Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'What is wrong with the word ‘Hindutva’?' that was published in Newsband

What is wrong with the word ‘Hindutva’?

During the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national executive meeting, Amit Shah put some light on the approaching Assembly elections. The battle lines between the nationalist and anti-national forces, according to him, had already been drawn. Other senior leaders — Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad — spoke along the same line. Prime Minister too Narendra Modi touched on the same subject stressing that the party’s basic policy should be “development, development and development”. The BJP targeted the Congress, portraying it as “anti-national”. They condemned Rahul Gandhi for supporting those who had shouted “anti-national slogans” on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus.

BJP sought to balance its development slogan with a return to its time-tested Hindutva line. Whenever BJP talks about Hindutva they invite criticisms from many quarters, even from quite many Hindus themselves, as if the word ‘Hindutva’ is some bad word. When Muslim countries talk about Islam or Catholic countries talk about Christianity, nobody opposes them. But in India, someone has to just utter the word ‘Hinduism’ and we find so many persons opposing the idea. Strange!

Just because a party supports majority Hindus that doesn’t mean they are against the minority. Has minority people belonging to different religions have ever been degraded as secondary citizen in India? Never! If you go through the history of India there was no unity among the Hindus living in different parts of India ruled by Chieftains or Kings and everyone wanted to widen their control by waging a war and established their hegemony. If we would have unity, we would have allowed neither the Moghuls nor the British to rule India. If you take China into consideration they did not allow any foreign rulers in their country because of their unity.

The Congress of today is in no way equivalent to the Congress which got freedom to India where leaders sacrificed their lives. The Congress went down to the dusts through nepotism, sycophancy, incompetence and most heinous corruption - and it took about 60 years for them to reach their dust level. BJP should learn from this failure of Congress and not make moves which will lead them to dust level also.