Hindutva & Modernity

Hindutva is Hindu modernity Abhinav Prakash Singh AUG 31, 2021 https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/hindutva-is-hindu-modernity-101630406266372.html	Hindutva is not Hindu modernity; it is populism Zia Haq SEP 04, 2021 https://www.hindustantimes.com/opinion/hindutva-is-not-hindu-modernity-it-is-populism-101630760964058.html
Traumatic and terrifying experience of the non-western world in its encounter with western colonialism, which was backed by modern industry, a new economic structure of capitalism, and a new political structure of nations and nation-States.	The modern idea of a nation is territorial, but nationhood in Hindutva is race-centric, having been informed heavily by 20th-century European nationalism.
Reformers were not only imagining the future but also re-imagining the past. They argued that modern values such as social equality, political democracy, liberty, the idea of the nation are all rooted in Hindu tradition and philosophy.	Voltaire’s idea of liberty.. John Stuart Mill’s democracy as a “government by discussion” and the Hobbesian world where the State has all monopoly over violence — these constitute the bedrock of modernity.
Hence, Hindu society and polity are naturally at home in the modern era. All segments of the Hindu polity, from the Left to the Right, argued for a modern nation despite rooting their positions in the civilisational antiquity of India.	Modernity, its “desacralising” impact, rejects anything sacred. Neither the clergy, nor the Church is sacred anymore; neither race nor the human body, making it possible to sell and buy human labour at a market price. The current non-liberal social order brought forth by Hindutva is, therefore, not a distortion of Hindutva, but its truest expression. Hindutva, whatever it was intended to be, has been reduced to Rightwing populism and a mode of politics.
None of them wanted a return to the past, unlike their counterparts in the Muslim polity, but wanted to learn from the values of a past and reinterpret it in a modern image.	Hindutva prescribes limits to who a Hindu could be; modernity prescribes no specifications on who a member of modern society could be. A Hindu is one who inherits that “blood of the great race”
	The social contract within the ambit of modernity is mediated by citizenship, which is the highest legal status of an individual.
Hindutva always confined itself to the aim of a Hindu Rashtra (nation), and, at no point, did it argue for a Hindu Rajya (State). Even the Hindu Mahasabha proposed a secular State based on the principle of one-man, one-vote.	Hindutva as propounded by Savarkar and being practised today, is a non-liberal social order presaged on race, culture, and faith, arching high over secular citizenship, an integral aspect of modernity.

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