Neo-Hindutva as a Civilisational State: Ali Javed on How an Ideology Became the Government Itself

A new series, a foundational question

This episode launches First Principles, a new strand of the Nous Podcast built around close, critical readings of political theory and philosophy, paired with what the hosts call a reflective look at Islamic intellectual history. The guest for the opening conversation is Ali Javed, and the subject is neo-Hindutva as a civilisational state. Host Bushra Khanum opens with a genealogical question: is Hindutva best understood as an ideology evolving from pragmatism toward metaphysics, or has it always carried a metaphysics of its own alongside its practical politics?

Javed's answer is a history lesson before it is a definition. He traces the coinage of Hindutva to around 1890, but locates its real origins in the vacuum left by the decline of Mughal sovereignty after 1857, sharpened by British colonial census-taking, which forced communities to confront, often for the first time in administrative form, the actual demographic composition of the territories they lived in. That anxiety, he argues, fed directly into events like the partition of Bengal and into a new literature of Hindu-majoritarian symbolism from the 1870s and 1880s onward.

Anand Math and the manufacture of a usable past

Javed's central historical example is Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's 1882 novel Anand Math, which he treats as an early template for the entire project: a fictionalised history in which Muslim fakirs, who in Javed's account fought alongside Hindu ascetics against British colonial policy and the famine it produced, are simply written out, leaving only Hindu "santans" as the resistance and casting the era's Muslim nawab as the colonial power's puppet. For Javed, this is the method more than the content that matters: a historical erasure, repeated and unlearned by successive generations, hardens into a self-evident memory of how things always were. He traces the same period's Arya Samaj and Shuddhi movements, the founding of the Hindu Mahasabha, and, in parallel, the formation of the Muslim League, as different communities each trying to work out what political vehicle could mobilise identity under a declining imperial order.

The philosophical turning point, in his account, is V.D. Savarkar, whom he credits with the first serious political theorisation of Hindutva as a stable, bounded polity rather than a loose cultural sentiment: a claim that a specific territory is the exclusive product of an indigenous philosophical lineage, from which Islam and Christianity, along with, in his broader treatment, Western frameworks like communism and liberalism, are structurally foreign. Even so, Javed insists that through Partition and the decades after, this remained substantially a movement rather than a state project organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS trained cadres and built institutions, but operated in what he calls a constant bargain with a national movement, and later a Congress-led state, that was itself never fully realised on its own constitutional promises to minorities.

From movement to metaphysics: what makes it "neo"

Javed dates the qualitative shift to 2014, but insists the underlying philosophy in what he terms neo-Hindutva is not new relative to Anand Math or Savarkar; it is the same project acquiring, for the first time, a body to inhabit. Where Hindutva theorists from Savarkar to Golwalkar had defined the doctrine's "soul," he argues, they lacked the state apparatus to give it a "body." The years since 2014 he reads as a steady process of constitutional reinterpretation and renegotiation, from the criminalisation of triple talaq to the push for a Uniform Civil Code, the abrogation of Article 370, and changes to waqf law each incrementally fusing what he calls the movement's soul, its animating philosophy, with the body of the state's institutions.

This is the crux of his definition: neo-Hindutva is not simply a ruling party's ideology but what he calls "a very robust metaphysics," a single, internally consistent framework that extends across territoriality, the nature of law, culture, ethnicity, religion and economics simultaneously. Its practical consequence, he argues, is that the RSS is no longer a necessary vehicle for the project's survival; it becomes, in his phrase, "just one of the organising forces," because the state itself now functions as Hindutva's primary organ. He is careful to add that this fusion is not complete or frictionless he compares it to a body that still carries a virus or bacterium it hasn't fully expelled but describes it as an ongoing, not a finished, process.

A metaphysics that costs more to sustain than a monotheism

Much of the conversation is given over to a structural comparison between Hindutva and Zionism as political-theological projects, a comparison Javed handles carefully, insisting the two are built on nearly opposite metaphysical foundations even as they converge in practice. Judaism's monotheism, he argues, tends structurally toward oneness and a compact, defensible claim to a small, encircled territory. Hindu thought, in his reading, is metaphysically pluralist at its root, hospitable in principle to multiple gods and multiple truth-claims, which makes imposing a single, unified political and territorial order on it, one nation, one law, one civilisational identity, a much heavier lift. "The amount of computational resources required to sustain that," as he puts it, "are much higher than would be required for a metaphysics of oneness." His answer to how that lift is managed is what he calls "sacred geography": a doctrine that reclassifies the internal multiplicity of Hindu traditions as a legitimate, native pluralism while branding anything arriving from outside that geography, Islam, Christianity, and by extension foreign philosophical frameworks, as an intrinsically alien contaminant. Sacred geography, in his account, functions as a shield that both licenses internal hierarchy and justifies exclusion of outsiders in the same gesture.

