Hinduism Does Not Need Protection. It Needs Liberation From Hindutva.
This article was written by a member of Hindus for Human Rights who was in India and attended the “Hinduism Needs Protection from Hindutva” event in person at the Calcutta Club. The perspectives, observations, and analysis that follow are grounded in firsthand experience of the discussions that took place and the broader context of debates around Hinduism, Hindutva, and contemporary Indian political discourse. Video of the debate is embedded below.
On Sunday, January 11th, a debate titled “Hinduism Needs Protection from Hindutva” was held at the Calcutta Club in the former colonial capital in West Bengal. That a debate with such a title took place tells us something important before a single argument is made. In a country where Hindus constitute around eighty percent of the population, dominate public institutions, and set the terms of national culture, Hinduism is being reframed as endangered.
Hosted by the Calcutta Debating Circle, the event brought together politicians, journalists, and intellectuals to argue over whether Hinduism requires protection from Hindutva, or through it. Yet, the more revealing question remained largely unarticulated: How did a tradition that functions as the default language of Indian public culture come to imagine itself as under threat? This reframing demonstrates Hindutva’s success in reshaping the language through which Hinduism is publicly discussed in our contemporary moment.
Those arguing for the motion- Mani Shankar Aiyar, former Union Minister and diplomat and a member of the Indian National Congress (INC); Mahua Moitra, Member of Parliament (MP) in the Lok Sabha for the Trinamool Congress; Ashutosh, former Aam Aadmi Party member and journalist; and Ruchika Sharma, a historian with a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University- made a crucial distinction that cannot be emphasised enough.
They underscored that Hinduism is a plural tradition with no central authority and has survived for millennia without the muscle of the state. Hinduism never depended on uniformity but embracing multiple ways of belief, practice, ritual, and thought. Hindutva, by contrast, is a modern political ideology that instrumentalizes Hindu identity to consolidate power. It is hungry for control and feeds on the fear of difference.
Mani Shankar Aiyar described Hindutva as “Hinduism in paranoia,” a phrase that captures the ideological core of the project with unsettling precision. He drew a sharp distinction between those who articulated Hinduism as a spiritual and ethical tradition and those who later refashioned it into a political doctrine. Figures such as Gandhi and Vivekananda, Aiyar argued, spoke from within Hinduism’s moral universe, grounding it in the pursuit of truth and the discipline of non-violence. Savarkar and Golwalkar, by contrast, did not interpret Hinduism- they re-engineered it, transforming a diverse religious tradition into an ideology of political mobilisation.
For Aiyar, this transformation marked a fundamental rupture. Hindutva, he insisted, is not an ancient civilizational instinct but a modern political invention, a “perversion” of Hinduism rather than its fulfillment. Its intellectual roots lie not in Hindu philosophy but in European ideas of territorial nationalism, shaped by thinkers such as Mazzini and Mussolini. What Hindutva presents as cultural authenticity is, in fact, a borrowed political imagination, repackaged as civilizational imperative.
Mahua Moitra sharpened this critique by dismantling Hindutva’s most cherished myth: its claim to anti-colonial purity. Hindutva, she argued, is colonial in origin, not merely in context but in imagination. Its principal ideologue, V.D. Savarkar was deeply shaped by colonial categories even as he claimed to reject colonial rule. The contradiction is not incidental but foundational. Savarkar’s record makes this plain. His contempt for non-violence, his reliance on spurious texts such as the Bhavishya Purana with its references to Queen Victoria, and his political collaboration with British authorities as head of the Hindu Mahasabha expose Hindutva’s claims of civilizational authenticity as fiction. She underscored a crucial distinction: Hinduism is a religious and spiritual tradition, while even the RSS itself refuses to define Hindutva as religious, acknowledging it instead as a political project. The implication is devastating for Hindutva’s self-image: Hindutva exists only because Hinduism’s capaciousness permits it, not because Hinduism depends on it for survival.
Ashutosh dragged the debate out of abstraction and into lived reality by naming the concrete consequences of Hindutva politics. Lynching has been normalized. Convicted criminals are publicly garlanded and celebrated. Muslims are systematically targeted under BJP rule. When violence is baptized as civilizational defence, faith is emptied of meaning.
Ruchika Sharma held that the greatest danger to Hinduism today is not external hostility but is Hindutva itself. Hindutva, she argued, threatens Hinduism precisely because it defines the tradition negatively- by identifying who does not belong- rather than articulating a positive and plural vision of what Hinduism can be. She maintained that a tradition confident in its moral and philosophical resources does not need to criminalize disagreement or sanctify brutality.
Ruchika reminded the audience that the term “Hindu” did not originate as a religious identity at all, but as a geographical descriptor- al-Hind- used by Arab traders to refer to the subcontinent’s many peoples and cultures. From its earliest use in the seventh century, the word Hindu signified plurality not uniformity and inclusion rather than exclusion.
Her intervention cut through the noise. Hinduism, she insisted, is not monolithic. She maintained that Savarkar’s conception of Hindutva is fundamentally antithetical to Hinduism, whose core principle she identified as pluralism. Hinduism has historically been shaped by multiple regions, languages, philosophies, and communities, many of them outside Brahmanical control. Hindutva’s project is to erase this history and replace it with a singular, exclusionary identity that is casteist and hypermasculinist.
