Hindutva — literally 'Hindu-ness' — was coined in 1923 by V. D. Savarkar to describe a specific idea: that India is fundamentally the homeland of Hindus, that Hindu identity is simultaneously religious, cultural and national, and that Muslims and Christians, whose sacred geographies point outside India, are at best second-class members of the nation. For most of the twentieth century, this idea sat outside the mainstream of Indian politics, which was dominated by the Congress Party's officially secular vision — a multi-religious republic where the state took no side between faiths. Under Narendra Modi's BJP, in power at the centre since 2014 and with an outright majority since 2019, Hindutva has become the operating ideology of the world's largest democracy. This is not incidental to global politics: it changes the identity of a country of 1.4 billion people, and it changes what India is willing to do in the region.
The BJP does not stand alone. It is the political wing of a much larger family of organisations known as the Sangh Parivar, at the centre of which sits the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925. The RSS runs an estimated 60,000 daily neighbourhood units (shakhas) across India, drills millions of volunteers in physical training and ideological instruction, and operates schools, unions, tribal-welfare organisations and student groups. Modi joined the RSS at eight and remained a full-time worker (pracharak) for years before entering electoral politics. Almost every senior BJP figure is an RSS product. This matters because it means Hindutva is not a personality cult built around one leader that will collapse when he leaves — it is an institutional movement with nearly a century of continuous organisation, a bench of cadre, and its own internal culture. It is the most successful mass political organisation in the democratic world.
The transformation has been steady rather than sudden. The special constitutional status of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir was revoked in 2019 and the state was split and demoted. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 offered a fast-track to Indian citizenship for refugees from neighbouring countries — of every major regional religion except Islam. A nationwide National Register of Citizens has raised the prospect that millions of Muslims could be declared non-citizens. Mob lynchings of Muslims accused of cow slaughter or 'love jihad' have risen sharply and mostly gone unprosecuted. The Ram temple was consecrated by Modi personally in Ayodhya in 2024, on the site of a mosque destroyed by Hindu nationalists in 1992 — an image broadcast as the ceremonial founding of a Hindu India. Meanwhile, on the ground, India's economy grows at 6–7% a year, its space programme lands on the Moon, and its foreign policy plays every major power off against the others. Hindutva has proved economically compatible with modernity in a way secularists once said it could not be.
A Hindu-nationalist India is still a democracy — messier, more coercive toward minorities than a decade ago, but with real elections and a real opposition. It is also increasingly a civilizational-state in the same vocabulary as Xi's China and Putin's Russia: a distinct civilization with its own values, resistant to Western universalism, entitled to a sphere of influence in its neighbourhood. This shapes India's foreign policy. It keeps buying Russian oil despite Western sanctions. It refuses to condemn Moscow over Ukraine. It hedges between Washington and Beijing rather than aligning firmly with either. It is happy to sit inside the Quad and BRICS simultaneously. For the West this is the great strategic puzzle of the century: the most populous country in the world is a democracy, and a fellow Indo-Pacific power, and a civilizational-state that does not intend to be anyone's junior partner. Understanding Hindutva is the first step to understanding why.