[ad_1]
In May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi marks 12 years in office. Given the country’s median age of 29, roughly half of all Indians – nearly 750 million people – have never known a different national leader as adults. Although the Bharatiya Janata Party that he represents had previously been in power, Modi’s landmark 2014 victory gave India its very first experience of a Hindu nationalist majority government.
Three decades after it was reduced to a paltry two seats in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections and despite the political setback of 2024, the BJP, today, inarguably stands as the pole around which Indian politics is arrayed.
Once described as a North Indian “Hindi belt” party that would find it hard to grow beyond its upper-caste base, the BJP now draws in votes from every corner of the country and supporters from across castes, communities, and even religions.
The underlying ideology that powers the BJP-Hindutva-and the party’s parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is indisputably the most influential socio-political force in the country – and by dint of India’s sheer scale, one of the most important phenomena in global politics.
How did this happen? What turned the BJP and the RSS into social and political behemoths? How did a movement known for polarising rhetoric and the instrumentalisation of violence catapult to power? And how should we understand Modi’s individual role within the broader story of Hindu nationalism?
India in Transition asked Tariq Thachil, former Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, to put together a reading list of key works for students and scholars to better understand the rise of Hindu nationalism and the BJP.
Thachil’s first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which looked at how elite parties use social services to win mass support through a study of Hindu nationalism, won the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, and the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, from the American Political Science Association.
CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Thachil about the books and papers he chose – from the canonical “insider” study of the RSS’ organisational working, to works that examine the movement’s efforts to broaden support across caste, gender, and geographical boundaries, to a paper that studies Modi’s personal appeal – and asked about his own book as well as non-Indian scholarship that might offer a useful perspective on the success of Hindu nationalism.
The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism, Walter K Anderson & Shridhar D Damle (Westview Press, 1987)
All of the books I’m going to recommend are to help understand the rise of something that we would call Hindu nationalism. Some might call it the Hindu Right, or Hindutva, in terms of the ideology it represents, but all of these are linked to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the current ruling party in India.
That party is the political arm of a family of organisations called the “Sangh Parivar,” linked by this shared ideology of Hindu nationalism or Hinduvta. And the parent organisation within the Sangh Parivar is called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, which sometimes calls itself the largest NGO or civil society organisation in the world.
I don’t think you can understand the rise of the Hindu Right in India without first fundamentally understanding the RSS. It was the foundational organisation out of which the BJP grew and without which the BJP would not have been able to persist and survive in Indian politics long enough to achieve the success it has today. The resilience of the BJP, and its ability to survive in relative political obscurity for many decades was really predicated on having this “strong organisation” behind it, which is much discussed but not always understood.
So, at the beginning of this list, I wanted to recommend a book that really unpacks the workings of the RSS. The great strength of the RSS, that even its critics will accept, is its organisational prowess, the loyalty of its cadres to the cause, and its willingness to do the painstaking work of propagating their ideology person-by-person. Anderson and Damle is the classic text and the first major English language academic book to provide a view of the inner workings of the RSS.
Brotherhood in Saffron unpacked how the RSS worked organisationally and focused on the day-to-day work of building the organisation and how it ran. Understanding the RSS as an organisation and not just an ideological formation is what Anderson and Damle do brilliantly. And that’s why it remains a landmark book to understand the wider Sangh Parivar.
They published a recent follow-up, The RSS: A View to the Inside (Penguin Viking, 2018), but the first is more impactful. There is a tendency with a lot of this scholarship to focus on tall leaders and heads of movements. The contribution of this book was to show that it is the everyday workings of thousands and later tens of thousands of volunteers that is the strength of the RSS.
The book has its critics. Damle, himself, was part of the reason they had access to RSS insider information, since he was an affiliate, and very much someone who is not held at a “full arm’s length” from the movement. That relationship permitted insider knowledge that the book draws on. More critical observers of the movement have rightly criticised the book as overly sympathetic, and even celebratory.
But those valid concerns should not obscure the fact that the best parts of the book delineate the day-to-day workings of the organisation in a way we previously had not seen.
The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Christophe Jaffrelot (Columbia University Press, 1996)
This is a long, dense book, and one that I don’t suggest you try to read start-to-finish in one sitting. But to this day, it remains the most encyclopedic account of the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement, touching on all aspects – electoral, non-electoral, ideological. If you want a reference text to understand this century-old movement, if you want granular details about how the different wings of the movement work with and are sometimes in conflict with each other, this is the benchmark text.