Those against the motion- Swapan Dasgupta, journalist and former Rajya Sabha member; Agnimitra Paul, Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in West Bengal for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP); J. Sai Deepak, Supreme Court advocate; and Sudhanshu Trivedi, MP and national spokesperson for the BJP- relied on a familiar set of moves.
Hinduism was reframed as a timeless civilizational essence while Hindutva was presented as the natural, organic expression and reaction of Hindus who experienced centuries of domination under the Mughals, then British colonial rule, and now secularism. In this telling, Hindutva is a method of fighting back, a way for Hindus, long oppressed by others, to reclaim power and assert themselves. The colonial origins of Hindutva, however, were largely ignored and the violent consequences of its politics carefully erased.
Agnimitra Paul’s intervention exemplified this narrative. By invoking real and ongoing persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh, she transposed minority vulnerability across borders into proof of a civilizational threat facing Hindus as a whole. This move detached specific, contextual instances of violence from their political realities and redeployed them to portray India’s Hindu majority, despite its overwhelming demographic and state power, as perpetually besieged. Hindutva thus appears not as a project of dominance, but as a defensive necessity against “pseudo-secularists,” reinforcing the myth of the endangered majority.
Building on this sense of siege, J. Sai Deepak positioned secularism itself as a central threat to Hinduism. He argued that Hindutva is necessary precisely to protect Hindu civilizational identity from a secular framework that, in his view, artificially separates religion from politics and constrains the natural expression of Hindu society. Secularism was portrayed not as a principle of neutrality or equal protection, but as an imposition that delegitimizes Hindu self-expression and undermines Hindu cohesion. By framing secularism as an obstacle to civilizational assertion, Deepak reinforced the idea that Hindus, despite being the overwhelming majority, require a political ideology like Hindutva to safeguard their culture. In this logic, secularism becomes a form of internal threat; legitimizing the very ideology that the proposition argues endangers Hinduism itself.
Much of the debate repeatedly returned to Kolkata, and for good reason: the city was both the colonial capital and a hub of intellectual ferment, making it the birthplace of many ideas that later shaped Hindutva.
Speakers opposed to the motion like Swapan Dasgupta and Sai Deepak sought to expand Hindutva’s intellectual genealogy beyond Savarkar, tracing it to Bengali thinkers such as Chandranath Basu who coined the term in the 1890s, and even to earlier works like the 1866 play Bharat Mata by Sandeep Mukhopadhyay. By doing so, they aimed to present Hindutva not as a twentieth-century distortion but as an organic, historically rooted civilizational response to centuries of perceived threats, linking it to the lived experiences and cultural identity of Hindu communities. Deepak even posited Bengali masculinity as a formative influence on Hindutva, framing the ideology as a natural shakti response to colonial subjugation, an argument punctuated with chants of “Jai Ma Kali!” and “Jai Shri Ram!” to dramatic effect.
The proposition, however, disrupted this narrative by rightly exposing its ideological and colonial underpinnings. Moitra named Hindutva’s architects honestly: Chandranath Basu’s politics- hostile to women’s education, widow remarriage, and social reform- were not incidental quirks but foundational to the ideology that would become Hindutva. The very fact that Hindutva was coined in the colonial capital, underscores its colonial roots and dependence on colonial concepts of race and nation, as well as European historiography. Far from being an authentic civilizational outgrowth, Hindutva is a constructed political project, borrowing selectively from history and culture to manufacture legitimacy. Sharma called out Sai Deepak’s comments about Bengali masculinity, pointing out that making such claims in the land of the Mother Goddess lays bare Hindutva’s hypermasculine, patriarchal politics.
Based on a count of hands in the audience by the chairperson Dr. Kunal Sarkar, the debate had no clear winner.
With West Bengal state elections approaching, the debate felt like a moment of cultural and political shift. In a city long known for being a bastion of liberal and progressive thought, the results and the fact that many in the audience applauded and cheered the pro-Hindutva side signals a new openness, or at least tolerance, for these ideas in Kolkata’s public sphere. As the latest stage for civilizational panic, elite Kolkata clubs and debating societies platform debates that cast Hinduism as a fragile inheritance in need of protection. When Hinduism is discussed chiefly in the language of defense, Hindutva has already succeeded in setting the terms.
The premise of the debate is where the problem lies. What Hinduism does need in our contemporary moment is not protection from Hindutva but liberation from it. Hinduism needs liberation from caste, from patriarchy, and all forms of oppression and domination. It needs protection from political instrumentalisation.
If Hinduism is under threat, that threat is from Hindutva. What is under threat is the possibility of Hinduism being more than what Hindutva allows it to be. This was not a contest between a divided Hinduism. It was a struggle over its future, between a vision rooted in exclusion and hate, and one grounded in pluralism and love.
Read more about the event:
"Hindutva basic immunity of Hinduism:" BJP MP Sudhanshu Trivedi at Calcutta Club's debate 2026