The Rising Tide of Hindu Nationalism: Threats and Opportunities for Peace

Abstract

Observers of Indian politics have noted rising acts of violence against Muslims in an atmosphere of increasing Hindu nationalism during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure. Hinduism, however, like all religions, also contains many resources for peace. Looking to both theory and practice, this piece examines how we can theorize Hinduism and religion in general as a source of protection for peace and human rights. It also looks for peaceful practices that may be of use in the contemporary climate of violence. I conclude that we can only get to peace through the acknowledgement of religious motivations within politics and a renewed commitment to the truth.

1. Introduction: The Resurgence of Hindu Nationalism in India and Abroad

On 22 January 2024, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi oversaw the consecration of a new temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, known as the Ram Mandir. Built over a long-disputed mosque site following the blessing of India’s Supreme Court in 2019; the site’s contested history provides a glimpse of increasingly difficult Hindu–Muslim relations in contemporary India (Al Jazeera 2024b). The Babri Masjid, constructed in honor of the Mughal (Muslim) Emperor Babur in 1528, stood in Ayodhya for 466 years, until Hindu mobs tore it down in 1992 (Sitapati 2018, pp. 225–26). This mosque, along with many other famous Muslim-built landmarks, such as the Taj Mahal, had therefore been part of India’s multicultural history for centuries. Its destruction and the consecration of a new Hindu temple on the site takes on great significance in Indian politics, symbolizing very different things to different populations in India.

To Hindu nationalists, the new temple is a long-overdue recovery and revival of a sacred place believed to be the birthplace of Lord Ram, one of the most important Hindu deities (Jaffrelot 2021, p. 20). To Muslims, the temple embodies a formalization of their second-class status within India, exacerbated by the informal and increasingly bold moves of Hindu nationalist actors on the ground, whose vigilantism appears to be protected by state actors (Jayal 2019, p. 46). To those who believe in India as a multicultural democracy that protects all religions, the temple represents an alarming blend of politics and religion, despite the Constitution’s official support for the promotion of all forms of religious expression on a footing of equality (Varshney and Staggs 2024, pp. 9–10; Bhargava 2007). The fears of the latter two groups already appear to be well-founded, as reports of anti-Muslim violence poured in shortly after the temple celebration (Sharma 2024).

The construction and government-led consecration of Ram Mandir is made possible by the triumphs of Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the decades of legwork performed by its “parent organization” (which acts like a militant social reform movement), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (Jaffrelot 2021, pp. 17, 20). Portraying Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party as their dynastic and elitist foil, the BJP and particularly their latest leader, lower-caste-born Modi, have used populism to a great effect (Jaffrelot 2021, p. 34; ET Online 2024). They have persuaded many Hindus, including lower-caste people who have been historically wary of the BJP’s upper-caste leadership, that the BJP’s pro-Hindu agenda will serve them better than democratic pluralism (Jaffrelot 2021, p. 44).

Hindu nationalist ideology frames Hindus as victims in their own homeland, who suffered Muslim invasions long before the British colonizers came along (Savarkar 1923; Jaffrelot 2021, pp. 13–14). Understanding themselves as a threatened regional minority surrounded by majority-Muslim neighbors (i.e., Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan) (Jayal 2019, pp. 36–37), Hindu nationalists want to return to the glory days of a flourishing Hindu culture and unchallenged political dominance. This blend of what Cristophe Jaffrelot refers to as both ethnic and territorial nationalism cannot permit special privileges for the Muslim minority in the Hindu homeland, despite Constitutional guarantees for community-based religious rights to the contrary (Jaffrelot 2021, p. 12). Anustup Basu also places the recent resurgence of Hindu nationalism alongside other emergent anti-liberal movements across the globe, exemplified by “neo-Ottomanism” in Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, “nativism” in Donald Trump’s United States, and the return of neo-Nazism in Austria and Germany (Basu 2020, p. 3).

