The End of Secular India

On April 19, India will kick off the largest election in history. Over 44 days, more than 500 million people—or 65 percent of the country’s nearly one billion eligible voters—are expected to participate. The exercise will be spectacular, with ballots printed in over a dozen languages and distributed from islands to remote mountain communities. But the result is not really in doubt. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party are expected to return to power for a third term.

The BJP’s margin is likely to be sizable. Modi’s approval ratings are high, and the party leads in every poll. And yet the BJP has gone into overdrive, using any means possible to subdue an already weak opposition. It has, most notably, turned the Enforcement Directorate, a body designed to investigate financial crimes, into a vehicle for prosecuting opposition politicians. Its latest and perhaps highest-profile target is Arvind Kejriwal, the chief minister of Delhi, who rose to public prominence leading an anticorruption movement. He was arrested in March on graft charges and is now running his government from jail.

At first, these measures may seem surprising. To win reelection, the BJP does not need to imprison Kejriwal or any other opponent. Such steps, which have created many controversies, seem gratuitous at best and risky at worst—needless gambles for a party cruising to victory.

But the BJP is not like most parties. Its goal is not just to win elections and pass discrete policies: the party sees political power as a means to a much grander end. The BJP is a Hindu nationalist organization that aims to completely restructure the Indian state as a Hindu nation. It wants to put Hinduism at the center of public life. It wants to make full Indian citizenship contingent on being Hindu. It has even set in motion laws that threaten many of the country’s Muslims with detention and eviction.

To make these bigger changes, the BJP must do more than just win a third term. It has to win big, with majorities large enough to completely steamroll the country’s opposition.

A CENTURY IN THE MAKING

Hindu nationalism may seem like an old ideology. It is not. It began to take shape in the 1920s in the work of the activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. The British government had imprisoned him for over a decade for his opposition to colonial rule. Following several mercy petitions asking for forgiveness, Savarkar was released in 1924 after he pledged undying allegiance to the United Kingdom. For the rest of his life, he never betrayed this oath. Instead of agitating against colonialism, Savarkar stuck to a habit he acquired in prison: writing about Hindus and Muslims in a way that sought to highlight the antipathy between India’s two largest religious communities and make their differences irreconcilable.

Savarkar was an atheist, but that was no obstacle to his mission. He saw Hinduness, or “Hindutva”—as he termed it—as a cultural source of identity. In his book on Hindutva, published in 1923, Savarkar argued that India should belong to this nation of Hindus, who considered the subcontinent both their fatherland and their holy land. Savarkar believed that Muslims and Christians could not belong to this nation. “Hindusthan” may be their fatherland, he wrote, “yet it is not to them a holy land too.”

Savarkar’s ideas quickly caught on. In 1925, a group of high-caste Hindus founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization dedicated to creating the nation Savarkar imagined. The RSS saw India as an exclusively Hindu nation and argued that Christians and Muslims had no place in it. One of the founders of the organization, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, argued that Muslims were “yavana snakes,” borrowing an archaic term for foreigners.

The BJP is not like most parties.

By the early 1930s, the RSS had gathered enough strength to send a delegation to Italy to meet with its leader, Benito Mussolini, and learn the art of cadre building from his fascist organization. Under the leadership of M. S. Golwalkar, Hedgewar’s successor, the group patterned itself on Mussolini’s party, creating a system of educational centers where members lived, studied, and trained, replete with uniforms and drills. Golwalkar also learned from European fascists’ views on minorities. In his writings, he claimed that the final solution in Germany was a model for how India should treat its own minority groups. (Modi has written and spoken of Golwalkar as one of his guiding lights.)

Such exclusionary views ensured that the RSS had little or no participation in India’s freedom struggle, which enjoyed the broad support of both Hindus and Muslims. The group was further marginalized after an RSS member assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. And it was decidedly uninvolved in the debates that led to the writing of the Indian constitution, which was adopted in 1950. As late as 1966, the RSS made clear its criticism of the founding document. The constitution “is just a cumbersome and heterogeneous piecing together of various articles from various Constitutions of Western countries,” Golwalkar wrote. “It has absolutely nothing which can be called our own.”

But gradually, the group began to enter Indian politics. In 1951, it founded the Jan Sangh—a precursor to the BJP—which contested and won seats in Parliament. Its members joined the bureaucracy, universities, and other prominent institutions. Although the RSS never concealed its vision of what India should be, its vast array of sympathizers lived out a variant of what the Polish-American writer Czeslaw Milosz described as ketman: they publicly accepted and even endorsed the country’s prevailing secular norms while concealing their true beliefs.

This strategy allowed the Jan Sangh to work closely with mainstream political groups, including ones that termed themselves socialists and progressives. Soon, the party was sharing power with such outfits at the provincial level. After the 1977 elections, which booted the Indian National Congress from government for the first time since independence, the RSS affiliate briefly shared political power as a junior partner in a diverse alliance. The coalition soon collapsed, and the Jan Sangh evaporated. But in 1980, the RSS set up a new political wing: the BJP. And in 1998, the party placed first in the national elections. An RSS-trained politician, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, became India’s prime minister.

The BJP may be carrying out the largest marginalization in human history.

During Vajpayee’s tenure, the BJP sought to allay any apprehension that it would act according to the stated desires of its parent organization. It worked well within the constitutional mandate, contesting elections without foul play and selecting candidates who did not publicly articulate the RSS’s disdain for the constitution. But in hindsight, it is clear Vajpayee was constrained only by legislative math. The BJP and its ideological partners did not have a majority in Parliament, so they had to work in coalition with more moderate groups.

