Hindutva

Hindutva ('Hindu-ness') holds that Indian nationhood is founded on a shared Hindu civilization, and that those whose sacred geography and cultural origins lie within the subcontinent constitute the true nation in a way religious minorities of external origin — chiefly Muslims and Christians — do not.

Its founding text, Savarkar's Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923), is cultural and territorial more than strictly theological. It defines the nation by common fatherland (pitrbhu), blood, and civilization, and by treating India as one's holy land (punyabhu) — a test that, by design, includes Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains while placing Muslims and Christians outside the national core, so the doctrine functions as a religious nationalism even as it calls itself civilizational.

It is not a fringe idea but the organizing ideology of a mass movement — the RSS, founded in 1925, and its political and social affiliates — which has grown from the margins into a dominant force in Indian public life, shaping government, education, and culture across a nation of over a billion people.

Its adherents present it as a long-overdue assertion of the majority's culture against colonial and secular elites who, they argue, disparaged it; the movement spans a spectrum from cultural revivalists to hard-line activists.

Its critics — and much of India's founding generation — see it in direct tension with the secular, pluralist constitution of 1950, and warn that defining the nation by religion structurally subordinates some 200 million Muslims and other minorities; India's independence itself was scarred by the communal violence of Partition.

Like other identity doctrines, its defining question is who belongs to the nation, which every axis here — measuring instead how a nation should be governed — is unequipped to ask; and it deliberately blurs the religion-and-politics line the instrument assumes.