HINDUTVA NATION?
WHAT IS THE IDEA OF INDIA? AMONG SOME INDIANS, EVEN asking the question is provocative. Those closely aligned with the Hindu right grow impatient with others—usually more left-leaning—who talk of the secular values of India’s constitution, refer to human rights and universal values, and are more likely to downplay culture and traditions linked to the Hinduism of the majority population. In turn, the more secular-minded worry that politicians who stir up Hindu identity, and appeal to voters based on culture and tradition, risk opening up, irreversibly, dangerous divisions. The idea of the Indian nation is contested, most broadly between those who define it by referring to traditions of its communities and those who refer instead to articles of the constitution and equal rights of all its individuals.
The fourth and final section in this book touches on the idea of the Indian nation. It considers whether the approach of the past seven decades, to celebrate (mostly) secular India rather than to emphasize the culture and religion of the majority, is giving way to something different. It would be a mistake, for example, to see Narendra Modi’s 2014 election victory only in reference to his talk of vikas and the “ABCD of development.” Economics mattered, but not exclusively. Culture and religion counted, too. A clever electoral strategy meant that Modi’s message was tailored to particular audiences. In some parts of the country, especially the semi-rural, northern, and central areas, he appealed to religion, nationalism, and identity politics. He posed in front of a big poster of Lord Ram, to cheer Hindu nationalist voters in Uttar Pradesh. In Assam he lashed out against Muslim migrants, a couple of days after violence in which Muslims were killed.
He knew his subordinates stirred up rivalries of caste and religion in places where such things would have the most effect. Amit Shah, a close collaborator and rather sinister figure from Gujarat, delivered an immense victory in Uttar Pradesh, where the Bharatiya Janata Party (and an ally) took 73 of 80 parliamentary seats. More than anything, victory there decided the outcome of the overall election. Shah managed in part by exploiting Modi’s identity as a member of the “Other Backward Classes” (OBC) category, urging members of the Jat community to back him. He also made the most of religious tension in the west of the state, around Muzaffarnagar, months after clashes killed sisty-two people there and helped to polarize voters. Shah told Jats to get “revenge” (against Muslims) at the ballot box. The Election Commission said he promoted “hatred and ill will” and banned him from campaigning. Yet Shah succeeded.
Modi’s party did best partly because it proved more professional in running its ground operation, aided immensely by Hindu nationalist volunteers. Somewhat like the Christian evangelicals in America who became increasingly influential in the Republican Party from the 1980s onward, Hindu nationalists who were growing more active on the right of Indian politics were made use of by Modi. Ajeet Upadhyay, a graduate student with a smear of vermillion on his forehead, was typical. He and two friends spent months knocking on doors, for hours every day, registering six thousand voters in his corner of a constituency in Varanasi, in 2014. An organizer for a Hindu nationalist movement, he said two thousand activists in that town trooped out for Modi, to restore pride in “what the nation lost in the last one thousand years, the sons of the nation, the Hindus who originally belonged to this country.”
The growing influence of the Hindu nationalist right can be seen by retracing the story of Narendra Modi’s own life, beginning in Gujarat, in the west of India. A few hours’ drive from Ahmedabad, the state’s main city, is a small town called Vadnagar. It is scruffy, busy, and growing—three words that apply equally to most urban areas in South Asia. A walled, older corner of Vadnagar had been home to Modi’s family. The town had a fifteenth-century temple and was supposedly inhabited continuously for at least the past two thousand years. It got a mention, under an earlier name, in the Mahabharata, India’s great historic saga. It has stone archways, handsome carved wooden balconies, and narrow streets that preserve a medieval air. “See how beautiful it is,” said my guide, Niyati, rather wistfully. “Somehow Modi’s town has escaped from his juggernaut of development.”
Modi’s father had scratched out a living at a tea stall near the railway station: India’s prime minister said, truthfully, he was “not from an elite club, but from a simple family.” The day I visited the station, with its single track and corrugated iron roof, it had a solitary customer—a grey donkey, immobile on the platform—and nearby stood an old school friend of Modi’s. Dasharathbhai Laxman Patel, who called Modi his “brother,” was the town leader of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the national volunteer organization for Hindu nationalists. Formed in 1925 to oppose both British colonial rule and Muslim separatists, it was modeled in part on Italy’s fascists, complete with a paramilitary-style uniform. Members called it the world’s biggest non-governmental organization, with millions of adherents. Opponents likened it to other groups of religious fanatics, set on “cultural purification” and hostility to non-Hindus. Modi had been an avid member for almost all his life.