Observers from organizations, such as Human Rights Watch and the Council on Foreign Relations, have noted a sharp rise in anti-Muslim violence in Modi’s India, and that violence has started to extend beyond India’s borders, through the actions of some members of the Indian diaspora (Ganguly 2023; Maizland 2022). Hindu nationalists worldwide, spurred on by Modi’s rising global image and the dominance of the BJP within India, have started to undertake acts of violence against Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians in countries like the US, the UK, Australia, and Canada (Daly et al. 2022). They defend their actions with tales of victimization that portray themselves as a threatened group, denying their role as perpetrators of violence against non-Hindus. For example, in a letter to then-Prime Minister Liz Truss of the UK following riots in Leicester, England, Alok Kumar of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Council of Hindus) urged her to protect “Hindu lives” and noted incidences of violence against “peaceful and law-abiding” Hindus in the UK. He attributed the violence solely to the Muslim community, referencing their supposed “ideology of hate, aggression and violence”. He also linked the Leicester riots to other incidents of “Islamic extremism”, which had occurred in the UK, positioning the Hindu community as the true loyalists to their adopted country (Vishva Hindu Parishad-VHP 2022).

According to a report by VICE World News, however, religious hate crime data reveal that Muslims face violence at far higher rates than Hindus in the UK. The events leading up to the Leicester riots that prompted the VHP’s letter to Truss illustrate this dynamic, as they began with mobs of young UK Hindus chanting “death to Pakistan”. Misinformation and falsified news reports, spread via viral social media posts, also played an important role in fanning the flames of violence between the communities, with Hindu nationalist internet trolls using phrases like #HindusUnderAttack. VICE reports that many of these posts were coming from inside India, not even from Leicester itself, revealing the difficulty of pinpointing and dismantling propaganda at its source (Daly et al. 2022). This link between right-wing internet activity and Hindu nationalist violence is well-established and on the rise. Investigative journalist Swati Chaturvedi, who undertook two years of conversations with Indian right-wing internet trolls, reports that she is “extremely worried about our careless use of lies and hate online–and more importantly the ways in which some key ruling party leaders have used this as a political tool”. She asks the following: “If you peddle lies and violence online, what does it say about your behaviour in the real world?” (Chaturvedi 2016).

These two examples—the consecration of the Ram Mandir temple and the spread of Hindu nationalist violence to towns like Leicester—produce (at least) two questions of urgent concern for scholars of interreligious studies and peace and conflict studies. The first is theoretical: how can we theorize Hinduism and religion, more broadly, as a source of protection, rather than harm, for peace and human rights? The second is practical: how can Hindus, Muslims, and members of other religious communities live alongside one another peacefully, in this atmosphere of increasingly militant Hindu nationalism?

In what follows, I will provide my best answers to both questions relying on a mixture of political theory, interviews that I conducted in India, and the analysis of secondary literature and news articles featuring religious actors building peace. I conclude that we can only get to peace through the acknowledgement of religious motivations within politics and a renewed commitment to truth, in all of its contested and changing forms. India’s “distinctive” approach, as Rajeev Bhargava puts it, to secular democracy is a good model (Bhargava 2007). The Constitution does not deny the importance of religion for its citizens, but it seeks to ensure that anyone in its borders can practice any form of religious expression without fear of discrimination (Jaffrelot 2021). Hindus must be able to express their pride in their religion while never making it impossible for others to do the same in the public sphere (Ali 2001). Given India’s context of rich religious diversity, the state must take up its responsibility to respectfully transform religious practices, particularly within Hinduism as the majority religion, which threaten the rights of others (Bhargava 2007).

2. Theory: Hinduism (And Other Religions) as a Source of Peace

Some liberal political theorists, such as John Rawls and, in the context of Hindu-Muslim relations in India, Amartya Sen, have been hesitant to recognize religious arguments in the public square, believing that they can only hamper political engagement across difference. For Rawls, a just society is one that devises its rules by a neutral process. In Justice as Fairness, he advocates for deliberating citizens to enter into “the original position” behind “the veil of ignorance”, which requires vacating all knowledge of one’s own identity and position in society (Rawls 2001, p. 15). Only from such a position, Rawls argues, can people be trusted to create laws and norms that support equality, because they have no knowledge of whether they would benefit from or suffer from potential inequalities. “Divine law” and “moral values” only get in the way of fair cooperation among “free and equal persons” who must be able to offer reasonable justifications to one another for their political decisions (Rawls 2001, pp. 14–16, 27).

