- Is India still safe for everyone?
A Muslim family of 10 people
assaulted, looted and abused.
Two Muslim women were beaten,
allegedly by the members of a Hindu radical group.
- The world's second most populous country
is grappling with a fundamental issue.
India was founded as a proudly diverse country.
So, how did it go from this?
- Prime Minister Nehru called upon leaders
representing many shades of political thought
and various religious groups
to help build a modern democratic state.
- To this?
- The Hindu nationalist ideology
that inspired the murder
of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi
was a fringe element of the country's politics for decades.
Now it's the ideology of India's ruling party, the BJP.
Despite India's history of tolerance,
it also has a history of religious violence,
deadly unrest
and devastating riots.
There has been a sharp increase in recent years
in attacks on religious minorities
by Hindu nationalist groups.
- But what exactly is Hindu nationalism,
and why is it so powerful in India today?
We're going to look at the rise of the Hindu right in India
and what that means for the future
of the world's biggest democracy.
Hinduism is thousands of years old
and is the world's third largest religion.
But Hindutva, a nationalist political ideology,
is not that old.
First, we need to define what Hindutva even means.
The closest translation is Hinduness.
Its core belief is that India should be a Hindu nation.
While 80% of India's population is Hindu,
almost 195 million Muslims live there.
India also has millions of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists,
and hundreds of other religious groups.
The ideology of Hindutva was, in many ways,
born out of Hindu anxieties over the growth
of other religions in the colonized subcontinent.
Quick history lesson:
For two centuries before it became a British colony,
India had been ruled by the Muslim Mughal Empire.
They also built this.
And then the British Empire came along.
- Hindutva has its roots during the colonial era,
when a segment of the Hindu population
felt that Western mores
were overwhelming Hinduism,
and, consequently, this led to a form of Hindu revitalization.
- Early in the 20th century,
Indian Muslims created the All-India Muslim League
to advocate for Muslim rights under British rule.
Hindu political leaders followed suit.
But modern Hindu nationalism is actually
traced back to this man.
Meet Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
In 1923, Savarker wrote a defining piece of work
called "Essentials of Hindutva."
The idea was that India would be rendered synonymous
with this Hinduness,
and all Indians would be seen as Hindu.
Hindutva transforms Hinduism into a race.
- In 1925, so just shortly after
the publication of Savarkar's work,
something happened that would profoundly impact
the Hinduvta movement for generations to come:
the creation of the RSS.
Today, the RSS is an influential, male-dominated,
paramilitary Hindu nationalist organization
and network in India.
It reportedly has 6 million active members
and over 100 affiliate bodies.
They have yoga sessions and morning training drills.
They also host summer camps with weapons training
and, reportedly, exert influence on the current ruling party
and at all levels of Indian society.
Former RSS members can be found in the highest ranks
of the Indian political establishment,
but more on that in a bit.
If you look at all of the violences
against minority communities that have happened in India,
you will see the imprint of the RSS.
- But the defining moment of the modern
Hindutva movement came in 1992 in the city of Ayodhya,
when the RSS joined other right-wing Hindu groups
to demolish the historic Babri Masjid.
Hindu nationalists believe the 16th-century
Mughal-era mosque had been built
on the site of a Hindu temple.
The mosque's destruction sparked Hindu-Muslim
communal rioting that killed some 2,000 people.
Imagine being of a minority community
in India, already vulnerable.
And then imagine symbolically something very powerful
to a community being broken.
- So, what's the link between
the paramilitary RSS and the ruling BJP?
The BJP relies on them to get out the vote.
The BJP relies on them for electoral purposes.
The BJP relies on them for political mobilization,
and consequently the RSS has a disproportionate influence
on this current BJP government.
- Guess which former RSS member
is currently at the very top?
Modi didn't become India's most powerful man overnight.
The story of Narendra Modi is really
a phenomenal coming-of-age political story.
His father was a tea vendor at a local railway platform.
Narendra Modi comes from a backward caste family.
So in the Hindu caste hierarchy,
he did not come from one of the few
privileged groups at the top.