Patel recalled how he and Modi joined the youth wing of the RSS in the 1960s. Modi, from a relatively poor family, one of six children, enjoyed being away from home. The RSS offered distractions, an identity different from being a tea-seller’s son, and perhaps it gave him the idea of escape to somewhere less parochial. Male youngsters met in the evenings to discuss patriotic subjects and the exploits of nationalist heroes. The mid-1960s were a time of recurrent tension and war. In 1962 China had humiliated India with its invasion in the north. Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister, died soon afterward. Then a border war erupted with Pakistan, in the west, in which India triumphed. Gujarat shares a border with Pakistan, although it is mostly empty desert and estuaries. Modi recalled watching soldiers at a nearby railway station on the way to the front line. The boys’ discussions at gatherings of the RSS were often intense, not about frivolous matters like girls but about “doing something for the nation,” said Patel. They spent evenings “roaming around the town, to do blackouts, looking for infiltrators,” he said. Modi joined the junior National Cadet Corps, said another childhood friend. That involved parades, more history lessons, exercises, plus some rifle shooting. He never considered joining the army.
Life as a youngster in Vadnagar in the 1950s and 1960s was quiet. Patel spoke of street games like kabbadi, a team contact sport in which opponents tag and wrestle each other. “We would play ‘short go,’ a chasing game, ‘kho kho,’ which was more like fighting, and ‘I am Shivaji,’ where boys competed to be the chief,” he said, grinning. At weekends they swam in a nearby lake, where Modi once found a baby crocodile that he brought home and kept for a short time. Modi was known for dressing with care, in clothes made of terracotton, a cheap mix of polyester and cotton. He made gestures at community work. Patel recalled how “we once took brooms to clean the town and the Dalits [formerly known as untouchables], who were supposed to do the work, they sat, watched and mocked us.” Modi later extended that youthful RSS effort into a national campaign to persuade Indians to “clean India.”
The boys made meals together, recalled Patel, gathering curry, seeds, and vegetables before Modi led the cooking. “It was the same with the games, Modi would always be the captain,” said Patel. They performed dramas, including one about villagers worshipping a prince’s sandal in a temple. Modi always played the prince “and we were his underlings,” he said. That fondness for drama and dressing up persisted throughout his career: Modi was intensely aware of how he presented himself, his posture, hand gestures, his tendency to hug others, and his dress sense. Showing off with a purpose was a recurring theme.
Modi’s story at times appeared to be inspired by another renowned Hindu nationalist, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, also from western India. Savarkar was an atheist, brilliant and personally brave, a man who campaigned against colonial rule and caste discrimination and who wanted to create a strong, successful India. But he was also a dangerously flawed, intolerant, divisive, and unsympathetic man. This founding figure of Hindu nationalism was a prolific writer; in the 1920s he invented the political term Hindutva, meaning “Hindu-ness,” a belief that India, or Hindustan, must be run by and for the majority Hindus. (Hindutva paralleled an idea that eventually triumphed among Muslim hard-liners in Pakistan, that only certain types of Sunni Muslims were truly Pakistanis.) Before independence Savarkar fell out with the more appealing, inclusive figures who built independent India to be a secular, multi-religious, and tolerant place.
The likes of Mohandas (the Mahatma) Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar triumphed over Hindu zealots such as Savarkar and other RSS figures. Secular-minded thinkers defined the idea of India as an inclusive country, in which individuals could believe what they wished. They sought change through mostly peaceful methods such as strikes, protests, mass mobilization, and courting arrest. And though many Congress leaders were Hindu, they saw the need to accommodate India’s many non-Hindus. Savarkar, by contrast, favored violence as a way of achieving political ends and grew to despise Gandhi’s pacifism and tolerance toward India’s Muslims. Suspected by the British of involvement in political murders, he famously once tried to escape arrest by diving through a porthole on a ship in harbor. He was jailed on the Andaman Islands (where his cell is now a tourist attraction).
