The Unawakened India

Abstract

Hindu nationalists see themselves as a beleaguered lot fighting against hostile religious minorities to protect the Hindu majority and strive for a Hindu Rashtra. Their role is of a vanguard because the significant bulk of the Hindu population they claim as their cultural constituency have never voted for Hindu right-wing political parties. Most Hindus have kept away from Hindu nationalism politically. Hindutva blames this on the influence of alien ideologies (secularism, democracy, communism), degenerate foreign ideas (Westernization), political opportunism (non-Hindutva political parties are rejected as opportunists who pander to minority and caste vote banks), and divisive tactics of foreign religionists. According to a Hindutva ideologue, the “Hindu addict of Macaulayism” (Macaulayism is used pejoratively to signify deracinated, Westernized Indians, following on from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s initiative to anglicize education in India in mid-nineteenth century British India) refuses to recognize any danger to Hindu society, pities minorities as downtrodden, assigns to the Hindus “an inescapable moral responsibility to rescue their less privileged brethren from the plight into which the Hindus have pressed them”; and harangues Hindus to set their house in order first (Goel n.d.b.).