Vinay Sahasrabuddhe

Hindus face a challenge—technically, Hinduism is like other beliefs. Practically, it is much more, hence the confusion

LLET ME FIRST CONTEXTUALISE this concept ideationally. ‘Hindutva’ is to ‘Hindu’ what ‘Christianity’ is to ‘Christian’. This is elementary grammar—an abstract noun formed from an adjective/ noun by adding the derivative particles—tva, ity respectively. As such, it connotes ‘the essence/ the principles thereof ’. The particles denote ‘ness’. So what is the problem?

The problem is India—specifically political, and globally civilisational— acquiring and retaining political power by rubbishing Hinduism and thereby dividing the Hindu society into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Hindu(ism). The Hindu is ‘good’—he is submissive even in the face of rampant abuse because his perennial virtue is ‘tolerance’. But when he rejoins or fights back for his values, he is ‘Hindutva’—‘bad’, ‘exclusivist’ Hindu. The Hindu, we accept, they patronisingly say, but Hindutva we reject, efforts at ‘being Hindu’ we reject. This convoluted argument amounts to this—“Allow us to denigrate you and we accept you. However, if you rebut our attack on your basics (values, beliefs, symbols, heroes), we call you ‘fundamentalist’, ‘fascist’ and hence retrograde”. Be good on our terms. The term ‘Hindutva’ was wantonly sought to be delinked from its etymology and its other religion synonyms, interpreted as an antonym of Hindu and propagated as the ‘ideology’ of Hindu civilisation, not as the ‘essence of Hindu civilisation’ but as a deviant construct. In truth, however, Hindutva simply means being a Hindu.

There are Hindus who tend to consider themselves Hindus by accident of birth since to them it hardly matters whether they are Hindus or non-Hindus. They claim the privilege of denigrating Hinduism by asserting that they are, after all, ‘Hindus’—but they are, in fact, just born in Hindu families. Such fashionable secularists have almost abandoned their ‘Hindu-ness’ as their brand of progressivism takes them to the belief that the world would not have been any different to them had they been born in a non-Hindu family. Sadly, in the case of a majority of proud Hindus, the quest to define Hindu, and thereby Hinduness has not gone too far at least at the popular level, maybe because the ordinary Hindu does not see why this question should be asked at all. What it means to be a Hindu

DESPITE THE WANTON EFFORTS TO PAINT IT AS A DEVIANT CONSTRUCT, ‘HINDUTVA’ SIMPLY MEANS BEING A HINDU