Hindutva is a political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India. The political ideology was formulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1922. It is used by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other organisations, collectively called the Sangh Parivar.
Mani Shankar Aiyar is an Indian politician and former career civil servant diplomat. He is a member of the Indian National Congress Party.
India since its independence in 1947 has been a secular state. The secular values were enshrined in the constitution of India. India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru is credited with the formation of the secular republic in the modern history of the country. With the Forty-second Amendment of the Constitution of India enacted in 1976, the Preamble to the Constitution asserted that India is a secular nation. However, the Supreme Court of India in the 1994 case S. R. Bommai v. Union of India established the fact that India was secular since the formation of the republic. The judgement established that there is separation of state and religion. It stated "In matters of State, religion has no place. Any State government which pursues nonsecular on policies or nonsecular course of action acts contrary to the constitutional mandate and renders itself amenable to action under Article 356". Furthermore, constitutionally, state-owned educational institutions are prohibited from imparting religious instructions, and Article 27 of the constitution prohibits using tax-payers money for the promotion of any religion.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is an Indian political theorist, writer and a Dalit rights activist. He writes in both English and Telugu languages. His main domain of study and activism is the annihilation of caste.
Madhu Purnima Kishwar is an Indian academic and a Hindutva commentator. She is currently employed as a chair Professor in the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Kishwar along with fellow-academic Ruth Vanita co-founded the journal Manushi.
Girindrasekhar Bose was an early 20th-century Indian psychoanalyst, the first president (1922–1953) of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society. Bose carried on a twenty-year dialogue with Sigmund Freud. Known for disputing the specifics of Freud's Oedipus complex theory, he has been pointed to by some as an early example of non-Western contestations of Western methodologies. Apart from this, he also started the first general hospital psychiatry unit (GHPU) in Asia at the R.G. Kar Medical College, Calcutta in 1933.
Ramachandra "Ram" Guha is an Indian historian, environmentalist, writer and public intellectual whose research interests include social, political, contemporary, environmental and cricket history, and the field of economics. He is an important authority on the history of modern India.
Thodur Madabusi Krishna is an Indian Carnatic vocalist, writer, activist, author and Ramon Magsaysay awardee.
Shiv Visvanathan is an Indian academic best known for his contributions to developing the field of science and technology studies (STS), and for the concept of cognitive justice, a term he coined. He is currently Professor at O P Jindal Global University, Sonepat. He was Professor, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar, India and has held the position of Senior fellow Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi He has also taught at the Delhi School of Economics. He has held visiting professorships at Smith College, Stanford, Goldsmiths, Arizona State University and Maastricht University, Harvard University & Oxford University. He is author of Organizing for Science, A Carnival for Science and has co-edited Foulplay: Chronicles of Corruption. He has been consultant to the National Council of Churches and Business India.
Yogendra Yadav is an Indian activist, psephologist and politician whose primary interests are in the political and social sciences. He was a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi from 2004 to 2016. He is a former member of University Grants Commission (UGC) and National Advisory Council on the Right to Education Act (NAC-RTE) constituted by Ministry of Human Resources and Development, Govt of India, in 2010. He was a member of the National Executive of the Aam Aadmi Party until 2015.
Hindu nationalism has been collectively referred to as the expression of social and political thought, based on the native spiritual and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent. "Hindu nationalism" is a simplistic translation of हिन्दू राष्ट्रवाद. It is better described as "Hindu polity".
Vinay Lal is an Indian historian. He is a professor of history and Asian American studies at UCLA. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India, cinema, historiography, the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems.
Rajeev Bhargava is a noted Indian political theorist, who was professor of political theory at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. His works on political theory, multiculturalism, identity politics and secularism have evoked sharp debates.
Professor Nalin Mehta is an Indian political scientist, journalist, and writer. His latest book, The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World's Largest Political Party, has been hailed as a "seminal", non-partisan revisionist account of the rise of the BJP in India.
Ritu Birla is an historian of modern South Asia. She is an associate Professor of History and is formerly the Richard Charles Lee Director of the Asian Institute and former Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Rajni Kothari was an Indian political scientist, political theorist, academic and writer. He was the founder of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in 1963, a social sciences and humanities research institute, based in Delhi and Lokayan, started in 1980 as a forum for interaction between activists and intellectuals. He was also associated with Indian Council of Social Science Research, International Foundation for Development Alternatives, and People's Union for Civil Liberties.
Ananya Vajpeyi is an Indian academic and writer. She is Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. She is the author of the book "Righteous Republic: The Political foundations of Modern India" published by the Harvard University Press. Born in 1972.
Tridip Suhrud is an Indian writer, political scientist, cultural historian and translator from Gujarat, India.
Joseph S. Alter is an American medical anthropologist known for his research into the modern practice of yoga as exercise, his 2004 book Yoga in Modern India, and the physical and medical culture of South Asia.
Anjali Monteiro is a documentary filmmaker, media educator and researcher who lives in Mumbai. She is currently Professor and Dean at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Jointly with K.P. Jayasankar, she has made around thirty-five documentary films on various subjects.