Jaffrelot does a great job of unpacking what Hindu nationalism was centrally concerned with, and examining its different components: What do we mean when we say Hindu nationalism? The answer broadly refers to a linking of certain socio-cultural practices associated with Hinduism and the territorial form of the nation-state. How are those two things braided together by the founding ideologues of Hindu nationalism? And what were they reacting against?
How is this braiding, in many ways, a response as to what they viewed as internal weaknesses within Hinduism, especially compared to “rival” faiths such as Christianity and especially Islam? How did Hindu nationalism draw on, but also depart from other kinds of Hindu “reformist” or “revivalist” movements in India? How is it, though the Hindu Right hearkens back to a past golden age, it actually represents a very modern form of politics at the time?
The book does a great job of unpacking all of those questions, and then giving a sense of the different beats of the movement from its birth to its current prominence. In doing so, this book also, in many ways, set the standard for deep “shoe leather” research on the BJP and Hindu nationalist movement.
There was too much of a tendency in academic circles to have under-researched work on the Hindu nationalist movement – a lot of opining about the movement without a lot of deep engagement, or without fieldwork or interviews with people who are actually from and of the movement. Reading Jaffrelot’s book as a graduate student, I realised the most meaningful insights about this phenomenon, and indeed any political phenomenon, had to come from deep engagement.
Hindutva and Dalits; Perspectives for Understanding Communal Praxis, Edited by Anand Teltumbde (SAGE and Stree-Samya Books, 2005)
One of the key aspects of the rise of Hindu nationalism was its growth in appeal from what was seen as, for many decades, a niche social movement that had a very loyal organisational base, but one whose political support was circumscribed to very particular parts of Indian society – specifically upper-caste Hindus. The BJP was often dubbed a “Brahmin, Bania” party. That really started to shift in the 2000s when other social groups – particularly from non-elite and marginalised Hindu communities – began to voice support for Hindu nationalism.
Electorally, the BJP could not be the dominant force it is today without having spread its appeal outside of upper-caste Hindus, who are a small fraction of India’s population. Those in the movement and the party knew they had to overcome this pigeon-holing. But for a long time, external observers thought the BJP could never have mass appeal.
Teltumbde’s book, an edited volume with work by many scholars, does a great job of raising the question of how the movement expanded. Much of the book was prompted by the participation of some Dalit individuals in Hindutva mobilisations, especially the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat.
Coming out of that, there was a reckoning that had to happen with explaining the unanticipated popularity of Hindutva among members of the Dalit community. I thought it was important to read about this reckoning from Indian writers who had been thinking about this issue for a while. This book tries to grapple with the role of violence and particularly violence against Muslims in uniting privileged and marginalised castes, thinking about what kind of inclusion this common “Hindu identity” could provide to Dalits who have been experiencing generations of subjugation.
In some ways, I don’t think the book fully answers the questions it raises, but I also don’t think it could have. Even today, we’re still in a process of understanding this particular phenomenon, and there’s no one single explanation for how a movement like Hindu nationalism and the BJP can maintain such broad social dominance across groups that have previously been deeply divided and in conflict.
Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, Kalyani Devaki Menon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)
So far, these books have been very big-picture, 30,000-feet views of what’s happening. This, however, is an ethnographic work that is much more modern and very readable. The author does a detailed ethnography with Hindu nationalist organisations in Delhi and is specifically interested in how women have found a role within a movement that is often very socially conservative.
It’s important to have a book that begins to explain the relationship that women have with the Hindu Right in India. Especially now – fast forward 15 years – with the BJP enjoying advantages with women voters and really centering its electoral campaigns, both national and state-level, on an appeal to target female voters, as well as crafting welfare programs that specifically target female beneficiaries (eg. the whole discussion of labhartis).
Anirvan Chaudhary is a young scholar who is writing a great book looking at the role of women within seva organisations today. But in 2010, Menon was already thinking about this puzzle. It’s not intuitively obvious why women might be attracted to a masculinist, sometimes aggressive, often violent movement. There might be a sense that women would not be full participants in that kind of politics. This book helps us erode that reductive assumption.
One of the things I really like about Menon’s book – and several others on this list – is that none of them reach for what I see as lazy arguments about “false consciousness”. It’s not that women are being forced or coerced into participation. There are complex reasons why they find participation in the movement appealing or affirming, and she’s trying to help make sense of that.
The next two books are also ethnographies. I focus on qualitative work for two reasons. One is that in my field, quantitative scholars are less likely to write books, and this is a reading list of books. But the second is deeper.