Savarkar later sneered that Gandhi was “mealy-mouthed,” a “crazy lunatic” who “happens to babble… [about] compassion, forgiveness.”1 He attacked Gandhi as a hypocrite, because the pacifist had worked as a stretcher bearer for the British in South Africa, during the Boer War, and later supported the British in World War I. Furious when Gandhi failed to prevent the secession of Pakistan from India at independence in 1947, Savarkar encouraged followers from Bombay who came to Delhi intent on violence. They went on to murder the Mahatma in 1948. Savarkar was arrested and tried as a conspirator in Gandhi’s assassination, though he was found not guilty. A biographer of Savarkar once summed him up as “the first, and most original, prophet of extremism in India.”2
Yet many Hindu nationalists, including Modi, celebrated Savarkar as a national hero. (A few Hindu extremists also celebrated those who were convicted of murdering Gandhi.) Modi paid homage to his portrait in parliament in Delhi, on his birthday, and in speeches called him an independence hero. Modi was perfectly happy to be associated with a strongman of the Hindu right. He inaugurated a website promoting Savarkar, calling him “largely unknown to the masses because of the vicious propaganda against him and misunderstanding around him,” meaning Savarkar’s arrest and trial over Gandhi’s murder. Modi also tweeted about Savarkar’s “tireless efforts towards the regeneration of our motherland.”
Savarkar was an unappealing figure to venerate. Hindutva, even in its softest form, meant asserting an exclusive idea of India, drawing on its especially Hindu heritage and culture—rather like Europeans or Americans might talk of their Christian culture as the only legitimate element of their countries. Often, however, Hindutva was interpreted to mean something much harder—namely, the excluding of non-Hindus as illegitimate or incomplete Indians. Extremists tried to convert others to Hinduism or used violence. Modi repeated phrases that were stock Hindutva complaints, drawn over the decades from the likes of Savarkar. For example, during his maiden speech in India’s parliament, in 2014, he spoke of ending “1,200 years of mental slavery” in India, a crude (and not entirely accurate) reference to the period in which Islamic ideas and Mughal rule, plus European colonial ideas and rule, came to the sub-continent. Modi was not the only leader in Asia to use history to whip up nationalist fervor—Shinzo Abe in Japan and Xi Jinping in China exploited particular versions of the past to bolster themselves. Europe and America, too, saw notably ugly nationalism rise in the 2010s. But Modi’s approach in India, where religious clashes were always possible, looked dangerously divisive.
Savarkar had called Muslims and other non-Hindus alien and separate. He wrote of his delight as a twelve-year-old, in what is now Maharashtra, neighboring Gujarat, at leading a gang of schoolmates to stone his village mosque, smashing windows and tiles, after riots between Hindus and Muslims. He told how “we vandalised the mosque to our heart’s content,”3 before he and his pals wielded knives and sticks to chase off Muslim youngsters who objected. In 1937 he wrote of “two antagonistic nations living side by side in India,”4 and urged Hindus to adopt what he called Muslims’ more warlike behavior. The phrase two nations was significant, for it suggested that Muslims and Hindus were irreconcilable. When Muslim figures used it, they did so to call for a separate homeland. When Savarkar used it, it was not clear if he agreed that Muslims should be ushered out of India. He certainly wanted Hindus to dominate: “I want all Hindus to get themselves re-animated and re-born into a martial race,” he said.5 To help this come about, he had become leader of the Hindu Mahasabha, an extreme-right body, from which the RSS emerged.
Modi also called himself an adherent of Hindutva and said he saw nothing wrong in it. However, as a child he was not obviously a rabble-rouser in the mold of Savarkar. Patel told of occasional playground scraps with Muslim children, but called the confrontations a mere bega, meaning a verbal clash that turns to blows. An Indian sociologist, Ashis Nandy, writing in 2002, was far more damning. He recalled meeting Modi and concluded he was a “fascist,” with an “authoritarian personality,” showing a “puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence.” Nandy also saw within him a “matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits” and described Modi as an individual who saw “cosmic conspiracy against India,” and every Muslim as a potential terrorist.6
In Vadnagar, among Modi’s friends and relatives, there was only evidence of a community relatively at ease with different religions. A street-side Sufi Muslim shrine sat just beyond a beautiful stone gate in the old town wall. Inside the ancient town, a tiny medical clinic had a wall adorned with a poster showing Swami Vivekananda, an even stronger hero for Modi and an early, moderate promoter of Hinduism, depicted as “The Hindoo Monk of India.” Another wall displayed the painting of a Hindu God riding on a tiger. Dr. Sudhir Chandrakandhi Joshi, with a brown striped shirt over his thin frame, said he had studied beside Modi for eight years, calling him driven but not bookish. He said Modi mostly read about Swami Vivekananda and about Ramakrishna Paramhansa, the Swami’s teacher. Modi’s real interests from the age of fourteen, when he won his first class election, were politics and theater. Joshi recalled that Modi won a school prize for performing the story of a nineteenth-century Gujarati, Jogidas Khuman, a Robin Hood–type figure who looted enemy villages. (Khuman was evidently a prudish sort of hero, who once said he doused his eyeballs with chilli powder to “punish my eyes” for looking at a beautiful woman.) As for politics, Joshi said that Modi was “very passionate with the Jan Sangh [another Hindu nationalist group], and then the RSS. There was always this leadership quality.”
