Will Hindutva Survive After 2024?

Ideology is not about the world out there but how we desire to view it. It is a way of organising the chaos of our desires. While, most philosophers of the 20th century liken ideology to consciousness, ph🔯ilosophers of the 21st century see in it the workings of the sub-conscious. Ideologies allow us to represent the world in a way that allows us to relate to it and make it more inhabitable. While there has been some talk of the world entering a post-ideological phase, political philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, rather counter-intuitively, that this “end of ideology” signifies that ideology has “come into its o💟wn” as it is now so entrenched that it is invisible. Ideologies are powerful when they no longer work as explicit ideologies but begin to become the “collective sub-conscious” or simply the commonsense of our times.

Further, ideology has conventionally been associated with the political domain. Ideologies are political, belonging to dominant political parties and political mobilisations. Ideologies were associated with governments and the State. Ideologies were imposed top-down, and consumed bottom-up. Global thinking on this has changed to recognise that if ideologies are about representing the world and help us relate with a sense of belonging then it cannot be exclusively political but also necessarily about culture. Cultur🦹e here refers to values, ideas, symbolism, ethics and emotions. Ideologies are collective expressions of individual experiences. Ideologies help us to connect disparate looking “inner environments” within us to collective being. Ideologies connect psychological drives to collective imperatives.

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Ideology in current times therefore is essentially about the interface between the political and the cultural. While the essence of culture is understood in terms of solidarity, oneness, and belonging, political is about power and instrumental reasoning. Ideologies of our times manage the conflictual relation between solidarity and instrumentality. While culture contaminates the political, the political attempts to colonise culture. While culture sets the gaze on the political being too modernist and individuated, political rakes up the prejudices within culture that are historically constructed but made to look eternal and natural. While historicity carries the burden of alienation, eternity (sanatan) of culture 🉐carries the burden of hierarchy. The supra-conflict of our times is how do we arrest modernist alienation that is soulless, amoral, and without intensity of emotions, without that fight against alienation becoming a ruse, an ill💖usion to justify and reinforce prejudice, exclusion and hierarchies? How do we construct ethico-political and politico-cultural ideologies to cohabit together—as individuals, as communities, as nations, and also globally and finally at a planetary level?

Hindutva in recent times has come close to signifying the “end of ideology” in ‘New India’. Hindutva is an ideological vision constituted by many layers and it looked as if there is nothing beyond the saffron horizon. The ‘success’ of Hindutva as an ideological force was in its ability in matching the “cultural turn” rather than project itself as an exclusive political one. It emerged as a formidable cultural force when all other political and social organisations in India converted themselves into exclusive political forces without a cultural location. While others sounded high modernist, Hindutva went national, and local. It made a claim to take the local into the global. Hindutva resonated with the times as an emerging politico-cultural and ethico-political ideology that is here to unify and forge new kinds of solidarity. It made the right noises about undoing hierarchies and prejudices, at least within the Hindus, without giving up on traditions and civilisational sensibilities. It made grand claims of “desh chalana hai, sarkar nahi” (we are here for the nation, not just to form a government). Hindutva ideology managed to c🗹onvert cas🐲te into culture, religion into community and nation into a family. It generated powerful metaphors and allegories of national/Hindu resurgence.

The success of Hindutva ideology was in connecting to a civilisational sub-conscious. It brought a sense of continuity and a memory of pride and historical injury together. It made an aggressive claim to ostensibly shake off diffidence and inferiority in its attempts to d🅠ecolonising narrative and backing traditional knowledge, yoga, Ayurveda, democracy in (Vaishali) ancient India, vernacular languages, traditional dressing, khadi, local cuisines and millets, handicrafts and tribal arts, among many such overtures. The Hindutva wave introduced a new lingo and provided a new politico-cultural frame that succeeded in connecting a majoritarian-political project to historical injury and an authoritarian state to memory. Hindutva was successful as much for its agenda as for being fresh, innovative, performative and banked on “speed and scale”. Ideology is as much about performance as it is about a perspective. Performance is not just theatrical but a necessary mode of communication in complex societies.

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