'Hindutva' and the Christian Response

Over six months have passed since the erstwhile BJP–led NDA government was routed at the Lok Sabha Elections but it appears that the Sangh Parivar (the backbone of the BJP) is yet to come to terms with the debacle.

In the concluded BJP Executive Committee conclave held in Mumbai and elsewhere, the former Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani hinted that the party has to carry along the Sangh Parivar line and rededicate itself to "our ideology and idealism". On a self–correcting course after its poll debacle, he signaled a return to the Hindutva–fold stressing on restoring the primacy of ideology while strengthening discipline, beginning with higher echelons, improving style of functioning and playing the role of an Opposition party with a difference. They are not the only ones to endorse this view. The Viswa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Shiv Sena are thinking in the same lines. In fact, one senior Shiv Sena leader was heard saying, “(We) realize the need to return to the basics... it's back to Hindutva” with the state assembly polls in Maharashtra round the corner.

Let us face facts. Despite brave pretences, the Bharatiya Janata Party is still to come out of its shock because of its comprehensive and humiliating defeat in the parliamentary election. From a party that laid down the political agenda for more than a decade – that is, even before it came to power in New Delhi in 1998 – the BJP suddenly finds itself on the margins of politics.

How does the BJP explain and come to terms with its rout? The short answer is, it does not. Its topmost leaders were stunned into graceless and undignified silence for more than a week after the election results. L K Advani's 'explanation' was, at best, ludicrous: ‘the BJP–NDA lost the mandate, but no other party/alliance won it.’ But no amount of jugglery with words can negate the glaring truth that the BJP–led NDA right now are in shambles. Instead of providing a direction to workers for the revival of the party, the post–poll high–profile meetings of the BJP leaders ended up further demoralizing them, as the party appears more divided than ever, with top leaders contradicting either their own statements or those made by others and being haunted by the ghost of Narendra Modi and the debacle of the “Tiranga Yatra.”

The signal is loud and clear: if BJP and its allies have to regain their lost glory they have to (or so they think) revert to ‘Hindutva.’ But all these discussions beg the question – what is Hindutva and how do Christians respond to it?