state, India and a theocratic Muslim state, Pakistan. Pakistan did indeed become an Islamic state, but India remained resolutely secular under the guidance of its guiding prophet Gandhi, its first PM Jawaharlal Nehru, its first Home Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, the architect of its Constitution, BR Ambedkar, its first Indian Governor-General, C. Rajagopalachari, its first President, Rajendra Prasad, and many other founding fathers (and mothers).
And so, going back on the secular tradition, not only of the last 75 years, but that espoused by the founders of India, would be a radical step indeed. But it is certainly something the majority Hindus can choose to do, and appear increasingly likely to do. The purpose of this article is not to debate whether such an action would be morally proper or not; rather, it is to analyze what the implications of India’s moves towards a theocratic state, which have been gradually intensifying over the last seven years, are for the future viability of the Indian state.
All-India Empires of The Past
One of the key motives of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party that rules India and the party that Mr. Modi belongs to, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the cultural organization that, too, Mr. Modi belongs to, behind transforming India into a theocratic Hindu state is their belief that the Hindus must have a homeland of their own in which Hinduism and its practices can reign unchallenged by ideas of civil liberties and freedoms. The RSS and the BJP also believe in a mythical concept known as “Akhand Bharat” (“Undivided India”), which is often depicted on a map as the whole of present India, along with the whole of present Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Burma — a fantasy of a state long back when Hinduism alone ruled over this entire land (In some versions of this fantasy, Akhand Bharat also extends to Tibet and East Asia — Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.)
Leaving aside the question of historical accuracy in terms of the borders of this mythical land that is supposed to have been entirely Hindu once, let us examine the merits of this proposal. What would happen if the whole of just present-day India (forget Akhand Bharat for now), were to be a Hindu land? What does history teach us about the viability of such a state?
The fact is that in our entire recorded history, the entire landmass of present-day India has only been ruled once in its entirety by a single ruler, and that is the British Empire. Three other empires in the last 2,500 years have ruled most of the subcontinent: The Maurya Empire, The Gupta Empire, and the Mughal Empire. It is instructive to examine when each of these empires reached their zenith and how long they were able to sustain it. The British Empire in India, also known as the British Raj, will not be discussed here, because it was not an Indian empire. The British never became part of India, and their empire was an entirely colonial exploitative enterprise held together by military force. However, it is worth noting that the British empire in India lasted less than a hundred years after it was fully established in 1858.
The Maurya Empire
The Maurya empire of Ashoka was founded by his grandfather Chandragupta Maurya in 322 BCE; however, the empire reached its peak under the rule of Ashoka, by about 250 BCE, about 70 years after the founding of the empire.
Ashoka died in 232 BCE. Within 50 years of his death, his entire empire collapsed. And therefore, when we think of the Maurya empire, we see that it took about 70 years for it to reach its peak, by when it conquered most of what is today India and its neighbors; and it collapsed in the same time that it took to reach its peak.
Note that the deep south of the country was not part of Ashoka’s empire, although his empire stretched from present-day Afghanistan to present-day Bangladesh.
The Gupta Empire
The founder of the Gupta empire can be considered to be Samudragupta, who ascended the throne sometime between 335 CE and 350 CE, and ruled the empire until his death in 375 CE. The empire proper can therefore be taken to have been established at the time of his death.
Samudragupta was succeeded at his death by his son Chandragupta II, under whom the empire reached its greatest extent, at which point, it was primarily a north and central Indian empire.
Chandragupta II died in 415 CE. By the time of the rule of his grandson, Skandagupta, the empire had become greatly weakened, and by 500 CE, the empire was finished. Thus one sees that the Gupta empire was established by 375 CE, reached its greatest extent by 415 CE (40 years), and collapsed by 500 CE (85 years).
The Mughal Empire
Although the Mughal Empire was formally founded by Babur, the extent of Babur’s conquests was fairly limited, and the true establishment of a large empire occurred under the rule of his grandson Akbar, who ruled from 1565 to 1605. The full establishment of the empire can therefore be dated to the death of Akbar in 1605.
Akbar was succeeded by his son Jahangir, his grandson, Shahjahan, and Shahjahan’s son, Aurangzeb. The greatest extent of the empire was achieved by Aurangzeb. Under his predecessors, the Mughal empire had been a north and central Indian empire. With his conquests of Bijapur in 1686 and Golconda in 1687, Aurangzeb extended the empire to all of India except modern Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Aurangzeb himself died in 1707, but in just over 30 years after that, the Mughal empire was completely destroyed in all but name by the invasion of Nader Shah of Persia in 1739. In effective terms, the Mughal empire took 40 years to build, but lasted just over a hundred years after that, despite the greatest exertions of its rulers.
