Scroll.in has an article penned by two academics at some American University on 'the rise of Hindutva'.
Beyond elections, a reading list to understand the rise of Hindutva and the BJP
What turned the BJP and the RSS into social and political behemoths? These books have some answers.
Sadly, no book has the answer. Why? It is because even a child could answer the question by saying
1) It was obvious that Marxism had failed everywhere by the end of the Seventies. This meant Religion was no longer seen as 'the opium of the masses'.
2) The rise of militant political Islam caused non-Muslims to want to circle their own wagons. The issue of caste-based reservations ('Mandal') needed to be countered by Hindu vote consolidation ('Mandir')
3) India's fascination with Gandhian gesture politics (spinning wheels & so forth) ended when the Janata Morcha imploded (on the issue of dual membership of the RSS) Later, other evanescent coalitions imploded in the same way till the BJP emerged as the only Janata survivor able to serve as a national alternative to Congress (which retains Gandhian clauses- e.g. the requirement that all Congress members be 'habitual spinners of cotton). In other words, Hindu consolidation would take a non-Gandhian direction.
The Dynasty could have pre-empted the rise of the BJP by returning Congress to its roots as the muscular Hindu party par excellence but autocracy was tempered by two assassinations.
Tariq Thachil & Rohan Venkataramakrishnan
May 18, 2026 · 11:30 am
Once described as a North Indian “Hindi belt” party
The RSS is from Maharashtra though it came into politics under a Bengali- Syama Prasad Mukherjee.
that would find it hard to grow beyond its upper-caste base,
this was also said of Congress before the Great War
the BJP now draws in votes from every corner of the country and supporters from across castes, communities, and even religions.
The underlying ideology that powers the BJP-Hindutva-and the party’s parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, is indisputably the most influential socio-political force in the country – and by dint of India’s sheer scale, one of the most important phenomena in global politics.
It is nationalist and pro-Hindu just as Congress was.
How did this happen? What turned the BJP and the RSS into social and political behemoths?
Assassinations. However, incompetence & corruption, too, played a part. However, it was Rahul's reluctance to take the top job, thus risking assassination, which enabled the BJP to win a majority in 2014.
How did a movement known for polarising rhetoric and the instrumentalisation of violence catapult to power?
It is not known for any such thing. It was Congress which went in for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims & even Sikhs.
And how should we understand Modi’s individual role within the broader story of Hindu nationalism?
By understanding that he did a great job in Gujarat and promised to do a great job in Delhi. Since he was miles better than any rival, he remains in office.
Governance is about running a tight shift and focussing on last mile delivery. It isn't about intrigue & virtue signalling.
India in Transition asked Tariq Thachil, former Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India,
in Pennsylvania- a place where there is zero interest in, or knowledge of, India.
to put together a reading list of key works for students and scholars to better understand the rise of Hindu nationalism and the BJP.
This is a reading list for those who want to completely misunderstand Indian politics.
Thachil’s first book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which looked at how elite parties use social services to win mass support through a study of Hindu nationalism, won the 2015 Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, and the 2015 Leon Epstein Award for best book on political parties, from the American Political Science Association.
Did any Indian politician or political analyst read it? No. Why? It was shit.
Its publisher describes it thus-
Tariq Thachil shows how arguments from studies of wealthy democracies (such as moral values voting) and the global south (such as patronage or ethnic appeals) cannot explain why poor voters in poor countries support parties that represent elite policy interests.
In 1946, why did poor Muslims vote for the Muslim League even though it could plausibly be called an elite party? The answer is that Muslims don't like kaffirs. But, kaffirs can come to feel the same way about jihadis.
He instead draws on extensive survey data and fieldwork to document a novel strategy through which elite parties can recruit the poor, while retaining the rich.
How did Mrs Thatcher get working class English people to vote Tory? She promised to make them better off. True, this might mean having to break the back of the Coal Miner's Union. But, since nobody wanted to go back to the three-day week, that was a small price to pay for owning your own home and getting shares in public utilities.
