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Hindutva: Power Disguised as Dharma

The loudspeakers blare not to praise the divine, but to drown out the neighbor’s prayer. The saffron flags don’t flutter for faith, but for dominance. Every act of religiosity under Hindutva is performance a show of muscle, not devotion. Its temples are not built to elevate the soul, but to assert territory. Every chant of Jai Shri Ram is less an invocation and more a declaration of control a warning to those whose gods, language, or very existence fall outside its hierarchy. What should have been spiritual transcendence has been turned into a weapon of social policing.

In Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 was not an accident of rage it was a rehearsal for the future. The mobs that tore it down were guided by the same logic that fuels today’s processions through Muslim neighborhoods, with loudspeakers, swords, and slogans. It wasn’t about reclaiming faith; it was about rewriting belonging. In 2020, the Ram Temple’s construction became a televised spectacle, a state-sponsored coronation of one religion’s supremacy over all others. And through every news channel and WhatsApp group, the message was clear: this is not about god, this is about power.

Faith in India once survived by coexistence. The Bhakti and Sufi movements blurred lines, saints like Kabir and Lalon Fakir spoke of god as love, not identity. But Hindutva’s religion is allergic to that softness. It thrives on resentment, feeding on the insecurities of a middle class taught to equate Hinduism with humiliation and revenge. For them, god is not a moral compass but a military banner. The divine is invoked not for introspection but for intimidation. The rituals of faith have been hollowed out and filled with hate.

The street processions, once meant for celebration, are now designed to provoke. Loud music during Muslim prayers, processions deliberately routed through minority areas, social media calls to “defend religion” that end in blood it’s not spontaneous. It’s choreography. The Bharatiya Janata Party learned long ago that the easiest way to maintain control in a poor, unequal country is to manufacture pride where there is only pain. Unemployment becomes a mosque problem, inflation a halal issue, corruption a Muslim conspiracy. Hindutva offers catharsis, not salvation. It lets the angry poor feel powerful for a moment by hating those even poorer.

There is no serenity because serenity requires equality. Hindutva cannot allow peace peace exposes its emptiness. If faith were truly personal, it could not be weaponized. If god were truly universal, the state could not claim him as property. The spectacle of religiosity the endless festivals, marches, slogans is a smokescreen for the loss of meaning. Behind every saffron-clad rally is a government gutting labor rights, selling farmland to corporations, and silencing dissent. The louder the temple bells ring, the more invisible the poverty beneath them becomes.

It is a cruel irony: the same civilization that once produced the Upanishads, speaking of the self and cosmos as one, now glorifies bulldozers demolishing the homes of the poor. From Gujarat in 2002 to Delhi in 2020, religion has become an alibi for state violence. The holiness of the cow matters more than the hunger of the farmer. The temple is defended while the child starves. This is not spirituality it’s sacrilege disguised as sanctity.

What Hindutva has done to faith is what capitalism does to everything commodify it, strip it of meaning, and sell it back as identity. The sacred becomes a slogan, god becomes a brand, and devotion becomes a tool for fascism. Its priests are politicians; its scriptures are WhatsApp forwards; its miracles are lynchings justified as divine justice.

And yet, beneath the noise, something else still stirs. The ordinary believer who lights a lamp at dawn, the worker who bows before a small shrine before laboring twelve hours, the grandmother who hums verses without hate they are the true inheritors of faith. Their god still whispers, softly, that power without compassion is hollow. That no flag can sanctify cruelty. That divinity cannot live in a mind consumed by vengeance.

Culture was supposed to be the language of people messy, alive, borrowed, shared. But Hindutva turned it into a gated compound. What used to be celebration became segregation. Food, clothing, cinema, language, and even love were no longer expressions of identity they were tests of loyalty. Hindi became the “national” tongue not out of affection for its poetry but as a cudgel against linguistic diversity. Festivals like Holi and Diwali, once grounded in joy and community, were stripped of their folk character and repackaged as symbols of Hindu triumph. The market and the temple began to speak the same language: buy, display, dominate.

Bollywood, once a chaotic fusion of Urdu lyricism and Indian melodrama, was one of the first cultural spaces to be captured. The industry that once made films like Garam Hava and Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi stories of dissent and loss now serves the regime’s propaganda. Nationalism replaced storytelling; soldiers replaced poets. Films like Uri, The Kashmir Files, and Gadar 2 became the cultural equivalents of election rallies, priming citizens to see their neighbors as enemies. The same camera that once romanticized rebellion now glorifies surveillance.

Censorship didn’t need to come from official bans; it came from mobs, from hashtags, from politicians who could unleash digital lynchings at will. When Padmaavat was attacked, when Tandav was boycotted, it wasn’t about hurting religious sentiments it was about establishing who gets to speak for India. Artists learned quickly: either worship the nation or be branded anti-national. The saffronization of cinema mirrored the saffronization of classrooms. Textbooks quietly rewrote centuries of plural history into a singular myth of Hindu greatness. Muslim rulers became invaders, Dalit struggles vanished, colonial exploitation softened. India’s pain was bleached into pride.

Even love was declared suspect. Love Jihad a conspiracy built on paranoia turned relationships into battlefields. Two young people holding hands could now be framed as a political act. Hindu men were told they were under demographic siege, that their masculinity was under attack, that their women were being “stolen.” It was fascist anxiety disguised as moral concern. And with every moral panic, the state grew stronger, feeding on the fear it manufactured. The cow vigilante, the moral police, the temple protector all instruments of social control wrapped in religious righteousness.

