Neo-Hindutva: From a Movement to the Metaphysics of the State

A Movement That No Longer Needs a Movement

In the opening episode of a new Nous series called First Principles, which sets out to examine political theory and Islamic intellectual history through a critical lens, the researcher and commentator Ali Javed lays out an ambitious argument: that Hindutva has stopped being merely a political project and become what he calls a "metaphysics" — a totalising worldview now fused directly into the machinery of the Indian state. His central claim is that after 2014, Hindutva no longer requires the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha or any other movement to carry it forward, because the state itself has become Hindutva. "The RSS is just one of the organising forces," he says — not the only one, and no longer even the essential one.

How a 19th-Century Anxiety Became a 21st-Century State

Javed traces the genealogy back to the late 19th century. The word "Hindutva" itself was coined around 1890, in the unsettled decades after the fall of Mughal sovereignty in 1857, when colonial census-taking revealed, to the surprise of many upper-caste and elite Hindus, just how large the Muslim population of India actually was. That anxiety, he argues, shaped a wave of identity-building: the Arya Samaj's Shuddhi movement, the founding of the Hindu Mahasabha, and — crucially — Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's 1882 novel Anandmath, which recast a historical anti-colonial rebellion in which Hindu ascetics and Muslim fakirs had fought together against British economic policy as a purely Hindu uprising, erasing the Muslim fakirs from the story entirely. It was, in Javed's reading, one of the first deliberate rewritings of Indian history into a majoritarian myth. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar later gave this sentiment its first real political theory: a vision of Indian territory as sacred ground, whose "original" belonging was Hindu, and from which other identities — Muslims, Christians, and by extension communism, liberalism and Western modernity — were structurally foreign.

For decades after independence, Javed argues, this project existed in tension with the constitutional state: the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha worked from the bottom up, building cadres and rewriting popular memory, while an ostensibly secular Congress establishment held the formal levers of power — itself inconsistently, drifting from Jawaharlal Nehru's ideological commitment to secularism toward the far more transactional politics of his successors. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement, amplified nationally through the state broadcaster's telecast of the Ramayana, marked a turning point in nationalising and universalising a specifically Hindu religious identity. But it was 2014, in Javed's framing, that changed the register entirely: Hindutva ideologues had already worked out its "soul" over a century of writing; what they lacked, until they won state power, was a "body." The abrogation of Article 370, the criminalisation of instant triple talaq, the push for a Uniform Civil Code, and changes to waqf law are, in this reading, not a series of separate policies but a single, ongoing process of re-fusing the constitution's soul and body into a Hindutva whole — a process he insists is still incomplete rather than finished.

A Shared Enemy With Zionism, Not a Shared Blueprint

A large part of the conversation is given over to a comparison between Hindutva and Zionism as "political theology" projects — both making grand historical claims to sacred territory, and both, in Javed's account, sharing a common adversary in Islam and a logic of mutual exclusion. He notes the well-documented historical admiration some early RSS ideologues, including M.S. Golwalkar, expressed for how Nazi Germany treated its minorities, and a parallel strand of early Zionist thinking that saw a Jewish ethno-state in the Middle East as a natural check on Muslim power in the region. But he is careful to argue the two projects are not structurally identical. Judaism's core metaphysics, he says, is exclusivist monotheism — a "chosen people" logic that fits neatly onto a small, bounded, defensible territory, which is why he sees Israel and, differently, Iran as comparatively "stable" territorial-theological configurations. Hinduism's underlying metaphysics, by contrast, is fundamentally pluralist — multiple gods, competing and even mutually exclusive truth claims, a range that stretches from Advaita's radical oneness to full-blown polytheism. Imposing a single, absolute claim of national and territorial oneness on top of that inherent plurality, Javed argues, takes enormously more sustained coercive energy than a monotheistic project requires — and that energy, historically, has been supplied by the caste hierarchy, which orders and restrains Hinduism's plurality into ranked "boxes": Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, Dalit, and, at the very edge of the frame, Muslims placed entirely outside it.

Where the Comparison Becomes Concrete

Javed points to real-world convergence between India and Israel as evidence that the comparison is not merely philosophical: arms deals, shared intelligence and surveillance technology (he cites the Pegasus spyware episode and defence ties involving Elbit Systems), and joint training in "homeland security." He argues the relationship deepened further after October 2023, when thousands of Indian workers were sent to Israel to fill agricultural and construction jobs after Palestinian day labourers from Gaza and the West Bank were barred as security risks — a labour substitution he frames as evidence of how deeply intertwined the two states' political economies have become, even as global opinion turned against Israel over the war in Gaza.

"Civilisation Before Nation" — But Only for One Side

The conversation's second major theme is the idea of the "civilisational state": the effort to make a civilisational logic — not just a set of policies, but an entire ordering of law, culture, economics and social hierarchy — manifest through every institution of the state, from the judiciary's interpretation of a Uniform Civil Code to citizenship rules, the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, and reservation policy. Javed argues this operates through inclusion and exclusion simultaneously — pointing to how the National Register of Citizens created a category of potential exclusion that then required the Citizenship Amendment Act to selectively include "its own people" back in. He is especially pointed about the rhetorical double standard this produces: Hindutva ideologues routinely argue that "civilisation precedes the nation," relativising the constitution itself against a deeper civilisational claim — yet Muslims are simultaneously expected to place the Indian nation before any transnational religious identity, with no equivalent right to argue that faith might precede the nation-state. He also points to organisations such as the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, formed in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots specifically to demonstrate that some Muslims stood with the ruling party, as an extension of this same logic — one that now visibly reaches, he says, into who gets appointed as a university vice-chancellor.