He shows how these parties can win over disadvantaged voters by privately providing them with basic social services via grassroots affiliates.
This may have been plausible in 2014. It isn't now. The problem with 'grassroots affiliates' is that they tend to be gangsters. They take kickbacks ('cut-money'). They may also rape you or force your daughter into prostitution. Voters don't like this. They want 'universal provision' and the disintermediation of 'grassroots affiliates'.
Such outsourcing permits the party itself to continue to represent the policy interests of their privileged base.
Also, these elites have turned the Post Office into a paedophile ring. Did you know that the elites are putting something in your coffee which causes you to forget Satanic abuse you undergo every night at the hands of a cabal of billionaires?
Extends the study of why poor citizens vote against their interests to the non-Western world
Extends paranoid American theories to the rest of the world.
The first book to provide a theory of social services as an electoral strategy,
In Econ, this is called Director's Law (after Aaron Director) Stigler's 1970 paper 'Director's Law of Public Income Redistribution' is the locus classicus though there had been previous theories of a similar sort.
It is fucking obvious that political parties compete for votes by promising more and better social services.
explaining why parties use social services for electoral purposes, how services win votes, and when this strategy succeeds or fails
Why not explain, instead, why eating your own shit is a bad idea? After all, if there is a person stupid enough not to understand why better social services garner more votes, then that person may currently be eating her own shit and wondering why she feels ill all the time.
CASI Managing Editor Rohan Venkat spoke to Thachil about the books and papers he chose – from the canonical “insider” study of the RSS’ organisational working, to works that examine the movement’s efforts to broaden support across caste, gender, and geographical boundaries, to a paper that studies Modi’s personal appeal – and asked about his own book as well as non-Indian scholarship that might offer a useful perspective on the success of Hindu nationalism.
Congress, as Gandhi said in 1939, is a Hindu party. It was nationalistic because Hindus wanted to take over the nice offices and mansions which the Brits had built for themselves. We may say 'Gandhi's Congress followed the line of Gokhale. The BJP followed the line of Tilak. Since all Gandhi's policies failed and then all Nehru's policies failed, Hindus have returned to the path of Tilak.
The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism, Walter K Anderson & Shridhar D Damle (Westview Press, 1987)
It was quite well researched but tends to miss the wood for the trees. Still, it pays tribute to some unsung heroes- e.g. Ganesh Savarkar
'G. D. (alias Babarao) Savarkar, a former revolutionary and the older brother of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, helped the RSS expand into western Maharashtra. He merged his own Tarun Hindu Sabha (Hindu Youth) as well as the Mukteshwar Dal (Liberation Organization), associated with Pachalegoankar Maharaj (a Hindu saint who passed away in 1986), into the RSS. He accompanied Hedgewar on trips to western Maharashtra, introducing him to Hindu nationalists. Some of these contacts (e.g., K. B. Limaye, Vinayak Apte, and Bhaurao Abhyanker) were to become prominent RSS officials in Maharashtra. Pune developed into the center of RSS activities in western Maharashtra.'
Dalme stresses that the Congress ban on dual-membership meant that the RSS would either have to stay with the Mahasabha, whose President its head did not get on with, or else find some other party to join. This difficulty was solved when SP Mookerjee broke with the Mahasabha.
All of the books I’m going to recommend are to help understand the rise of something that we would call Hindu nationalism.
Which started gathering steam in the 1880s. Incidentally, AO Hume, who founded the Congress party, was a Vedantist who advocated cow-protection.
Some might call it the Hindu Right, or Hindutva, in terms of the ideology it represents, but all of these are linked to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the current ruling party in India.
Both these dudes are of Indian origin. Why are they talking about the place as if it was some distant planet?
That party is the political arm of a family of organisations called the “Sangh Parivar,” linked by this shared ideology of Hindu nationalism or Hinduvta. And the parent organisation within the Sangh Parivar is called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS, which sometimes calls itself the largest NGO or civil society organisation in the world.
