Fascistic ideologies, religious or political, can never soar too high. The vast majority of sane voices in India must realize that the Hindutva ideology should meet the same fate as it did in the West once in history. However, if this Hindutva obsession does not fall apart, it will burgeon into an uncontrollable, unaccountable, palpable deep state that runs on its precepts.

India today has turned into a smoldering cauldron of religious intolerance, hate, outright bitterness, and spiteful contempt concerning its minorities, which, with time, seems to be gaining momentum. Alhough all minorities, in general, are facing existential challenges, Muslims, in particular, seem to be the center of possibly the worst of hostilities and virulence. The country has reached a state of affairs where the very survival of the minorities poses a looming question mark. The Bharat ‘Tiranga’ which means three colors, bearing white and green and representing minorities and Muslims respectively, are now being swallowed by the saffron. Being a Muslim in India today is a nemesis. These are those Muslims whose ancestors chose India over Pakistan during the partition. The widow and handicapped grandmother of this scribe, being herself the descendant as well as the wife of the Indian freedom fighters who gave their lives in the struggle for Indian freedom, chose to stay back till her nephew, whom she had brought up and who was serving in the army compelled her to migrate to this side with him. She undertook the journey with her two daughters and one teenage son (my father). That was the last train to Pakistan. This step was taken because of the unabated vandalism where the children were unsafe. My father and his sister (renowned writer, Altaf Fatima) were held captives in their Hindu-dominated school under the pressure of blood-thirsty Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) warmongers, a right-wing Hindu paramilitary volunteer organization founded by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who had created the ideology of Hindutva. Coming out alive from their vicious claws was no less than a miracle for them. In the face of such barbarity, a wide majority of Muslims chose to stay in India by using their better judgment that normalcy would ultimately return under the patronage and philosophy of Gandhi. This, however, never turned out to be the case. 
Mahatma Gandhi, whose ideology of 'Ahimsa' (respect for all living things and avoidance of violence towards others) precluded not only the act of inflicting a physical injury, but also mental states like evil thoughts, hatred, and even unkind behavior, all of which he saw as manifestations of violence, were brutally bulldozed by the worshippers of hate, smashing under their very feet his vision of people to be the ‘citizens of the world’ rather than religious fanatics. Gandhi was heartbroken when his symbol of the spinning wheel was replaced with that of Ashoka Chakra, thus replacing a symbol representing peace and nonviolence with power and authority. This led him, at one time to move to Pakistan (Noakhali, East Pakistan, which had been a seat of Hindu-Muslim riots) to register his protest in his way. Gandhi, who had survived five assassination attempts, was not spared from such overtures and was finally assassinated on January 30, 1948, at 78 by Nathuram Godse (member of the political party, the Hindu Mahasabha and a member of RSS). With Gandhi finally out of the way, the genie of Hindu fascism with its entire monstrosity emerged, which, today, has engulfed India in its vicious stranglehold. 

With Gandhi finally out of the way, the genie of Hindu fascism with its entire monstrosity emerged, which, today, has engulfed India in its vicious stranglehold. 

To understand this transmutation, we must go a few steps back in history to understand the genesis that helped shape India into its present form. 19th century India, except for minor sporadic religious affrays, was still a place where traditions, languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith. This was, however, the case until 1857, the ‘year of the mutiny’. What happened next in the course of history, and which remained the hallmark of a deliberate and carefully crafted policy, was to drive a wedge between the two communities and can best be summarized in the report to the Board of Control in London by the then Governor General, later Viceroy, Lord Canning (1856-1862):
“The men who fought us in Delhi were of both creeds. As we must rule 150 million people by a handful of Englishmen, let us do it in a manner best calculated to leave them divided” (Canning Papers).
Historian Alex von Tunzelman observes in her book, Indian Summer (widely considered as a rejoinder to Freedom at Midnight), “The British started to define 'communities' based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.” British scholar Yasmin Khan, in her acclaimed history The Great Partition, judges that “Partition stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different and unknowable paths.” Prominent Hindu historians, R. C. Mujamdar, and A. K. Mujamdar confirm “…one factor was responsible to a very large extent for the emergence of the idea of partition of India on communal lines; this was the Hindu Mahasabha…” (Struggle for Freedom, Page 611). 
The Congress masquerading as the champion of secularism too, to start with, had a few giants from the very beginning. Prominent people like Vallabhbhai Patel, Tilak, and Lala Lajpat Rai, spoke of India exclusively as a Hindu nation. Alhough the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS were not mainstream then, owing to the Hitlerian model (with regards to dealing with minorities) so openly professed by them, the imminent threat posed by these fringe groups against Muslims as well as the visible swelling number of their followers could not be ignored. Consequently, the Muslim League, set up originally only to safeguard Muslim representation, finally pushed for a separate state.