Meanwhile, the economy beneath all this theater continued to hollow out. Corporate monopolies tightened their grip, small farmers drowned in debt, workers migrated from one precarious job to another. But the spectacle of nationalism gave them something else to believe in: that their suffering was part of a civilizational struggle. While the billionaires built temples of glass and steel, the poor built shrines of desperation. The more unequal the country became, the more aggressive its identity politics grew. Power needs distraction; Hindutva supplied it.

The tragedy is not that the Hindu right conquered culture, but that it did so by selling back fragments of what once united the subcontinent. The folk songs, the dialects, the shared myths between Hindu and Muslim peasants all were sanitized, rewritten, stripped of ambiguity. A bhajan without a qawwali, a Ram without Rahim, a Bharat without dissent. It’s cultural partition masquerading as unity.

And yet, resistance persists in the margins in the street theater of JNU students, in the poetry of Meena Kandasamy, in the murals painted during the Shaheen Bagh protests. Even in the smallest acts a Dalit writer reclaiming myth, a queer collective rewriting ritual, a village refusing to rename its Urdu school the old plural India flickers. Hindutva can dominate television screens, but it cannot rewrite hunger, it cannot police grief, it cannot sanctify injustice forever.

At the heart of Hindutva is not devotion but ownership ownership over land, labor, god, and guilt. Its religiosity is a mask for its economics. The temple is not a place of worship; it’s a franchise. Behind every chant of Jai Shri Ram lies a contract, a tender, an investment portfolio. The old caste order merges seamlessly with neoliberal greed. Brahminical hierarchy didn’t die in modern India; it just learned how to code, how to draft corporate policy, how to privatize oppression.

The RSS and its political arms, from Jana Sangh to BJP, never imagined a socialism of faith. They imagined a hierarchy of faith aligned perfectly with the hierarchy of class. The upper-caste elite would administer both the scriptures and the stock market. The genius of this arrangement was that it dressed feudalism in the clothes of nationalism. The same logic that once justified varna now justifies privatization: everyone must “stay in their place,” and those who fail must accept it as destiny.

The liberalization of 1991 was not a rupture for Hindutva it was its coronation. Economic policy and cultural chauvinism fused into a single ideology. Markets were opened to foreign capital while society was closed to internal dissent. Corporate titans like the Ambanis and Adanis became the new temples’ patrons, their fortunes sanctified by the rhetoric of national growth. Modi perfected this formula: sell god to the poor and the nation to the rich. The demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 was not just an act of religious violence it was the spiritual twin of economic liberalization, both marking a decisive shift from collective struggle to individual accumulation.

Underneath this fusion, caste never loosened its grip. The Hindu Right could not survive without the social scaffolding of caste privilege. The BJP’s voter base mirrors the social structure of inequality upper castes dominate the leadership; OBCs are courted through tokenism; Dalits are instrumentalized as foot soldiers and scapegoats. Reservation policies are eroded not by frontal assault but by slow bureaucratic suffocation. The promise of meritocracy hides the same old hierarchy dressed in management jargon.

In the tribal belts of Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha, Hindutva advances hand in hand with mining companies. The language of national pride justifies the theft of land, the displacement of entire communities, the burning of forests. Adivasi gods are absorbed into Hindu pantheons; their rituals rebranded as “local Hindu traditions.” Conversion without consent, assimilation without recognition. The resistance of these communities often branded “Maoist influence” becomes the justification for militarization. Development, in this schema, is another name for dispossession.

The capitalist engine behind Hindutva also manufactures its enemies. Muslims are not just scapegoats; they are the emotional labor that keeps the machine running. Every riot, every lynching, every headline about “love jihad” reinforces the illusion of Hindu victimhood the myth that a majority can be under siege. It’s a perfect feedback loop: fear fuels nationalism, nationalism fuels consumption, consumption fuels the same corporate giants that fund the party. The spiritual crisis of the middle class is pacified with designer religiosity yoga retreats, digital temples, saffron startups.

And for the poor, faith becomes the only affordable luxury. A migrant laborer who cannot afford healthcare can still afford a pilgrimage. The state recedes, replaced by gods who now wear the face of the government. Welfare is distributed through temple networks and party rallies. The boundary between god and prime minister blurs. To oppose one is to commit blasphemy against the other.

But beneath this choreography, the contradictions grow. Farmers march with portraits of Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh beside Sikh and Muslim flags. Students shout slogans not just for bread but for dignity. Even within the RSS’s ranks, the younger generation feels the unease an empire of faith built on empty stomachs cannot last forever. Hindutva can claim to speak for 1.4 billion, but it cannot fill their plates, cannot erase their debts, cannot silence the memory of what India once promised to be.

Hindutva’s nationalism is not a rebellion against colonialism it is its heir. The RSS was born not in opposition to British power but in imitation of it. Its founders admired the discipline of European fascism, the racial hierarchies of the British Empire, the orderliness of the Raj. Hedgewar and Golwalkar didn’t dream of a liberated India; they dreamed of a purified one, where the Brahmin ruled the Shudra as naturally as the English ruled the Indian. When Golwalkar wrote We, or Our Nationhood Defined in 1939, he praised Hitler’s methods of “maintaining race pride,” calling it “a good lesson for us in Hindustan.” This was no accident it was a declaration.