Hardikar & Hegdewar were Maharashtrian Medical students in Calcutta before the Great War. They were inspired by the 'Anushilan Samitis' (which gave training in martial arts) set up by Hindu revolutionaries in Bengal. Hardikar set up the Congress Seva Dal as a paramilitary outfit with the help of Nehru. But Congress itself could be banned at any time & so Hegdewar set up the RSS as a 'social', not 'political', organization. Its volunteers did good work and thus it was able to expand. Interestingly, those who became full-time 'pracharaks' chose celibacy. Unlike the Seva Dal, which degenerated into a bunch of sycophantic careerists, sociopathic opportunists & outright thugs, the RSS preserved a good moral ethos as a sort of cross between the Boy Scouts & the Rotarians.
After Independence, the RSS helped Shyam Prasad Mookerjee (the son of the great Sir Ashutosh) found the Jan Sangh. Once Nehruvian policies failed, the Jan Sangh, like other non-Congress parties, began to rise. The 1967 elections were the turning point. You could travel from Amritsar to Calcutta without setting foot in a Congress ruled state. Then, Indira Gandhi got shot of the senile shitheads of the Syndicate and make her party Dynastic. She was actually less shitty than Morarji Desai, which is why she prevailed.
I don’t think you can understand the rise of the Hindu Right in India without first fundamentally understanding the RSS.
Which this nutter refuses to do though the thing is blindingly obvious.
It was the foundational organisation out of which the BJP grew and without which the BJP would not have been able to persist and survive in Indian politics long enough to achieve the success it has today. The resilience of the BJP, and its ability to survive in relative political obscurity for many decades was really predicated on having this “strong organisation” behind it, which is much discussed but not always understood.
No. The Jan Sangh had some good leaders- Vajpayee, Advani, Nanaji Deshmukh- and both Lohia & JP Narayan were prepared to use them so as to take on the Congress Party- more particularly under Indira.
So, at the beginning of this list, I wanted to recommend a book that really unpacks the workings of the RSS. The great strength of the RSS, that even its critics will accept, is its organisational prowess, the loyalty of its cadres to the cause, and its willingness to do the painstaking work of propagating their ideology person-by-person.
Congress Seva Dal did the same thing but became decadent. By the mid Seventies, if a man said 'my son attends the RSS shaka', you understood that the boy was of good character. If you said 'my son is in the Youth Congress', you understood that he was either a pimp or a thug.
Anderson and Damle is the classic text and the first major English language academic book to provide a view of the inner workings of the RSS.
Anderson may simply have been naive & ignorant. Damle had an agenda. Consider the following-
' Hedgewar's revolutionary past and the paramilitary nature of the RSS convinced the Central Provinces Home Department that the RSS could develop into a dangerous revolutionary group, and this suspicion continued throughout the pre-independence period.
More to the point, it might get involved in communal riots. Thus the administration needed to know whom to arrest or extern from the District if a flare-up was expected. But the Khaksars and other such groups were also under surveillance.
In fact, the RSS remained scrupulously nonpolitical
Hegdewar himself would resign so as to go to jail as part of a Congress agitation. The problem was that 'freedom fighters' were pushing against an open door. The only question was who would dominate India when the Brits departed. The answer was, he who controls the army controls the country. That is why Gandhi kept demanding the Brits hand over the Army to Congress.
and it was not until after independence that it began seriously to consider political activities. People who knew the RSS well, such as Dr. Hardikar, the leader of the Hindustan Seva Dal (the youth unit of the Congress) criticized the RSS for its refusal to get politically involved.
He knew there was an undercover cop noting down his speech. He wanted to preserve the RSS's alibi for obvious reasons.
V. D. Savarkar, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha after 1937, frequently denounced the RSS for its "purely cultural" orientation.
He was an old-school revolutionary of the pre-War type who thought assassinations were a good idea.
In his typically frank manner, Savarkar publicly stated, "The epitaph for the RSS volunteer will be that he was born, he joined the RSS and he died without accomplishing anything.
Unless he volunteered to help flood victims or to build a school etc.
