How to Talk About Hindutva

What is Hindutva or Hindu supremacy?

Hindutva — literally, “Hinduness” — is a fascist political ideology that emerged in the early 20th century. It seeks to define India as fundamentally a Hindu nation and argues that Hindus should hold a privileged position within Indian society and politics.

Hindutva is centered around a few ideas:

• India should not be a secular democracy, but a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation) or a Hindu theocratic ethno-state. Therefore, India's institutions, laws, and understanding of national identity should be molded around Hindu majoritarianism.
• Hindus are by default superior over non-Hindus.
• Minorities, specifically Muslims and Christians, should be stripped of their human rights, subjected to mass violence, and reduced to second-class citizens.

Hindutva is also an explicitly genocidal ideology, and has been the driving force behind decades of pogroms, mob lynchings, attacks on mosques and Muslim neighborhoods, and a rising tide of hate speech that encourages anti-Muslim violence on a near-daily basis.

Hindutva also enjoys fairly normalized support among the global diaspora, including in the US, where it is often presented as a benign cultural movement or "Hindu pride". Hindutva in liberal spaces, including civil rights spaces, often is not recognized as a dangerous supremacist movement because it is couched in the language of human rights activism. Hindu nationalism often gets packaged as a decolonial framework, and a movement to protect Hindus from harms that are either real or imagined.

Is Hindutva the same as Hinduism?

No. Hinduism is one of the world's oldest religious traditions and encompasses an enormous diversity of beliefs, practices, and traditions. Hindutva, by contrast, is a modern political ideology that emerged in the 20th century and seeks to define Indian national identity through the lens of Hindu supremacy and minority exclusion.

In fact, one of Hindutva's foundational thinkers, Vinayak Damodar (V.D.) Savarkar, explicitly distinguished Hindutva from Hinduism, and instead attempted to frame Hindu identity as a distinct racial category. In his 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva, he wrote:

Doesn't Hindutva just mean “Hinduness,” or taking pride in being Hindu?

In modern times, many Hindu supremacists claim that Hindutva is simply an articulation of cultural or religious pride. In the diaspora especially, this defense is often used to falsely conflate criticism of Hindutva with criticism of Hinduism.

In reality, Savarkar and the other founding ideologues of Hindutva were explicit in their writings and speeches that a core tenet of Hindutva is claiming superiority over non-Hindus, and calling for minorities' subjugation.

Hindutva supporters in India, including elected officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), also use similarly hateful rhetoric to speak about Indian Muslims in the modern day:

Where does Hindutva come from?

Hindutva developed in the early 1920s, during the height of British colonialism. In his 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva, Savarkar attempted to define Hindus as a separate “race” from other communities, tying the idea of a modern Indian nation to a vague idea of Hindu civilization.

In 1925, based off Savarkar's ideas, physician K.B. Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an all-male Hindu supremacist paramilitary group aimed at mainstreaming Hindu supremacy.

M.S. Golwalkar, second chief of the RSS, was just as blatant as Savarkar in professing Hindutva as a fascist anti-minority ideology, claiming that minorities must be “wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges . . . not even citizens' rights.”

Just a few years later, in 1948, Hindutva adherent and former RSS member Nathuram Godse shot and killed Mahatma Gandhi. “I have no doubt,” he said during his trial, “[that] honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof someday in future.”

Over the decades, the RSS would become the central node of what is now called the Sangh Parivar, or “Sangh family” — a network of thousands of organizations, from violent militant groups to charities to political parties, advancing Hindu supremacy in India and across the world.

See the Caravan Magazine's RSS Project: Seeing the Sangh for a comprehensive map of the Sangh Parivar. You can also look up individual organizations to understand the depth of their RSS connections.

Hindutva supporters argue that the ideology has nothing to do with minorities. Is that true?

Hindutva's political project affects India's religious minorities so extensively that the organization Genocide Watch, which tracks the risk of genocide globally, has declared India in a state of emergency. Muslims in particular face extensive discrimination, political targeting, and violence.

