India to celebrate Independence Day. Is it shifting from a secular state to a Hindu homeland?
As India marks independence, Luna Sabastian, author of the book ‘Fascism in India’, explains how Hindu nationalism reshaped the world’s largest democracy.
Independence Day celebrations get underway this Saturday Aug. 15 across the world’s most populous country, when India’s 1.4 billion people mark the country’s freedom from British colonial rule in 1947.
In gaining independence, India rejected minority rule in favor of a constitutional democracy, which guaranteed rights to not only the Hindu majority – who make up 80% of people in India – but its large Muslim minority, along with Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. But these days, this vision is being put to the test.
Northeastern University historian Luna Sabastian tells Northeastern Global News (NGN) that under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is changing from a secular nation into one defined by a singular Hindu nationalist vision known as Hindutva. “India is being rewritten” as a land just for Hindus, said Sabastian, assistant professor in History at Northeastern University London.
Sabastian’s 2025 book “Fascism in India: Race, Caste, and Hindutva,” traces Hindu nationalist ideology from its origins in the 1920s to its present form in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has led India for the last 12 years. “The motivation behind my book was the desire to understand, historically, where Hindu nationalism in India comes from,” said Sabastian. For a century, Hindu nationalists have been led above all else by the “dream” of Hindu Rashtra, an explicitly Hindu nation-state, she explained, and today that vision “seems to have finally come true.”
Sabastian spoke with NGN about how India has been re-imagined by Hindu nationalists, how they shared ideas with Europe’s fascists, and whether the country’s founding vision can be saved.
Editor’s Picks
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How does the vision of the current government impact everyday life in India?
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been in power in India since 2014, so the government has had a lot of time to revamp India’s political and legal landscape. This included revoking the special autonomous status of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, in 2019, which had operated since Indian independence as a largely self-governing region. Nationwide, the BJP has introduced a new criminal code, which grants powers to authorities to surveil, detain and imprison critics. Minorities – above all Muslims, who represent 15% of the population – face oppression. There is plenty of very courageous protest but so far the opposition has failed to break the BJP’s hold on government because there actually is a lot of support for Hindu nationalism’s stated goal, which is to make India a Hindu country.
How did this idea take root in Indian politics?
Hindutva – or ‘Hinduness’ – has been around as a political ideology since the 1920s. Hindutva contributed hugely to the escalation of violence between Hindu and Muslims in the run-up to independence in 1947, when British-administered India was divided into modern-day India, Pakistan and what is today Bangladesh. But the ideology and the major political figures associated with Hindutva fell from grace when Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist, killed Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. As a result, Hindu nationalism did not get a say inIndia’s post-colonial framework, which established India as a secular country with protections for minorities. But since then, this ideology has bided its time.
Many people associate Indian independence with Gandhi and non-violent protest. What does this picture miss?
Gandhi was intimately aware that non-violence in India could flip into violence at any point and his genius lay in trying to discipline Indians against that. But as independence neared, it really wasn’t Gandhi’s non-violence that won. Vinayak Savarkar, the main original theorist of Hindutva in the 1920s, was the most important political figure in the Hindu nationalist movement before independence and Partition.It’s Savarkar’s brand of Hindutva that dominates that era and influenced this period’s mass violence, which left a million people dead and 15 million forcibly displaced.
Most people hear “fascism” and think of 20th Century Europe and Nazi Germany, which appear far removed from present-day India. Are you arguing that Hindutva is a form of fascism?
For decades, critics in India have used “the F word” – fascism – to describe their political predicament. Fascism has always been a polemic term to use. But in the Indian case, it’s based on a real historical connection. Hindutva emerges from the crisis of the interwar years, between 1918 and 1939, that also birthed fascism. Hindu nationalists and European fascists exchanged ideas and sought ties. That doesn’t mean that Hindutva is a copy of European fascism. The conclusion of “Fascism in India” is that Hindutva developed its own ideology and brand of genocidal violence, which almost paradoxically functions through inclusion. We’re familiar with the idea that genocidal violence functions through exclusion – as in the case of Nazi Germany, where Jews were forced from all areas of public life in the years leading to the Holocaust. By contrast, Hindutva aims to destroy its enemy – Muslims in India – through absorption. For instance, Savarkar wanted Hindu men to marry Muslim women and have children with them, because that would make them Hindu.
As India celebrates Independence Day, what can we predict about the country’s future?
I’m not very optimistic. Even if the BJP lost the next general election, their damage to India’s legal framework would take a long time to undo. Also, the grassroots support is real. The most disturbing aspect of the violence perhaps is the vigilante violence and killings of minorities on the streets, which show how the public absorbs this violent ideology. But I’m also not an activist: I am a historian. Activists themselves hopefully have more optimism.
Northeastern Global News, in your inbox.
Sign up for NGN’s daily newsletter for news, discovery and analysis from around the world.