The British Empire taught India’s elites two essential lessons: how to rule through division, and how to moralize exploitation. Hindutva absorbed both. It took the colonial model of racial purity and translated it into religious purity. It turned the British notion of “civilized versus savage” into “Hindu versus foreigner.” It learned to weaponize census categories, just as the Empire had done to fragment castes and tribes. And like the colonial administrators, it turned violence into virtue pogroms as “defense,” lynchings as “justice,” massacres as “correction.”

This inheritance runs deep in policy as well as ideology. The British used railways and famine laws to extract wealth from peasants in Bengal and Bihar; today, Hindu nationalists use privatization and “development zones” to achieve the same end under a saffron flag. In both cases, the victims are the same: Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis, the landless poor. The color of the flag changed, the hand that holds the whip did not.

When the British left, they handed power not to revolutionaries but to a class of collaborators landlords, merchants, and bureaucrats who had thrived under imperialism. Hindutva became the ideology of that class’s grandchildren. They inherited not just the estates and English education but the contempt for the masses. They learned to quote scriptures the way the colonizers once quoted scripture to justify hierarchy as divine order.

Even their nationalism smells of colonial mimicry. The obsession with borders, maps, and “territorial integrity” it’s the same paranoia that drove the Empire’s cartographers. The hatred for dissent, for intellectualism, for ambiguity that’s the insecurity of a colonial psyche pretending to be sovereign. When a government bans books, jails comedians, or rewrites textbooks, it doesn’t act like a confident civilization; it acts like a nervous empire.

The British built prisons for revolutionaries; the BJP builds prisons for students. The Raj had sedition laws; Modi’s India has the UAPA. The British looted India’s grain during the Bengal famine of 1943; the new rulers let farmers starve under corporate monopolies. Colonialism never ended it privatized itself.

But the most profound continuity is psychological. The colonized mind, once told it was inferior to the white man, now tells itself it is superior to the Muslim. This is the psychic alchemy of Hindutva: to turn humiliation into hate, and hate into hierarchy. It offers the wounded Hindu middle class a mirror where they can finally see themselves as conquerors. The result is a nationalism that is simultaneously vengeful and dependent unable to imagine greatness without an enemy, unable to exist without imitation.

Its foreign policy mirrors this schizophrenia. It worships Israel as a model of “strong nationalism,” courts the United States as a patron, and condemns China as a rival. The same India that claims ancient moral wisdom buys its weapons from Western arms dealers and borrows its surveillance technology from Israeli firms. It dreams of empire while remaining a client of empire.

In this sense, Hindutva is not an Indian revolution but a Western reaction transplanted to Indian soil a fascism in Sanskrit. It borrows the Nazi’s ethnic chauvinism, the British Empire’s bureaucratic cruelty, and the American cult of the market. It promises a golden past but manufactures a gray present a nation of malls, mobs, and moral policing.

Yet no amount of imported fascism can erase the contradictions of this land. India is too old, too plural, too chaotic to be reduced to one scripture or one race. Every time Hindutva tries to harden identity, the cracks appear: a Dalit student quoting Ambedkar in Hyderabad, a Kashmiri poet refusing silence, a tribal woman guarding her forest in Bastar. The revolution Hindutva fears most is not foreign it’s buried beneath its own soil, waiting to breathe again.

Then let’s keep walking through the same corridor of history, only now the walls close in around women first. Because before Hindutva made the Muslim its primary enemy, it made the woman its first property.

Every nationalist project needs a body to sanctify and a body to control. In the Hindutva imagination, womanhood is not a personhood it’s territory. Bharat Mata, the “Mother India,” is drawn as pure, fertile, veiled, needing protection from the “invader.” Her protection justifies the violence that follows. From the 1920s, the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha began shaping this theology of purity. Savarkar’s writings on “virility” were obsessed with the idea that Hindus had become weak because their women were “dishonored” by Muslims. Golwalkar took this further to preserve the nation meant preserving caste, endogamy, and control over female sexuality.

That is the root. Everything after is the bloom of that poison. By the 1980s, as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement gathered steam, women were mobilized into the street not as autonomous citizens, but as symbols. Sadhvi Rithambara’s speeches before the Babri Masjid demolition dripped with the language of sexual revenge the temple must be rebuilt to restore the honor of violated Hindu womanhood. And when the mob climbed the dome in Ayodhya in 1992, they chanted not about God but about the womb “Ram ke naam par badla lenge!” (“We will take revenge in Ram’s name!”). The violence that followed in Bombay, in Surat, in Delhi, always followed the same pattern: the woman’s body as battlefield.

But Hindutva’s gender politics didn’t stop at hate; it found ways to market itself as empowerment. After 2014, when Modi’s BJP took power, slogans like “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” wrapped patriarchy in neoliberal fabric. On the surface: girls’ education, sanitary pads, toilets. Underneath: the same message protect the Hindu daughter from the Muslim man. “Love Jihad” became the new demon, a conspiracy theory born in Sangh think tanks and circulated through WhatsApp universities. It turned every interfaith romance into a national emergency, every Muslim boy into an infiltrator, every Hindu girl into national property.

This politics of purity expanded to the queer body. The same forces that preached cow protection and temple restoration also fought to preserve Section 377, the colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality. The irony is almost too neat Hindutva opposes Western “decadence,” yet enforces a Victorian morality imported by the British. It fears queerness because queerness dismantles hierarchy it dissolves the binary that caste, gender, and religion depend on. In a society where everyone must know their “place,” a queer existence is blasphemy.

