The Birth of Hindu Nationalism

Vajpayee was born in 1924, but Choudhary’s account begins earlier, with the early history of Hindu nationalism. Vajpayee’s father, Krishna Bihari, led a political life founded on three pillars that Vajpayee would later adopt as his own: pride for the “Indian motherland,” the belief that Islamic and British rule of India was humiliating to Hindus, and the need for Hindu unity or Sangathan to root out the causes of such humiliation.

The Vajpayees’ political consciousness was shaped by two pivotal pro-Hindu outfits, the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha. In 1875, the Arya Samaj was established as a Hindu reformist movement seeking to combat the conversion of lower castes by Christian missionaries. Dayanand Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, believed in the spiritual and civilizational superiority of “ancient Hinduism,” of which the caste system was an integral part. Accordingly, colonialism and Christian proselytism were seen by Saraswati and Arya Samajists as a twin threat to “Hindu civilization.”

Hindu Sabhas, or Hindu Associations, on the other hand, were organized by Hindu elites in response to another perceived threat. In 1906, the viceroy of British India, Lord Minto, promised a separate electorate for the Muslim minority, which was granted under the Morley-Minto constitutional reforms of 1909.

In the eyes of the Hindu elite, this was a clear case of favoritism by the British and did not bode well for the future of Hindus. In response, from 1907 onward, Hindu Sabhas began to form throughout India, eventually culminating in the formation of the All India Hindu Sabha, or Hindu Mahasabha, in 1915. The next decade, already rife with sectarian conflicts, witnessed the full ideological codification of Hindu nationalism and supremacism through the idea of Hindutva, formulated by Mahasabha member V. D. Savarkar in his tract “Hindutva/Who is a Hindu?”

If Dayanand Saraswati’s Hindu revivalism relied on the perceived threat of Christians, for Savarkar, Muslims were the true menace. India’s Hindu elite, in particular, begrudged the granting of a separate electorate to Muslims in the 1900s. Twenty years later, they were even more alarmed by a full-blown Muslim mobilization spurred by the Khilafat Movement. Launched in response to the British role in a postwar peace treaty that abolished the Ottoman Caliphate, the Khilafat Movement spilled over into hostilities with Hindus, particularly where the two communities were already gripped by socioeconomic tensions. Multiple riots ensued, among them the Mappila Rebellion of 1921, in which the impoverished Muslim Mappila peasantry attacked their feudal Hindu landlords.

In the aftermath of the Khilafat Movement, lingering anti-colonial sentiments among Hindu nationalists turned to anti-Muslim impulses. The Hindu right would thereafter remain aloof from anti-colonial movements. Case in point, the primary ideologue of Hindutva, Savarkar, was a former anti-British dissenter turned Mahasabha man.

Emerging in the 1920s, the ideological crux of Hindu supremacism, or Hindutva, rests on a manufactured narrative of a millennia-old Hindu-Muslim conflict. In this portrayal, Muslims are cast as historical invaders of India and Hindus as eternal defenders of the motherland. Despite being debunked by historians, that narrative has held a powerful grip on national discourse from Vajpayee’s times onto the present day.

Inspired by Dayananda Saraswati’s reinterpretation of the Vedas — the ancient Sanskrit texts on religious rituals — Savarkar identified India as extending from present-day Afghanistan to Myanmar and Sri Lanka in the south. Hindus, Savarkar wrote, were the autochthonous people of India, the true inhabitants of an undivided Indian land, or Akhand Bharat; all other religious groups were outsiders and invaders. According to Savarkar, Hindus’ claim on India was grounded in the fact that it was their pitribhumi, or Fatherland, as well as punyabhumi — the Holy Land. Consequently, “outsiders” like Muslims and Christians were always a priori suspect since their Holy Lands were Arabia and Palestine respectively. This logic was later extended by Savarkar’s disciple Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar to include communists and anybody who professed “Western ideals,” such as secularism.