Moral Of The Story
What does all this tell us? What we can learn from all this is that in the 2,500-year history of the Indian subcontinent, no ruler has managed to rule the whole of the Indian subcontinent, or even the majority of the Indian subcontinent, for more than a century.
Thus, India as a single entity does not have a long or a significant history.
Each of these three empires lasted about a century or less after being established; the British empire in India lasted less than a century after it was established, and modern India has only been in existence for 75 years now. In contrast, Great Britain, Russia and Japan have been in existence as a single entity for centuries; Italy has been a single entity since 1861; and Germany since 1871. India’s unity, in contrast, has never been shown to be durable in its long history.
This has nothing to do with religion, either. The Mauryas were Jain rulers, as was Ashoka, before he converted to Buddhism; the Guptas were Hindus; and the Mughals were Muslim. Yet they all fragmented in a relatively short time. Neither were the empires that displaced these empires necessarily of a different religion. It was common in medieval India for Hindu kings to fight other Hindu kings; Jain kings to fight other Jain kings; Buddhist kings to fight other Buddhist kings; Sikh chiefs to fight other Sikh chiefs; and Muslim kings to fight other Muslim kings.
The BJP and the RSS are trying to tell Hindus that just as the French, Germans, Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, and so many other nations have a unifying thread of identity that binds them together, Indians, too, have a thread binding them together, and that thread is Hinduism. The RSS/BJP fairytale is that if only all Indians accepted that they are Hindu by civilization — that, even if, because of conversions due to India’s long history of being conquered or subjugated by non-Hindu rulers, some are today Muslim or Christian, if these were to only accept that their core civilization is Hindu, and their ancestors were Hindu, then the unity of India would be preserved.
But this assertion is not rooted in truth. For millenia, Hindu kings have been fighting other Hindu kings for supremacy, often in the same geography, where their cultures have much in common. For instance, for centuries, the Tamil-speaking Cholas fought constant battles with their neighbors the Pandyas, even though both of them were Hindu, spoke Tamil, and venerated the same gods — Thanjavur, the historic Chola capital, boasts of the great temple of the god Shiva known as the Brihadeeswara Temple, whereas Madurai, the historic Pandya capital, boasts of the great temple of Parvati, or Meenakshi, the consort of the god Shiva, known as the Madurai Meenakshi Temple.
Such conflicts are the rule rather than the exception in every part of India. Hindu kingdoms have fought other Hindu kingdoms in every part of India, throughout millenia of Indian history. If a common religion, common deities, common diet, and a common language are not enough to ensure unity, what is?
The fact is that what divides Hindus is far greater than what unites them: language, sub-sect (for example, Vaishnavites, or those worshipping Vishnu, versus Shaivaites, or those worshipping Shiva), caste, sub-caste, diet — all these differences, and many more, are far more significant for Hindus than the mere fact that they all belong to the same religion.
As the great Indian philosopher, politician, and statesman, Dr. BR Ambedkar stated in his 1936 essay “The Annihilation of Caste,” “Hindu society as such does not exist. It is just a collection of castes.” Thus, Ambedkar points out that Hindus care only about their caste and members of that caste, and that, even when dealing with members of the same caste, say the Brahmin caste, there are very large differences between Bengali Brahmins and Tamil Brahmins.
This is true even today. One just has to look at the various Indian subgroups in their adopted land of the United States: you have the Bay Area Telugu Association (BATA), the Vokkaligga Parishat of America, Bay Area Tamil Manram, New York Tamil Sangam, South Florida Tamil Sangam, The Odisha Society of the Americas, the Cultural Association of Bengal USA, the East Coast Durga Puja Association, the International Hindi Association, the Gujarati Cultural Association of North America, the All-American Tulu Association, the Yadav Mahasabha USA, the Brahman Samaj of North America, and hundreds more associations to understand how Hindus define themselves more by their narrower sub-identities rather than by their Indianness. In fact, when the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana (both still Telugu-speaking states), the Telugu Association of North America (TANA), too, saw a split, with the Telangana-based members of that association breaking off to form a Telangana American Telugu Association (TATA).
