MET ONE NATIONALIST...:

The most important ideologue of Hindu nationalism, Vinayak Savarkar (1883-1966), was a beef-eating Brahmin atheist who was educated in England and later jailed by the colonial authorities for his role in the assassination of a senior British official in London. Savarkar believed that India had succumbed to foreign invaders--first Muslims, then the British--for one main reason: a lack of unity in the majority Hindu community, divided into roughly 3,000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes, and speaking a Babel of dozens of languages and thousands of dialects, many of them mutually unintelligible.

Savarkar viewed India as an essentially Hindu nation, and Muslims and Christians as members of a kind of fifth column. They could not be fully trusted because their holy lands--Mecca, Rome, and Jerusalem--lay outside the Indian subcontinent. This contrasted sharply with mainstream Indian nationalism, spearheaded by Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) and the Indian National Congress, which strove to unite Indians of all faiths against colonial rule. "Those who are conscious of the spirit of nationality do not interfere with one another's religion," wrote Gandhi in Hind Swaraj in 1909. "If the Hindus believe that India should be peopled only by Hindus, they are living in dream-land."

The 1920s, when Savarkar propounded his thesis, were a period of political turmoil. World War One and the devastating Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 had eroded British prestige and boosted Indian nationalism. The emergence of Gandhi on the political scene injected mass-mobilization into the independence movement. At the same time, the frequent eruption of Hindu-Muslim riots widened the appeal of religious nationalism in both communities. In several instances, most famously the Moplah rebellion in today's Kerala in 1921-22, Hindus bore the brunt of the violence. As Sitapati puts it, Hindu nationalism was birthed "in part by the fear of effete Hindus being beaten up by tough Muslims on the street."

In 1925, influenced by Savarkar's writings, K. B. Hedgewar, a fellow Maharashtrian Brahmin, founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or "National Volunteer Corps," the mothership of Hindu nationalism. Its aim: to unify India's disparate Hindus. Three years later, the RSS swore in its first 99 volunteers before an effigy of the monkey God Hanuman. It modeled its basic organizational unit, the shakha, on a traditional Hindu gymnasium used to train wrestlers. A shakha typically consists of 50-100 males instructed in self-defense and indoctrinated with the group's distinctive worldview. By the late 1930s, the RSS counted about 60,000 volunteers.

Like two other vast organizations formed in the 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party and the Muslim Brotherhood, the RSS continues to exert influence to this day. Though its record-keeping is sketchy, it claims to be the world's largest NGO with 5 million volunteers. (Independent scholars estimate that number as closer to 2 million.) About 6000 of these are pracharaks, or preceptors, typically unmarried men steeped in RSS ideology who dedicate their lives to the organization. Over the years, the RSS has also stood up dozens of affiliated organizations, including India's largest labor union (Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh), largest student union (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), and the World Hindu Council (Vishwa Hindu Parishad), an attempt to unite ecclesiastical authority under a loose "Hindu Vatican." Together these organizations are known as the Sangh Parivar, or Sangh family.

The BJP, the most prominent RSS offshoot, was born in 1980. But the Sangh Parivar's direct involvement in electoral politics dates to newly-independent India. In 1951, it helped found the BJP's predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.

The RSS and the BJP share a worldview rooted in a Savarkarite reading of Indian history as "plagued by a lack of unity that rendered it vulnerable to invasions." They focus especially on a pivotal battle in 1761 outside Delhi in which the Hindu Marathas, who had risen in the mid-seventeenth century to challenge the Muslim Mughal Empire, lost to an Afghan marauder. The defeat weakened Maratha power and eased the way for the British conquest of India.

Western commentators sometimes label the RSS as conservative. But in a caste-bound land, its founding marked a radical break from the past. From the start, it viewed its role as unifying Hindus across caste lines against what it saw as the threat of better-organized Muslims prone to violence. The RSS espouses what Sitapati calls "defensive violence." In the organization's view of itself, it retaliates against violence, but does not initiate it. Many scholars dispute this characterization.

In politics, Hindu nationalists have long focused on three core concerns: the importance of maintaining an overwhelming Hindu majority in India, the threat to the nation's "sacred territory" posed by Pakistan and China, and opposition to any differential political rights for religious minorities, such as the autonomy once enjoyed by the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, and separate sharia-based civil laws for Muslims. At the same time, Sitapati points out that from the start the RSS had no principled objection to democracy. Universal suffrage advantaged the more numerous Hindus over Muslims.

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