How Modi Reshaped Hindutva Politics Within Mainstream Governance

Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist ideology historically associated with organisations including the RSS and VHP, has a long history in Indian politics that predates Modi by decades. What changed significantly during his tenure as Prime Minister is how that ideology moved from street-level agitation into formal government policy and legislation. This article examines that shift.

From Agitation to Institutional Process

The clearest example of this shift is the Ram Mandir project itself. For decades, the movement to build a temple at the disputed Ayodhya site was associated with mass mobilisation campaigns, including the 1990 Ram Rath Yatra and the 1992 Babri Masjid demolition, episodes marked by significant communal violence. Under Modi’s government, the same underlying cause reached its resolution through a very different mechanism: a Supreme Court judgment in November 2019 that awarded the disputed site for temple construction, followed by a government-backed trust overseeing formal construction, culminating in Modi personally presiding over the temple’s consecration ceremony in January 2024, covered in our earlier article on that event. ThePrint’s commentary on this pattern, in a piece titled “Art 370, CAA, triple talaq, Ram Mandir are just one cycle of Modi’s ‘permanent revolution,'” specifically frames this shift, alongside the Article 370 revocation and the Citizenship Amendment Act, as evidence of Hindutva-linked goals being achieved through the ordinary machinery of legislation, litigation, and executive action rather than through the agitational politics of earlier decades.

The Scholarly Framing

Academic commentary has specifically used the language of “mainstreaming” to describe this shift. An analysis published by Strafasia, titled “From Fringe to Forefront: The Mainstreaming of Hindutva Ideology,” argues that ideas and policy goals once associated primarily with more fringe Hindu nationalist organisations have become embedded within ordinary government policy and mainstream political discourse during this period, rather than remaining confined to movement politics outside formal governance.

Also read: Ram Mandir Consecration 2024: Modi's Role in the Ayodhya Ceremony

The Specific Policy Examples

Beyond the Ram Mandir, several other policies are commonly cited in this broader pattern. The August 2019 revocation of Article 370, ending Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status, is frequently described in this context, though it’s worth noting the government’s own stated justification for that decision centred on full constitutional integration and economic development rather than religious framing specifically, even as many commentators have linked it to the broader Hindutva political project. The December 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, which created an expedited citizenship pathway for non-Muslim religious minorities from three neighbouring countries, drew sustained criticism, covered in more detail in our earlier article on the law, for what critics called an implicit religious criterion embedded in citizenship law for the first time. Ongoing discussions around a potential Uniform Civil Code, a single set of personal laws replacing religion-specific ones, represent a further policy area frequently placed within this same broader framework.

The Criticism

Secular commentators, minority rights groups, and opposition politicians have raised sustained concerns that this pattern represents an erosion of India’s constitutionally enshrined secular principles, arguing that translating Hindutva movement goals into formal state policy blurs the line between religious identity and citizenship in ways the Constitution’s framers specifically sought to avoid. These concerns have been raised repeatedly in the context of each of the specific policies mentioned above, and remain a live, unresolved point of political and constitutional debate.

The Government’s Counter-Framing

The government and its supporters have consistently rejected the framing that these policies represent anti-minority or exclusionary governance. Their position, articulated repeatedly in official statements and BJP campaign messaging, holds that these measures correct what they describe as decades of historical neglect of Hindu civilizational identity and cultural heritage under previous governments, rather than representing discrimination against any religious minority, and that policies like the CAA specifically extend protection to persecuted minorities rather than restricting anyone’s existing rights.

Why Both Framings Persist Simultaneously

This is a genuinely contested area of Indian political life where the same underlying set of policy decisions supports two fundamentally different narratives, one describing a necessary civilisational correction, the other describing a concerning erosion of secular constitutional principles, with neither side’s core argument likely to be definitively settled through the policies themselves, since the disagreement rests on deeper questions about the relationship between religion, culture, and the Indian state that predate this specific government by decades.

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The Role of State Elections in This Debate

It’s worth noting that Hindutva-linked messaging has not delivered uniform electoral success across every context where it has been deployed, with BJP’s performance varying considerably across different state elections covered in our earlier article on state-level results, suggesting that voters’ responses to this broader ideological project are shaped by a range of local factors, including specific candidates, regional issues, and economic conditions, alongside any ideological messaging, rather than religious or civilisational appeals alone determining electoral outcomes in any straightforward, mechanical way.

How This Debate Is Likely to Continue

Given that the underlying questions here touch on the Constitution’s founding secular commitments and predate Modi’s own political career by decades, this is unlikely to be a debate that any single government’s tenure, however consequential, fully resolves. Future governments, regardless of their own ideological orientation, will likely continue to face similar questions about how India’s diverse religious communities are represented within a shared national and legal framework, meaning this specific period is probably best understood as one significant chapter within a much longer-running national conversation rather than a definitive final answer to it.

Bottom Line

Modi’s tenure has seen ideas and policy goals long associated with Hindutva movement politics move decisively into mainstream government legislation and Supreme Court-adjudicated processes, from the Ram Mandir’s judicial resolution to the Article 370 revocation and the CAA, a shift scholars have described using the specific language of “mainstreaming,” and one that continues to generate genuine, unresolved disagreement between those who see it as civilisational correction and those who see it as erosion of secular constitutional principles.

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Abhyudaya Verma