Sen’s theorizing about identity is grounded, rather than ideal like Rawls’, but he reaches a similar conclusion about the probable harm of allowing religious identity a place of prominence in political interactions. While he goes farther than Rawls in terms of acknowledging the potential good produced by identity (“it can be a source of richness and warmth as well as of violence and terror”), he argues for a pluralistic understanding of identity that emphasizes shared traits, whether emotional or political, as well as “the broad commonality of our shared humanity” (Sen 2007, p. 4). Deeply moved by his childhood experiences with India’s partition and the Hindu–Muslim violence that he personally observed, he argues that a common humanity approach to identity is much more likely to lead to peace than invoking religious identities for political action (Sen 2007, pp. 174–78).

In Sen’s experience, to be Hindu is to murder Muslims, and vice versa around the time of partition. His conclusions in favor of choosing to activate broader, shared identities seem very reasonable in light of that context, which is not so different from the contemporary resurgence of Hindu nationalism and the anti-Muslim violence that it has produced. However, even Sen’s stance, which considerably softens Rawls’, will alienate those who sincerely act upon the basis of deeply-felt religious identities. The way forward cannot be to deny or diminish the role of religion in our political interactions, in favor of limiting ourselves to shared humanity only, falsely bifurcating religion from what it means to be human.

As Jeffrey Stout argues, to bar religious arguments from public deliberation is to encourage a false presentation of ourselves and our true motivations. Instead, we should share those motivations, religious or otherwise, and then deal honestly with one another’s ideas and the political arguments that flow from them (Stout 2004, p. 64). Contra Rawls, he asks how it could it be fair to require silence from religious actors if religious values are the only reasons they have for their political positions. Such a requirement is contrary to a society that claims to value religious freedom (Stout 2004, p. 72). As Amir Ali argues about the Indian context, religion (and particularly minority religions such as Islam, which struggle to get a hearing) must be able to move from the realm of private practice to public assertion if it is to be truly protected (Ali 2001, p. 2424).

Moreover, Stout notes that many of the most important contributors to American democracy, such as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., have offered explicitly religious framings for their arguments on behalf of peace, justice, and human and civil rights. For example, Lincoln’s second inaugural address invokes the Biblical concept of charity and refers to God as the higher power who will sit in the judgment of sinners (Stout 2004, p. 70). Arguments, such as these center, rather than sideline, religious motivations within political action. And contra the fears of liberal theorists like Rawls and Sen, these religious arguments prop up peace, rather than standing in its way.

My argument, leaning heavily upon Stout’s, demands further examination, however. Even as I share examples of peace-oriented religious arguments, readers will be well aware of religious motivations that produce violence. As R. Scott Appleby has famously argued, the sacred is “ambivalent”—it produces both positive and negative outcomes for peace and human rights. Particularly dangerous for peace are fundamentalist approaches to religion, which leave no room for interpretive freedom (Appleby 2000, pp. 57–58). As the introduction to this piece illustrated, those outcomes have largely been negative with the resurgence of Hindu nationalism. How do we know which religions, or expressions of religion, are the “good” kind that can promote peace? Perhaps even more importantly, who decides? These are important questions for both theology and political theory, and it is beyond the scope of this essay to fully address them. However, I believe that by turning to several concrete examples of religion in practice, with particular reference to India and to Hindu–Muslim relations across time, we can begin to see a path forward, bolstered by real examples of religiously motivated actions for peace.

3. Practice: Living Alongside Religious Others—The Role of the Truth

While examining the practices of religious actors who stand against violence in Indian politics, I was struck by a consistent theme that emerges across different people, time periods, and locations: the necessity of revealing and living by the truth. Truth and peace go together, and the peddling of untruths contributes to violence. This emergent theme is all the more interesting in light of arguments coming from liberal theorists, like Rawls and Sen, who might wish for religious actors to silence or at least soften religious truths for the sake of a shared common good. It seems that in practice, the search for and presentation of truth by religious actors is central to nonviolent action in the face of violence and to building peace across ethnoreligious difference.

