Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post. The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans. 

Whose Rama?

The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime.

The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at the feet of a Brahmin woman who then sprinkled her urine on him. That was the punishment given to a Hindu for reciting the Gita! This is the essence of Hindutva, Whose Rama? teaches me.

I will write about Whose Rama? in greater detail when I complete reading it. I wish to draw your attention to the Caravan article now which says that “The myth of a homogenised ‘Hindu identity’ and so-called ‘Hindu unity’ – the political mission of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – it turns out, is not just a hollow narrative, but a brittle political coalition that collapses as soon as it is put to test in the social realm.”

The Caravan goes on to say that “Under Modi’s tenure, upper castes have targeted Shudras for even the slightest challenge to their social dominance.” Non-Hindus such as Muslims and Christians are attacked relentlessly. You would have thought that at least Hindus would be safe in the emergent Hindu Rashtra. No, you’re wrong. Hindutva doesn’t even recognise the low caste Hindus and the so-called Untouchables as human beings.

What happened in Etawah is not an aberration, says The Caravan and goes on to mention similar attacks in other places. “At least 50,000 cases of caste atrocities are annually committed against Dalits and Adivasis,” according to the article. Apart from such assaults, there is a systematic effort to deny citizenship to the Dalits and Adivasis. For example, 1.9 million people were declared foreigners in Assam. Thousands of people are denied voting rights in Bihar now.

Recently, P N Gopikrishnan, noted Malayalam poet and writer, delivered a lecture in Kochi on the rise of fascism in Modi’s India. He spoke about how Savarkar, one of the RSS patriarchs, invented a strategy to strengthen Brahminism by subsuming the lower castes into the system. Having obtained freedom from prison by means of numerous apologies to the British officers, Savarkar condescended to eat with the Dalits in his neighbourhood. He also supported the view that the Dalits should be allowed to enter temples. This was only a strategy to make the Dalits feel they are respected. A strategy just to keep them within the system.

From The Caravan

In reality, Savarkar was playing with the Dalit psyches. If V T Bhattathiripad, a social reformer from Kerala, asked the Brahmins to humanise themselves, Savarkar gave the Dalits a false sense of pride in sharing some of the privileges reserved for Brahmins. This Savarkarian strategy is employed today by the Sangh Parivar, says The Caravan. “The only visible social dimension of the BJP’s Hindu unity,” says the magazine, “has been that, every now and then, its leaders visit Dalit homes to eat off freshly bought plates.”

Gopikrishnan calls the RSS “a terrorist organisation.” The Caravan ends its article with a prognosis: “The contradictory approach of the BJP-RSS in cementing Hindu unity will take them nowhere except irreparably shredding the social union of the nation.”