Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Independent India
Partition and its aftermath
The political impact of the growth of the RSS in the 1940s was magnified by the
events surrounding the birth of Independent India. The RSS, implicitly basing
itself on the concept of a cultural “majority,” took a very different view of
Hindu–Muslim differences than did the leaders of the Muslim League. But ironi-
cally, both were opposed to the dominant Congress idea of an India for all reli-
gions. The leaders of the Muslim League held that it would be impossible to have
a single nation-state for all religions, and campaigned for the creation of a sepa-
rate “Islamic state” of Pakistan. Hindu nationalists, and in particular, the RSS,
equally disagreed with the concept of a state neutral (or equally tolerant)
towards all religions. But they did not hold the Partition of India to be the solu-
tion. They argued instead that India (by then defined by the borders of the British
Raj, although in Hindutva theory it was a much larger and ideal entity, perhaps
encompassing everything between Iran and Singapore) was already a Hindu
nation and should never be divided. Instead, all Muslims had to agree to partici-
pate in a national life that, in some constitutive way, was Hindu. The renascence
of the nation would not consist only in the transformation of the attitudes and
values of those who already counted themselves as Hindus. It would also require
the recognition by both other native Indian religionists – Buddhists, Jains – and
religionists of the “alien” religions – Muslims, Christians – that they were, in a
cultural sense, Hindus. For this reason, the RSS implacably opposed the Parti-
tion of India. Hindu nationalists could not reconcile themselves to Partition,
when those from Congress who negotiated for Indian Independence – Gandhi,
Nehru, Patel – finally and reluctantly consented to it because they recognized
that the idea of a unified and religiously neutral state was unacceptable to the
Muslim League and its supporters.
With Partition, the political leadership within Congress showed potentially
divergent attitudes to the emerging situation, based on different readings of the
role of Hinduism in the Indian polity. Jawaharlal Nehru and others held the
secular position that (the now partitioned) India should be a country in which
the state was neutral towards all religions and, if anything, supportive of the
minorities so as to compensate for any natural domination that a majority Hindu
population would have in the polity. Vallabhai Patel and others sympathetic to
a Hindu traditionalist position argued in precisely the opposite direction: given
a natural Hindu majority, the structures and processes of the state should reflect
that fact, so that the treatment of minorities, while having to obey all the dic-
tates of legal equality and fairness, had to be derived from a Hindu position. This
division was based on competing interpretations of Gandhi’s own balance
between his Hindu beliefs and his acceptance of the equality of religions. After
Partition, Gandhi refocused his expression of interreligious amity, from
contemporary political hinduism 531