When the Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality in 2018, the RSS issued a cautious acceptance not because it changed, but because it learned to camouflage. Now they speak of “acceptance” as long as “Indian culture” defines its limits. That’s the new face of saffron liberalism: tolerance as branding, freedom as marketing. Pride parades are allowed in Gurgaon as long as they sell credit cards and rainbow flags from Reliance malls. The queer movement, once led by working-class and Dalit activists in Mumbai and Hyderabad, is slowly being sterilized its slogans replaced by corporate HR hashtags.

And in the countryside, the women who fight the real battles for land, water, survival remain invisible. In Bastar, where Adivasi women organize against Salwa Judum and mining displacement, the state answers with the same logic as the zamindars of old: rape as intimidation, humiliation as order. Between 2005 and 2012, hundreds of cases were documented by fact-finding teams, names erased from official records but alive in testimonies Kopa Kunjam, Hidme Markam, Sukma’s unnamed daughters. Their resistance is not feminist by academic definition; it is survival. Yet it is precisely this kind of rebellion Hindutva fears, because it cannot co-opt it into temple politics or Instagram slogans.

Even the so-called liberal opposition has played along. When Congress governments jailed tribal activists under anti-terror laws, when NGOs were forced to close for receiving “foreign funds,” the ideological continuity was clear. Hindutva does not need to directly control you if it can train your institutions to act like it. And every time the state criminalizes a protest whether it’s a farmer in Punjab or a student in JNU it performs a ritual learned from colonial masters: discipline the body, erase the voice, claim moral superiority.

Women’s liberation under Hindutva is like a mirror it reflects only the faces they approve of. The rest, it shatters. Ask the women of Shaheen Bagh, who stood in winter cold for months in 2019–2020 against the Citizenship Amendment Act, carrying the Constitution in one hand and their children in another. They were called “anti-nationals,” “Pakistani puppets,” “shameless.” But what they really did was reclaim India’s spiritual center they proved that resistance can be maternal, that revolution can wear a hijab.

That’s the real threat to Hindutva’s order. Because it cannot imagine strength outside masculinity, or faith outside ownership. Every woman, every queer person, every caste rebel who refuses to fit inside their nationalist costume tears a hole in the saffron fabric.

Then the saffron mask learned to smile. Once the riots and demolitions had done their work, once blood had baptized the nation, Hindutva discovered the genius of capital that power lasts longer when it is profitable. The first phase, from 1925 to 2002, was about domination through fear. The next, from 2002 to 2025, became about domination through aspiration. And nobody fused those better than Narendra Modi.

Modi didn’t invent neoliberal Hindutva; he perfected it. After the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, which killed over a thousand Muslims (officially) and displaced tens of thousands, the Western world briefly turned its back visa bans, condemnations, symbolic outrage. But capital never holds grudges. By 2005, U.S. think tanks like the Asia Society and the Hudson Institute were already floating the “Gujarat Model” as a success story: high GDP growth, massive privatization, foreign investment zones. The genocide was reframed as “law and order restoration.” The same language used for Chile under Pinochet, Indonesia under Suharto, and apartheid South Africa’s “security measures.”

By the time Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, Hindutva had merged entirely with the market. The RSS no longer needed to march in uniforms; it wore suits and ran conglomerates. Adani, Ambani, Vedanta their fortunes multiplied with every government contract, every land grab disguised as “Make in India.” Adivasi lands were auctioned to mining corporations, environmental clearances were diluted, labor laws dismantled. And every protest whether in Niyamgiri, Baghjan, or Jharkhand was silenced as “anti-development.” The state and the corporation no longer shared power; they had become the same entity.

The co-optation went beyond economics. Every resistance symbol was appropriated, repackaged, sold back at a markup. Gandhi was turned into a cleanliness mascot. Ambedkar, who called Brahminism “spiritual fascism,” was rebranded as a champion of “Hindu social reform.” His face appeared on government posters while Dalit students like Rohith Vemula were driven to death in universities. The RSS began holding “Ambedkar Jayanti” marches to prove that caste no longer existed even as manual scavengers continued to die cleaning septic tanks in Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

The feminist slogans of the 1970s “Azaadi” and “My Body, My Choice” reappeared in the 2020s, printed on Zara T-shirts, drained of politics, sold in malls owned by the same billionaires funding lynch mobs. Queer visibility too became a market sector. Corporate India learned that diversity sells better than justice. Pride campaigns were sponsored by companies that refused to unionize trans workers or pay fair wages. What the market cannot crush, it digests.

This is Hindutva’s genius: it doesn’t erase dissent, it brands it. You can be a “progressive” influencer, post rainbow flags and feminist quotes, as long as you never question privatization, caste hierarchies, or the military occupation of Kashmir. You can demand representation in ads, not redistribution of power. Your rebellion must look good on Instagram. This is the neoliberal reeducation camp teach the oppressed to speak the language of empowerment while selling them the instruments of their exploitation.

Meanwhile, the structural violence deepened. Between 2014 and 2024, lynchings of Muslims and Dalits were livestreamed on Facebook and justified as “cow protection.” The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) became the state’s favorite tool over 5,000 arrests, 97% without conviction, used to imprison activists, journalists, students. The Bhima Koregaon case turned the mere possession of Marxist literature into terrorism. Sudha Bharadwaj, a lawyer defending Adivasi workers, spent years in jail without trial. Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who fought for tribal land rights, died in custody after being denied basic medical care.