Despite the different metaphysical starting points, Javed argues both projects converge on treating Islam as a common adversary and on a logic of mutual exclusion, which he says explains their deepening alignment in defence trade, intelligence sharing, and technology, and the fact that Indian labourers have filled roles in Israel's economy vacated by Palestinian workers since October 2023. He does not shy from the uncomfortable historical detail that RSS founder-era figures, including M.S. Golwalkar, wrote approvingly of Nazi Germany's approach to minorities, even as the same current also expresses solidarity with Zionism as a fellow ethnonationalist project, a pairing he calls internally consistent only in the narrow sense that both share the same enemy.

Akhand Bharat and Greater Israel: maximalist claims by design

Turning to the idea of India as a civilisational state, Javed argues that any philosophy claiming a holistic vision of a society will naturally produce a civilisational self-image; the distinguishing feature of a civilisational state is when that logic is deliberately pushed, bottom-up, into the machinery of law and government itself, from a uniform civil code to citizenship rules. He draws a direct parallel between the RSS-linked concept of Akhand Bharat and Israel's Greater Israel project, arguing both stake claims to the maximal historical extent of a civilisation's past reach rather than its present, lived reality, and that China's own civilisational-state rhetoric produces a similar, ongoing territorial tension with India's. In his account, this is not unique to Hindutva: dynastic and imperial claims throughout history, Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, Roman, have worked the same way, and he is explicit that Muslim empires' own historical expansions are not exempt from the same critique when their legacy is treated as an entitlement rather than a closed chapter.

Muslims as the "new Dalits": a political economy argument

The conversation's most pointed claim concerns political economy rather than theology. Javed argues that Muslims now occupy, within Hindutva's economic order, a structural role that Dalits historically occupied: a "reserve army of labour," to use the phrase he borrows from Marx, whose economic surplus is available for extraction and whose visible precarity lets Dalits and OBCs feel comparatively better off, a psychological wage that helps stabilise caste hierarchy even as, he says, atrocities against Dalits continue largely unreported. In his framing, the deliberate hyper-visibility of Muslims as a supposed threat and the simultaneous invisibility of their citizenship claims are two sides of the same mechanism, and it lets the state, in his words, "manage and contain" caste oppression rather than resolve it, by redirecting the sharpest edge of extraction and violence toward Muslims instead. He summarises the resulting role starkly: reduced to what he calls a "political technology," a Muslim's instrumental value to the state increasingly narrows to little more than a vote, useful chiefly for consolidating Hindu identity against a designated external enemy.

Whose decolonisation? A critique of borrowed vocabulary

Javed devotes a substantial part of the discussion to what he sees as Hindutva intellectuals successfully repurposing academic vocabulary, decoloniality, indigeneity, postmodern multiplicity of truth, that originated in Western critical theory, and using it to attack constitutional secularism and Islamic universalism as themselves foreign impositions. He names J. Sai Deepak's India That Is Bharat trilogy, Rajiv Malhotra's "Breaking India" framework, and the temple-history work of Meenakshi Jain and Vikram Sampath as examples of this method, and argues that without a clearly defined ethics, history and account of who actually counts as indigenous, the category of decolonisation becomes infinitely elastic and easily weaponised. He is equally critical of the Muslim intellectuals and activists who adopted decolonial language without, in his view, working out who the framework was meant to serve in a context this layered. He also pushes back on one specific piece of that Hindutva historiography: the use of Shah Waliullah's eighteenth-century letter urging Ahmad Shah Abdali to intervene against Maratha and Jat power as supposed proof of an anti-Hindu Muslim conspiracy, pointing out that Waliullah's own writing does not use the word Hindu, that the conflict was over Mughal sovereignty rather than religion, and that Hindu rulers of the period wrote comparable appeals to Abdali for their own reasons.

A prescription, not just a diagnosis

The episode closes with Javed turning from analysis to strategy. He argues Indian Muslims need to move out of what he calls a "victim psychology" without denying real victimhood, framing the Prophet Muhammad's Meccan period as a model of a persecuted community that nonetheless articulated universal, not merely sectarian, claims. Practically, he argues for issue-based alliances with Dalits, OBCs, the left and feminist movements rather than assuming a single natural coalition exists, and for translating Islamic economic and social principles, zakat as a wealth tax, the critique of exploitative interest, an existing tradition of legal pluralism, into a vocabulary that can appeal beyond the Muslim community rather than being framed as sectarian demands. His sharpest criticism is reserved for the community's own leadership structure, which he describes as gerontocratic forums dominated by people in their seventies and eighties, with no visible pipeline of Muslims in their twenties, thirties or fifties being trained and empowered to lead. The episode ends with an invitation to viewers to suggest topics for the series going forward, and a promise that the strategic questions raised here, particularly around alliance-building, will be taken up at greater length in a future episode.