- He began attending RSS meetings
at the age of 8,
and formally joined the organization in his early 20s.
And then Modi quickly rose through the ranks of the BJP.
He was someone who had a unique charisma,
unique intellect and a unique ability
to kind of navigate politics.
And in 2001, the BJP made him the chief minister
of the state of Gujarat,
which is a pretty significant state, in the western part of India,
that's home to about 60 or 70 million people.
- And then, just a few months
after Modi came into power in the state, this happened.
Fifty-nine Hindus died after a train was engulfed in flames,
which was blamed on Muslims.
The train fire sparked some of the worst
communal violence India had ever seen.
About 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.
- Both the BJP and Modi were accused
of being complicit in either instigating the violence
or not doing enough to stop it.
Both denied the charges, and a 2012 judicial inquiry
cleared Modi of wrongdoing.
For the Hindutva movement,
the Gujarat pogrom meant that it had succeeded.
If Indian Muslims were to ask themselves,
how does it feel to be Muslim in India today?
The answer had significantly shifted
from 2001 to post-March 2002.
- Modi couldn't entirely escape
the fallout from the Gujarat riots.
In 2005, the United States government
denied him a diplomatic visa.
But, despite the travel restriction and widespread criticism,
Modi was reelected three times.
He increasingly focused on business and economic development
and was elected prime minister in May 2014.
So, his campaign centered around the economy
and fighting corruption.
But, his win meant that the BJP,
and therefore the ideology of Hindutva,
had found a home in the highest political office in India.
Modi's 2014 election had initially leaned on
the promise of economic development,
but his reelection campaign in 2019 was different.
They talked a lot about nationalism,
about a muscular India.
They talked about how to make sure
that they stopped illegal immigration,
largely from Muslims coming from Bangladesh.
And, of course, the election took place at a time
when there was heightened conflict
between India and Pakistan.
And so Modi was kind of able to use this pro-Hindu,
pro-India, anti-Pakistan kind of rhetoric,
to help mobilize his supporters for the election.
- A Human Rights Watch study found
a nearly 500% increase in charged and divisive language
by Indian politicians since Modi's election,
90% of it was from the BJP.
Like the BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh,
he once he said this during a rally:
- And then there's Home Affairs Minister
Amit Shah, seen by some as India's second-most powerful man.
Shah has called Muslim refugees and migrants
from Bangladesh "termites."
Oh and, by the way, in August 2019, Shah did this.
Article 370 giving Jammu and Kashmir special status
has been virtually scrapped.
- Modi's landslide reelection victory shows
how popular he and his ideology are.
And not only in India.
Once denied entry to the United States,
today he's welcomed like a rockstar.
I think that there are benefits, as well,
in creating the links between a Hindu nationalist
powerful diaspora who then is able to finance campaigns
of both the Republicans as well as Democrats
to influence what power in the United States looks like.
And then to have that power function in the interest
of state power in India as well.
- With Modi in power and Hindutva entrenched
in every level of Indian politics,
there is some fear that secularism,
which has had a long history in India, is in danger.
Since 2019, protests have erupted in India
over a controversial citizenship act,
which grants amnesty to undocumented immigrants
from neighboring countries.
It's being called anti-Muslim
because Muslim immigrants are excluded.
The Indian government is also building
its first massive detention camp
where it plans to hold undocumented immigrants,
many of them most likely Muslim.
But it's important to remember that the rise of populist,
supremacist politics in India is part of a global trend.
I mean, if you look at the United States
and the rise of Donald Trump,
the creeping white nationalism,
we see the divisive language or the anti-Muslim
or anti-minority sentiment, anti-immigration sentiment.
And then you look across at Europe,
and you see the same things going on,
whether it's Brexit, or in Hungary and Austria.
We're in a a global era right now where this is on the rise.
And so I think democracy in that sense
does seem to be on the back foot.
- Following independence in 1947,
India's first prime minster Nehru
suggested that Hindu communalism was dangerous for the country.
Was he correct in his prediction?