-Ramphal Kataria
From Republic to Religious State: India’s Dangerous Drift
India did not emerge as a nation in 1947. It emerged as a civilisational compact centuries earlier. What we now call “India” was never a monolith of faith, language, or culture. It was a continuously negotiated coexistence—between Shaiva and Vaishnava, Buddhist and Brahmanical, Sufi and Bhakti, tribal and agrarian, Persianate and Sanskritic. This composite culture was neither accidental nor sentimental; it was forged through interaction, conflict, accommodation, and synthesis.
On October 15, 1947—barely two months after Independence and Partition—India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote to the chief ministers of provinces:
“Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State.”
This was not merely a humanitarian appeal. It was a statement of constitutional philosophy. Nehru understood that if India responded to Pakistan’s religious nationalism by mirroring it, the Republic would forfeit both its moral legitimacy and its democratic future. Secularism, for Nehru, was not hostility to religion; it was state restraint in matters of faith.
Yet this vision was never uncontested. Even within the Congress, conservative Hindu sentiment existed. As prime minister, Nehru nevertheless worked deliberately to marginalise the forces of Hindutva, represented by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Jana Sangh. History’s irony is that only after his death did these forces begin their steady ascent, culminating in the dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
India, which once hoped to chart a path fundamentally different from its neighbour, is now drawing disturbingly close to Pakistan in the fusion of faith and State, differing only in the identity of the religious majority.
Majoritarianism as Structure, Not Rhetoric
The majoritarian character of contemporary India is no longer anecdotal; it is structural. Of the more than 800 Members of Parliament elected on a BJP ticket across the last three general elections, not one is a Muslim. Under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, the BJP has consciously constructed a Hindu-only electoral coalition, fighting and often winning elections on the basis of Hindu consolidation alone.
Once power was secured through Hindu-first politics, the sangh parivar moved from mobilisation to social consolidation: the systematic demonisation, criminalisation, and marginalisation of Indian Muslims—and increasingly, Indian Christians. This is not spontaneous prejudice; it is organised othering.
Within living memory, Muslims held cabinet positions, headed the Intelligence Bureau and the diplomatic corps, presided over the Supreme Court, and led the Indian Air Force. Two cities in Modi’s home state once elected Muslim MPs. Today, Muslims are almost entirely absent from positions of public prominence. Working-class Muslims face housing and employment discrimination, routinised humiliation, lynching in the name of cow protection, and bulldozer demolitions masquerading as “law and order.”
Christians, though fewer in number, face parallel targeting—church vandalism, disruptions of Christmas celebrations, and false conversion prosecutions. The message is unmistakable: citizenship is being graded by faith.
Law, Symbol, and Spectacle
Majoritarianism is equally visible on the legal plane. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act introduced religion as a criterion for citizenship for the first time in India’s history, explicitly excluding Muslims. The abrogation of Article 370 cannot be divorced from the fact that Jammu and Kashmir was India’s only Muslim-majority state.
At the symbolic level, the signalling is relentless: saffron robes as executive authority, and the prime minister presiding over the inauguration of a grand Ram temple. These are not benign spectacles. They signal hierarchy and embolden officials to behave as if they are Hindus first and constitutional functionaries later.
Popular culture has been conscripted as well. Bollywood—once a site of composite imagination—is increasingly deployed to portray Muslims as internal enemies and non-Hindus as perpetual outsiders.
Institutional Silence and Electoral Hate
The open avowal of majoritarian bigotry has become routine. Campaign speeches in Assam and elsewhere, particularly by Himanta Biswa Sarma, have led to petitions alleging a sustained pattern of hate speech and incitement against Muslims. That the higher judiciary has largely failed to impose timely restraint is not merely shocking; it is symptomatic of institutional moral exhaustion.
India, in law and politics, in symbol and substance, is thus becoming ever more like Pakistan—except that here Hindus rule over citizens of other faiths.
This Did Not Begin in 2014
Yet to attribute this transformation solely to 2014 would be historically lazy. Hindutva has deep roots—from 19th-century revivalist movements to the Hindu Mahasabha, and the founding of the RSS in 1925. During Nehru’s years it was recessive, not absent.
Its decisive opportunity came through the failures of the post-Nehru Congress. Rajiv Gandhi bears particular responsibility. By overturning the Shah Bano judgment to appease Muslim clerics, and unlocking the Babri Masjid site to placate Hindu hardliners, he legitimised religion as an instrument of governance.
Once religion became statecraft, numerical asymmetry guaranteed that Hindu extremism would dwarf minority extremism. The demolition of the Babri Masjid was not an aberration; it was the logical outcome of this shift. The BJP’s rise—from two seats in 1984 to national dominance within fifteen years—was its political harvest.
Ambedkar’s Diagnosis: Communalism as Structural Tyranny
This trajectory vindicates the warnings of B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar rejected the notion that communalism was merely religious misunderstanding. He saw it as a by-product of structural inequality, especially caste.
For Ambedkar, a communal majority is fundamentally different from a political majority. It is permanent, immune to democratic rotation, and therefore a recipe for the tyranny of the majority. This is why he warned that political democracy without social democracy is unsustainable, why he insisted on strict state neutrality in religious affairs, and why he argued that communal conflict often serves as a smokescreen for caste domination.
His insistence that citizens must be “Indians first, Indians last” was a direct rebuke to competitive religious loyalty.
Composite India and Its Dissenters
India’s moral inheritance lies not with majoritarians but with its dissenters. Basavanna rejected ritual hierarchy centuries ago. Jyotirao Phule exposed Brahmanical domination. Periyar dismantled the sanctity of religious authority. The Bhakti-Sufi tradition spoke a shared idiom of devotion and social equality. The communists foregrounded class against communal identity.
They understood a simple truth: religion becomes dangerous when it is mobilised for power.
The Muslim rulers of medieval India were kings, not theologians. Their primary objective was revenue and control, not conversion. To project modern communal identities onto medieval politics is not history; it is ideology disguised as memory.
The Global Record: No Exceptions
The claim of a “civilisational renaissance” collapses under historical scrutiny. Pakistan’s Islamic identity hollowed out democracy and economy alike. Iran’s theocracy destroyed its modernist potential. Sri Lanka’s Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism ignited a civil war that set it back decades. Israel today risks pariah status through theocratic militarism.
Across faiths—Sunni, Shia, Buddhist, Jewish—the lesson is consistent: when religion becomes state ideology, democracy corrodes and human rights shrink. There is no reason to believe Hindus are exempt from this rule.
The Republic at the Brink
India in 2026 stands closer to being a Hindu Pakistan than at any previous moment. Whether this trajectory can be reversed is uncertain. What is certain is this: nations are not made by temples, myths, or majorities, but by equal citizenship.
To abandon that principle is not to revive civilisation—
it is to betray the Republic.
Footnotes
1. Romila Thapar, Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History – on plurality and debate as civilisational features.
2. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian – on pluralism as constitutive of Indian identity.
3. Irfan Habib, writings on medieval Indian polity – critique of communal readings of pre-modern history.
4. B. R. Ambedkar, Communal Deadlock and a Way to Solve It – distinction between political and communal majorities.
5. B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste – caste as the structural root of social inequality.
6. Jawaharlal Nehru, Letters to Chief Ministers (October 1947) – minority protection and secular statecraft.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism – “normalisation of cruelty” and routinised injustice.
8. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism – critique of self-worshipping nations.
9. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies – dangers of moral absolutism and closed societies.
10. Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India – institutionalisation of Hindutva politics.
