opposition to Partition to harmony between India and Pakistan and between the
religious communities within India.
The RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha had some affinity with the Hindu tradi-
tionalists within Congress, and on occasion were invited into its fold. But the
Hindu traditionalists were still utterly loyal to Gandhi, whereas his morally
unflinching strategy of reaching out to Muslims after the death of his political
dream of an undivided India profoundly alienated Hindu nationalists. (There
were, however, some Hindu traditionalists who abandoned Congress to join the
Hindu Mahasabha, because they thought the Congress insufficiently resolute in
its opposition to Partition.) Hindu nationalists saw this as the ceding of the goal
of a Hindu India, although there were differences of opinion in the RSS and the
Mahasabha about how to treat the offer of rapprochement from Hindu tradi-
tionalists within Congress. The potential for any development in such a direc-
tion was severely damaged when a Mahasabha (and former RSS) member,
Nathuram Godse, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi for his sympathetic attitude to
Muslims. Nehru saw this against his reading of all forms of Hindu nationalism
as essentially fascistic, and acted strongly by banning the RSS.
In the years after Independence, Hindu nationalism was in a strange state. On
the one hand, it had not only not got its demand for an undivided, Hindu India,
but it had been implicated in the death of Gandhi. On the other, it not only had
affinities with one wing of the utterly dominant Congress Party (and therefore
some scope for future political influence), but it seemed well placed to occupy
that space in the political sphere open for sociocultural conservativism. During
the crisis caused by the issue of the treatment of Hindus in Pakistan (especially
Bengalis in East Pakistan), Hindu nationalists sought to take the high ground
against what they saw as Nehru’s soft and weak strategy. But he acted decisively
against their attempts to manipulate the political issue and build bridges with
Hindu traditionalists within Congress.
The Jana Sangh and the dominance of Nehruvian secularism
There was no real growth in Hindu nationalism over the following two decades.
The single most important reason was extrinsic to the Hindu nationalist organ-
izations: the determination of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, to
fashion a polity and a politics that was not only secular in the formal Indian
sense of state neutrality towards religions, but also “noncommunalist,” that is,
strictly without any appeal to or role for religion-based identity in the public life
of the nation-state. The Indian constitution that came into force in 1950 was
very much a secular document, since many of its framers had views akin to
Nehru in this regard.
The constitutional framework of Indian politics therefore made it difficult for
the Hindu Mahasabha to operate on its basic ideology of a Hindu nation. Any
explicit electoral appeal to putative Hindu values seemed to run counter to the
legal concept of a polity in which religion was not a legitimate source of politi-
532 c. ram-prasad