Of course, the pursuit of truth and humans’ ability to share understandings of truth are highly contested and contextualized endeavors. Michel Foucault has argued that truth is always already produced within historical and social contexts; there is no such thing as a self-evident universal truth that all people could come to know (Deere 2014, p. 517). My examples of practice will show, however, that some approaches to religion are supportive of peace, while others are supportive of violence. Just as regimes of truth are constructed, if we are to believe Foucault (Foucault 1997), religious actors working for peace can choose to build regimes of peace that rely on constructive truths. My first example, Mahatma Gandhi, was a famous “experimenter” with truth who did just that (Gandhi 1969).

3.1. Gandhi’s Salt March

Going back to the era of civil disobedience, India’s most famous citizen, Mohandas K. Gandhi (known as the “Mahatma” or holy person), subtitled his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Gandhi 1969). As he walked his path from student, to lawyer, to activist, to one of the most prominent leaders of an internationally-famous movement for independence, he remained devoted to the search for the truth throughout his life. Judith Brown describes Gandhi’s method of satyagraha, his truth-centered approach to nonviolent activism, as beginning with “a meticulous concern for the collection of properly documented evidence”–i.e., with uncovering the truth (Brown 1989, p. 113; Cortright 2006, p. 22). While his civil disobedience tactics often ended with applying pressure via non-cooperation, they always began with an attempt to persuade the opponent by laying out the truth, as best he could understand it at the time in his context. Only after the presentation of the truth failed to move the other side would Gandhi proceed through the steps of using personal sacrifice to prick their consciences, followed by coercive non-cooperation (Cortright 2006, p. 22).

Peace studies scholar David Cortright directly ties Gandhi’s social and political practices, centered on nonviolent non-cooperation, to a number of religious influences (particularly to Jainism, Hinduism, and Christianity) (Cortright 2006, pp. 11–12). Gandhi would never go beyond non-cooperation to violent revolution because of his theological understanding of humans’ ability to see only partial truths. Because humans can never fully know the absolute truth (God alone can know such things), they are not “competent to punish” others who see differently, he argued (Gandhi n.d., p. 506; Cortright 2006, p. 15). Therefore, they cannot use violence against each other.

These religious views inspired one of the largest and most attention-grabbing nonviolent campaigns of the twentieth century, the Salt March against British colonization. Characterized by mass participation and well-covered by the media, the Salt March captured the attention of both the British and the rest of the world, putting pressure on the colonizers to grant freedom to peaceful Indians who clamored for self-determination. This was achieved, in large part, by Gandhi’s ability to use his awareness of religious difference to unite a religiously diverse Indian population. He traveled around giving speeches and recruiting both Hindus and Muslims to the cause, speaking to them in terms of their own religious beliefs. For a Hindu audience, he employed the concept of dharma, or righteousness, encouraging Hindus to see breaking an unjust law as their religious duty. For a Muslim audience, he quoted from the Koran (Suchitra 1995, pp. 744–45). Suchitra argues that salt was such a successful symbol for the march primarily because it was such an object of “common use”, cutting across “religious, caste, and class differences” and “offer[ing] Hindus and Muslims a platform for a joint struggle on an economic issue” (Suchitra 1995, p. 744).

Notice that Gandhi’s method of cutting across differences, however, did not negate but rather employed religious arguments to reach both Hindus and Muslims. They could come together on salt, in part, because Gandhi could offer arguments in terms that they understood, which gave them good reason to respond. It is important to acknowledge that some aspects of India’s politics got in the way of widespread Muslim uptake of the March, with some Muslims calling for a boycott (Suchitra 1995, p. 746). That was not unusual in a time in which Hindus and Muslims disagreed over the desirability of a post-colonial partition. Still, it is clear that religious truths, selected for their ability to support peace, played a large role in the Salt March, which was widely deemed an enormous (nonviolent) political success (Popovic and Miller 2015, p. 40).

