The Hindu Right and India s Religious Diplomacy

Narendra Modi has devoted an unusual amount of time and energy, for an Indian leader, to religious diplomacy. It is arguably one of the few innovations that he has made in the conduct of Indian foreign policy. He has visited a series of significant religious sites, engaged in dialogues between religious communities and made a series of appeals to religious arguments, in various diplomatic contexts. This article argues that Modi's religious diplomacy aims to boost India's public diplomacy and soft power, to promote India as a destination for tourists interested in its Buddhist heritage and sites, and an attempt to engage with India's diaspora communities. But it also observes that Modi's religious diplomacy is underpinned by his personal beliefs and his idea of the image that he wants to project of his leadership and what he thinks ought to be India's place in the world to domestic and foreign audiences.

The paper will examine the intersection between Sangh Parivar activities, Christianity, and indigenous religions in relation to the state of Nagaland. I will argue that the discourse of 'religion and culture' is used strategically by Sangh Parivar activists to assimilate disparate tribal groups and to envision a Hindu nation. In particular, I will show how Sangh activists attempt to encapsulate Christianity within the larger territorial and civilisational space of Hindutva (Hinduness). In this process, the idea of Hindutva is visualised as a nationalist concept, not a theocratic or religious one (Cohen 2002: 26). I will argue that the boundaries between Hindutva as cultural nationalism and its religious underpinnings are usefully maintained in the context of Nagaland because they allow Sangh activists to reconstitute the limits of Christianity and incorporate it into Hindu civilisation on their own terms.

The purpose of this article is to critically examine the politics of religious conversion in India. Since Christianity is the main religion espousing and conducting conversion in ever-larger numbers in India, my focus, in the following pages, is to interrogate the debate surrounding this particular undertaking and the attendant conflict dynamics. This study is organized according to the following framework. First, it situates religious conversion in the context of radical Hindu nationalism. Second, it explores the issue of religious conversion in the theories of identity and globalization. Third, it probes the specifics of Christian conversion in India and investigates the issue within the framework of identity politics and secularism. Fourth, it examines the response and reaction of the radical Hindu nationalists towards religious conversion in general and Christian conversion in particular from the perspective of ethno-religious nationalism. Fifth and finally, it evaluates the dimensions of conflict between Christians and Hindus and how they are played out in the shared social arena. In conclusion, this article stresses that religious conversion in India is a form of a socioeconomic emancipatory undertaking. Those who feel stifled by the discriminatory caste order prevalent within Hinduism and live a marginal existence embrace this new identity. In the same breath it argues that Christianity in general, and Christian missionaries in particular, have courted criticism, opposition, and violence from radical Hindus, informed citizenry, and the institution of the state, as they are considered an “external other”—accused of undermining the complex sociopolitical order in the country.

2021

The present article explores the discourse of extremist Hindus after Gandhi. Gandhi’s discourse, in his lifetime, was to become the most important political driving force in India. Having been assassinated by an extremist Hindu, function of Gandhi’s discourse has, too, faced many ups and downs in the context of historic developments and following competing discourses and debates, all of which had played a role in shaping India’s foreign policy. In this sense, the significance of taking into consideration Gandhi’s discourse is being felt more than ever. The present paper examines the effective historic developments, which have contributed to shaping India’s foreign policy, basic debates, and discourses based on Hinduism in India, all of which define Gandhi’s discourse as their otherness. The main question of the research is “What discourses and to what extent have they been envisaged in India’s foreign policy?” The assumption of the research is as follows: “With respect to Gandhi’s l...

Swastik, 2014

The studies on various societies and the recent changes in some countries show that religion whether as a social structure or an important part of culture, still has some important social functions. This book has followed the use of religion in politics in a society still traditional but with a secular state. It is an attempt to understand why religion is important in politics and politicians still use it. For this purpose, India as a context of the study has been examined. The study tries to find out the reasons for the continuous relevance of religion in the Indian political arena. It clarifies the different aspects of political function of religion in contemporary India and the political groups or leaders who have made an effective use of this function. It also tries to explore the impact of the new situation in post-independence India on the political functions of religion in the country. The book, originally written in 2013 as a PhD thesis, which mentions a possible Abrahamic agreement between Islamic, Jewish and Christian states (p. 62), similar to what was later happened in 2020 under Abraham Accords between USA, Israel and Arab countries. It is available upon request.

Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies, 2023

Following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the sociopolitical rivalry between Hindu religious nationalists and secular democratic nationalists that arose during the independence struggles, and whose intolerance precipitated the conflict, persists to this day. Following an extended period of dominance as one of the two major political parties in India, the Indian National Congress Party (INC), which espouses Indian secularism rooted in Gandhian socialism, social democracy, secularism, and democratic socialism, has been at the helm of Indian politics for approximately three decades. However, Hindu nationalism will soon supplant INC's political preeminence, which forms the foundation of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) political ideology. This article aims to shed light on the voting patterns of supporters of radical Hindu political parties over a three-decade period (1980-2014). Additionally, it will examine the impact of globalization on the dynamics of interaction between radical Hindus and adherents of other religious minorities in India, including Islam and Christianity. The primary research inquiry of the article is as follows: To what extent has globalization influenced the voting patterns of radical Hindu political party supporters? Furthermore, what impact has globalization had on the dynamics of interaction between adherents of Hinduism and other faiths in India? Its hypotheses assert that Hindu radicalism is shifting toward moderation due to globalization. In addition, individuals are distancing themselves from radical Hindu parties, and these parties are losing their political base as a result of the effects of globalization. Keywords: Bharatiya Janata Party, Globalization, Hinduism, Hindutva, Radicalism, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)

Eastern Anthropologist IISN Number - 0012-8686, 2018

The paper explores the interplay between religious and political spaces which pave the way for a new secular political strategy in which the idea of secular itself becomes a contested one. By examining the VBI initiative of the AOL, a Hindu spiritual guru led organization, the paper outlines the details of the mass initiative to create a political niche for the present day BJP government during the Lok Sabha General Elections (2014) in India. I served as a volunteer for AOL so the data was collected through participant observation during my fieldwork. By using the example of VBI, the paper argues for a change in the idea of secular to a lived reality impinging on the cognitive spaces of the masses. The paper is an attempt to bring together religion, politics and the idea of religious space making by reinventing the secular to suit the contemporary times.

Forthcoming in Making Sense of the Secular: Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia, edited by Ranjan Ghosh (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

Modern Asian Studies

Between 2014 and 2022, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made a determined bid to establish its electoral and discursive dominance in regions beyond its traditional strongholds in Northern and Western India. In the North-east, in the Christian-majority states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Nagaland, it encountered fierce hostility from the Church which exercised a hegemonic control over the religious, social, and political life in these states. This article focuses on the political tussle between the BJP and the Church in this time period and attempts to explore the deeper ideological contestations and competing narratives underlying this struggle and their implications for the Indian political discourse. These include contestations over the very conceptualization of secular democracy in India and the role of religion in it; different understandings of religious conversions and freedom of conscience; and the conflicting agendas around the categories of ‘tribe’, ‘indigenous people’/‘adiva...

The Review of Faith and International Affairs, 2016

As a secular democracy, India’s constitution enshrines relatively robust safeguards for religious equality and freedom. Article 25 provides all citizens the right to “freely profess, practice, and propagate” religion, and avoids assigning to Hinduism any special role or explicit privilege (in contradistinction to the situation with Buddhism in Sri Lanka, for example). Moreover, the Indian government itself has not generally engaged in any systematic or flagrant way in the direct persecution or oppression of its religious minorities. However, India’s religious minorities do face certain challenges. Among them are several legal and judicial issues. Judicial rulings in independent India have weakened the safeguards of the constitution in several ways, such as when, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court declared that the constitutional right of “propagation” did not include (or protect) the right to intentionally convert another. Similarly, half a dozen Indian states have now passed “Freedom of Religion” laws (called “anti-conversion” laws by their critics) that have been problematically and prejudicially implemented, as has a national anti-defamation law. Additionally, national laws securing reserved seats in Indian legislatures, civil service, and educational institutions for lower-caste Hindus (but not for lower-caste non-Hindus) provide implicit disincentives to lower-caste Hindus considering conversion. Finally, a weak and easily corrupted criminal justice system exacerbates many of these legal issues, and is frequently used by anti-minority actors who exploit the legal ambiguity with regard to religious freedoms in India to harry religious minorities with spurious charges or unlawful imprisonment, thereby undermining the protections that Indian law does afford religious minorities. In addition to these legal issues, religious minorities in India are occasionally threatened, intimidated, harassed, sexually assaulted, and attacked by their neighbors, in both small-scale, isolated incidents and in the context of large-scale riots. While the perpetrators of these incidents are not state actors, generally speaking, they do in many cases enjoy the explicit or implicit support of local or even national law enforcement and political officials. For example, local, regional, state, and even central governments have been accused, at various times, of intentionally responding slowly, or even inhibiting a police response to instances of anti-minority violence. The more secular of India’s two dominant political parties, the Indian National Congress (or “Congress”) party, has occasionally been linked to anti-minority activities, most notably in the anti-Sikh bloodletting that took place after the party’s powerful prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Nevertheless, accusations of involvement in anti-minority activities are far more regularly leveled, and justifiably so, at the broad association of nationalist social, religious, and cultural organizations called the Sangh Parivar (or “Sangh”), and at the political party associated with it, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, “Indian People’s Party”). It is for this reason that the BJP’s resounding national electoral victory in late 2014 appears to have emboldened anti-minority social and state actors, and has caused India’s religious minorities a great deal of concern. In what follows, I provide the minimum amount of historical and contextual information necessary to understand contemporary dynamics at a basic level. After that, I describe the contemporary situation in more detail. In the final section, I provide some recommendations to US foreign policy specialists on how to intervene (and/or not intervene) productively in support of religious freedom and religious minorities in India.