Brotherhood in Saffron unpacked how the RSS worked organisationally and focused on the day-to-day work of building the organisation and how it ran. Understanding the RSS as an organisation and not just an ideological formation is what Anderson and Damle do brilliantly. And that’s why it remains a landmark book to understand the wider Sangh Parivar.
Not really. We understand that joining the RSS and doing voluntary work gains you respect and trust. This in turn means you can rise in the Co-operative movement or Trade Union movement or that of the Agriculturists etc. RSS lawyers and Doctors tend to do a lot of pro bono work and this raises their prestige. They can get good grooms and brides for their children. However, for many, the attraction of both Gandhian as well as RSS type movements was that caste barriers were broken down. In other words, the burden of maintaining ritual purity was lifted because people felt you were doing something worthwhile for the country as a whole.
It must also be said, provincial India was as dull as ditch-water. The big cities did have brothels and wine-shops but you either got syphilis or cirrhosis. Even doing voluntary work was better than either dying of boredom or dying of the clap.
They published a recent follow-up, The RSS: A View to the Inside (Penguin Viking, 2018), but the first is more impactful. There is a tendency with a lot of this scholarship to focus on tall leaders and heads of movements. The contribution of this book was to show that it is the everyday workings of thousands and later tens of thousands of volunteers that is the strength of the RSS.
It is also the strength of the Republican party and the Democratic party and every other party in every democracy under the Sun.
The book has its critics. Damle, himself, was part of the reason they had access to RSS insider information, since he was an affiliate, and very much someone who is not held at a “full arm’s length” from the movement.
He stresses that the RSS was about being a good and decent person rather than an assassin or a bank robber.
That relationship permitted insider knowledge that the book draws on. More critical observers of the movement have rightly criticised the book as overly sympathetic, and even celebratory.
Why does Damle not reveal details of the Satanic orgies in which RSS pracharaks bathe in the blood of Muslim virgins?
But those valid concerns should not obscure the fact that the best parts of the book delineate the day-to-day workings of the organisation in a way we previously had not seen.
Few Indians would need to read a book to grasp how the RSS works.
The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, Christophe Jaffrelot (Columbia University Press, 1996)
which ignores the fact that Congress was the embodiment of that movement.
This is a long, dense book, and one that I don’t suggest you try to read start-to-finish in one sitting. But to this day, it remains the most encyclopedic account of the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement,
which began around the time Hindus started organizing to get rid of foreign invaders whom they described a 'mleccha'. It would be fair to say that the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Turks inspired English speaking Indians like Raja Ram Mohun Roy. The idea was that India had once been as culturally and scientifically rich as ancient Greece but, like that unfortunate country, it had become poor and ignorant because of centuries of Islamic misrule.
touching on all aspects – electoral, non-electoral, ideological. If you want a reference text to understand this century-old movement, if you want granular details about how the different wings of the movement work with and are sometimes in conflict with each other, this is the benchmark text.
If you have Hindus and hope the Indian nation will disintegrate, this is the book for you.
Hindutva and Dalits; Perspectives for Understanding Communal Praxis, Edited by Anand Teltumbde (SAGE and Stree-Samya Books, 2005)
Why do Dalits prefer Hindutva- which wants to get rid of casteist thinking- to Islam- which thinks Dalit kaffirs should be killed same as all the other types of kaffir?
Teltumbde doesn't know.
One of the key aspects of the rise of Hindu nationalism was its growth in appeal from what was seen as, for many decades, a niche social movement that had a very loyal organisational base, but one whose political support was circumscribed to very particular parts of Indian society – specifically upper-caste Hindus.
Upper-caste Hindus wanted to get rid of various ritual taboos. That's why they joined Nationalist outfits which promoted 'inter-dining'. Also, in the Army, we see the son of a Duke taking orders from the son of a cobbler. If he didn't do so, there would be no fucking Army. India would either be enslaved yet again or it would get rid of casteism- including the dynastic rule of a nice Italian lady's mooncalf of a son.
