The Uncomfortable Truth: How Well-Intentioned Ideas May Have Paved the Way for Hindu Nationalism
What if I told you that the intellectual framework for the Hindu rashtra—the very ideas that underpin its current rise—weren't solely built by those in saffron robes and khaki shorts?
What if, for decades, some of India's most celebrated, radical, and progressive intellectuals, in their noble quest to decolonize the Indian mind, inadvertently sharpened the very knives now being used to wound the Indian republic?
This is the difficult, uncomfortable, yet profoundly important argument laid out with devastating clarity by scholar Meera Nanda in her latest book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism. It's a crucial point to grasp because an idea that originates in a university seminar doesn't simply remain there; it travels from academic journals to political rallies and ultimately influences the laws that govern our lives. This is the story of how seemingly well-intentioned academic theories became strange bedfellows with political forces, contributing in five crucial ways to the current landscape.
1. Turning Criticism into Treason: The "Mental Slavery" Mantra
The academic theory initially sounded radical and even noble. For years, influential postcolonial thinkers, such as Ashish Nandi in his book The Intimate Enemy and Parachhati, argued that the gravest crime of colonialism wasn't just the theft of resources but the "colonization of the mind". They posited that Western ideas – concepts like science, rationality, secularism, and the rule of law – constituted a "mental cage". To think within these frameworks, they argued, was to be a "pathetic copy," suffering from "mental slavery".
Does that phrase, "mental slavery" (Gulami Ki Maansikta), ring a bell? It should, because it has now become the official ideology of the Indian state. The Prime Minister himself frequently speaks of shedding this "slave mentality," dishonestly lumping centuries of Mughal rule with the British Raj as "1200 years of slavery". This very premise forms the backbone of massively popular books like J Saiak's India That Is Bhat, which openly calls for the tearing up of the Indian constitution on the grounds that it is merely a "colonial document".
The connection is direct and chilling: the postcolonial left provided the Hindu right with both the intellectual framework and the moral legitimacy for their project. They made it fashionable to view universal ideas as "foreign poison". Consequently, when you now defend scientific temper, you're not just engaging in policy debate; you're branded a "Macaulay putra" – a child of the coloniser. When you advocate for secularism, you're not upholding the constitution; you're accused of possessing a "slave mentality". This weaponisation of an academic critique has transformed genuine dissent into accusations of treason, shifting the battleground from reasoned debate to identity-based denunciation.
2. Making Science Just Another Belief System: The Relativisation of Truth
Another powerful academic idea that took root was the notion that modern science is not a universal truth. Influential figures like Wandana Shiva and Claude Alvarez argued that science was merely an "ethnoscience," specifically that of the "Christian West". They claimed its objectivity was a myth, and therefore, it was arrogant to judge traditional Indian knowledge systems, such as astrology or ritual healing, by the standards of modern science. Their core assertion was that "all knowledge systems... are equal".
The result of this relativisation of truth has been, as the video states, an "absolute carnival of absurdity promoted by the state itself". We've seen preposterous claims at the Indian Science Congress that ancient Indians flew airplanes. The Ayush ministry, flush with public money, makes dangerous and unsubstantiated claims about curing everything from COVID-19 to cancer. Even "Vedic mathematics" – a collection of calculation tricks that are neither genuinely Vedic nor truly mathematics – is now being pushed in schools, packaged as ancient wisdom.
The logic is simple and insidious: if science is just one Western way of knowing things, then "who's to say that Vic science isn't the Indian way?". By flattening the intellectual landscape and stripping away the authority of universal truth, these intellectuals created an intellectual vacuum. Into this vacuum, "state-backed superstition [has come] marching proudly under the flag of decolonization".
3. Attacking Secularism as a Foreign Disease: Undermining a Foundational Principle
For decades, brilliant minds like Tian Madan and Ashish Nandi told us that secularism was an "alien concept to India," a European construct stemming from the historical struggle between the church and the state. India, they contended, possessed its "own natural authentic way of being tolerant".
This sophisticated academic critique has provided a ready intellectual source for the crude political jibe of "pseudocularism" that we hear so often today. The Hindu right doesn't claim to be against secularism; instead, they declare themselves to be for "true secularism that respects the faith of the Hindu majority". This exact logic was invoked to justify the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act. New intellectual warriors of the right, from Rajiv Malhotra to the Kent school, have eagerly amplified this very argument: that secularism is a "Christian idea unfit for a dharmic land".
But let's be honest about this "natural tolerance" of the past. What was it, truly? Often, it was the "tolerance of the cast system" – communities living separately and unequally, governed by "brutal divinely ordained rules of purity and pollution". It was decidedly not a tolerance between free and equal citizens. The secular state, despite its flaws, holds the profound promise that an individual possesses rights against the so-called mob. By branding this vital promise as foreign, these intellectual critiques have severely "weaken[ed] the very wall that was meant to protect" individual liberties.
4. Romanticising the "Pure God-Loving Common Man": Fueling Populist Poison
Another academic theory involved the idealisation of the "subaltern" – the ordinary, non-elite Indian – as a "reservoir of pure authentic tradition". The historian Deep Chakraarti, in his hugely influential work Provincializing Europe, even urged us to accept the supernatural beliefs of the people – their gods and spirits – not merely as metaphors, but as reality itself. Their religiosity, in this framework, was cast as a "noble resistance against the cold modern state".
This intellectual romanticisation perfectly mirrors the populist poison disseminated by the Hindu right today. They claim to be the "sole voice of the pure people, the simple god-fearing Hindu, against a corrupt English-speaking dassinated elite". This narrative is the very "engine driving the entire temple movement," from Ayodhya to Kashi. The underlying argument is clear: the "faith of the people must crush the facts of law and history".
In their championing of this "authentic faith," its intellectual proponents conveniently ignored its darker side. They overlooked the "iron cage of cast, the subjugation of women, the violence of superstition". They inadvertently created a false choice: "you are either with the people and their faith or you are a westernized enemy". The Hindu right simply walked into this intellectually prepared space and declared, "we are the people, we are the faith".
The Chilling Warning: A Weimar Analogy
This brings us to a final, chilling warning. Scholar Miraandanda draws a comparison that should make us all pause: she argues that the intellectual climate in India today mirrors that of the Weimar Republic in Germany during the 1920s. There, too, brilliant "conservative revolutionaries" – philosophers like Heidegger and jurists like KL Schmidt – despised liberal democracy. They "launched a total war on reason and science in the name of an authentic German culture". Their intellectual revolt against the Enlightenment, however, did not create the romantic utopia they envisioned. Instead, it "created an atmosphere of anti-rationalism and contempt for democracy that prepared the ground... for the Nazis to seize power".
The ultimate warning is not that these left intellectuals are fascists; that is a crude and false claim. The true danger lies in the fact that their ideas, "when pursued without a vigilant sense of the political consequences," can create a "wasteland where only monsters can thrive".
What Are We, the Citizens, Supposed to Do?
We are supposed to think. To defend reason is not to be a slave to the West; it is to be an heir to India's own magnificent traditions of dissent, from the Buddha and the Lokayatas to Foolkar, who dared to question the gods of their time. To defend secularism is not to be "dassinated"; it is to defend the one principle that allows a nation of a billion and a half people, of every faith and no faith, to live together as equals under the law.
The struggle against communal fascism demands more, not less, of the critical thinking and unflinching, evidence-based reason that these fashionable theories sought to discard. The architecture of our republic, battered as it may be, is the only shelter we have. To help tear it down in the name of an imaginary pure past is to invite a truly dark future.
One must think, and think with rigor. That is the only way.
