On 21 April 2024, India -- in the throes of a scorching summer and an equally searing national election -- watched in horror as Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a savage assault on the Indian Republic’s religious pluralism.

Addressing a rally in India’s largest state, Rajasthan, his stentorian voice climbing to a crescendo of hate, Modi described Muslims as 'infiltrators' and thundered falsely that when the Congress Party was last in power, it made Muslims the foremost recipients of India’s resources. He declared that the Congress and its allies intended to snatch away the Hindu majority’s hard-earned wealth and give it to Muslims, sparing not even the gold mangalsutra (a Hindu woman’s sacred matrimonial necklace) of their “mothers and sisters”, adding that they would redistribute wealth to Muslims (those who “have more children”) and even promote Sharia law.

Electoral politics aside, this extraordinary scare-mongering about two hundred million of his fellow citizens, all of whom he is constitutionally bound to serve, was in keeping with the Hindu chauvinist doctrine the Prime Minister imbibed in his youth and now personifies.

Hindutva, his party’s majoritarian credo, emanated in the 1920s -- inspired largely by Europe’s burgeoning fascist movements of that era, complete with khaki shorts and paramilitary drills -- to advocate the supremacy of Hindus over India’s religious minorities, especially Christians and Muslims.

Hindutva ideologues argue that India belongs to its Hindus, the original denizens of India, who regard this country as their fatherland, motherland, and holy land. People of other faiths, whose primal allegiances lie elsewhere, Hindutva argues, are either guests or interlopers and must exist in India only on terms dictated by the Hindu majority.

While the ruling BJP is the dominant political arm of Hindutva, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) -- which celebrates its centenary next year -- is its fountainhead and driving force, providing both the sheath of cultural nationalism to the sectarian political sword of the BJP and the springboard into public life for numerous young votaries of Hindutva.

No wonder, then, that the Prime Minister and several members of his Cabinet started out as young men in a local RSS branch, the shakha, where they were schooled in the fundamentals of Hindu chauvinism, chief among which is Hindutva’s perception of Indian history. 

This sees India as a Hindu land successively invaded by Muslims (various dynasties of whom ruled for a thousand years) and then by Christians (the British, who ruled for two hundred) before finally being able to reassert its nationhood today.

In the process, India’s history has become a battlefield, with the past routinely wielded as a weapon to challenge the present. Mediaeval-era wrongs by an assortment of Muslim rulers are resurrected to be 'set right' today, usually at the expense of today’s Muslim Indians.

Since their inception in Indian politics, Hindutva organisations -- together known as the Sangh Parivaar -- have wielded this history, suffused with Islamophobia and a wounded vanity, as a weapon of mass division to sunder Indian from Indian on the basis of religious identity.

In power over the past decade, the BJP has promoted these views in office and in their electoral campaigns, much to the detriment of our republic’s foundational values, which emphasised pluralism, secularism and “unity in diversity”.

After the first uprising against them in 1857, the British in India began fearing the power of Hindu-Muslim unity, which had galvanised that empire-threatening revolt. In the ensuing century, until their departure from the Subcontinent in August 1947, they clung onto power by practicing the old Roman technique of divide et impera: divide and rule, seeking to separate Hindus and Muslims politically.

In the early 20th century, they created separate electorates for Muslims -- encouraging them to look upon themselves as a political entity distinct from Hindus.

As the nationalist movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress gathered irresistible momentum, the Indian freedom struggle split on one fundamental question: should religion be the determinant of nationhood and citizenship?

An affirmative answer by some Muslims led to the British-directed Partition of India and the creation, when Independence came in August 1947, of a separate state for Muslims, Pakistan. But it also orphaned those who, though Muslim, remained in India.

The politics of Hindutva has long hinged on evoking the spectre of the endangered Hindu, enfeebled and subjugated by foreigners, who finally has the opportunity to restore the glory of Hindu culture and religion, which Muslim conquerors had tarnished and British imperialists had demeaned.

The Muslims remaining in India are the arch-villains in this narrative, demonised as the wrongdoers of history who are seeking to prevent the resurrection of Hindu glory. (Mr. Modi’s vilification of Muslims included accusing them of waging a “vote jihad” to this end.)

Yet, as I long have argued, while the founder of a Muslim dynasty may have come to India from abroad, he and his descendants stayed and assimilated in this country, married Hindu women, and immersed themselves in the fortunes of this land.

Each Mughal Emperor after the first had less and less connection of blood or allegiance to a foreign country. If they looted or exploited India and Indians, they spent the proceeds of their loot in India, and did not send it off to enrich a foreign land as the British did. By the third generation, let alone the fifth or sixth, they were as “Indian” as any Hindu. Many were syncretic in their rule, assimilationist in their culture, and pluralist in their politics. But Hindutvadis prefer their history in unambiguous shades of black and white, choosing to view all Muslim rulers as evil foreign oppressors and all Hindus as valiant resisters, embodiments of incipient Hindu nationalism.

History has been a frenetically contested terrain in India, but its misuse in the context of 21st century politics remains a major challenge for India today. Social harmony is a sine qua non for the kind of economic development Modi likes to boast of, but his politics risks threatening the peaceful co-existence between Hindus and Muslims that was a strength of India.

In the recent elections, Muslim voters largely rallied behind the Opposition parties led by the Congress, helping deprive Mr Modi of his majority. Whether this will have a sobering effect on the Islamophobia that disfigured his campaign remains to be seen. At stake is the well-being of 1.4 billion people in the world’s largest and most diverse democracy.