There are many topics on which quantitative work in political science has offered a lot of insight in the case of India. I don’t think the rise of the BJP is one of them. This is a topic I’ve written about too, so I’m not exempting myself from this critique. I can’t definitively explain this observation, except to say a movement that’s as complex and multidimensional as Hindu nationalism does require sustained engagement to make sense of. And, for various reasons, qualitatively oriented scholars have been more likely to focus on this movement and party for large chunks of their careers, and hence provide us the richest insights about its workings.
Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State, Ward Berenschot (Columbia University Press, 2011)
I picked this for two reasons. One, it would be remiss to have a reading list on the rise of Hindu nationalism without at least one text that fundamentally foregrounds violence, because violence has been an integral strategy for the expansion of the movement. I, myself, have written about how movements like the Rath Yatras of the 1980s and 1990s or the massive amount of violence following the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 were harnessed to consolidate upper-caste support for the BJP at a critical time, when it was trying to move from obscurity to relevance.
Violence had a role to play in the gradual expansion of the party’s workings, and Berenschot documents this process at the very local level in Gujarat, the state where the BJP has enjoyed the most consistent support over a long period of time.
In particular, he looks at how the ability to produce violence or “riots” is deeply intertwined with everyday politics. He looks at what political scientists called “patronage politics,” where you have to go to politicians as a voter and ask them for help, which they will provide in return for support. This sort of discretionary exchange is what makes politics work.
What the book shows is that, to dispense patronage right, you need local eyes and ears in different neighborhoods. And these networks can also be used for both instigating and perpetuating riots. It shows how both forms of politics, everyday material politics and violent riots, depend on everyday organisations and are very carefully orchestrated. He shows the linking of those two forms of politics nicely.
There is a tendency sometimes to separate these. The idea being that we should disavow the violence but see the everyday material exchange of the BJP as a “normal party,” politics as usual, just like any other. Berenschot shows that reality is more complicated. The structures that allow for normal everyday politics are able to be quickly weaponised for violence, which is what makes it a really interesting and rich book.
In India, violence per se has not been the exclusive purview of any particular ideology (think of examples under leftist rule in West Bengal, Congress rule in 1984, and the banal, devastating violence of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar under regional party rule). That said, Berenschot helps explain why the unique scale, motivation, and political success of violence by Hindutva actors draws on their unsurpassed ability to organisationally link the production of violence with the bread-and-butter of everyday politics.
The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast, Arkotong Longkumer (Stanford University Press, 2021)
A lot of the attention given to the rise of the Hindu Right has been focused on North India, the belt extending from Gujarat in the West to Chhattisgarh in the East, running through states like Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, where the BJP has routinely done the best. But we talked about the BJP’s growing caste appeal; another aspect of its rise has been the ability to break into new regional parts of India. It’s no longer confined to the “Hindi Belt.” It routinely does well in some states in the South, like Karnataka.
But perhaps its strongest success has been in eastern India, where it has entrenched itself as one of the top two political formations in states like Bihar, West Bengal, and in India’s “Northeast”. Understanding this regional expansion is something that we still lack good work on. Longkumer is one of the first to really provide an inside look into the workings of the Sangh Parivar in Northeast India.
The task the Hindu Right faced there was, how do you expand into areas often dominated by indigenous communities that have long had a fractious relationship with “mainland” India, where the movement originated? How did Hindutva and Hindu nationalism get translated, both ideologically and organisationally, to get some purchase in parts of India that look very different, ethnically, linguistically, and politically where Hindu nationalism previously survived? I think he does a great job beginning to answer that question.
There can be individual reasons why the BJP wins a particular election in a particular state in a particular year. A lot of the readers will follow the news coverage of that. But if you’re taking the time to read books, it should be to shed light on things that you’re not picking up in day-to-day commentary. I’ve often said that a lot of the political success of not just the BJP, but even the Sangh Parivar does not require a full ideological conversion and espousement of all the central tenets of Hindu nationalism. My own work has suggested that one does not require the other.
What all these books have in common is that the major transformations that we’ve seen allowing a sustained period of dominance is not the product of a given election result or narrow strategic decisions. They cannot be understood without seeing the long-term dedication to not just ideological work but organisation building, using an array of strategies, an effort to embed within many parts of Indian society – women, Dalits, indigenous, Adivasi communities or even within the day-to-day workings of city material politics. This is the key to understanding the broader rise of both the Sangh Parivar and the BJP.
The Politics of Vishwas: Political Mobilization in the 2019 National Election, Neelanjan Sircar (Contemporary South Asia, May 2020)
This is a great paper. One of my bugbears with academic research – and we’ve talked about this before – is that I don’t think we have great work in political science explaining the specific impact of Modi. It’s obvious to anyone studying the BJP how important he has been to this zenith of the party’s success, and for the movement. But for various reasons, I don’t think political science has been well placed to explain that. In general, explaining the individual impact of a leader is not something that, structurally, the discipline is well suited to explain. That’s more the purview of political biographies or work narrowly focused on an individual.