Relying on fabricated versions of history, the Hindu supremacism of Arya Samaj promoted extremely skewed accounts of the “Hindu past” in its periodicals and through the writings of affiliated authors. Choudhary is unsparing in his analysis of these revisionist exercises:

It pointed towards a deep-rooted inferiority. Whereas the past ought to be faced squarely, the response of the Hindi elite was the response of a defeated people, for whom lying to themselves was the only recourse. These novels interpreted the history of Hindus over the past 1,000 years as not one of abject surrender to Islamic and British rule but rather one of constant struggle and occasional victory. Pre-nineteenth-century sources have Rajputs sharing their worldview with the Muslim warriors, but now they began to be seen in terms of either treason or heroic resistance.

Anachronistic though they may have been, these works were immensely popular and very effective in fueling sectarianism.

Vajpayee in the RSS

As anti-Islamic sentiment grew in the early twentieth century, so did the idea that everything Islamic needed to be combated by Hindu Sangathan or unity — eventually leading to the establishment of the RSS a year after Vajpayee’s birth. Many early RSS activities are shrouded in secrecy and still poorly understood. The group’s elders withheld the organization’s working principles from new recruits, and RSS participants were forbidden to speak to outsiders about the organization. The RSS did not record its activities in case they were ever investigated.

This precaution, it turned out, was necessary because the RSS’s ambitions were large-scale and long-term: to challenge the future government of India and bring about a Hindu revolution. Choudhary cites a rare insider account from 1940, stating that the organization’s brightest young men should occupy positions in the army, navy, postal service, and other areas of the government so that, when the time came, the capture of the state could be easily achieved.

The foundational and long-term objective of the RSS was to establish a Hindu Rashtra, or Hindu state, eventually leading to the creation of an Akhand Bharat — a Hindu-ruled Indian mega-territory. Meanwhile, the organization’s short-term goals included developing a paramilitary force and spreading the idea of Hindu supremacism through an expanding rank-and-file membership.

The founders of the RSS included Hindu Mahasabha men such as B. S. Moonje, who traveled to Europe in 1931, met with Benito Mussolini, and was impressed by the indoctrination of young boys and girls at the Fascist Academy of Physical Education. Moonje reported his observations to the RSS secretary, K. B. Hedgewar. Like the Italian fascists, all RSS units, or shakhas, included activities for children such as military-like marches, physical training, and defensive drills, as well as imaginary war dramas where Hindus beat up Muslims.

This was the milieu in which Vajpayee grew up, performing war simulations pitting Muslim “villains” against Hindu “heroes.” Those same RSS drills have even been linked to latter-day lynch mobs: in modern India, where everything from a frustrating cricket match to the mere suspicion that someone is consuming beef is a sufficient pretext to kill Muslims, the early militarist history of the RSS is lurking.

Choudhary explores the anti-Muslim indoctrination of the RSS by analyzing a verse written by a young Vajpayee about the Taj Mahal. Built in Agra by the Muslim Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century, the Taj Mahal is an architectural splendor and is considered one of the wonders of the world. Vajpayee laments that the Taj Mahal was built on the “tears of every Hindu,” hinting at the exploitation of Hindu workers by the Mughals. The poem reflects a distinct lack of interest in the complex social history of Agra, in the reality of collaboration between elite Hindus and the Muslim Mughals, or in the coexistence of masses of common Hindus and Muslims. History in Vajpayee’s world served a specific function: to establish that all Hindus belong to an ancient nation that has to be reincarnated, a nation with no place for Muslims.

Vajpayee’s rise to eventual leader of the RSS’s electoral counterpart, the Jan Sangh (precursor to the Bharatiya Janata Party), was the result of his service to advance the cause of Hindu supremacism — a service he continued even as his political profile grew as a member of Parliament. Two early aspects of Vajpayee’s personality, in particular, made him both a celebrated national leader and an effective ideologue for Hindu nationalism: his oratory and his poetry. Both of these crafts were sharpened through his association with the RSS, though they were later rebranded as emblems of his urbanity.

While at university, Vajpayee was an RSS bauddhik karyawaah, or intellectual worker. In that capacity, he gave weekly lectures that helped him improve his public-speaking skills. He also won the student-union elections as an RSS candidate at Victoria College, giving him many opportunities to speechify. College friends noted how much Vajpayee would research and rehearse before making a seemingly effortless, humorous speech.

Vajpayee’s writing career really took off after he graduated from university. He became one of the founding editors of the RSS mouthpiece Rashtradharma, just weeks after India gained independence on August 15, 1947.