The BJP was often dubbed a “Brahmin, Bania” party.
Nehru in his Autobiography said India had become 'Bania-ified' (i.e. merchants had too big a role). His mission was to 're-Brahminize' it.
The Jan Sangh was dismissed as the 'traders' party'.
That really started to shift in the 2000s when other social groups – particularly from non-elite and marginalised Hindu communities – began to voice support for Hindu nationalism.
They had supported Congress because it was the muscular arm of Hindu nationalism (even though Gandhi would keep pretending that Hindus were incapable of defending themselves. But that was because he wanted the Brits to hand over the Army to him. Otherwise Muslims & Punjabis (irrespective of creed) would grab all the nice shiny things. )
Electorally, the BJP could not be the dominant force it is today without having spread its appeal outside of upper-caste Hindus, who are a small fraction of India’s population.
That could be said of Congress & the Communist parties.
Those in the movement and the party knew they had to overcome this pigeon-holing. But for a long time, external observers thought the BJP could never have mass appeal.
Only if they had been brainwashed by the Left.
Teltumbde’s book, an edited volume with work by many scholars, does a great job of raising the question of how the movement expanded. Much of the book was prompted by the participation of some Dalit individuals in Hindutva mobilisations, especially the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat.
Why did Dalits & Tribals kill Muslim usurers or other gangsters? Didn't they know it was their duty to play second fiddle to Muslims so that Islamic rule could be re-established in India?
Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India, Kalyani Devaki Menon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)
A Hindu nun- like Uma Bharati- could become Chief Minister even though she was of 'Backward Caste'. The Hindu right will promote Hindus, regardless of gender or caste, on the basis of merit. Why? Hindus want Hindus to prosper and gain in strength.
It is not intuitively obvious why women might be attracted to a masculinist, sometimes aggressive, often violent movement.
Women don't want to become Chief Minister. What they really want is to be raped and robbed by all and sundry. Indeed, a woman whose breasts are being lopped off by a rapist will become very indignant if some masculinist & aggressive person uses violence against her assailant.
One of the things I really like about Menon’s book – and several others on this list – is that none of them reach for what I see as lazy arguments about “false consciousness”. It’s not that women are being forced or coerced into participation. There are complex reasons why they find participation in the movement appealing or affirming, and she’s trying to help make sense of that.
It really is very difficult to understand why a woman would rather be Chief Minister rather than a victim of rape.
Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State, Ward Berenschot (Columbia University Press, 2011)
Nehru presided over the biggest ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the sub-continent.
I picked this for two reasons. One, it would be remiss to have a reading list on the rise of Hindu nationalism without at least one text that fundamentally foregrounds violence, because violence has been an integral strategy for the expansion of the movement.
Why did Gandhi go to Champaran in 1917? The answer is that Bihar was consumed by cow-protection riots. Gandhi helped create a distraction so as to preserve the Congress/Muslim League pact negotiated by Jinnah.
I, myself, have written about how movements like the Rath Yatras of the 1980s and 1990s or the massive amount of violence following the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 were harnessed to consolidate upper-caste support for the BJP at a critical time, when it was trying to move from obscurity to relevance.
It had stopped being 'obscure' in 1977. Nanaji was offered the Deputy Prime-Ministership. Vajpayee got the External Affairs portfolio.
Violence had a role to play in the gradual expansion of the party’s workings,
Rajiv didn't get re-elected with a huge majority after Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi. What actually happened was that Sikhs committed suicide because they were so sad that Indira had died.
and Berenschot documents this process at the very local level in Gujarat, the state where the BJP has enjoyed the most consistent support over a long period of time.
Behenchooth, the famous Indian expert on Dutch politics, has documented the manner in which trillions of Muslims were tickled to death in Amsterdam by Geert Wilders. He also sodomized Uranus with his giant, invisible, cock.
In particular, he looks at how the ability to produce violence or “riots” is deeply intertwined with everyday politics
Modi put an end to the periodic riots in Gujarat which started in 1969.
