India is one of the most diverse polities in the world, containing cross-cutting socio-cultural divisions based on religion, caste, language and region. The once-dominant Indian National Congress (INC) party viewed this diversity as a source of pride, championing ‘unity in diversity’. Today’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) champions a different nation-building strategy, downplaying diversity and emphasising a common subcontinental heritage of Hinduism.
The most obvious impacts of this Hindu nationalist approach have been felt by India’s religious minorities, particularly adherents of Islam. But the ideological shift affects all parts of Indian society.
For the BJP, India’s plurality is a source of division and a threat to security, while unity or sangathan is a prerequisite for national revival after centuries of foreign Muslim and European domination. The BJP has two strategies for achieving sangathan—scapegoating religious minorities, particularly Muslims, and overcoming internal divisions among Hindus.
The increasingly precarious situation of India’s large Muslim minority is the most visible consequence of the BJP’s nation-building strategy. While animosity towards Muslims is not new, it has grown significantly over the past 35 years along with the BJP’s expansion.
This expansion began in the 1980s, aided by three actions by Rajiv Gandhi’s INC government. The first was the decision to commission two teleserials based on the Hindu epics, which gave Hindu nationalism a popular vocabulary. The second was the reversal of a supreme court ruling that mandated the payment of spousal maintenance to a Muslim woman, in defiance of Muslim law. The third involved allegations of government influence in a case involving an obscure religious site at Ayodhya, where a mosque built by the first Mughal emperor Babur was claimed by some as the site of a temple commemorating the birth of the Hindu deity Rama.
BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani seized on these issues, calling for the implementation of a uniform civil code and launching a multi-state march to claim the Ayodhya mosque site for a temple complex to the Hindu deity Rama. The campaign culminated in the mosque being torn down by a mob on 6 December 1992 and the contruction of the Ram temple complex from 2020.
The opening of Ram temple in 2024 was celebrated on a grander scale than India’s 2023 moon landing. Telecast worldwide for the Indian diaspora, the ceremonies featured Prime Minister Narendra Modi consecrating the temple and making a personal offering to Rama with scores of celebrities on hand to witness. Those who questioned the propriety of so brazenly trampling on a minority community’s sentiments and heritage were few and the opening capped a decade of scapegoating Muslims—from allegations of cow slaughter to an immigration law that threatened to deport Muslims and the dismantling of India’s only Muslim-majority state.
Inevitably, there is now talk of reviving the controversial ‘uniform civil code’, to replace the practice of laws specific to different religious communities. While the principle is defensible, in practice it is a red flag for conservative Muslims and a rallying cry for Hindu nationalists. Most provocatively, perhaps, the government has announced the implementation of the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which fast-tracks citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian refugees from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh but excludes Muslim refugees.
Muslims, of course, are not India’s only religious minority. Attacks on Christians have increased in frequency in recent years, spreading to churches and their clergy. The main historical grievance against Christians involves proselytising and conversion, which Hindu nationalists view as a threat to Hindu numbers. Similarly, while non-proselytising Sikhs and Parsis experience no animus from Hindu nationalists, certain Buddhist communities who seek converts from low-caste Hindus do.
Among Hindus, division through caste is also a potential threat to the BJP’s vision of sangathan. This can refer to two different categories—the four ranked varnas (Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra) and locally specific jatis, endogamous occupational groups. Politically, the latter are more significant. In the past two centuries, many jatis have combined into large caste clusters, seeking political clout and better educational and economic opportunities. After independence, preferential quotas in legislatures, government jobs and educational institutions for the most deprived jatis—the Scheduled Castes (SCs)—led many relatively disadvantaged communities to seek additional quotas for Other Backward Classes (OBCs).
In the 1980s, parties championing OBCs became an electoral challenge to the BJP and Hindu consolidation was deemed necessary to counter the preponderance of OBCs in most states. The division of OBCs by the BJP was achieved by supporting targeted quotas for Most Backward Classes and creating a new category of ‘economic backwardness’ for poorer members of higher status communities.
At the same time, the BJP’s vision of a resurgent, homogenised and notionally caste-free Hinduism proved ideologically attractive to many members of less advantaged castes. The Ram temple movement and the prime ministership of Modi, himself a member of an OBC, contributed to this.
But in 2023, Bihar, one of the poorest states in the country, held a caste census—the first since 1931 to ask about castes other than SCs. The census was conducted with the express purpose of expanding OBC quotas, an outcome which could threaten the BJP’s OBC strategy if it spreads to other states.
Like OBC quotas, linguistic and regional cleavages are about political opportunity as much as identity. Riots rocked India in the 1950s and 1960s over demands to redraw state lines to match linguistic communities and proposals to replace English with Hindi as the language of administration and education. Hindu nationalists passionately opposed the first and supported the second while members of larger regional language communities felt the reverse—and eventually won.
The BJP continues to pursue linguistic homogenisation. Proposals to make Hindi the national language resurfaced in 2022 to fierce opposition. Modi—himself not a native Hindi speaker—has promoted replacing English with regional Indian languages as a way of increasing opportunities for poorer Indians. This populist rather than nationalist argument, first made by a socialist champion of OBC quotas, brings the language issue full circle.
Hindu nationalism has long been associated with the slogan ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’, which loosely translates to ‘one language, one religion, one nation’. This notion of a homogeneous India contrasts sharply with the INC vision of ‘unity in diversity’.
While the BJP governed at the head of a coalition from 1998 to 2004, it avoided the three controversial planks on which it rose to prominence—Ayodhya, the uniform civil code and Kashmir. Since coming to power with a majority in 2014, the BJP has seized on these historic commitments and more. The long-term consequences of these decisions for national unity are not yet clear.
Arun Swamy is Professor of Political Science at the University of Guam.