The pattern is unmistakable Hindutva doesn’t want silence, it wants performance. It wants the oppressed to perform their suffering within acceptable limits, never to organize. Dalits can protest lynchings, but not demand land. Muslims can ask for safety, but not equality. Women can call for empowerment, but not emancipation. Queer people can celebrate pride, but not revolution. Every movement must end where the stock market begins.

And yet, the cracks keep widening. Farmers, in the largest protest in human history, occupied Delhi’s borders for over a year between 2020 and 2021. They faced tear gas, arrests, cold, and death and they won. The farm laws were repealed. It was the first defeat for Modi’s corporate-Hindutva state. The farmers’ slogans were secular, collective, and deeply Indian: “Kisan Mazdoor Ekta Zindabad.” They reminded the country that solidarity, not purity, is what sustains revolutions.

That’s the quiet truth Hindutva cannot digest its power depends on division, and every act of unity, however small, poisons it from within. It can buy headlines, but not history. It can brand rebellion, but not bury it.

Hindutva, since its earliest articulations, had never been an isolated phenomenon. It was born in the same global furnace that forged fascism in Europe. When V.D. Savarkar published Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? in 1923, Mussolini was already rising in Italy and Hitler was writing Mein Kampf in a Munich prison. The ideological climate was one of fear of communism, of equality, of the colonized waking up. Across continents, the ruling classes were seeking new myths to unify their fractured societies through race, blood, and faith. Savarkar’s Hindutva was the Indian variation on that theme: a fusion of racial nationalism and religious revivalism, designed to turn caste hierarchies and Brahminical supremacy into patriotic duty.

But Hindutva didn’t just imitate European fascism; it studied it systematically. In 1931, B.S. Moonje, the mentor of RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar, visited Italy and met Mussolini personally. He attended youth parades, inspected military schools, and returned to India praising Mussolini’s “discipline, nationalism, and unity.” Moonje founded the Bhonsala Military School in Nashik in 1937 to replicate those fascist methods physical training, ideological indoctrination, and loyalty to a singular leader. Hedgewar, inspired by that model, expanded the RSS’s shakhas (branches) across the country, teaching young men to salute the saffron flag and drill in militarized routines.

While Europe burned in the 1930s, the RSS watched, learned, and cheered. When Hitler passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, the RSS mouthpiece Organizer published glowing editorials calling Nazi Germany “a good lesson for us in Hindustan.” They admired Hitler’s racial policies not for their brutality but for their efficiency in uniting a fractured people under a single identity. Golwalkar’s 1939 tract We, or Our Nationhood Defined explicitly stated that India should emulate Germany’s handling of its “racial problem” where minorities existed “wholly subordinate to the national race.” It was a blueprint for ethnic fascism draped in the language of cultural revival.

Post-independence, Hindutva went underground but never vanished. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, an RSS sympathizer, in 1948 forced a temporary ban on the organization. But by the 1950s, it had quietly rebuilt through front groups the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (founded 1951), student unions, and religious charities. The ideological lineage stayed intact: racialized nationalism, patriarchal order, militarized youth, and absolute obedience to authority.

The global turn came later. In the 1970s, when the United States began funding anti-communist forces worldwide, the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha found ideological allies in American Christian fundamentalists. Both feared socialism, both preached “traditional family values,” both saw feminism and secularism as moral decay. The Sangh’s overseas armsHSS (Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh) in the U.S., Hindu Sevika Samiti in the U.K. raised millions through temple networks and diaspora organizations. They learned from the American right how to package religious chauvinism as “cultural pride.” The same donors funding Reagan’s Moral Majority sent checks to RSS-linked NGOs.

By the 1990s, as India liberalized its economy under IMF pressure, Hindutva liberalized its propaganda. The Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 was broadcast like a media spectacle, not a riot. Advani’s Rath Yatra was the prototype for Trump’s rallies and Bolsonaro’s caravans: demagoguery on wheels, televised rage. Global networks of power amplified it. The British-Indian media played along. Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV gave airtime to RSS narratives in the name of “balance.” American think tanks like the Heritage Foundation hosted BJP leaders as defenders of “free markets and democracy.” The fascist aesthetics masculine nationalism, family sanctity, corporate order now had a neoliberal vocabulary.

Under Modi, the synthesis became complete. Hindutva learned from America’s Christian nationalists how to use “religious freedom” as a shield for majoritarian rule. It borrowed Israel’s model of occupation, surveillance, and apartheid from biometric databases to the “surgical strike” doctrine in Kashmir. It mimicked Britain’s colonial counterinsurgency tactics in Bastar and the Northeast. The so-called cow protection squads mirrored America’s militias, and WhatsApp propaganda copied Cambridge Analytica’s algorithms. Every part of the machine was transnational.

Even the aesthetics the image of the ideal Hindu man, muscular and obedient came from the West. RSS iconography blended Nazi color palettes with Silicon Valley design. The saffron flag replaced the swastika, but the language remained: purity, discipline, destiny. Modi’s PR teams hired Western firms like APCO Worldwide (which previously rebranded dictatorships in Kazakhstan and Nigeria) to craft his global image. They produced glossy videos of “Digital India,” “Swachh Bharat,” “Incredible India” slogans indistinguishable from corporate advertising. It was not coincidence; it was fascism marketed as development.

