| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
If history is commonly viewed as a useful tool for seeking linkage between the past and present, the politics of colonial and post-colonial India has indeed come to place pre-colonial India at the centre of historical debates in contemporary India. Despite the relative dominance of the secular liberal nationalists in the colonial and the early decades of post-colonial India, the subsequent period saw the steady emergence and rise of the 'extremist' or 'militant' Hindu supremacist ideology of Hindutva-vad, the totalising, homogenising and unhistorical political-cultural construct of the notion of Hindutva (literally, the 'essence' of Hinduism or 'Hindu-ness'). The Hindutva-vadi (literally, the propagation of Hindutva-vad) has come to represent, in practical terms, an intolerant and violent Hindu majoritarian politics. In the name of redressing the alleged 'past wrongs and injustices' perpetrated on the contemporaneous Hindus by their 'medieval' Muslim conquerors, the Hindutva-vadi particularly target the minority Muslim community. The litany of those 'medieval' Muslim 'sins', in the eyes of today's Hindutva-vadi is long, and ranged from alleged discriminatory attitudes and measures, forced conversions, temple desecrations and destructions, construction of mosques at times on those ruined temples, to outright executions and slaughters.
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