What Hindu nationalism means

EVER since India won its independence in 1947, most of its leaders have been proud nationalists. Until very recently, all had been Hindus. So why should anyone feel apprehensive about the fact that India’s next prime minister, Narendra Modi, is a Hindu nationalist?
Perhaps 80% or more of all Indians identify themselves as Hindus. What this means exactly is a tricky business, for no one text or organisation can lay claim to Hinduism. Likewise with Hindu nationalism, a political ideology that is expressed differently by a variety of groups which share little more than a family resemblance. Sometimes they band together as the Sangh Parivar, the "family of organisations". The Sangh has its roots in a 19th-century confrontation between colonial Europeans and Indians who yearned for a national identity of their own. They wanted something on the model of a Western blood-and-soil nationality, with specially Indian characteristics, with which to stand against their foreign rulers, both British and the Islamic dynasties that preceded them. This family’s 20th-century godfather could be an atheist named Vinayak Savarkar, who wrote a pamphlet called "Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?" in 1928. Savarkar’s Hindu is someone who regards India as both a fatherland and a holy land. Fellow travellers founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) at the same time, devoting themselves to personal discipline and service to the Hindu nation. Their most influential leader, M.S. Golwalkar, was more religious than Savarkar, and was notably impressed by the German Nazis’ fervour. (He was not however an anti-Semite, and felt a deep affinity for Zionism.) Under Golwalkar’s leadership the RSS spawned most of the other groups that make up today’s Sangh. Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was formed in 1980, was a latecomer to the fold. By then Mr Modi had joined the RSS, at the tender age of eight.

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