Muslim existence has been criminalized and marginalized throughout India. Mob violence and lynchings are rampant, as are the arbitrary demolitions of Muslim-owned homes, businesses, and places of worship. Policies at both the state and federal levels target Muslims' citizenship rights, their ability to express their faith through the hijab and prayer, their ownership over their own historic places of worship, and their right to vote. Muslims also suffer workplace, educational, and housing discrimination. Online spaces offer no reprieve; social media platforms are saturated with hate speech, videos of Muslims being attacked and lynched, Hindu supremacist memes, and anti-Muslim pop music. In recent years, calls for a Muslim genocide have become mainstream.

Christians have also faced increasing violence, harassment, and discrimination throughout India, with nearly 900 anti-Christian attacks being reported in 2025 alone. Several Indian states have enacted anti-conversion laws that, according to Human Rights Watch, have been used as pretext for Hindu supremacists to storm churches and congregations, attack worshippers, and then arrest Christians over baseless accusations of “forced conversions” of Hindus.

Sikhs are often co-opted as a branch of Hinduism by the Hindu far right, even as they are the target of violent repression by the Indian government. In 2020 and 2024, Sikh farmers protesting the government were met with tear gas, water cannons, internet shutdowns, baton charges, and the arrest of Sikh activists. Sikhs in the diaspora have also been subjected to assassination attempts, censorship, and visa revocations.

Kashmiris have suffered under Indian occupation for decades. In 2019, the Modi government revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, stripping Kashmir of its special semiautonomous status and doubling down on a military crackdown. In the years since, Kashmiris have suffered torture by Indian military and police forces, extrajudicial killings, wanton arrests, internet shutdowns, land seizures, the forced closure of mosques, and other human rights abuses. Indian officials and Hindu supremacist leaders alike have called for implementing an “Israel model” in Kashmir; Sandeep Chakravorty, India's consul general to New York City, declared in 2019 that India would build settlements in Kashmir, adding, “If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it.”

Hindutva also dehumanizes those it claims under the Hindu umbrella: Dalits, Adivasis, and women are all considered subservient to the Brahmin man.

Who is enabling this hate and violence?

Hindutva is advanced through a broad network of militant groups, religious and cultural organizations, charities, student groups, and other institutions collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, or the “RSS Family.”

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) serves as the political arm of the Hindutva movement, led since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an RSS member since the age of eight.

Under Modi's rule, Hindu supremacy has become a dominant force in Indian politics and policymaking, while simultaneously crippling India's democratic institutions. Experts have documented the steady erosion of the judiciary, media, and law enforcement's independence from government coercion. Freedom House currently ranks India as an electoral autocracy.

As a result of this democratic backsliding, the state itself has become an instrument of anti-Muslim discrimination, raising alarm from allied governments and NGOs alike.

Why does understanding Hindutva matter for the diaspora?

Hindutva is not just a foreign policy issue. Since the 1970s, Hindu supremacist organizations affiliated with the RSS have worked to spread Hindutva in the United States, forming a network known as the American Sangh. Collectively, these groups engage in a range of dangerous activities, including:

• Maintaining material as well as ideological ties to Indian militant groups
• Spreading Hindutva and BJP propaganda to American audiences
• Raising funds for Hindu supremacist activities in India
• Promoting casteist, anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh, and other anti-minority narratives
• Pushing back against civil rights protections for vulnerable groups
• Collaborating with white supremacists and Zionists
• Launching coordinated harassment campaigns against activists, journalists, and elected officials who speak out about human rights abuses in India

For Indian American Muslims, these bigoted campaigns can have a direct impact on our rights, safety, and ability to participate equally in American civic life, impacting everything from schools, to workplaces, to mosques, to public spaces. Political networks, money, propaganda, and organizing strategies between global far right networks cross borders, while anti-Muslim rhetoric developed in India is actively being imported into American political and cultural spaces.

For American Muslims, understanding these networks is an important part of defending our civil rights and protecting our communities.

What's the bottom line?

By every metric, Hindutva is a supremacist movement that calls for violence against India's most vulnerable minorities. It's important to recognize this ideology for what it is, call it out wherever it rears its head, and amplify the work being done to combat it.