And yet, beneath the surface, the contradictions only deepen. The ideology that once claimed to reject Western dominance now survives entirely through it. The RSS’s worldview was molded by Europe’s worst nightmares; its empire thrives on American capital. The Hindu right’s anti-colonial mask hides the reality that it became the colonizer’s most obedient student. Every multinational entering India today Amazon, Meta, ExxonMobil, BlackRock has the regime’s blessings, tax exemptions, and protection. The RSS has become what it once claimed to resist: the broker between empire and the oppressed.

Hindutva’s project of domination did not only unfold through temples, elections, or textbooks; it dug its roots into the most intimate terrain of all gender, sexuality, reproduction. From the very beginning, the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha saw women not as individuals but as biological vessels for the nation. In the writings of Savarkar and Golwalkar, the “Hindu woman” was simultaneously sacred and subordinate the womb of the race, the keeper of chastity, the silent mother of warriors. Liberation was never on offer; only glorified servitude wrapped in ritual purity.

In the early decades, Hindutva’s patriarchy tried to overwrite the social turmoil unleashed by reformist and leftist movements. The 1920s and 1930s had seen women from peasant and working-class backgrounds entering public life in trade unions, in anti-colonial protests, in the Communist Party’s ranks. The Hindu right responded with moral panic. The Mahasabha’s journals printed hysterical essays warning that “modern” women, educated and mobile, would “corrupt the Hindu home.” The RSS women’s wing, Rashtra Sevika Samiti, founded in 1936, was set up not to empower but to discipline teaching cooking, ritual chanting, and ideological obedience. The revolutionary woman of the Left was rewritten into the obedient wife of the nation.

By the 1950s and 60s, when socialist and feminist debates were gaining traction in independent India, Hindutva found a convenient enemy: the secular state itself. Every attempt to codify gender equality in the Hindu Code Bills was attacked by the RSS and Mahasabha as “an assault on Hindu tradition.” They claimed the reforms which simply gave women rights to property and divorce were “foreign,” “Western,” and “against dharma.” It’s one of the great historical ironies that the same movement which imported fascist ideas from Europe now pretended to defend India from “foreign influence.”

Then came the television age the great ideological multiplier. In the 1980s, serials like Ramayan and Mahabharat were turned into moral lessons on national womanhood. The ideal Sita became the prototype for the Hindu citizen: loyal, suffering, pure, and unquestioning. The Ram Janmabhoomi campaign fused these mythologies with militant politics. Every demolished brick of the Babri Masjid was sanctified through the imagery of violated womanhood Bharat Mata’s honor supposedly defiled by “foreign invaders.” Hindutva’s gender politics were never about protecting women; they were about mobilizing men.

The 1990s brought globalization, and with it, new contradictions. Liberalization exposed India to consumer feminism and global media jeans, call centers, television anchors, the language of choice. The BJP realized repression alone would not suffice. So it shifted tactics: co-opt the language of empowerment but empty it of substance. “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” was born a slogan that sounded feminist but was always patriarchal at its core. The “daughter” was to be educated, yes, but never liberated; her education was meant to serve the family, not herself. Meanwhile, the same government cut funding for women’s safety, refused to criminalize marital rape, and blamed victims for their assault.

In Gujarat, during the 2002 pogrom, the gendered logic of Hindutva revealed itself in its rawest form. Muslim women were not just murdered; they were assaulted with ritualized cruelty. The violence had a message: purity must be restored through pollution, the “motherland” cleansed through the bodies of its supposed defilers. Decades later, the same narratives reappeared in anti-Muslim propaganda around “love jihad” a conspiracy theory that Muslim men were seducing Hindu women to weaken the race. It was eugenics repackaged for the digital age, and the RSS’s media ecosystem amplified it endlessly.

By the 2010s, the Hindutva state had perfected its control over gender by merging patriarchy with capitalism. The very corporations funding women’s empowerment ads Tata, Reliance, Infosys were the same ones donating to the BJP’s election funds. Patriarchy became a brand, a pinkwashed commodity. Female influencers wore saffron kurtas while preaching submission as “culture.” Feminism was recast as treachery. When women protested in Shaheen Bagh or against farm laws, the propaganda machine called them “puppets,” “anti-national,” “funded by Soros.”

Even queerness, once dismissed as degeneracy, was appropriated for optics. As global capital demanded inclusivity, the BJP posed with rainbow flags while jailing trans activists and censoring queer art. The message was consistent: you may exist, but only on our terms. It’s the same hypocrisy that allowed Savarkar a man who once wrote erotic letters to his male comrades to become the idol of a regime that bans books about same-sex love.

Hindutva’s entire moral order depends on fear: of women who choose, of men who refuse to dominate, of anyone whose identity cannot be contained by caste, faith, or gender. It’s why every “reform” it offers is a reassertion of control. The RSS may hold matru vandana ceremonies, but its women cannot lead; it may build toilets for “dignity,” but it kills Dalit women who try to claim their land; it may talk of protecting girls, but it parades them as proof of national pride.

And yet, resistance keeps emerging in the spaces they cannot colonize in the forests of Bastar where Adivasi women lead guerrilla units, in the textile mills where Dalit women organize unions, in the classrooms where queer students tear saffron posters off the walls. Each act of defiance, however small, tears a hole in the sacred veil of Hindutva morality.

After 2014, Hindutva stopped pretending it was merely a cultural movement. It became a corporate brand streamlined, data-driven, and globally marketable. The old shakha discipline of khaki shorts and bamboo sticks gave way to PR firms, social media war rooms, and billion-dollar campaign machinery. Where once the RSS paraded barefoot in dusty maidans, now it curated hashtags and influencer deals. The saffron flag had merged with the corporate logo.