The inaugural issue of the RSS mouthpiece featured two articles by its young editor. The first was a poem called “Hindu Tan Mann,” or “Hindu Body and Soul.” The poem repeats the idea of Muslims as invading hordes that violently force their religion on others. Although he never explicitly names Muslims, Vajpayee pits a peaceful, pious Hindu identity against a foreign Other. It’s hard to miss his meaning:

When did I torture someone in the name of my gods Krishna and Ram?

Did I ever massacre in hordes to inflict Hinduism upon the world?

Could anyone claim that I broke a mosque in Kabul?

Such rhetoric is a staple of the Hindu right and has been used in alarming ways over the last ten years. Its purpose is threefold: it doubles down on the historical misrepresentation of Muslims as inherently violent; second, it casts Hindus as a nonviolent, tolerant, and peaceful people; third and most mendacious, it promotes the idea that, because of their nonviolence, Hindus have been subject to oppression, but the time has come to abandon nonviolence and take up arms. Vajpayee was not particularly original in these formulations, but he gave voice to a line of conspiratorial thinking that forms the ideological fulcrum of the Hindutva.

Today, the Hindutva nexus is headed by the RSS and its global equivalent, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Council of Hindus, which has played a role in fomenting sectarian tensions around the world — the most recent example being the riots in Leicester, UK. The network also includes the militant youth wing of the RSS, the Bajrang Dal, mainstream television news media, right-wing social-media creators, and a formidable online troll army operated by the BJP IT Cell, the wing responsible for managing BJP’s digital presence. This nexus has utilized the same Islamophobic trope used by Vajpayee in his poetry to disseminate several conspiracy theories.

Building on the Hindutva theory that Muslims are violent invaders, these conspiracies fixate on a specific idea of “jihad,” the Arabic word for a struggle to achieve a goal. In a post-9/11 world where jihad has been associated with Islamist terror, Hindutva goals have been expedited.

The first and most notorious of these conspiracy theories is that of “love jihad”: Muslim men, according to Hindutva theory, target non-Muslim women, and especially Hindu women, for conversion to Islam through romantic relationships or marriage. Proponents of the theory claim this is a deliberate strategy to increase the Muslim population and challenge the Hindu demographic majority. Although it has been disproven, this conspiracy theory continues to be spread through various media and holds significant sway in the imagination of the average Indian.

This has been followed by a spate of other jihad conspiracy theories: land jihad, corona jihad, street-vendor jihad, and even, incredulously, spit jihad. All of these variations revolve around the same central axis, the idea that Muslims are violent outsiders and are waging a multisided war against peaceful Hindus. Needless to say, these conspiracies have actively incited violence against Muslims in India.

Vajpayee’s second piece, an essay written two weeks after the independence of India, provides more clarity about the origin of these theories. At nearly eight-thousand-words long, the essay titled “Muslim Rajya: Beej, Vikar aur Fal” (Muslim State: Seed, Growth, and Fruit), considers all Muslims as one homogenous entity that carries out Islam’s sole mission: “kill the infidels, spread Islam.”

Indian Independence and the Rise of the Hindu Right

The timing of the essay was particularly ill-considered. The independence of India in 1947 witnessed the partition of India and the creation of the state of Pakistan. Both nations were experiencing terrible religious strife, and as many as two million people are estimated to have died in the riots that followed partition. Given such an environment, Vajpayee’s writings would certainly have catalyzed violence. But Vajpayee and the RSS did not seem particularly concerned about encouraging peace.

In fact, they mocked Mahatma Gandhi, who was fasting at the time to end the interreligious violence. RSS volunteers marched through Delhi chanting, “Let the old one die,” and articles in Panchjanya, a second RSS mouthpiece, argued that Gandhi was actively trying to hurt Hindu interests by pandering to Muslims. Two weeks after he began his fast, on January 30, 1948, a frail and unarmed Gandhi was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a member of the RSS-affiliated Hindu Mahasabha.

