For all its democratic credentials, only a Hindu can become India’s Prime Minister. Not that one is forgetting Manmohan Singh. But how many did see the minority colours in Singh’s urbane turban when he served the nation for two full terms for a Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, a Roman Catholic? Today, a chaiwallah could become the PM but the odds are still stacked heavily against a Dalit or a Muslim, leave alone a Christian, a community with a mere 1.8% of the population, rising to the top post in the world’s largest democracy.

The Hindu identity has always been an important, nay, a decisive marker in India’s electoral politics. Especially now with Hindutva in ascendancy and BJP and Narendra Modi remaining steadfast in their project of cultural nationalism being construed as ‘anti-Hindu’ could blight your power prospects.

How would you stop the Hindutva politics in its tracks? It seems, and quite dangerously so, Congress has arrived at the conclusion that reclaiming its Hindu credentials is a prerequisite for stealing the winds out of Modi’s sails. That has led to the Congress spokesman telling us that Rahul Gandhi is not only a Hindu but a sacred thread wearing Hindu, one step better than Modi, the Hindu Hridaya Samrat, during the fever-pitched campaign for Gujarat assembly elections.

So it is no surprise that politician and author Shashi Tharoor, Congress’s leading intellectual hero, has come out with a personal Hindu manifesto that would also largely explain the liberal Indian’s stand towards religion and humanism.

Why I Am A Hindu (Published by Aleph, Pages 302, Price Rs 699) does not have the provocative power of an earlier book by Dalit scholar Kancha Ilaiah’s Why I Am Not A Hindu. Tharoor’s is a lucid, persuasive account of his own journey within Hinduism and he sharply reminds us about the urgent need to reclaim Hinduism from the Hindutvadis.

Why I Am A Hindu is a robust defence of Hinduism in all its vibrant, pluralistic glory. It is a must-read for every politically curious Indian, and not only for janeu-dharis.

Tharoor, the brilliant scholar that he is, has neatly separated the wheat from the chaff and kept his arguments focused on three areas. In Section I, Tharoor lays bare ‘My Hinduism’ before the reader. In Section II, titled Political Hinduism, he examines Hinduism and the Politics of Hindutva and the uses and abuses of Hindu culture and history. And he closes off with the raison d’etre for his book—taking back Hinduism.

In his author’s note Tharoor says that he wrote Why I Am Hindu for two reasons–to try and understand for himself, and whosever else was interested, the extraordinary wisdom and virtues of the faith he has lived for over six decades. The second reason, says Tharoor, was to show that the intolerant and often violent forms of Hindutva that began to impose themselves in the 1980s went against the spirit of Hinduism, the most plural, inclusive, eclectic, and expansive faiths.

Tharoor recalls that Mahatma Gandhi was a great exemplar of this Hinduism. In a response to being classified a Hindu, he said: “I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Parsi, a Jew.” It is equally valid to recall Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s riposte: “Only a Hindu could say that.”

What makes Why I Am Hindu a compelling reading is Tharoor’s take on Political Hinduism, the effort of the Sangh Parivar to recast Hinduism as an Abrahamic religion.

Tharoor traces the shape-shifting of Hindutva from the days of M S Golwalkar to the current Hindutva icon, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya. Golwalkar, the RSS sarsanghchalak for three decades from 1940-1973, rejected the concept of territorial nationalism, the modern variant of nationalism which identified a state with its territory and bestowed equal rights of citizenship on all those who lived within it and passionately advocated ‘cultural nationalism.’ Tharoor points out that this ‘cultural nationalism’ is directly opposed to the civic nationalism enshrined in the Constitution of India.

Tharoor says that although Hindutvadis would not welcome the comparison, Golwalkar’s conception of Hindu India is not very different from the prevailing ideology of a Muslim Pakistan.

The new challenge for India, Tharoor writes, is that Golwalkar’s views of nationalism continue to inspire his political followers nearly half a century after his death—except that unlike when he expressed them, those who believe such things are actually in power and in a position to do something about them. It is important to note that Golwalkar had found our Constitution “cumbersome” in its failure to incorporate “absolutely nothing” from the Manusmriti.

In an illuminating critique of Upadhyaya, Tharoor says he went beyond the exclusively Hindu Rashtra of Golwalkar and was willing to acknowledge that the inhabitants of this country included Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and others. But Upadhyaya too insisted that in his Hindu Rashtra the Muslim and Christian would be welcome only if they became one with the national cultural mainstream—without any change in their mode of worship. But for that they had to own up to the ancient traditions of India, to look upon Hindu national heroes as their national heroes, and to develop devotion for Bharat Mata.

I don’t know how many would take note of this but Tharoor points out that we have already lost the battle against Hindutva to a dangerous degree with the constitutional acceptability of the concept of Hindutva with the declaration of a ‘famously liberal’ chief justice J S Verma that Hindutva “was a way of life and not a religion.” And the constitutional acceptability of the concept of Hindutva is no longer in question since on 2 January 2017, the Supreme Court of India declined to reconsider its 1995 judgment.

But, on the other hand, Tharoor exposes the Hindutva doublespeak by pointing out that Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, who rejected the Constitution of India in conception, form and substance, would be astonished to find his disciple Modi saying the Constitution is his holy book.

And now there is an increasing clamour for Modifying the Constitution. Tharoor raises the pertinent question whether a Hindutva-modified Constitution will retain the core principle of independent India, that all adult Indians are deemed equal, irrespective of religion. If it did, Tharoor says, it would be a betrayal of the Hinduism that Swami Vivekananda or Mahatma Gandhi stood for.

For Tharoor, the strength of Hinduism is its eclecticism. He says that the Hindutva presumption that to be Hindu is more authentically Indian is absurd. And Tharoor gets it absolutely right when he says that: “I consider myself as a Hindu and a nationalist but I am not a Hindu nationalist.” May his tribe increase.