The turning point wasn’t ideological it was financial. The 2016 electoral bonds scheme legalized anonymous political funding, effectively allowing India’s richest corporations to bankroll the BJP in secret. In return, they received deregulation, privatization, and the systematic dismantling of labor protections. Adani, Ambani, Vedanta names that once operated quietly in boardrooms became synonymous with governance itself. “Nationalism” was no longer a feeling; it was an investment portfolio. Hindutva became the moral arm of neoliberalism, giving greed a holy face.

The corporate media followed suit. Channels that once claimed neutrality now functioned as state propaganda outlets. Republic TV, Times Now, Zee News each became a stage where fascism wore a business suit. Every night, primetime anchors screamed down dissenters in the language of patriotism. The poor were told their hunger was sacrifice. The rich were told their profit was service. When farmers surrounded Delhi in protest, the same journalists who praised Gandhi’s Salt March called these farmers “terrorists.”

In universities, the ideological purge began quietly. The syllabi of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, and Ambedkar University were rewritten to delete subversive thought. Fanon, Marx, Ambedkar, and even Periyar were replaced by Savarkar and “Vedic Science.” The state didn’t burn books it simply stopped printing them. RSS affiliates entered academia disguised as “think tanks,” and NGOs that promoted secularism were accused of “anti-national activities.” Knowledge itself became contraband.

The alliance between Hindutva and neoliberalism wasn’t accidental. It was structural. Global capital has always preferred regimes that can suppress dissent without moral friction. The Modi government offered exactly that: a vast, docile labor force, stripped of union power and silenced by patriotic guilt. When the pandemic hit, millions of migrant workers were abandoned on highways, walking hundreds of kilometers barefoot. The same government that refused them food launched a campaign celebrating “self-reliance.” Hunger was renamed virtue.

And yet, beneath the economic brutality lay a cultural reprogramming so total that resistance began to feel like blasphemy. Movies like The Kashmir Files, Uri, and Gadar 2 rewrote history into nationalist myth. Web series glorified army men and vilified activists. Bollywood, once capable of minor subversion, became an auxiliary of the regime. Muslim characters disappeared except as villains or terrorists; Dalit stories were scrubbed from scripts. Every love story became a sermon in disguise.

Even the aesthetics of rebellion were commodified. The government co-opted yoga, khadi, and even Ambedkar’s face packaging them as symbols of a “New India.” Corporations sponsored Independence Day ads quoting Tagore, while their factories destroyed the same environment he worshipped. The revolution was aestheticized into a filter saffron and sepia tones masking surveillance and poverty. Obedience became aspirational.

And surveillance was the final ingredient. The Aadhaar project, once sold as welfare efficiency, turned into a massive tracking system. Pegasus spyware, used against journalists and activists, exposed the state’s fear of information itself. Every tweet, every post, every WhatsApp forward became a data point in a vast algorithm of control. Dissent was not just punished; it was preempted. The internet, once the tool of liberation, became the cage itself.

Hindutva learned from its predecessors. Where Mussolini built mass hysteria through radio, Modi built it through WhatsApp. Where the Nazis created a ministry of propaganda, the BJP outsourced it to millions of unpaid “IT cell” volunteers, who flood timelines with hate memes and disinformation. Islamophobia, casteism, misogyny all were gamified, reduced to viral content. The fascist imagination no longer needed censorship; it had achieved virality.

Meanwhile, the very same neoliberal world that claims to champion human rights rewarded this project. Western governments hailed India as “the world’s largest democracy.” Silicon Valley tech firms signed data deals with the state. American billionaires praised Modi as a “visionary.” Global capital doesn’t mind fascism; it minds instability. And Hindutva’s genius lies in selling repression as stability.

Yet for all its control, something remains unmanageable. Every act of resistance from Bhima Koregaon to Shaheen Bagh, from Hathras to Bastar refuses the algorithm. Each time the state crushes a protest, new ones emerge from the ashes. The working poor, Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis, queers, and women those the state most wants erased are also the ones who keep reappearing, inventing new forms of defiance. Hindutva and neoliberalism can buy data, airtime, and armies, but they cannot buy truth.

By the late 2010s, the machinery of Indian democracy had been hollowed from within. The façade remained the elections, the speeches, the ink on the finger but the substance was gone. Institutions that once mediated power had been domesticated. The judiciary, once capable of standing against emergency powers in 1977, now flinched at the mere mention of contempt. The same Supreme Court that had declared privacy a fundamental right looked away when journalists were hacked by Pegasus. Cases involving lynchings, hate crimes, and constitutional violations lingered for years. Bail became a privilege for the powerful, not a right for the accused.

The Election Commission, once a neutral referee, turned partisan by omission. When Modi’s party used religion in campaigns a constitutional offense the Commission “took note.” When opposition parties sought fair access to media, it “reserved comment.” Even the judiciary’s language began to change. Judges once wrote verdicts; now they delivered sermons about “national duty” and “development.” The law, which once restrained the state, now disciplined the citizen.

The same rot spread through the bureaucracy. Governors acted as party agents, universities were run by RSS appointees, and police forces in states like Uttar Pradesh became political militias. The language of neutrality disappeared. The term “anti-national” replaced “dissent.” In every press briefing, the home minister and his subordinates spoke of “urban Naxals,” a category so elastic it could include anyone with a book, a beard, or a conscience.