Borrowing the Language of Decolonisation

One of Javed's sharper arguments is that Hindutva intellectuals — he names the writer J. Sai Deepak and the historian Vikram Sampath specifically — have adopted the vocabulary of postcolonial and "decolonial" theory, developed originally to describe the relationship between coloniser and colonised, and turned it into a tool of majoritarian history-writing. Their argument, as he characterises it, splits Indian history into "two colonisations" — a British one, which India's constitution addressed, and an earlier "Islamic colonisation," which it did not — and uses that framing to justify revisiting historical grievances (temple-destruction claims feeding into disputes such as the one over the Mathura mosque) as a present-day "correction." Javed pushes back on the framing itself, asking pointedly who actually qualifies as "indigenous" in India if the term is taken seriously — noting that by genetic ancestry studies, groups such as Adivasi communities and the population of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands would have a far stronger claim to indigeneity than the upper castes now invoking the term. Concepts like decolonisation and indigeneity, he argues, are "conceptual containers" that mean nothing on their own without a prior, explicit ethical and historical framework — which is exactly what allows them to be weaponised by whoever holds the microphone.

Disputing a Founding Myth of "Muslim Separatism"

Javed also directly contests a genealogy popular among Hindutva writers, which traces the origins of Muslim separatism in India to the 18th-century scholar Shah Waliullah, who wrote to the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali urging him to intervene against the rising Maratha and Jat powers as Mughal authority collapsed. He argues this is read anachronistically as an anti-Hindu appeal, when Shah Waliullah's own writing does not use the word "Hindu" at all — the conflict, he says, was over Mughal sovereignty, and several Hindu rulers of the period, whose own power was entangled with the Mughal state, sought the same kind of external help against the Marathas. More broadly, he argues that Shah Waliullah's intellectual influence runs through virtually the entire spectrum of 19th- and 20th-century Muslim thought in South Asia — Deobandis, Barelvis, Ahl-e-Hadith, and modernisers such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Iqbal alike drew on different fragments of his work. Reducing that entire, contested intellectual tradition to a single "foreign colonisation," he argues, is what allows madrasas, mosques and organisations such as the Tablighi Jamaat to be cast wholesale as illegitimate — leaving India's Muslims, in his phrase, as "subjects," not citizens, whose existence is treated as conditional on majoritarian approval.

Muslims as the New Dalits

Perhaps the podcast's starkest argument is economic rather than theological. Javed contends that India's political economy has historically required a "reserve army of labour" — a phrase he borrows from Marx — that can be paid the least and exploited the most, a role Dalits occupied for centuries and have only partly been able to exit through constitutional protections such as the Atrocities Act. He argues Muslims have increasingly been pushed into that same structural position: a population from which economic surplus is extracted upward toward dominant castes, while communal violence periodically forces the sale of Muslim-owned property at a loss. In his account, the intense public visibility given to Muslims as an alleged threat serves a second purpose beyond its stated one — it makes the continuing reality of Dalit oppression comparatively invisible. "The new Hindutva state does not resolve Dalit and lower OBC repression," he says. "It manages and contains it." He extends this into a compact phrase of his own: Muslims today function as a kind of "political technology" — their chief remaining value to the ruling order being an instrumental one, useful for consolidating Hindu identity against an external "enemy," for keeping caste competition suppressed, and for the redistribution of economic surplus upward, with scarcely any independent political agency of their own beyond, increasingly, the ability to vote.

A Community Without a Roadmap

Javed turns the same critical eye on the Muslim community itself. He argues Indian Muslims have failed to convert their own religious and ethical tradition — zakat as a form of wealth tax, the prohibition on riba or exploitative interest, waqf and philanthropy as redistributive institutions — into a concrete, articulable public-policy language capable of appealing beyond the community, the way B.R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi each built negotiable political vocabularies out of their own philosophical traditions that could speak to the nation as a whole. The problem, he says, is not a lack of ideas but a failure of "articulation" and of the institutional capacity to execute them. He is equally critical of Muslim community leadership as gerontocratic and insular — forums dominated by people in their seventies and eighties, with no visible pipeline training younger men and women to take their place — and argues that even during the comparatively better Congress era, the community failed to make full "constructive use" of the space that was available to it, a failure he says has not been corrected since.

From Victimhood to Strategic Alliance

Javed closes by arguing that no single "counter-hegemonic" force — Marxist, Dalit, feminist or Muslim — is strong enough on its own to challenge Hindutva's dominance, and that durable alliances have to be built on overlapping material interests rather than sentiment: shared stakes in reducing wealth inequality, expanding healthcare and education access, and defending personal-law pluralism, rather than an alliance whose only real purpose is opposing a common opponent. He insists Muslims should acknowledge their status as a genuinely victimised community without remaining trapped in what he calls a "victimhood psychology," arguing that active Muslim politics should mean actively shaping public discourse with confidence, not merely reacting to it — a process he acknowledges will take years, not a single dramatic event. The episode ends as the first instalment of an ongoing series: Javed and his interviewer promise to return to the unresolved threads — what a genuine Muslim political strategy in India could look like, and which alliances might actually hold — in future conversations.