3.2. Interreligious Associational Civic Engagement and Peace Committees

The truth also plays an integral role in maintaining peace in cities that avoid Hindu–Muslim riots, in Ashutosh Varshney’s 2002 study of ethnic conflict in India. Through the examination of six Indian cities, three of them succumbing to violent riots and three of them avoiding the violence, Varshney uncovers the causal mechanism of formal engagement within civil society associations, across ethno-religious boundaries (Varshney 2002, pp. 7–10). In peaceful cities, formal associations (such as unions, business associations, and political parties) that involve regular and voluntary engagement across religious divides serve as the basis for temporary “peace committees” that rise up in times of crisis (Varshney 2002, p. 47). According to Varshney, these committees emerge organically from pre-existing relationships that were built in formal civic settings, and they perform activities such as “polic[ing] neighborhoods, kill[ing] rumors, provid[ing] information to the local administration, and facilitate[ing] communication between communities in times of tension” (Varshney 2002, p. 10).

For example, in the city of Lucknow, Hindu attempts to instigate riots against Muslims failed when they ran up against strong, cross-community civic ties and an informal peace committee. Varshney reports the following: “A sadhu (Hindu holy man) was killed, and a rumor circulated that a Muslim had killed him; it turned out that a Hindu had actually killed the holy man. … The district administration was able to catch the culprit quickly…and present him before his own community, the peace committee, and the press” (Varshney 2002, p. 14). This was effective because of its intercommunal nature—both Hindus and Muslims were on the peace committee, which was grounded in years of formal economic relations in Lucknow—and because of its emphasis on uncovering the truth as quickly as possible. The ability to reach the truth, and for people to believe it once it is publicized, is grounded in the pre-existing relationships that have been forged for years, helped along by, in the case of Lucknow, economic self-interest (Varshney 2002, p. 15). These religious actors were not motivated by religious values themselves; however, their religious identity was key to their successful pursuit of peace between religious groups. As Hindu nationalist violence polarized society, the ability of Hindus and Muslims to stand shoulder-to-shoulder—first in long-standing civic associations, and then in ad hoc peace committees that formed as needed—proved integral to the preservation of peace.

3.3. Manipur Baptist Church

In my own field research for a different study conducted in Manipur, India, in 2014–2015, I examined the theories and practices of women pursuing peacebuilding across ethno-religious difference in a setting of low-intensity armed conflict. Using observation and interviews, relying on snowball sampling, I embedded myself with peacebuilding organizations and followed leads to gather as wide a range of practices and participants as possible. I then used qualitative analysis software MAXQDA 10 to analyze women’s actions towards peace, as they defined and understood it themselves. The politics of the Northeast region are rather different from those of mainland India, characterized by concerns related to indigenous identity, migration, and self-determination (Ahmed and Pathak 2020). Hindu–Muslim conflict is relatively rare, and violence is more likely to break out among different ethnicity-based insurgent groups and between representatives of the Indian state and such groups as the central government attempts to impose order (Baruah 2020).

Women peacebuilders associated with the Manipur Baptist Church, in my study, promoted peace on two fronts: among widows of different ethnic groups and between men and women. Their efforts were inspired by their understanding of Christian scriptures. I spoke at length with LI (full name redacted for her protection) about her work with the women’s department for the church. She emphasized that their projects started with a consultation to uncover the most common needs across ethnically diverse local women in their communities. We can interpret this as a Gandhian search for facts. Who was suffering in society; what did they need, and how could the women’s department help? They found that conflict widows, coming from many different ethno-religious communities, were a socially neglected yet tremendously needy group, overlooked even by (male) church leaders.

