How India’s Hindu Nationalists Are Weaponizing History Against Muslims

How India’s Hindu Nationalists Are Weaponizing History Against Muslims

India used to be a secular democracy, but its current leader, Narendra Modi of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), advances a radically different vision. Modi wants India to become a Hindu nation, in which India’s religious minorities (about 20% of the population) are second-class citizens and Muslims especially (about 14% of Indians) are compelled to accept increasing majoritarian violence. Indeed, stories of terrorizing Indian Muslims have become depressingly common in Modi’s India, with human rights groups documenting rising violence with each passing year. International groups, such as Freedom House and V-Dem, consider India only “partly free” and an “electoral autocracy” owing to the sharp decline of human and civil rights.

The BJP has always considered Muslims to be less Indian than Hindus. The political party was formed in 1980 as an offshoot of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an all-male paramilitary organization founded in 1925 and modeled on Italian fascist groups such as Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Both the BJP and RSS view India as a nation for Hindus, by Hindus, and seek to coalesce and mobilize a Hindu identity that historically was porous and varied. 

Early Hindu nationalist leaders endorsed violence against Indian Muslims. For example, in December 1938—mere weeks after Kristallnacht—the Hindu nationalist leader V. D. Savarkar declared that Muslims who oppose Hindu interests “will have to play the part of German-Jews.” The RSS’s second leader, M. S. Golwalkar, proclaimed that Germany’s “purging the country of the semitic Race - the Jews” is “a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” Such genocidal calls remain current today. In 2021, a Hindu nationalist leader urged his followers to be prepared to kill millions of Indian Muslims. Watchdog groups, including Genocide Watch and Early Warning (a project of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), caution that signs of genocide are already manifest in India.

Modi is a lifelong member of the RSS. Before he became India’s Prime Minister in 2014, he was Chief Minister of Gujarat, a state which, during his watch in 2002, saw India’s worst communal riots since partition—leaving at least 1,000 people dead, most of them Muslim. This earned him international rebuke, including a 2005 U.S. travel ban, and notoriety at home as an anti-Muslim strongman. That reputation helped propel Modi and the BJP to victory in India’s 2014 general election. After five years of rising Hindu nationalist violence against Indian Muslims, Modi led the BJP to another election win in 2019. Although many Indians—including many Hindus—oppose the BJP, it currently enjoys unprecedented power to reshape India.