Given these huge differences between Hindus, the BJP/RSS mandate of uniting all the Hindus of India is an extremely ambitious goal. Given how fractious the Hindu polity has been for two and a half thousand years, to imagine that such an endeavor will be met with success is a fantastically unrealistic hope.
It is true that the Japanese, the Chinese, the French, the Germans, the Italians, and many other states are united as nations, whereas India is not. But every one of these nations has always had a fairly uniform culture. For example, the vast majority of the Italians are White, Italian-speaking by birth, and Roman Catholic Christian. The vast majority of Germans are White, Christian, and German-speaking by birth. The overwhelming majority of Chinese (90%) identify themselves as a single ethnic group, the Han Chinese, and a large majority (70%) speak Mandarin Chinese; and the majority of Chinese follow a blend of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.
Hinduism lacks such unifying characteristics. In the absence of such unifying characteristics, it is pertinent to ask: Is a Hindu nation even a practical possibility? Can a nation with Hinduism as the sole glue even exist without irreparably fracturing?
A few years ago, I was at the home of an old friend in Mumbai who is a huge supporter of the Modi government’s discriminatory policies towards Muslims. I asked him why he would support a government that indulged in blatant discrimination towards Muslims, and which did not condemn lynching of innocent Muslims. He replied that his greatest fear is that Muslims are trying to break India apart and that “we do not want a second partition of India” — and that by making India a Hindu land, Modi is trying to prevent such a second partition by “putting Muslims in their place.”
But is the goal of a united India under Hindu majoritarian rule achievable?
Some may argue that the huge support Mr. Modi has been receiving from the Hindus of India proves that Hindus can be united — after all, they are united today. But I would respond that Hindus can only remain so united when confronted by an external adversary that forces them to bury their mutual differences temporarily. This is what we saw during the struggle for Indian independence from the British. But once the British were vanquished, and Indians became independent, the old divisions of caste, sub-caste, language, diet, etc., came to the forefront again and have been dividing Indians ever since.
Today, the Hindus have been made to think that they again have a common adversary: Muslims, and to a lesser extent, Christians. But once the Muslims all over India have been subjugated, crushed underfoot, forced to sell any valuable enterprises they may own, and sent to internment camps, as is currently happening in Assam, the old divisions will come back up. And then, for example, south Indian Hindus will realize, once again, what differences they have with their north Indian counterparts; Bengali Hindus will realize what makes them different from UP Hindus; Marathi Hindus will realize how they view things differently from Gujarati Hindus; and so on.
It is instructive to look at the fates of other multicultural nations in recent history. The dramatic breakup of the former Yugoslavia between Catholic Croatia, Orthodox Serbia, and Muslim Bosnia after nearly 50 years of being held together by force is the prime example. Sudan became an independent nation in 1956, but it was a Muslim-majority nation with a significant Christian minority. After more than 70 years of conflict, South Sudan became an independent nation. Africa is full of conflicts between people of different tribes who live in the same country — the prime example being the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994. And in the UK, both Scotland and Wales have for centuries chafed at the fact that they were forcibly integrated into the United Kingdom. Scotland even held a referendum for independence, and may well hold one again. In the Ukraine, there has always been a schism between the Orthodox eastern part of the country and the Uniate western part of the country, which has led to civil war.
Closer to home, Bangladesh split from Pakistan after 24 years of Pakistani independence, in a dispute that owed itself to language-based discrimination. And Sri Lanka fought a 30 year insurgency because the Tamil minority felt (and still feels) discriminated against by the Sinhalese majority. The conflict nearly caused the split of the island nation, and the split was only prevented by military force — which means the problem has only been postponed, not solved.
Therefore, the history of the contemporary world is not an optimistic one as far as multicultural societies are concerned. The Indian Union, therefore, is a very precarious one.
One prime divisive factor is coming our way in five years’ time, and that is the delimitation of seats in Parliament based on current population statistics. The current distribution of the 543 seats in Parliament is based on the census of 1971 and has not been updated since. It is now scheduled to be updated in 2026. In the last 50 years since the 1971 census, the population of north Indian states, in which the most-commonly spoken language is Hindi, has grown much faster than the population in other parts of the country, specifically in the south of the country and the east. This means that when a delimitation exercise is conducted in 2026, north Indian states will gain many more new seats in Parliament than south Indian states. Essentially, the voice of states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala will be substantially diminished because they did such a good job on population control relative to states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
This can have dramatic effects on the power of north Indian states to enact legislation that is favorable to them but not to south Indian states: for example, compulsory adoption of the Hindi language for official business, or forced vegetarianism (north Indian states such as UP have a higher percentage of the population that is vegetarian than states like Tamil Nadu). Furthermore, what such a delimitation will do is that it will mean that if a politician can win the seats in the well-represented states of north India, they can win the general election, without any consideration of how many seats they win in the South or the East. This will mean marginalization of the concerns of people from the South and the East.