It is writing on the wall today that if Modi wins the elections of 2024, not only survival of Muslims and minorities will be at stake, but India’s very own edifice standing on the foundations of a secular democracy housing diversity will perish.

Following the assassination of Mr. Gandhi, the Nehru administration carried out a countrywide crackdown on right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations. As a result, most of their leaders went underground; however, some of them did manage to found a political party by the name of Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the founding fathers of which included L. K. Advani and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which, in 1980, became Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This Hindu nationalist party could only win two seats in the elections of 1984; however, to gain political mileage, the same year, its disciples initiated an organized campaign against Babri Masjid. This gambit worked, and Hindu fanatics started gathering under the flag of BJP. In the 1989 elections, it won 85 seats, which grew to 120 in the 1991 general elections, and became the second largest party of Lok Sabha. The very next year, Babri Masjid was attacked by the zealots of BJP and demolished. This fetched them the required medal, and in 1998, BJP formed the government with Vajpayee as the Prime Minister, thus bringing out the bitter truth–the truth behind the rise of  BJP. 
The emergence of Narendra Modi on the political canvas par excellence was in 2001 when he, as Chief Minister, following the footsteps of his forebears, let loose Hindu goons on the hapless Muslim community of Gujarat. The unprecedented state-sponsored massacre of the Muslim community fetched Modi the victory and premiership in the elections of 2014. With Modi firmly entrenched, the scene began to change for the worse in India with the rise of ‘Hindutva’, a term coined originally in the 1920s by Savarkar himself. The Western press uses a more understood term, ‘Hindu nationalism’ while Indian critics sometimes use the term ‘majoritarianism’ to describe the ‘Hindutva’ mindset–that is, ‘the Hindus should only have rights as they own the nation and this is justified because they form the majority.' Modi’s strategy is to appease the poor masses and the elite. Despite the economic failures of his first term, Modi, with his anti-Pakistan narrative, won a second term in 2019 with an even bigger majority. In Modi’s second term, matters took a serious turn for Indian Muslims.
A nefarious plan for a Hitler-styled reduction of Muslim citizens was hatched. Under this, the government initially brought National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam to decide between bona fide citizens and illegals. It envisaged birth certificates of self and parents. Detention centers on the pattern of concentration camps were established in Assam. Once sent to the camps, the inmate would have no recourse to justice or law as the person was stateless; however, this went awry, as in the case of villages and rural areas, most people do not have birth certificates. Thus, more Hindus were deemed illegal due to the lack of citizenship documents. The plan was to extend the NRC to the whole of India. Still, seeing that more Hindus than Muslims would be deemed stateless, the government sought a way out by creating the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to provide humanitarian refuge to persecuted minorities from three Muslim countries i.e., Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. The CAA provided an escape for Hindus left out of the NRC due to the lack of documents to obtain citizenship by claiming they were persecuted refugees from the neighboring countries. However, that option would be denied to Muslims failing to provide documents or birth certificates. The combined CAA-NRC would then act to send Muslims selectively to concentration camps, and from thereon, it would be a step to a Hitlerian-style genocide that the RSS has always wanted.
A year ago, the Narendra Modi government brought two resolutions related to Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK). The first rendered Article 370 inoperative in IIOJK, which under Article 35A, gave special status to Kashmir in 1954 by applying the power granted under the same article of the constitution. Some of the key powers it guaranteed to the State of Jammu and Kashmir were to bar outsiders from buying property and settling down in the state. It also denied Kashmiri women their right to inheritance should they marry an outsider. The second resolution was for the bifurcation of the State of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union territories–Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. This fulfilled a long-cherished demand of the RSS-BJP since the days of Bharatiya Jana Sangh, whose leader, Syama Prasad Mookerjee died in a Kashmir prison, campaigning against the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. Such autonomous powers enjoyed by Jammu and Kashmir could have been changed only with the concurrence of the state’s Constituent Assembly or the legislative assembly. When the Modi Government brought the two resolutions, the State was under President’s rule under Article 356. The imposition of Article 356 meant that in the absence of the state Legislative Assembly, parliament had the power to make legislative decisions on behalf of the state. The Presidential Order 2019 superseded the one from 1954, ending the separate status it enjoyed for nearly seven decades.
It is writing on the wall today that if Modi wins the elections of 2024, not only survival of Muslims and minorities will be at stake, but India’s very own edifice standing on the foundations of a secular democracy housing diversity will perish. Decades ago, Nehru had foreshadowed the nexus between RSS and BJP as a Cyclops that promulgated Indian-styled fascism. Fascist ideologies, religious or political, can never soar too high. The vast majority of sane voices in India must realize that the Hindutva ideology should meet the same fate as it did in the West once in history. However, if this Hindutva obsession does not fall apart, it will burgeon into an uncontrollable, unaccountable and palpable deep state that runs on its precepts.   

The author is a historian and a regular contributor to The Nation. 
E-mail: [email protected]