Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist volunteer paramilitary organisation. It is the progenitor and leader of a large body of organisations called the Sangh Parivar, which has developed a presence in all facets of Indian society and includes the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling political party under Narendra Modi, the 14th prime minister of India. Mohan Bhagwat has served as the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS since March 2009.
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.
The term pseudo-secularism is used to describe individuals who claim to be secular but may display biases towards a particular religion, whether consciously or unconsciously. This term has gained popularity in recent Indian politics, where it is often used to criticize individuals who identify as secular and advocate for minority rights while remaining silent or opposing concerns faced by the majority religion. Some Hindu nationalist parties employ this term as a counter-accusation against their critics, alleging that the secularism followed by the Indian National Congress and other self-declared secular parties are flawed or distorted.
Bajrang Dal is a Hindu nationalist militant organisation that forms the youth wing of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP). It is a member of the right-wing Sangh Parivar. The ideology of the organisation is based on Hindutva. It was founded on 1 October 1984 in Uttar Pradesh, and began spreading more in the 2010s throughout India, although its most significant base remains the northern and central portions of the country.
Asghar Ali Engineer was an Indian reformist writer and social activist. Internationally known for his work on liberation theology in Islam, he led the Progressive Dawoodi Bohra movement. The focus of his work was on communalism and communal and ethnic violence in India and South Asia. He was a votary of peace and non-violence and lectured all over world on communal harmony.
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.
Hinduism is the largest and most practised religion in India. About 80% of the country's population identified as Hindu in the last census. India contains 94% of the global Hindu population. The vast majority of Indian Hindus belong to Shaivite, Vaishnavite and Shakta denominations. India is one of the three countries in the world where Hinduism is the dominant religion.
Mukundan Chembakasseriyil Menon, professionally known as Mukundan C. Menon, was a human-rights activist in India. He helped found a number of India's national non-governmental human rights organizations, including PUCL and National Confederation of Human Rights Organisations (NCHRO) in Kerala.
Religious violence in India includes acts of violence by followers of one religious group against followers and institutions of another religious group, often in the form of rioting. Religious violence in India has generally involved Hindus and Muslims.
Anti-Christian violence in India is religiously motivated violence against Christians in India. Human Rights Watch has classified violence against Christians in India as a tactic used by the right-wing Sangh Parivar organizations to encourage and exploit communal violence in furtherance of their political ends. The acts of violence include arson of churches, conversion of Christians by force, physical violence, sexual assaults, murders, rapes, and the destruction of Christian schools, colleges, and cemeteries.
The Constitution of Bangladesh includes secularism as one of the four fundamental principles, despite having Islam as the state religion by 2A. Islam is referred to twice in the introduction and Part I of the constitution and the document begins with the Islamic phrase Basmala which in English is translated as “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful” and article (2A) declares that :"Islam is the state religion of the republic". Bangladesh is mostly governed by secular laws, set up during the times when the region was ruled by the British Crown.
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".
There have been several instances of religious violence against Muslims since the partition of India in 1947, frequently in the form of violent attacks on Muslims by Hindu nationalist mobs that form a pattern of sporadic sectarian violence between the Hindu and Muslim communities. Over 10,000 people have been killed in Hindu-Muslim communal violence since 1950 in 6,933 instances of communal violence between 1954 and 1982.
Des Raj Goyal (1929-2013), also known as Desraj Goyal or D. R. Goyal, was an Indian journalist, academic and a well-known author of books on secularism and communalism. Having been a member of the Hindu nationalist organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in his younger days, he wrote a seminal book on the organisation in 1979, which is widely cited in academic works.
These are the references for further information regarding the Sangh Parivar.
The All India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC) is an ecumenical organisation founded in 1914 to represent the interests of Christians in India. It was founded to advocate for the moral, economic, and intellectual development of the Indian Christian community. The All India Conference of Indian Christians held its first meeting on 28 December 1914 and was led by Raja Sir Harnam Singh of Kapurthala, who was the president of the National Missionary Society (NMS); the first AICIC General Secretary was B. L. Rallia Ram of Lahore. Its creation united local and regional Indian Christian Associations, which existed in Bombay, Madras, Hyderabad, Punjab, United Provinces, Bengal and Burma, under one umbrella organisation. At the time of the Indian independence movement, the organisation allied itself with the Indian National Congress and the resolutions passed by All India Conference of Indian Christians advocated communal harmony, while also pressing for the rights of Christians in both colonial India and independent India. The India Conference of Indian Christians advocated for self-rule in a united and independent country, opposing the partition of India. During the era of the British Raj in India, the AICIC served as the mouthpiece for members of the Indian Christian community, conducting membership drives to boost its base, which included Protestant and Catholic Christians. As such, the presidents of the AICIC represented the Christians of undivided India at the Round Table Conferences.
1999 Ranalai violence refers to the incident of violence that occurred on March 15, 1999, in the village of Ranalai in Gajapati district of Orissa. The violence occurred after a dispute of adding religious symbols in the Khamani Hill of the village. A crowd of 2000 people, reportedly followers of the Sangh Parivar, armed with country made guns and weapons, completely burned down 157 Christian houses and looted the remaining Christian houses in the village. 14 Christians were injured including three injured by gun shots. An investigation by the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the violence.
Shamsul Islam is an Indian author, academic, and activist known for his work on the intersection of religion, politics, and history in India. He is a retired professor of political science from the University of Delhi, where he taught from 1973 to 2013. He has been particularly vocal about the rise of communalism and the distortion of historical narratives, especially in the context of Hindu-Muslim relations in India. His work often critiques the ideological underpinnings of the Hindu nationalist movement, particularly its attempts to rewrite Indian history in a way that marginalizes minority communities.