The town was home to the usual South Asian collection of barber shacks, paan shops, ice-cream stalls, carts laden with onions, and a few solar-powered street lights, plus a stall jammed with tin sousaphones and other instruments for delightfully noisy wedding parties. Few people showed much warmth for their most famous son, however, perhaps because Modi in adulthood had mostly shunned his family and town. At Modi’s inauguration as prime minister, thousands of guests were invited, but none of his own family. Officials had urged Modi at least to invite his mother, but the prime minister refused. Though he had made occasional, much-publicized visits to his aging mother, he had spent little of his adult life in her company. Residents of the town recalled a cursory trip he took in order to attend his father’s funeral, but mostly the family, including brothers, were kept at arm’s length. One interpretation was that Modi wished to show that no relative would get political favors, or pose as a middleman for tycoons seeking opportunities. Another theory suggested he had deeply absorbed the solitary habits of being an RSS pracharak.
In one narrow street many households shared the name Modi. The family belonged to the Ghanchi caste, who by tradition pressed cooking oil. In the hierarchy of the Hindu caste system, Ghanchis fell into a broader category now known as the OBC (which, as noted earlier, stands for “Other Backward Classes”). These were by tradition not as deprived as many, such as the sub-caste Dalits, but they were less privileged than, for example, Brahmins, the scholar caste. Modi was only the second OBC to become prime minister. A part of his appeal to middle India was his ability to reach out to other “mid-level” caste groups, like the Jats in states such as Uttar Pradesh, and to suggest that he understood their needs.
His mother lived elsewhere in Gujarat, and others had bought their old home—a narrow, renovated, three-story building with a staircase outside. The immediate neighbor, a grey-haired woman in a green sari, offered a glimpse of what Modi’s childhood had been like: her house was unchanged in decades, with walls of faded green paint, a stone floor cool under bare feet, and steel dishes and cups balanced on exposed wooden wall beams. It had the feel of a small stable. A charpoy—a bed with a rope mattress—was the main piece of furniture. The place was spotless, though a fearless brown mouse scampered around our feet. Kamuben Modi’s voice crackled with age—she was eighty-five—and the two largest toes on her left foot were missing. “The house next door, where the family lived, was not in good condition. They had no attic, no proper roof, just a tin roof,” she recalled. Modi was a stubborn and forceful child, she said: “I remember he would never get beaten by other children, he would beat the others.” As for helping with his father’s business: “He did not work, not regularly, on the tea stall. The mother wanted him to help, but he didn’t.”
She spoke of Modi’s arranged wedding as a teenager. “The wife came from the same community, and the parents had given their word when the children were little. A decision can be taken very early, even with the child in the womb,” she explained. “I was at the wedding. He didn’t want to get married. It was against his will. She was from a nearby village, from the extended family. It was a full ceremonial ritual at Brahmanwada, the bride’s home. I went to the village, it was a summer wedding, it took two or three days.” Modi was not defiant during the ceremonies, she said, but soon after, he quit his studies and left his wife in the family home. “His mother used to cry a lot after he went. His wife was here, and he had no contact with her. It was a prestige issue for the family that he had left his wife behind,” said Kamuben. She suggested that Modi never slept with his wife. He supposedly told his parents “you wanted me to get married, that’s your lot, then keep her.” Kamuben concluded that “his ambitions were too big.”
Modi’s private life was discussed only sporadically in the Indian press. Recurrent press speculation concerned Rahul Gandhi’s failure to marry, despite the existence of various girlfriends over the years. But Modi himself was not often the subject of such close personal attention. One discussion centered on his treatment of, and apparent infatuation with, a young woman whose father had won business with Modi’s government in Gujarat. There were allegations, known in the press as “Snoopgate,” that Modi (and Shah) deployed state resources, including spies, to follow the woman, and later even arranged for her to be married off to somebody else. But beyond rumors that he’d had occasional affairs with women in Delhi, it was widely accepted that Modi was a strikingly solitary man who eschewed meat, lectured others on not overeating, shunned alcohol, and kept his sex life as private as possible.