Media consolidation was the regime’s most efficient coup. Corporate mergers reduced hundreds of newspapers and channels into a handful of conglomerates Reliance, Adani, Essel, and the Times Group all with deep ties to the government. The result was not censorship but consent. Editors began to self-censor; reporters rewrote truth into narrative. The investigative journalist became an endangered species. When the Wire, Scroll, and Alt News exposed the government’s lies, they faced raids, defamation suits, and digital attacks. The line between propaganda and journalism dissolved.

The electoral process, too, became a managed performance. Data analytics firms like Cambridge Analytica’s Indian affiliates and BJP’s own "Panna Pramukh" system micro-targeted voters with personalized misinformation. In 2019, over 50% of all political ads on Facebook were pro-BJP, funded through shell accounts. WhatsApp, with its encrypted intimacy, became the new ballot box. There was no need for ballot-stuffing when minds could be programmed beforehand.

Even opposition parties internalized the language of Hindutva. The Congress invoked “soft Hindutva” to survive, adopting temple tours and saffron symbolism. Regional parties avoided criticizing Modi directly, fearing backlash from majoritarian voters. Secularism, the founding principle of India’s republic, was quietly rebranded as “appeasement.” The RSS had won not just the state, but the vocabulary of politics itself.

In this environment, the language of the Constitution liberty, equality, fraternity sounded almost subversive. When Dalits quoted Ambedkar, they were accused of incitement. When Muslims invoked Nehru, they were told to “go to Pakistan.” When women protested at Shaheen Bagh, they were accused of being paid actors. The very idea of citizenship was racialized. The NRC and CAA turned the right to belong into a bureaucratic privilege, demanding that the poorest prove their ancestry while billionaires naturalized their offshore wealth.

Democracy had been replaced by what the political theorist Wendy Brown once called “authoritarian liberalism” elections without equality, markets without freedom. The state no longer served the people; it managed them like a workforce. Every institution from universities to the courts existed to stabilize capital and punish deviation. Even the NGOs that once worked for the poor were forced to register under draconian foreign funding laws, while right-wing religious organizations flourished tax-free.

And yet, resistance persisted, fragmented but alive. Farmers encircled the capital for over a year, braving winter and repression, until the government was forced to repeal its corporate-friendly farm laws. Students from Jamia to JNU continued to organize underground reading groups, teaching Marx and Ambedkar under surveillance cameras. In Kashmir, in Manipur, in Bastar the peripheries of the republic resistance took on older, harder forms: survival itself as defiance.

The myth of the “world’s largest democracy” had become a brand, exported to global investors and liberal think tanks. But the reality inside was closer to managed fascism where elections legitimize rule, not contest it; where capitalism needs religion to sanctify inequality; and where the people’s faith in democracy becomes the state’s most efficient weapon.

The machinery of power under Hindutva didn’t only capture institutions; it captured culture. School textbooks became vessels of curated memory, teaching children not history but loyalty. Ancient battles were retold to glorify “Hindu heroes,” while the voices of Muslim rulers, Dalit revolts, and tribal resistance were erased or diminished. Literature festivals faced censorship; plays were canceled for “hurting religious sentiments,” and social media campaigns demonized authors and artists who challenged orthodoxy. Bollywood scripts were subtly retooled, celebrating hyper-nationalist narratives while silencing stories of dissent.

Corporate media, aligned with state ideology, began producing reality shows and celebrity profiles that normalized hierarchy, obedience, and consumerism as virtues. The idea of questioning authority became a social transgression. Universities saw the rise of saffron clubs, funded through trusts with opaque links to the government. Student unions that once organized protests against privatization or communal violence now operated under the shadow of party-appointed leaders, and scholarship funds were strategically directed to compliant students.

Even environmental struggles were reframed. The displacement of Adivasis in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha for mining projects was painted as “development,” while protests were labeled “anti-national.” The forests and rivers that sustained generations of tribal people were commodified, sold to private corporations, and marketed internationally as “green investment opportunities.” Resistance was criminalized, and activists were accused of links to Maoist insurgents, further blurring the line between legitimate dissent and terrorism in public perception.

Simultaneously, the Hindutva agenda infiltrated civil society. NGOs advocating women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, or minority protections faced funding cuts and audits, while right-wing religious groups expanded programs promoting patriarchal norms and rigid caste hierarchies. Marriage counseling, sex education, and gender studies became battlegrounds, not classrooms, as the state sought to normalize conservative family structures and erase intersectional understandings of oppression.

The economy itself became a tool of social engineering. Privatization and foreign investment flowed into urban centers, concentrating wealth in pockets of Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru, while rural areas were left dependent on exploitative contracts, forced labor, and land grabs. Labor laws were loosened; unions weakened; collective bargaining shrank. The same hand that wielded religion and caste as instruments of control now wielded money to discipline bodies and minds alike.

Yet under this pervasive control, fissures appeared. Farmers, workers, students, and Adivasis continued to organize, leveraging digital networks, underground publications, and cultural resistance. The very tools of capitalism and propaganda social media, corporate funding, global attention were repurposed by activists to expose the machinery of oppression. The state’s attempts to monopolize truth and history collided with the persistent, stubborn reality that the oppressed remembered, spoke, and acted.

This cultural and economic capture is not just about power. It is about the re-engineering of society itself redefining who counts as citizen, whose stories are worthy, whose bodies matter, and whose labor is disposable. The transformation is deep, subtle, and systemic, but it also provokes reaction, organizing, and rebellion.

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