Fire, The BJP and Moral Society

Abstract

Not surprisingly much of the analytical focus on the BJP's rise to power has been on its revolutionary political and cultural program. The ideology of 'Hindutva' not only challenges the secular basis of the Indian state, threatening to overturn it altogether, but it also proposes a communal reconstruction of national identity. India is projected by the Sangh Parivar as constituting a primordial Hindu community, which transcends regional, language and cultural difference and is bound together by a common history, civilisation and destiny. A new religiously exclusive India beckons in which nationality and citizenship are to be couched in terms of Hinduness, potentially rendering as foreigners millions of non-Hindu Indians and threatening the very preservation of the Indian Union.