Modi after all had gone to some lengths to hide his marriage. As he rose in the RSS and became a pracharak, he was supposed to devote his life to the cause and not marry. The fact of his marriage did not prevent him from rising but might have left him with a greater sense of being an outsider, already vulnerable in the organization because he was lowish caste, from a poor family and with little education. In public, Modi was a bachelor, but he never divorced or annulled the marriage. As he advanced in his political career, he made a virtue of having no family. Finally, in 2014, when running for national parliament, he was forced to admit he had a wife.
Kamuben did not hesitate when asked about the biggest influence on Modi in childhood: “That was the RSS,” she said. The judgment was repeated elsewhere. A few doors along was another elderly Modi, a frail woman with jet-white hair. Her sari and the walls of her home shared the same pale blue—it was natural to wonder, were she to press herself to them, if she would fade away. She had taught Modi and found him unremarkable, but said that “once Modi joined the RSS, that became his life, he never came back or looked back. He was more interested in religion.” As a youngster he had dreamed of escaping his small town and found that his passion for the RSS offered a way out: the Hindu nationalist movement would propel him to new places.
The easiest way for an outsider, like me, to see the RSS in action was at a shakha, or daily gathering for its members. One steaming morning, in the grounds of a leafy, century-old campus—Banaras Hindu University, in Varanasi—several dozen men stood in a grassy square. The men, in shorts, were enjoying the shade of an enormous mango tree. They saluted the Indian tricolor and listened as a tubby leader in a blue waistcoat finished a lecture and led a rousing song. Indresh Kumar carried off a faintly comical boy-scoutish outfit of sandals, beige shorts, and black cap. So many threads were wrapped around his wrist it looked as if an unraveled cuff dangled there. A national leader of some notoriety, Kumar was quick to lash out at secular softies, and liked to damn Jawaharlal Nehru as a “traitor of the motherland.” Oddly, Kumar had the job of trying to attract new members, even Muslims. He advised non-Hindus to emulate Hindus by shunning beef. He was handicapped in his efforts to reach out by years of press allegations, never substantiated and stoutly denied, that he had played a role in the deadly bombing of a Sufi shrine in Ajmer in 2007.
Kumar said his followers had just marked the birthday of Mother Earth, “the day of the first human being on Earth, the first arrival of a human being, every village is celebrating today.” They promised “social harmony of different religion and caste” and care for the environment. Shakhas brought unity, he said: “RSS daily chants are so we should be healthy and happy, society should be harmonious, above caste, religion, and the world can be without conflicts.” That sounded appealing, though it was harmony on the RSS’s terms, defined by its interpretation of Hindu culture. No women attended shakhas—separate meetings existed for them—and most men here presented remarkably dour expressions.
In the past the RSS claimed only to care for social matters, but everyone knew it also quietly guided the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to promote Hindu nationalism in politics. The pretense was dropped by 2014 and the Hindu nationalist movement became openly involved in election politics, backing Modi and pushing Hindu culture over secular ideas. Its crowds roared for Modi until hoarse; its volunteers brought voters to polling stations. The national leader of the outfit was explicitly partisan. Mohan Bhagwat, a man with a bushy moustache, regularly met Modi and pressed RSS appointments on his government, who turned out to be among its least competent ministers. No government in history had ever been so stacked with current or former RSS figures.
Bhagwat, eager to encourage social division, had all the grace and subtlety of an Indian Donald Trump—far-right Hindus in Delhi even took to demonstrating in favor of the American populist in 2016, apparently fond of his anti-Muslim statements. Bhagwat liked to say that “Hindustan is for Hindus,” excluding the fifth of the population who were Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, or something else. Kumar snorted at my suggestion that this was provocative, saying “our country has many names, Aryavarta, Bharat, and Hindustan for Hindus, India, and Indians. These are names for nationality. Hindu is not a religious terminology.” Asked if minority religions would see it that way, he bristled: “Why are you branding RSS communal? Christians are the most communal,” he said, glowering. He strode away, kicking up dust, his followers huddled importantly about him.
Hindu nationalism had grown more assertive, and the movement helped to shape Modi’s understanding of the world. In turn, Modi in power made Hindu nationalism more acceptable among a rising middle class. A senior government figure once said he worried about “the nutty underbelly” of some of his ministerial colleagues, meaning the RSS-nominated ones. As prime minister Modi, mostly, presented its gentler face: he talked up India’s devotion to yoga and its ancient Vedic civilization, suggesting that it had invented airplanes, plastic surgery, and more. But Modi also enabled the hotheads, tolerating those who spoke out in more extreme ways.