. He looks at what political scientists called “patronage politics,” where you have to go to politicians as a voter and ask them for help, which they will provide in return for support. This sort of discretionary exchange is what makes politics work.
No. Modi has shown that voters hate that shite. Entitlements must be universal. If they are discretionary then the party machine at the local level will be taken over by thugs who will demand 'cut-money' in between raping and robbing everybody in the vicinity.
The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast, Arkotong Longkumer (Stanford University Press, 2021)
Places which fear Muslim infiltration will switch from Congress to the BJP. File under 'sad but true'.
What all these books have in common is that
they don't mention the elephant in the room- viz. fear of demographic replacement by Muslims. This is becoming a factor in European politics.
The Politics of Vishwas: Political Mobilization in the 2019 National Election, Neelanjan Sircar (Contemporary South Asia, May 2020)
This is a great paper.
It is shit. This is the abstract-
In this article, I develop a model of the politics of vishwas (trust/belief).One of my bugbears with academic research – and we’ve talked about this before – is that I don’t think we have great work in political science explaining the specific impact of Modi.
You also don't have great work in Physics explaining why you will hurt yourself quite badly if you jump out of a window on the tenth floor of a building.
... what Sircar talks about in this piece is persuasive. He argues that the biggest shift under the BJP and Modi has been the centralisation of political power.
That happened under Nehru & reached its acme under Indira & Rajiv.
... Sircar documents how the BJP under Modi is increasingly relying on the trust in a strong leader and the belief in that leader’s ability to do right by his supporters, irrespective of the actual performance record.
Which political party says 'our leader is shit. Don't vote for us.'?
He distinguishes from a politics of vikas, or development – the meat-and-potatoes politics that we think drives a lot of support – and the “politics of vishwas,” of trust in a leader like Modi.
If you don't trust a guy to deliver development, you won't vote for him.
It’s not really about tallying performance, but the underlying trust in an individual, communicated by a strong party organisation.
Sadly, that isn't enough. You have to show that every guy from your party who is standing for election is trustworthy and better than his rival.
Rohan: Two follow-ups. Tell us about your own book, Elite Parties, Poor Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
That book was an attempt to understand what was happening with the BJP. It came out a few months after the 2014 election, which was the first in which the BJP under Modi came to power, and they have remained in power since. My interest was to see how the BJP consolidated support across the central belt of India from Gujarat to Chhattisgarh. I basically argued that it did so by being able to create this unlikely social coalition between its core base, upper-caste Hindus, and disadvantaged and marginalised castes, specifically Dalits and Adivasis.
Who were Hindus & who had strong reasons to hate Muslims. But it was corruption which brought down Congress- more particularly because Rahul refused to step up to the plate.
The question was “how did they do that?” and the simple answer in the book was that they did it through a division of labor. The BJP at the time remained very much oriented to the interests of its upper-caste core.
Did you know that Modi is actually a British aristocrat named Lord Nicholas Maugham?
The policies that the upper castes favored at the time was where the party oriented itself, whether on questions of economic liberalisation or caste quotas. And it outsourced the recruitment of Dalits and Adivasi voters to its social movement partners.
i.e. the RSS.
This is why it’s so important to think of the BJP’s rise as embedded within the Hindu nationalist movement, and specifically organisations that style themselves as seva organisation. Seva Bharti, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram – which works for tribal communities specifically – and others. The book detailed that process and how it worked. Part of it was trying to show that, while there’s no question that the current dominance of the BJP owes a lot to the personal popularity of Narendra Modi, a lot of the groundwork to make the BJP even come up to the position to where it could be on the precipice of dominance was long in the making, well before 2014.
In other words, the RSS did the sort of stuff Congress Seva Dal should have been doing. Modi, first in Gujarat and then in Delhi, is doing the stuff a good Prime Minister should be doing. It appears that his cabinet is clean and efficient rather than corrupt and consumed by intrigue.
Still, Modi can't afford to be complacent. He isn't a Professor of stupid shit in Amerika. He could get the order of the boot in 2029.
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