LI described the “double responsibility” of conflict widows who had lost the male breadwinners in their lives to violence:

Many widows … they have their own children … they have to shoulder the men’s part, and then motherhood. So they have to take double responsibility. … Many churches, they don’t understand and they don’t really think of widows, and then they are struggling. …We need to help them, we need to encourage them, we need to be supportive. …So being [the] women’s department, the women understand more, and better, than the [men], no?1

The Women’s Department at Manipur Baptist Church therefore decided to particularly support economic opportunities for conflict widows of many different identities, to include Meiteis, Nagas, Kukis, Nepalis, and Muslim Pangals (close ethnic cousins of Meiteis in Manipur), which meant including participants adhering to Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. They built peace by creating pathways towards economic self-sufficiency for women and by promoting relations across differences among women who had experienced similar political and social events. Their work included training women on making products, which the church would then sell for them, as well as offering a space for these bereaved women to make and eat meals together (although Muslim widows would prepare their meals separately, to observe Muslim halal practice).2 In sum, once church leaders took the trouble to investigate the truth of these women’s dire situations, they brought them together and forged religiously sensitive connections across communities whose men were otherwise fighting one another.

A second route towards peace, for LI, lay in instructing male pastors about Biblical teachings on women’s role in the church. This may seem to lie outside of the traditional concerns of peace and conflict and of Hindu–Muslim relations, but we can read this as pushing back against the structural violence that silences women in religious settings, leaving them vulnerable to influential community leaders who do not understand their experiences and who actively keep them from leading (Farmer 2003, p. 40; Galtung 1969, p. 170). Among groups like Kukis and Nagas, the church is so central to social life that this religious, gender-based discrimination necessarily spills out into the rest of social life, creating additional sources of violence against women. Countering gender-based discrimination in the church is thus an important aspect of improving equity between men and women.

LI was conducting a women’s leadership seminar with a Meitei association in May of 2015. To her surprise, fifteen male pastors attended, and LI spoke her mind about faulty interpretations of biblical texts. She reported the following:

Many people say Paul said women should not speak in the church, women should be silent like that, no? All those passages, many pastors base on that, and then they prohibit women speaking in church, without knowing the context. They generalize it and then apply it. Whereas Paul, you know, how many women co-workers he has in Romans 16? Out of 27, I think if I’m not wrong, around 11 are women. See? How can he contradict himself? It’s the context.

One of the pastors stood up and addressed the seminar after she finished speaking:

We never heard this kind of teaching before. … What our leader was telling us, women should be submissive, women should be silent, women should not preach. That[’s] what our former leaders taught us, so we just follow[ed] that. Today, your teaching is a very new thing for me, and eye-opening.3

LI doubted that she convinced all fifteen of the men present, but she was encouraged if even one pastor changed his mind, as this would have effects that rippled out into the lives of his congregants. While this kind of theological work is not traditionally considered part of peacebuilding, it could certainly serve as a seed of transformation for gender relations in this community. It relies on re-examining Biblical interpretations and questioning whether traditions are grounded in mere habit. While hermeneutical interpretations of scriptures may yet differ, the search for the truth, in this case, led to better lives for women of many different religions living in a conflict zone.

3.4. Hindus for Human Rights

Many Indians outside of India likewise pursue the truth from a religious perspective, pushing back on the harms that they see from the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, as well as within the diaspora population. Hindus for Human Rights, a non-profit organization based in the United States (US), is one such organization that publicizes their understanding of a pluralistic and tolerant Hinduism and uses it to “advocate for shanti (peace), nyaya (justice), and the manavtha (human rights) of all communities from a Hindu perspective” (The Board of Directors 2020). They regularly respond to major political events within India, lobbying political leaders in the US and mobilizing Indian Americans for their cause.

Two recent political events that have caught their attention include the consecration of the Ram Mandir and the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act. A statement on their website from Pandita Sapna reflects on what the Ram Mandir celebration means to her, a woman born as a Vaishnava Brahman who worked at Hindu camps and even majored in Hindu theology at her university. Sapna notes with evident grief the following:

The events leading up to the demolition of the Babri masjid and the ripples of violence that have followed after–these are not, in my understanding, being done following the guidance of Sananthan Dharma. They were done only for political gain by those who wish to destroy the idea of an India for all.