One RSS figure in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Virendra Jaiswal, once explained from a dingy office over a shopping mall that the “sons of the nation, the Hindus who originally belonged to this country,” were reclaiming their birthright thanks to Modi. “At one time India was called Golden Bird, we want to re-achieve that status, as the Teacher of the World,” he said. A boss of the national movement, Ram Madhav, said that Modi could only be understood as a “part of our fraternity, a member ideologically of the family,” the RSS. Another figure, from the broad association of nationalist groups known as the “Sangh Parivar,” regularly lectured me on Hindus as the world’s oldest surviving civilization: “It has not happened by accident, Hinduism is our identity and it is a civilizational term. Hindu nationalism is the same as Indian nationalism.”
Another RSS leader in Uttar Pradesh was Devendra Pratap Singh, a reedy man with a high voice, white hair, and a black shirt. He joined as a six-year-old, in 1944, and said that “if there is any good in my life that is because of my association with the RSS.” He had a smear of sandalwood paste on his forehead and his walls were heavy with portraits of nationalist heroes. He was an old sort of high-caste RSS man who talked up charity work—the group has 150,000 social, medical, and teaching centers—and said “people try to misunderstand the RSS, those who oppose us, but in their heart of hearts they appreciate us.” He said of Modi that “the RSS is in his blood, basically he is an RSS person. It affects every aspect of life, it makes a person more disciplined, more devoted to the country. Any action is for the overall development of India.” He also lauded Modi as an Other Backward Class figure: “Most pracharaks in the beginning were Brahmins from Maharashtra, now it has changed completely,” he said. “Only great people can devote all their time to the nation.”
The RSS marks its centenary in 2025, at which time it might well be even more prominent in mainstream politics despite its paramilitary uniform and its early fascination with Italian fascism and Savarkar. Modi helped to change its image: keeping its Hindu chauvinism, but appealing to young Indians who craved material goods. Previously an RSS leader had to forget his family, shun the limelight, reject luxuries, and celebrate self-denial, celibacy, and restraint. Modi could not always show restraint, however. As noted, he was known for his fondness for expensive clothing, pens, footwear, and glasses, but also for his bragging about his personal might, his macho poses, and his boasts about supposedly having a “fifty-six-inch chest.”
The RSS, with Modi in office, pressed for conversions of non-Hindus, a process called ghar wapsi, or “homecoming,” though Singh said nobody should fret about that: “If someone had gone over to another religion and come back, it is a good thing.” The term Hindu encompassed all people devoted to the motherland, he said, and “99 percent are people of this Indian [Hindu] origin. It is because of certain circumstances they have taken up Islam.” He warned instead about Muslim Lotharios who seduced and converted Hindu women, a process termed love jihad: “It is happening so much. The way Hindu girls are marrying Muslims, everywhere, there is a large trend, from Kerala to Kashmir, a deliberate campaign even in Varanasi, in this neighborhood.” He grumbled that liberal, secular types fussed too much when one of Modi’s junior ministers called non-Hindus “bastards” at an election rally, or when nationalist right-wingers in Mumbai wanted a statue erected for the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi.
The RSS also tested Modi. In public the prime minister did not disavow the worst extremists in his government (he did not even sack the “bastards” minister), giving the RSS something to cheer about, as other Indians and outsiders looked on, dismayed. But Modi also refused in his first years in office to promote the RSS’s core issues, such as its demand to change the special constitutional status for Muslim-majority Kashmir or its wish to be rid of a separate marriage code for Muslims. RSS leaders hoped his delay was tactical, that a red-blooded Modi would turn to such matters once his party fully controlled both houses of parliament.
The most troubling detail about the RSS and similar Hindu nationalist groups was their history of taking part in religious violence. A threat to stable relations between India’s religious groups would be a perennial concern even as India’s economy grew, its people moved into cities, and modernity spread. Memories of Partition, and of the immense bloodletting of 1947, would not disappear. The threat from the RSS lay in fears that religious violence could one day return. It was a duty of political leaders to do everything possible to discourage divisions, rather than exploit them. To get a sense of Modi’s character when put under intense pressure and of some of those around him—notably Amit Shah—it is necessary to understand what unfolded in Gujarat when Modi was in charge.