On the 15th of August 1947, the day India formally gained independence from British rule, Mahatma Gandhi was absent from the celebrations. While political leaders gathered in Delhi to mark the birth of the new nation, Gandhi chose to remain in Calcutta, where Hindu-Muslim riots had engulfed the city during the violence of Partition. Rather than participate in triumphant ceremonies, he spent the day meeting affected communities and attempting to restore peace.
Explaining his decision, Gandhi stated: “I am not going to Delhi to participate in the festivities of August 15. My place is here with you, in the midst of this suffering. If Calcutta can remain peaceful, it will be a miracle and a lesson for the whole of India.”
The symbolism of this moment remains deeply significant. At the very moment India became independent, Gandhi’s instinct was not towards triumphalist nationalism, but the preservation of interreligious coexistence. India’s founding vision, admittedly imperfectly realized, was imagined as a secular republic grounded in pluralism, where people of different religions could belong equally.
That same day, Gandhi reflected on the contradictions of independence itself: “This is a day of rejoicing, but for me, it is also a day of sorrow. Freedom has come, but it is stained with blood. We must pledge to wipe out this stain with our love and unity.”
Less than six months later, Gandhi would be assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who is admired by some for his actions in today’s India, where Hindu nationalism reigns supreme.
Gandhi’s image continues to occupy a central place in how India presents itself to the world. Prime Minister Narendra Modi regularly invokes Gandhi in international forums, positioning India as a civilizational force which is democratic with multifaith harmony. His government frequently deploys the Sanskrit phrase “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”, roughly translated as “the world is one family”, to reinforce this image of India as inherently tolerant and plural.
Yet this carefully cultivated international image exists alongside a much more uncomfortable political reality within India itself. This other India is the one experienced domestically by minorities, journalists, activists, and political critics: an India where anti-Muslim rhetoric has become normalized within mainstream political discourse; where bulldozer demolitions and communal polarization are televised spectacles; where dissent is frequently framed as anti-national; and where Hindu nationalism increasingly shapes the grammar of the state itself.
This contradiction is striking, but underdiscussed: Gandhi abroad, Hindutva at home. To understand this contradiction, it is necessary to understand the political context and specifically, Hindutva, the political ideology driving India over the past two decades.
The rise of Hindutva
India’s constitution, written after independence in 1947, envisioned the country as a secular republic belonging equally to all its citizens regardless of religion. This secularism did not mean the absence of religion from public life, rather, it meant that the state was not supposed to privilege one religion above others. It is important to acknowledge that this was never perfectly the case, and India has always been a “democracy with adjectives”.
Hindutva challenges this framework by arguing that India’s identity is fundamentally Hindu and that secularism unfairly weakened or diluted the Hindu majority’s civilizational primacy. Supporters of Hindutva present it as a movement of cultural revival. They argue that India has always been a Hindu nation, but Hindu identity was historically suppressed, first under centuries of Muslim rule and later under British colonialism. They further suggest that post-independence secular elites continued to marginalize Hindu civilizational pride in the name of minority appeasement. For many supporters, Hindutva therefore represents the cultural restoration of Hindus, and resistance to westernized liberal elites.
The historicity of these claims has been contested by historians and scholars, who face harassment, deplatforming or state-violence. Since the BJP’s stay in power, changes have been made to the curriculum by deleting chapters on Mughal rulers, the 2002 Gujarat riots (overseen under Narendra Modi’s tenure as Chief minister of Gujarat), and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, amongst other changes.
This narrative has proven politically powerful. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s ruling party since 2014, emerged directly out of the broader Hindutva movement. The BJP is the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organization founded in 1925. The RSS functions as the ideological backbone of the Hindutva movement and has spent decades building an enormous grassroots network across India through schools, cultural organizations, student groups, unions, and religious mobilization.
The RSS was credibly linked to Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, and was banned for a year in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination. Revisions to school textbooks in 2023, removed the fact that the RSS was banned while downplaying the mentions of Godse.
For much of post-independence India, Hindutva remained politically marginal. The dominant political narrative was shaped by the Indian National Congress. This began to change dramatically in the late twentieth century.
The BJP’s rise accelerated during the 1980s and 1990s through a combination of a surge in caste politics, religious mobilization, and dissatisfaction with Congress rule. One pivotal moment was the Ram Janmabhoomi (“birthplace of Ram” movement), which claimed that the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya had been built on top of the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram after the destruction of a Hindu temple, by Muslim “invaders”.
The movement became one of the defining political mobilizations in modern Indian history. In 1992, Hindu nationalist mobs demolished the Babri Masjid, triggering widespread communal riots across the country. For supporters of Hindutva, the movement symbolized the reclaiming of Hindu pride and historical justice. For critics, it marked the normalization of religious majoritarianism within mainstream politics.
The reimagining of Indian nationhood
The BJP’s transformation into India’s dominant political force has reached its peak under Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister since 2014. Under Modi’s leadership, Hindu nationalist ideas have increasingly moved from the political margins into the centre of public discourse. This shift is visible not only in policy decisions but also in language and symbolism. Muslims are frequently portrayed within sections of political and media discourse as demographic threats, security risks, or culturally “alien” populations. Conspiracy theories targeting Muslims, such as “love jihad”, suggesting that Muslim men systematically entrap Hindu women in relationships to convert them, have become mainstream political vocabulary in parts of India.
Because India continues to hold elections, maintain formal democratic institutions, and project itself internationally as plural and tolerant, the scale of the ideological transformation underway is often underestimated abroad. The rise of Hindutva is not simply the rise of a conservative party. It represents a deeper reimagining of Indian nationhood itself.