That changed when the BJP came to power in 2014 with a majority—and under the leadership of Modi. This prime minister was a dyed-in-the-wool Hindu nationalist, one who began volunteering for the RSS as a child. He then became a pracharak, a formal organizer for the group, serving until 1985. The RSS eventually seconded Modi to the BJP, where he quickly rose up the ranks. In 2001, he was elected chief minister of the Indian state of Gujarat. Under his tenure, Hindu mobs carried out a pogrom there, killing at least 800 Muslims. The police, which reported to Modi’s government, largely stood aside.

Modi carried RSS ideology with him into national leadership. Over his ten years in office, the prime minister has successfully relegated Muslims to second-class status in Indian society. He has, for example, passed laws that could strip many Muslims of their citizenship. His party has fielded just one Muslim candidate in the 2024 elections, from a district where Muslims make up over 70 percent of the population, depriving the religious group of representation in government. And BJP-controlled states have enacted bills that make it extremely difficult for Hindus and Muslims to marry, for anyone to convert to Islam, and for Muslims to purchase property in Hindu-dominated areas. Many of the bills’ provisions also affect Christians. Hindus may make up 80 percent of India’s population, but given its size, the number of people affected by the BJP’s discrimination exceeds 200 million. The party may well be carrying out the largest marginalization in human history.

The discrimination has accelerated the longer Modi has stayed in power. Since winning reelection in 2019, his government has advanced many large-scale legal changes that were once considered out of bounds for even hardcore Hindu nationalists. Modi has, for instance, revoked the special status of Kashmir—once India’s only Muslim-majority state. (The government also divided the state in half and relegated the resulting parts to “union territories” run by the federal government.) The government has overseen the construction of a Hindu temple atop the ruins of a medieval mosque that an RSS-affiliated mob vengefully tore down in 1992. Uttarakhand, a state under BJP control, has even implemented a civil code that, while quashing Muslims’ access to laws of their own, still allows Hindus to access specific tax provisions that result in significant savings.

A NEW NATION

Today, the RSS is closer than ever to creating the country of its imagination. But it is not yet sated. As the group approaches its 100th anniversary, it wants to render the de facto Hindu nation it has built into one that is de jure. And if Modi wins a third term, he will do whatever he can to deliver.

Modi’s success will depend on the size of his majority. Today, the BJP and its allies control 346 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. They are just shy of a majority in the upper house, where they control 122 of the 245 seats. These seats are elected by provincial legislatures over a six-year cycle rather than through a direct vote. But the BJP will almost certainly obtain a majority in the upper house by 2025 and is expected to preserve its majority in the lower house. The party will then be able to advance legal changes that have eluded it so far. It may, for example, extend the civil code adopted in Uttarakhand across the country.

The BJP will also build on past provisions. It could, in particular, fully implement the national register of citizens that it announced in 2019. The register, the government claims, will allow it to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. In reality, it is a mechanism through which New Delhi can deport Christians and Muslims. To join the registry, Indians must prove their citizenship by providing certain documents. In a country where good records can be hard to find, many will fail to get the papers they need. In the prevalent Islamophobic climate, it would then be easy to label Muslims as illegal immigrants and threaten to detain and expel them.

To make other fundamental shifts, the BJP will need to alter the constitution. That will be a much harder task. Constitutional amendments must pass each of the two houses by what is called a “special majority,” a vote in which at least two-thirds of the members of each house participate. This means opposition parties can block an amendment if they control at least a third of either chamber. The BJP and its allies must therefore gain an additional 30 seats in the lower house and 42 in the upper house if they want to change India’s foundational text. But if the party can succeed in 2025 and then in subsequent state elections, it will finally be able to scrub the constitution of its secular provisions and language.

Modi’s success will depend on the size of his majority.

These numbers help explain why the BJP has resorted to controversial methods going into these elections. To complete its mission, the RSS must stamp out any serious opposition—to the point where no party can challenge Hindu nationalists in state or federal elections. And to do that, the party has employed even more autocratic and illiberal techniques, including arresting opposition leaders such as Kejriwal.

Although such acts are controversial, there are reasons to think the BJP will not pay an electoral penalty for them. The mass media is effectively controlled by the BJP and its affiliates. It has largely prevented details about the government’s misuse of power from reaching ordinary voters, and when it does allow news to seep through, the information is typically couched in discourse about how the opposition has done and will do far worse things.

The Indian opposition will also struggle to capitalize on any of the BJP’s vulnerabilities. The country’s election process is overseen by a body that is now staffed by ex-bureaucrats selected by the government, and their behavior during other recent elections suggests they will ignore the BJP’s dog whistles about Muslims and punish the opposition for even minor infractions. (In the past, for example, they have disqualified legislators.) Even without such penalties, the opposition will be feeble. Kejriwal is in jail. The de facto leader of the Indian National Congress—Rahul Gandhi—has not been imprisoned (although convicted of defaming Modi, he remains free on appeal), but he is widely considered ineffective. The scion of a political dynasty, Gandhi has worked hard to improve his personal branding, but he has failed to create an organization that can take on the BJP. In an effort to stay above the day-to-day fray of politics, he has placed other politicians in charge of rebuilding the once dominant party. But as long as he remains involved, they cannot wield real authority. The result is an irresolvable dilemma. India’s biggest opposition party is helmed by a leader who does not want to lead, but that can only be led by him.

In the meantime, the BJP marches on. It seems certain to win in the coming election, so the next five years are all but guaranteed to feature further authoritarianism and increasing marginalization of Muslims. But if the party scores big, it may be able to irrevocably restructure the Indian polity. The margins, therefore, matter. The fate of over 1.4 billion people hangs in the balance.