Hindu nationalism, once a fringe ideology in India, is now mainstream. Nobody has done more to advance this cause than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one of India’s most beloved and polarizing political leaders.
And no entity has had more influence on his political philosophy and ambitions than a paramilitary, right-wing group founded nearly a century ago and known as the RSS.
“We never imagined that we would get power in such a way,” said Ambalal Koshti, 76, who says he first brought Modi into the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in the late 1960s in their home state, Gujarat.
It’s only a small percent of the population, and I can only go by what I see from my own in-laws on Facebook and in person, but I sense that Sikhs are becoming wary of Modi and the BJP. At first, “anything but Congress” seemed good enough, and they were thoroughly sick of the Gandhi/Nehru families. Manmohan Singh was a nice blip, but it seemed after his tenure Congress were back to business as usual. BJP makes a lot of the fact that Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs are all part of the same faith tradition, so they are all “native” religions and not problematic. Given the other concerns, this was enough to want to give them a chance, especially partnered with a local conservative-leaning party in Punjab.
Now, after a decade of power, the bloom is off the rose (or the lotus, maybe). Modi’s tendencies are more obviously authoritarian and his economic policies are very much geared towards big business and the biggest cities. Punjab is still very agrarian, and many Sikhs have been at the forefront of the farmers’ protests in India. As support has eroded locally, the BJP’s grip on national politics has strengthened, and you’re basically seeing them re-create Khalistani terrorism out of thin air to have a scary label for frustrated farmers, mostly by going after fringe activists in India and the diaspora, in several cases carrying out extra-judicial assassinations on foreign soil.
Khalistani sympathies began a fairly quick and steep decline after Air India Flight 182 in 1985. Separatism was a relic of history in a pluralistic India, and the general sense I get is that while few Sikhs shed a tear for Indira Gandhi, it was all in the past. No one in my wife’s family thought Khalistan was worth even a passing thought until Modi started turning off the entire internet in Punjab and shooting kooky uncles in Vancouver. If it becomes any sort of serious movement, it will largely be Modi’s fault.
Then, with most of the “Fuck dem Muslims” items checked off the to-do list, you’re beginning to see the more brazen Hindutva types start to bring out the old saw that not only is Sikhism part of the same religious tradition, it’s not even distinct enough to be its own religion at all, but is just a provincial flavor of Hinduism. Devout Sikhs find this paternalistic and deeply offensive, and even less devout ones find it eye-rolling from the fringe but threatening coming from the mainstream.
It’s only a matter of not having enough Muslims to persecute before they begin to correct the errant faiths in order to ensure a true measure of “hindu-ness”. It’s a dark path India is traveling and Modi, for all his murderousness, is not the end. He’s a precursor.
Wow thank you for your super informative comment!
Which country do you belong to?
That’s a fair question. I am an American of European descent (i.e. “a white guy”) married into a half-Punjabi family with members in Punjab, New Delhi, the US, the UK, Canada, and elsewhere. I don’t claim to relate anything other than what I’ve heard and read and my perspective is necessarily a limited one, but I have a vested interest in the Sikh diaspora and am generally troubled by the larger trends I see with BJP governance in India.
What is the percentage of Sikhs in your country of total population? Modi has openly sat in satsang of Punjabis, shown immense respect to Waheguru, has a person called Hardeep Singh Puri in Union Cabinet handling the portfolio of ‘oil’. It is a crucial thing, especially after Russia-Ukraine war.
There are around half a million Sikhs in the US, so less than .2% of our population. They’re not evenly spread out across the country though. We have a huge South Asian diaspora in NJ; I grew up with a good number of Sikhs