Why do I say this? If we believe, as we are taught to, that Ram is the epitome of dharma–that to have Ram in your heart is to follow a righteous path–then what is that dharma? I’ve always been taught one of the central tenets of Hinduism and indeed almost a synonym to dharma is ahimsa–nonviolence. …

So how is violently destroying a house of God ahimsic? It is not.

How is subsequently murdering Muslims in a state-sponsored pogrom in Gujarat ahimsic? It is not.

How is denying those who–like myself–wish to call themselves Hindu and are taught to believe that Hinduism can stand for egalitarianism, equality, love for all,—the right to actually see those things in practice ahimsic? It is not. …

She closes her statement with a call for a Hinduism that is characterized by pluralism and nonviolence, instead of what she has observed as Hindu nationalists, in India and abroad, have (sometimes violently) celebrated the consecration of a Hindu temple that symbolizes so much terror for Muslims (Hindus for Human Rights 2024a).

The organization has also been vocal in response to the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act, passed in 2019 but finally undergoing implementation in 2024, shortly before the next cycle of national elections is set to begin in India (Al Jazeera 2024a). Scholars and activists have denounced this law as an example of religious discrimination, as it fast-tracks citizenship for some based on religious identity. The Act eases length-of-residency requirements for persecuted religious minorities who have migrated to India, including Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Parsis (Jayal 2019, p. 35). “The silent implication”, citizenship scholar Jayal notes, “is that Muslims from these countries would continue to be treated as illegal immigrants and would not therefore be eligible” under the purview of the law, as they are in the religious majority (Jayal 2019, p. 36). Muslims are therefore automatically excluded from Indian citizenship due to religious identity, regardless of whether they have faced persecution in their country (disqualifying, for example, the Rohingya) (Hindus for Human Rights 2024b). Protests over this law rocked India for many weeks, from 2019 into 2020, ending only with the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic (Venugopal 2020).

Public concern was reignited in March of 2024 now that implementation has begun, and members of Hindus for Human Rights have released statements in response arguing on behalf of India’s status as a secular democracy. In a blog post, they declare the following:

Hindus for Human Rights stands in solidarity with all communities who seek refuge from persecution. We advocate for a more inclusive approach to asylum and citizenship, one that aligns with the rich and diverse ethos of India and respects the country’s constitutional commitment to secularism and equality before the law. India, as the world’s largest democracy, has the moral responsibility to set an example in upholding the principles of diversity, tolerance, and human rights.

(Hindus for Human Rights 2024b)

All of this advocacy has earned Hindus for Human Rights something of a notorious reputation in Modi’s India, illustrated by the recent blocking of their social media posts within India’s borders. Their X account, along with the account of an ally organization and frequent collaborator, the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), has been blocked since October of 2023. In a press release, Hindus for Human Rights argued that this censorship reveals how their “truth telling” and “constant insistence on justice” have threatened India’s Hindu nationalist regime. Invoking Gandhi’s first civil disobedience movement, they call their current work “the second freedom struggle for India. Nothing less” (The Wire Staff 2023).

The IAMC added in a separate release that X (formerly known as Twitter), under Elon Musk, is “accelerating the suppression of free expression and democracy in India and the US”. The organization has relied on social media sites like X to spread their views on the “worsening human rights conditions of persecuted minority groups in India”. To not even be able to draw attention to these conditions entails the violations of free expression and free speech, according to IAMC President Mohammad Jawad (The Wire Staff 2023).

In sum, Hindu nationalists fear the truth, according to groups like Hindus for Human Rights and the IAMC. This fear, to me, suggests that their primary concern is not the ability to practice their religious values but rather their ability to hold onto political power. That moves the conversation away from theological assessments of the content of “true Hinduism” or “true Islam”, enabling outsiders to those religions to offer critiques based on political practice and the protection of human rights. Anyone, regardless of religious affiliation, can observe the effects of religiously motivated actions and determine whether they are peaceful or violent. When religion becomes propaganda, and when the pursuit of religious values entails blocking the right of others to express their own religious values, we can question religious actors by the fruits of their actions.