But what Sircar does in this piece is understand not just Modi the individual, but the form of politics that he represents. We don’t really have a good book-length academic analysis of that yet within my discipline. But what Sircar talks about in this piece is persuasive. He argues that the biggest shift under the BJP and Modi has been the centralisation of political power.
There is a lot of talk of centralisation of power that the BJP has done within the Indian political system, but from the perspective of the Hindu nationalist movement, the big shift has actually been the centralisation of power within the movement, which previously prided itself on a multi-headed approach. There was a leadership of the BJP, of the RSS, and of different organisations within the Sangh Parivar. That is still true. But there is no denying that there is one leader who is the most powerful of all. And that centralising impulse and its consequences for the politics of the BJP is what Sircar is looking at.
For all that we have focused on organisational strength and the movement embedding in Indian society, Sircar documents how the BJP under Modi is increasingly relying on the trust in a strong leader and the belief in that leader’s ability to do right by his supporters, irrespective of the actual performance record. He distinguishes from a politics of vikas, or development – the meat-and-potatoes politics that we think drives a lot of support – and the “politics of vishwas,” of trust in a leader like Modi. It’s not really about tallying performance, but the underlying trust in an individual, communicated by a strong party organisation. The same organisation that once served so many roles in the past is now geared to communicating the achievements of one leader in order to maintain trust and belief, and this paper gives the best account of that.
Rohan: Two follow-ups. Tell us about your own book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
That book was an attempt to understand what was happening with the BJP. It came out a few months after the 2014 election, which was the first in which the BJP under Modi came to power, and they have remained in power since. My interest was to see how the BJP consolidated support across the central belt of India from Gujarat to Chhattisgarh. I basically argued that it did so by being able to create this unlikely social coalition between its core base, upper-caste Hindus, and disadvantaged and marginalised castes, specifically Dalits and Adivasis.
The question was “how did they do that?” and the simple answer in the book was that they did it through a division of labor. The BJP at the time remained very much oriented to the interests of its upper-caste core. The policies that the upper castes favored at the time was where the party oriented itself, whether on questions of economic liberalisation or caste quotas. And it outsourced the recruitment of Dalits and Adivasi voters to its social movement partners.
This is why it’s so important to think of the BJP’s rise as embedded within the Hindu nationalist movement, and specifically organisations that style themselves as seva organisation. Seva Bharti, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram – which works for tribal communities specifically – and others. The book detailed that process and how it worked. Part of it was trying to show that, while there’s no question that the current dominance of the BJP owes a lot to the personal popularity of Narendra Modi, a lot of the groundwork to make the BJP even come up to the position to where it could be on the precipice of dominance was long in the making, well before 2014.
Any non-Indian books that come to mind, which might give us insight from another perspective?
There are two types of books I’ve thought about. One has been looking at other political parties that grew out of, for lack of a better term, faith-based political movements.
One political formation that there actually are surprising amounts of parallels with is the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
Two books on this: Mobilizing Islam: Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham and Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt by Tarek Masoud.
Obviously, the fortunes of these two have diverged significantly. But at the time these books were written, there were striking parallels. Both were movements and political parties that primarily won support initially from the urban middle classes and not the poor, both had strong organisations that helped them weather rough political times, and both looked to deploy a range of strategies (from service provisioning to violence) to win support from different sections of society.
The second was in thinking about the expansion of the BJP’s support, a lot of which was unanticipated by scholars in India, because there was a sense that the party in its policy postures catered more to privileged caste voters. Why would less privileged voters vote for it?
There are a lot of analogues in the US to that question. There is a famous book by Thomas Frank called What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, which tried to understand why working-class white voters flock to the Republican party. That’s a question that is being asked even more under Trump.
More recently, there was a book called The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker by Katherine J Cramer, which tried to understand the basis of rural, working-class support for an elite-oriented Republican party.
There are many differences programmatically between this phenomenon and the BJP in India. Under Modi, we’ve seen a massive expansion of certain forms of direct benefits and certain forms of household welfare that are very different from what’s happening with the Republican Party. So, this is not to narrowly say these are identical, but it’s useful to compare and contrast alongside.
Tariq Thachil is Professor of Political Science and the Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. He was CASI’s Director from 2020-’25.
Rohan Venkat is CASI’s Managing Editor for India in Transition.
This article was first published on India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.
[ad_2]
Source link