In the Hindutva imagination, India is not a secular republic containing a diversity of equal communities. Rather, it is viewed as a Hindu nation whose culture and political identity have historically been weakened by centuries of foreign invasions, colonialism, and what its proponents perceive as excessive appeasement of minorities, especially Muslims.
This does not mean that all Indians support Hindutva politics. In the 2024 general elections, the BJP received 36.6% of the vote share – just a little over a third of ballots cast. India remains a deeply contested society with opposition parties, independent journalists, civil society organizations, student movements, and citizens who continue to defend secular constitutional values.
Yet the impact of Hindutva should not be underestimated. Rather, the issue is that international audiences often are denied easy access information which allows them to grasp the scale of the ideological transformation underway. In order to clarify just how mainstream and direct the hateful rhetoric is, I provide recent examples from the Indian democracy.
Earlier this month, India held elections in 2 out of the top 3 states with the highest percentage of Muslim population, West Bengal and Assam, respectively. The BJP were winners in both, and these are some of the statements of the men who were chosen to be the Chief Minister of each state:
“A lesson must be taught. Like Israel did in Gaza, India’s 100 crore Hindus, the government is working towards the welfare of Hindus. A lesson must be taught like India did to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor,” said new West Bengal chief minister, Suvendhu Adhikari, with reference to Muslims in December 2025. In the same month, Adhikari garlanded a mob who were responsible for assaulting three Muslim street vendors. In Jan 2026, Adhikari advocated for Hindus to put flags atop their houses, in order to “separate the jihadi fundamentalists”.
In February 2026, the official account of BJP Assam shared an AI-generated video depicting now-Assam Chief Minister, Himanta Biswa Sharma aiming a gun at men with skullcaps with the text “No Mercy”, “Foreigner-free Assam”. These are not isolated incidents. The Center for the study of Organized Hate (CSOH) documented 1,319 hate speeches targeted Indian minorities across India in 2025, averaging to 4 hate speeches per day.
Beyond hate speech, anti-democratic policy decisions by the government, as well as toleration of extrajudicial violence against Muslims has also been documented.
In the lead up to the elections in West Bengal, the Electoral Commission of India conducted a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter rolls to delete ineligible voters. However, this process was conducted through an opaque, AI-driven process flagging “logical discrepancies” which led to 9 million disqualifications, about 12% of the state’s electorate. This 9 million included citizens who have been voting in Indian elections for 50 years, as well as families who have served in the Indian Army. Further, analysts find that the deletions disproportionately affected Muslims, tribals and women. About 2.7 million people challenged their elimination from the rolls, but they were not reinstated before the election. The BJP ended up winning the elections in West Bengal for the first time in the state’s history, and journalists are still trying to understand the role played by the SIR in this.
Beyond removing rights, there is now also widespread removal of people altogether. In July 2025, Human Rights Watch reported that Indian authorities had illegally deported hundreds of Muslims to Bangladesh. Victims claimed that they were ordered by the border security forces to cross the border into Bangladesh at gunpoint, and without due process. Only about 200 people have been able to return to India.
Social bases of support and opposition
The BJP attempts to portray a version of India to those outside which speaks of democracy and Gandhi. Yet this stands in stark contrast to the India which exists within its borders, a state where the Prime Minister does not hold press conferences, where criticisms of the ruling party are regularly censored online, where Muslims are harassed by the state on a regular basis. This generates a dissonance which is only magnified by the actions of Indians abroad – a diaspora which is disproportionately affluent, North Indian, and upper-caste, which has become increasingly visible across Europe’s universities, technology sectors, financial institutions, and policy spaces. Historically, upper-caste Hindus from North India have constituted the BJP’s strongest voter base. This is not accidental. Hindutva’s political vocabulary, centred around the primacy of the Hindi language, and the Hinduism it puts forth, with its emphasis on vegetarianism, is much more aligned with the Hindi-speaking belt of Northern India. Abroad, many among this demographic continue to present India through the language of multicultural harmony and civilizational tolerance. India is described as a uniquely diverse society where “all religions coexist,” where secularism is supposedly embedded naturally within the culture, and where western criticisms of Hindu nationalism are dismissed as exaggerations or colonial misunderstanding.
What is often absent from these conversations, however, is any serious engagement with the lived realities of minorities within contemporary India. It is relevant that the same social groups that often dominate India’s international representation, are frequently among those least structurally affected by the majoritarian turn within India itself. As a result, the India presented internationally can become deeply selective: cosmopolitan, educated, and culturally plural on the surface, while obscuring the unequal realities experienced by minorities and marginalized communities domestically.
In this sense, the contradiction is not sustained only by the Indian state. It is also sustained socially through diaspora networks that continue to export an idealized image of India while remaining reluctant to confront the exclusions increasingly embedded within contemporary Indian politics. I have witnessed this strange dissonance first hand, with how India is (mis)perceived in Europe, and how the Indian diaspora drives this misperception.
But as a proportion of Indians, the diaspora – and the North Indian upper-caste Hindu base more generally – are still a minority. There is a systematic attempt by the RSS to export its politics abroad, with its overseas arm, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) which claims to hold a presence in more than 150 countries, with the stated goal of practicing and advancing the values of Hinduism. It is important to acknowledge the strong critics of majoritarian politics within India, who are fighting against hateful narratives and actions. To understand India honestly today requires holding both realities together at once. It requires recognizing that the country which invokes Gandhi abroad is currently experiencing the growing influence of an ideology that fundamentally redefines the meaning of Indian nationhood. That is the cognitive dissonance at the centre of contemporary India: a state that continues to seek global legitimacy through the language of Gandhi while increasingly shaped internally by the hateful, exclusionary politics of Hindutva.
Aryan Goyal is a researcher who studies the diffusion of hatered in contemporary India.