4. Conclusions: The Pursuit of Truth on the Way to Peace

I posed two questions in the introduction to this piece: first, how can we theorize Hinduism and religion, more broadly, as a source of protection, rather than harm, for peace and human rights? Second, how can Hindus, Muslims, and members of other religious communities live alongside one another peacefully, in this atmosphere of increasingly militant Hindu nationalism? The answer to both takes inspiration from the Gandhian method of relentlessly pursuing the truth, which I have shown to be important for many diverse religious actors across India (and the diaspora population) and across time.

Even Sen, whom I portrayed as a liberal theorist wary of religious values, promotes his own version of truth-seeking. He may primarily express concern about the effects of religious mobilization in politics, but he believes that there are right and wrong ways to conceive of human nature, i.e., that there are truths about humans that can be known, even in diverse societies. His approach pleads for us to recognize the truth of humans’ pluralistic identities. We are not only Hindus, or only Muslims, he says; we are also members of families, of communities, of states, and more. He argues that we can act on the basis of these other identities, rather than allowing elites to mobilize communities for violence on the basis of just one (Sen 2007, pp. xiii–xiv).

While I would prefer for Sen to make this argument in a way that leaves more room for the positive assertion of religious identity, he and I essentially agree on the imperative of self-reflexive truth-seeking about our identities and what they mean for political action. We can take this insight of Sen’s, use Stout to interpret religion charitably as a positive force in democratic deliberation, and theorize religion as a motivation for the seeking of truth. It does not have to serve as an automatic mobilizer for the persecution of religious others. If and when religion mobilizes people towards violence, rather than towards peace, Stout would say that it is no longer participating in the democratic tradition. That argument may not be very persuasive in countries that do not value democracy; however, as the members of Hindus for Human Rights are so quick to point out, India does—or at least, it claims that it does (Hindus for Human Rights 2024b).

How, then, can members of different religious communities live peacefully together in this atmosphere of rising Hindu nationalism? Across the examples that I presented from Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement, Varshney’s peace committees, Manipur Baptist Church’s interreligious activism for conflict widows, and the advocacy work of Hindus for Human Rights, I see three emergent practices. First, none of these groups asked anyone to give up their religion for the sake of peaceful, democratic functioning. For all of them, religious identification, religiously motivated values, and their understandings of scripture were central to their work in support of peace.

Second, as we saw, particularly with Gandhi and the Manipur Baptist Church, their peace work also involved instances of respect for religious traditions other than their own. Gandhi spoke to Muslims on their terms; the ministry at the Manipur Baptist Church made room for Muslim conflict widows to prepare their meals separately to follow halal. Taking motivation from one’s own religion corresponds to respect for others’ religious traditions.

Third, all of them relentlessly investigated the truth. This practice is perhaps the most controversial and the most difficult to do, as religious truths may well conflict with one another. No one will ever have precisely the same understanding of the truth, and all truths are historically and socially situated (Foucault 1997). However, I have argued that we do not necessarily have to know, or agree upon, the content of something like “true Hinduism” or “true Islam” in order to welcome arguments coming from Hinduism or Islam into the public sphere. Groups like Hindus for Human Rights use their understanding of true Hinduism to critique Hindu nationalist political practice. I myself am a Christian, but I agree with their critiques since they are promoting my understanding of what is important for peace: a respect for democratic values like freedom of expression and the equal treatment of people regardless of their religious identity. Since Hindu nationalism advocates for turning Muslims in India into second-class citizens (Jaffrelot 2021, p. 14), as a peace studies scholar, I condemn it on the basis of its politics, regardless of whether it is “ahimsic” (Hindus for Human Rights 2024a). Does that mean that I have subordinated religion to politics, i.e., I can only accept those religions that agree with my politics? No, not at all; it simply means that people of different religions can together, from different perspectives, promote the politics that they believe to be ethical and grounded in their best understanding of the truth, listening to one another’s diverse reasons and advocating against those reasons that they believe to be false. In scenarios like the Leicester, UK, riots, according to Daly et al., “a toxic online soup of hate speech and fake news came from all sides throughout the unrest”. (Daly et al. 2022) Religious actors have a duty to stand up for the truth in such settings if they wish to promote peace.