{"id":429,"date":"2024-06-19T14:08:23","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T14:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gold-tapir-911468.hostingersite.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/19\/india-why-hindu-nationalism-and-zionism-are-ideological-cousins\/"},"modified":"2026-03-27T13:43:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T13:43:43","slug":"india-why-hindu-nationalism-and-zionism-are-ideological-cousins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/19\/india-why-hindu-nationalism-and-zionism-are-ideological-cousins\/","title":{"rendered":"India: Why Hindu nationalism and Zionism are ideological\u00a0cousins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Volunteers of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh take part in a march in Chennai, India, on April 26 2023. Idrees Mohammed \/ EPA<\/a><\/p>\n

The results are in for India\u2019s general election. The country\u2019s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has won enough seats to stay in charge<\/a> for a third consecutive term. But his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has suffered big setbacks, and is gearing up for coalition talks having failed to win an outright majority for the first time in ten years.<\/p>\n

The BJP is premised on Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist ideology. Devised in the early 20th century, the politics of Hindutva<\/a> insist that the country\u2019s national identity be built around those who consider only India\u2019s geography sacred. Muslims and Christians, whose holy sites lay in the Middle East, were therefore considered second-class citizens.<\/p>\n

Modi foregrounded Hindutva in his election campaign. He falsely accused<\/a> the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, of basing their manifesto on the ideology of the Muslim League<\/a>, the party that championed the partition of India in 1947. And he weaponised demographic anxieties around marginally higher Muslim fertility rates to claim<\/a> that the opposition planned to redistribute wealth to \u201cinfiltrators\u201d who \u201chave more children\u201d.<\/p>\n

But Hindutva doesn\u2019t stop at India\u2019s borders. Hindu nationalists have used the ongoing conflict in Gaza to vilify other Muslims globally. BJP troll farms have spread disinformation<\/a> and anti-Palestinian hatred online, and Hindu nationalist groups in India have organised pro-Israel marches<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Where does this curious Hindutva-Zionist solidarity spring from? One origin is from the earliest Hindu nationalists who modelled their Hindu state on Zionism.<\/p>\n

Hindutva\u2019s founder, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, supported majoritarian nationalism and the rooting out of all disintegrating forces. These included Muslims who supported electoral quotas for their community and left-wing internationalists.y<\/p>\n

As a result, he even condoned the Nazis\u2019 antisemitic legislation in two speeches<\/a> in 1938 because, as he saw it: \u201ca nation is formed by a majority living therein\u201d. Yet Savarkar was not antisemitic himself. He often spoke favourably<\/a> of the tiny Jewish-Indian minority because he considered it too insignificant to threaten Hindu cohesion.<\/p>\n

In fact, Savarkar praised Zionism as the perfection of ethno-nationalist thinking. The way Zionism seamlessly blended ethnic attachment to a motherland and religious attachment to a holy land was precisely what Savarkar wanted for the Hindus. This double attachment was far more powerful to his mind than the European model of \u201cblood and soil\u201d nationalism without sacred space.<\/p>\n

Today, Hindu nationalists perpetuate this legacy and still look to Zionism as a uniquely attractive political ideology. To Hindu nationalists, some Zionists were engaged in a project to reclaim their holy land from a Muslim population whose religious roots in the region were not as ancient as their own.<\/p>\n

In a similar way, Hindutva\u2019s supporters saw it as engaged with a Muslim population that it vastly outnumbered, but which had significant cultural power. This power came through the Mughal dynasty<\/a> that ruled much of India from 1526 to the establishment of the British Raj in the 19th century.<\/p>\n

This idea was further popularised by Savarkar\u2019s ideological successor, Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar. In 1947, Golwalkar wrote<\/a> that Zionism was the \u201cattempt at rehabilitating Palestine with its ancient population of the Jews \u2026 to reconstruct the broken edifice and revitalise the practically dead Hebrew national life\u201d.<\/p>\n

Delegitimising Muslim Citizens<\/h4>\n

Just as the Palestinians had to make way for those whose claims of ancient sacred space took primacy, so too, in Golwalkar\u2019s view<\/a>, did \u201cnon-Hindu people of Hindusthan\u201d have to be \u201cwholly subordinated to the Hindu nation\u201d. Part of this process today has been redefining citizenship.<\/p>\n

In 2018, Israel passed a law that rebranded<\/a> the country as \u201cthe nation-state of the Jewish people\u201d and delegitimised its non-Jewish citizens. Similarly, India\u2019s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 eased paths to citizenship for immigrants from several religious groups, but not Muslims.<\/p>\n

Coupled with rhetoric associating millions of Indian Muslims with illegal immigration, human rights groups argue that this law could be used<\/a> to strip many Muslims of their Indian citizenship.<\/p>\n

Hindu nationalists have also stoked a culture war to consolidate \u201cHindu civilisation\u201d and sweep away symbols of Islam. This is very much in keeping with the wish of Israel\u2019s far right to rebuild Solomon\u2019s Temple on the site of the holy Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where al-Aqsa mosque compound currently sits.<\/p>\n

In 1969, a Zionist extremist burned the south wing<\/a> of al-Aqsa. And in 1980, the fundamentalist group Jewish Underground<\/a> plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine at the centre of the compound.<\/p>\n

A similar project of demolishing mosques and building temples in their place was suggested<\/a> by Savarkar and Golwalkar. Hindu nationalist organisations focused their attention on Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodha, since this was the mythical birthplace of the Hindu god, Ram.<\/p>\n

The co-founder of BJP, Lal Krishna Advani, led a national campaign in 1990 to build a new temple \u2013 a proposal that had been prohibited by the Indian supreme court for decades. But the fervour the campaign unleashed resulted in a Hindu nationalist mob demolishing<\/a> Babri Masjid mosque in 1992. And after a new Indian supreme court ruling in 2019 gave permission, a temple<\/a> was built on the site of the destroyed mosque, and inaugurated by Modi with great ceremony in January 2024.<\/p>\n

A few months later, in May 2024, Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared<\/a> from al-Aqsa mosque compound that a Palestinian state would never exist. As he did so, his entourage prayed illegally on the contested site of the Temple Mount.<\/p>\n

As Hindu prayers are offered from the site of the demolished Babri Masjid, hundreds of other mosques<\/a> in India now find themselves under threat. Hindu nationalists are petitioning courts to deliver land administered by Islamic trusts to the majority Hindu community.<\/p>\n

As Modi embarks on a third term, he may look to complete the task of making India an exclusive Hindu holy land \u2013 albeit with a more powerful opposition than before.<\/p>\n

\"TheSource:<\/strong> https:\/\/theconversation.com\/india-why-hindu-nationalism-and-zionism-are-ideological-cousins-230497<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

Vikram Visana\u200b<\/a><\/h3>\n

Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Leicester<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The results are in for India\u2019s general election. The country\u2019s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has won enough seats to stay in charge for a third consecutive term. But his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has suffered big setbacks, and is gearing up for coalition talks having failed to win an outright majority for the first time in ten years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-429","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-article","8":"category-south-asia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":533,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions\/533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-secularist.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}