Vajpayee quickly coauthored an article asserting that the RSS and the Mahasabha were two separate entities, but his writings had contributed decisively to an atmosphere of hate that led to Gandhi’s assassination. Within the logic of Hindu supremacy, Gandhi’s policies of religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence had catalyzed the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, thus harming the goal of Akhand Bharat or United India. Dismissing and denigrating Gandhi, therefore, was and continues to be an integral aspect of right-wing Hindutva discourse, today evident in the increasingly open valorization of Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse, who is considered a patriot by members of both Mahasabha and the BJP.

Despite a dip in their popularity following Gandhi’s assassination, Vajpayee and his comrades in the Jan Sangh recovered and did well electorally. The Janata Party coalition won the 1977 general elections, bagging 298 out of 542 seats. Ninety of these were won by the Jan Sangh, the RSS affiliate party and one of the coalition’s leading formations. Vajpayee, despite being the Jan Sangh’s star campaigner, was deemed too young at fifty-two to be prime minister and became the minister for external affairs instead.

Jan Sangh’s politics of cow protectionism (always a safe gamble, given Muslims consume beef) and sectarian violence played some role in mobilizing votes. But the Janata Party’s true electoral success relied on a strong opposition movement and a nifty bit of opportunism: the Janata Party brought together ideologically disparate political parties disgruntled with the government to create a coalition that portrayed itself as center-right, effectively camouflaging the extreme right-wing, indeed fascist, principles of the Jan Sangh.

The campaign to camouflage Jan Sangh’s extremism was aided by Vajpayee’s own rising popularity and his carefully groomed image. In 1955, in preparation for the first-ever election, Vajpayee fought as a Jan Sangh candidate; however, in doing so, his image was scrubbed, with some party outlets even claiming he had been an active participant in the anti-colonial Quit India movement.

Launched by Mahatma Gandhi in 1942, the Quit India movement was a pivotal campaign in India’s struggle for independence, marked by Gandhi’s famous “Do or Die” slogan, urging Indians to engage in nationwide civil disobedience to end British colonial rule. Chaudhary reminds that Vajpayee, like most RSS members, was at best agnostic toward the Quit India movement and held fast to Savarkar’s diktat that RSS and Mahasabha men must remain aloof and committed to the goal to “Hinduize politics and militarize Hinduism.”

It was thus an extraordinary bit of mythmaking to rebrand Vajpayee as a proponent of independence. Fast forward to the present: Modi’s political power has drawn on similarly outlandish myths, some of them going so far as to state that Modi is a reincarnation of a Hindu god. Indeed, a few weeks before this year’s general elections, the prime minister himself claimed that he was “not biological” and had been sent by God.

Nor was this the first time the current prime minister emulated the example of Vajpayee. In 1961, shortly before Vajpayee was about to compete in the important general election, the Jan Sangh mounted a grassroots disinformation campaign against India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in a bid to defeat his party, the Indian National Congress (INC). Aiming to rile up Hindu religious sentiments, the campaign claimed that Nehru consumed calves’ tongues for breakfast. Similarly, the disinformation campaign waged by BJP in recent times has tried to establish that Nehru and his family, who are Kashmiri Hindus are, in reality, Muslim.

During his most recent campaign for the 2024 general elections, Prime Minister Modi slammed the INC’s manifesto, claiming it is tainted with the ideals of the Muslim League, the political party founded in 1906 and eventually led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to found the state of Pakistan. Modi also alleged that INC leader and Nehru’s grandson, Rahul Gandhi, and another leader, Lalu Prasad Yadav — both practicing Hindus — were anti-Hindu because they had consumed goat meat during the month of a Hindu religious festival.

Similar to early RSS ideologues who looked abroad for inspiration in Mussolini’s fascist state, Vajpayee and his RSS contemporaries found a kindred spirit in Israel — a trend that continues to the present day. In the 1960s, the RSS-Mahasabha expressed open admiration for Israel, believing India and Israel had a common enemy in Islam.

The present-day Hindu right harbors similar admiration: amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, Hindu leaders in India are cautioning against a Palestinian uprising in Indian streets and villages — a veiled reference to the Islamophobic trope that Indian Muslims pose a threat to Hindu women and Hindu prosperity. Recently, a right-wing Indian scientist also advocated for an “Israel-like solution” in Kashmir, valorizing Israel’s violent settler-colonialism.