Understanding Gandhi, Nehru and the Other Founders of India
With this understanding, one can now appreciate better why the founding fathers (and mothers) of India decided on the course they did for the newly independent state of India.
One of the common allegations of the RSS has been that Gandhi and Nehru “conspired” to deny India the status of a Hindu nation and instead, in a “betrayal of Hindus,” made India a secular nation.
But Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar, Rajaji, Prasad, Bose, Azad, and others like them were practical people. They had worked with the masses and understood how to mobilize grassroot support for the freedom movement. And in doing so, they had understood the practical difficulties of uniting the Indian people: they knew how divided Hindus, Muslims, and indeed all Indians were.
They understood that a Hindu majoritarian nation would never last, because the differences that separate Indians are far greater than the similarities that unite them. And that is why they attempted to create a tolerant, mutually-respectful nation — one that went above differences in language, culture, diet, religion, and race. But, in hindsight, they may have failed.
That is why the India of 1947 did not have linguistic states. You simply had administrative divisions, such as Bombay Presidency, Madras Presidency, Central Provinces, and so on. But the divisive tendencies of Indians could not be contained. At a time when there were no language-based states, Potti Sriramulu agitated for a separate state for Telugu speaking people, went on a hunger strike in 1952, and died. A shocked Nehru agreed to the formation of India’s first language-based state, Andhra Pradesh. A domino effect followed, with language-based states for every major language in India: Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Orissa, Kerala, Karnataka, Assam, etc., etc. Nothing can be a more powerful demonstration that Hindus cannot remain united.
The history of India since independence has seen one manifestation of division among Hindus after another. At the time of independence, reservation of jobs and university admissions was instituted to ensure that Dalits and members of tribal communities, who had been systematically discriminated against for millenia by Hinduism, received some support so that their communities could advance and progress. Today, every caste grouping wants reservation for itself in educational institutions and jobs, because they do not trust the other communities to be fair to them — and often with reason.
And so, it is an open question whether India as it exists today can continue to be a viable, united entity.
Indians since 1947 have accepted the tacit assumption that a united India is a given, an obvious fact. But the reality is that there is nothing inevitable about a united India.
If anything, the history of India for 2,500 years tells us that a divided, Balkanized India is the norm, not a nation that is united from Kashmir in the north to Kanyakumari in the south, and from Kutch in the west to Kamrup in the east. The great social experiment that is a united India has not been tried anywhere else in the world. We forget this at our own peril.
And that is why a policy of tolerance and mutual respect — respect for each other’s language, religion, caste, subcaste, diet, and the dozens of other factors that divide us — is the best hope for sustaining this wonderful social experiment. Unity in diversity is exceedingly difficult to achieve. And a majoritarian attitude is not the way to ensure unity in probably the most diverse large country on earth.
A country like Turkey may successfully move from being a pluralistic state to an Islamic theocracy, but Turkey has a level of religious and cultural homogeneity that India does not and never will have.
Nevertheless, the BJP government continues, at breakneck speed, to move towards the creation of a Hindu state, with huge support from the majority Hindus of India. They will have their wish, for nobody can stop them now but themselves. There is no real opposition. Even the opposition parties of India, such as the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party, are trying to tell Indians that, they, too, are parties of devout Hindus. But are the Hindus of India ready for the consequences of a Hindu rashtra?
As the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it!”
Instead of just a second partition, the reality that might stare Indians in a few decades might be multiple partitions and a fractured, broken India, not a Vishwaguru (World Leader) Hindu superpower. Will that be preferable to the tolerant, secular, and united India that Nehru sought to create?
If you are a Modi supporter, and if, like me, you do not want to see more partitions of India, this is my question to you: Do you have more faith in Modi’s strategy of majoritarianism — or in 2500 years of Indian history?
Seshadri Kumar has a BTech from IIT Bombay and an MS and a PhD from the University of Utah, US, and writes about social and political issues, science, music, movies, literature, and religion.