Toward the Mainstream

Campaign-trail machinations took a backseat when the Janata Party came to power in 1977. Forced to work within a big-tent coalition government, Vajpayee quickly realized that compromise was the key to gaining more power. He was especially concerned that his own party’s anti-Muslim reputation could jeopardize its electoral future; this explains why Vajpayee announced, in a surprising volte-face, that the Janata Party would support Palestine, going so far as to label Israel an aggressor.

This would be the first of many steps that Vajpayee took to appear moderate, exaggerating superficial differences from his RSS colleagues. Historically, RSS members have been indoctrinated into the project of Hindu supremacism from childhood; one’s right-wing credentials are proven through an unwavering commitment to the ideals of the RSS, which translates as “National Volunteer Service.” On that count alone, Vajpayee always fell short.

The Sangh, largely an upper-caste organization, demands upholding strict codes that guarantee caste purity — a purity that sets them apart from the so-called inferior castes. Vajpayee defied those edicts throughout his life: he ate meat, drank alcohol, and lived out of wedlock with a married woman. Those eccentricities were often trumped up as evidence of Vajpayee’s distance from Hindu nationalism — and yet he remained completely committed to the RSS.

Vajpayee walked this tightrope throughout his life, remaining committed to the hard-line Hindu right agenda and yet appearing outwardly noncommittal. For example, after the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 — a watershed moment in the ascent of the Hindu right — Vajpayee was prompt with his condemnation. And yet he was also one of the sixty-eight conspirators held culpable by a 2009 commission set up to investigate the incident.

In 2002, when Narendra Modi was chief minister of the state of Gujarat, a state-sponsored pogrom killed around 1,200 Muslims. Admirers argue that Vajpayee, by now prime minister, would have called for Modi’s resignation if not for pressure from RSS. But weeks after the massacre, Prime Minister Vajpayee used derogatory speech against Indian citizens, going on record to say that Muslims are incapable of peaceful coexistence with other communities. Ironically, Vajpayee’s efforts to turn India into a nuclear power and his handling of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1999 have further contributed to his image as an enlightened statesman.

Vajpayee’s unorthodox behavior and renowned politeness made it easier to forget that he was a long-term ambassador of Hindu supremacism. Even today, critics of Prime Minister Modi evoke Vajpayee’s personal manner and his tenure as PM as a model from which Modi could draw lessons. Whitewashing Vajpayee’s long-term membership in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the electoral wing of the RSS, Modi critics remember the former PM as a wise and courteous poet-parliamentarian whose moderation stands in contrast to the abrasive and famously Islamophobic Modi.

This is due in no small measure to the contrasting realities between Modi’s and Vajpayee’s India. India, under Modi’s rule, has witnessed an unmatched escalation of authoritarianism. The rise in anti-Muslim hate, which culminates in mob lynching and destruction of property; the dismantling of democratic institutions; the incarceration of students, lawyers, and activists; the crackdown on free speech and protest; the troll army bankrolled by the BJP IT Cell; the openly bigoted Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which offers citizenship to religious minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh but excludes Muslims; the conversion of mainstream television media into a government propaganda tool; and the brazen arrest of opposition leaders in the midst of a general election, are without modern precedent. But Modi’s own extremism should not induce amnesia about Vajpayee’s role in the rise of the Indian far right.

On June 4, 2024, the National Democratic Alliance formed a coalition government, and Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India for a third term. Although Modi lost his parliamentary supermajority and looks politically vulnerable, it is unclear whether the coalition government can put a check on the prime minister’s authoritarian reach.

Case in point, just a few days into Modi’s new term, the lieutenant governor of Delhi authorized the prosecution of renowned Kashmiri academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain and activist and Booker Prize–winning author Arundhati Roy under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967. In light of such developments and the prime minister’s track record, fears abound that Modi’s third term could see India, already considered an electoral autocracy, descend into dictatorship.

Preventing such a descent and preserving India’s democratic, secular ethos will require defeating Modi and the BJP on political grounds. But it also requires an honest reckoning with the history that normalized the BJP’s Hindu supremacism and catalyzed Modi’s authoritarianism. The past, as Chaudhary reminds us, must be faced squarely.