The Decolonial Inversion: Anatomy of the Neo-Hindutva Civilisational State

I. A world dividing and India’s impossible position

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched a second, larger round of coordinated strikes on Iran by targeting its nuclear infrastructure, military command, missile arsenal, and the very foundations of its governing structure. In the weeks that followed, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic and the highest religious authority in Shia Islam, was killed. The most consequential assassination of a head of state in the 21st century had occurred and India said nothing. India’s Prime Minister had been in Tel Aviv two days before the strikes began, standing before the Knesset and declaring that India stands with Israel ‘firmly, with full conviction.‘ He had returned home, the bombs had fallen, the Supreme Leader was dead, and from New Delhi, the only reaction that came was silence. He was the only leader of a founding BRICS member to refuse formally to condemn the attacks on Iran. When asked whether Modi had been briefed about the imminent strikes, the Minister of State for External Affairs told Parliament that ‘no discussions took place related to the matter.’ His visit, the diplomatic silence, and the subsequent absence of condemnation were all coherent expressions of an ideology and not some diplomatic accidents. This essay is an attempt to name that ideology, to trace its intellectual architecture, and to explain why it makes India’s alignment with Israel and its abandonment of Iran, of Gaza, and of its own Muslim citizens a structural inevitability.

This diplomatic silence is the starting point because of who was watching it inside India and what it revealed to them. India is home to one of the world’s largest Shia Muslim populations, tens of millions of citizens, concentrated in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and parts of the Deccan, for whom Khamenei was not a foreign political figure but one of the highest living religious authorities of their tradition, as spiritually significant as the Pope is to Indian Catholics. His death in the course of a war that India’s Prime Minister had publicly validated two days earlier was not a distant geopolitical event for these citizens. It was the killing of their Imam, met by their own government with approval by association and silence by choice. And alongside them, every Muslim Indian who had watched Gaza for eighteen months, who had seen 50,000 Palestinians killed in a campaign the International Court of Justice described as a plausible case of genocide, who had waited for their government to speak, received a final answer. It seemed that their grief was not India’s grief, their sacred figures were not India’s concern, and their civilisational connections were in the framework of the state that governs them — the enemy’s connections.

To understand this silence, we must first understand the eighteen months that preceded it. The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and Israel’s response transformed the moral grammar of the conflict across the Global South. The scale and visibility of the killing in Gaza — livestreamed, satellite-documented, narrated daily by journalists and aid workers made it impossible to contextualise away. Street protests in Jakarta, Nairobi, Istanbul, New York, Lagos, and London rewrote the political calculus for elected leaders. The axis of resistance — Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and aligned non-state actors, which Western media had consistently framed as a destabilising force, began to be read across much of the world as the only actors seriously challenging US-Israeli hegemony in the region. The Houthis’ disruption of Red Sea shipping routes demonstrated that resistance had material consequences extending far beyond the region. The world was being asked to choose sides, and most of the Global South, including much of India’s own neighbourhood, was choosing differently from New Delhi. India’s silence on Gaza was a position, read as such in every Muslim-majority country with which India has historical ties.

Then came the first Iran war — Israel’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities beginning 13 June 2025, the United States joining on 22 June with the Massive Ordnance Penetrator on Fordow and cruise missiles on Natanz and Esfahan, Iran’s retaliation with ballistic missiles against Israeli cities and US bases in Qatar, and the ceasefire brokered on 24 June, and then the far larger February 2026 campaign that ended with an assassinated Supreme Leader and a shattered Iranian state structure. The international order that had governed state conduct since 1945 — sovereign equality, the prohibition on aggressive war, and the inviolability of declared nuclear sites under IAEA safeguards was openly set aside. West Asia holds roughly a third of the world’s proven oil reserves, and its remittance corridors sustain dozens of economies, including India’s, which receives more than $100 billion annually in remittances, the largest share from its Gulf diaspora.^[3] For India, this is an event inside its economic bloodstream, and it forced into the open a question that was always there but could previously be managed through studied ambiguity: whose side is India on, and why?

India was the only founding BRICS member to refuse formally to condemn the attacks on Iran. It dissented from the SCO’s joint condemnation — the only member to do so. It co-sponsored a UN resolution condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf states without naming Israel’s initial aggression. Between 2020 and 2024, it had been Israel’s largest arms customer, accounting for 34 percent of all Israeli arms exports, approximately $20.5 billion. Indian companies continued supplying components to Israel through the Gaza war, with video evidence of missile remains bearing ‘Made in India’ markings found in Gaza’s rubble. What appears to Western strategic analysts as India’s pragmatic multi-alignment is, in fact, the expression of an ideological formation — Neo-Hindutva that has transformed from a political movement (Hindutva) into the constitutive logic of the Indian state. Scholars who have studied it most carefully —Christophe Jaffrelot, over half a century of fieldwork, Partha Chatterjee on colonial modernity and communalism, and Romila Thapar on the selective historicism Hindutva deploys against its minorities, all observe the same structural phenomenon: the systematic production of the Muslim as a constitutional and civilisational outsider. Understanding that formation, its intellectual genealogy, and its geopolitical logic is what this essay attempts to do. The stakes of it have evolved now, from being primarily geopolitical to becoming constitutional for Indian democracy itself.

To understand this silence, then, is to understand an ideology: its genealogy, its intellectual architecture, its political economy, and its geopolitical logic. This essay argues that what is governing India today is not the Hindutva of Savarkar’s pamphlets or the RSS’s shakhas, but a new formation — Neo-Hindutva that has upgraded the original civilisational grammar into a sophisticated, institutionally embedded, and internationally legible project. It is necessary to retheοrise Hindutva because the opposition to it has consistently fought the old version: defending constitutional secularism against street-level communalism, protecting minority institutions against majoritarian encroachment, appealing to international human rights norms against a state that has theorised those very norms as colonial impositions. These responses are not wrong, but they are insufficient. They are instruments designed for an earlier ideological era, deployed against a formation that has already absorbed and neutralised them. Neo-Hindutva does not fear the secular liberal critique; it has pre-empted it. It does not fear the international human rights framework; it has reframed it as civilisational aggression. It does not fear the charge of communalism; it has converted communalism into decolonisation. To name it accurately, to trace where it came from, to identify its intellectual architecture and the geopolitical logic it generates, that is what the remaining sections of this essay attempt. Section II traces the genealogy of Hindutva through Savarkar and Golwalkar, establishing the century-deep ideological roots of the India-Israel alignment. Section III maps the Neo-Hindutva intellectual upgrade — the four formations and five axioms that give the new formation its theoretical depth. Sections IV and V identify the two most powerful mechanisms of immunisation — the Decolonial Inversion and the Waliullah Trap that make Neo-Hindutva resistant to both liberal and Islamic challenge. Section VI turns to the political economy, showing how the Muslim’s structural degradation serves the material interests of the upper-caste elite. Section VII establishes why the China-Russia-Iran axis is not merely geopolitically unavailable to the BJP but ideologically incompatible with its domestic architecture. And Section VIII argues that the India-Israel alignment is not a strategic convergence but a civilisational obligation, overdetermined by a century of shared intellectual genealogy. The conclusion asks what a counter-theory adequate to this formation would require.

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II. The genealogy of Hindutva: a century of civilisational politics

I begin with origins. Hindutva was formally articulated by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in Essentials of Hindutva, written in 1922 at Ratnagiri jail and published in 1923 under the pseudonym ‘A Mahratta.’ For Savarkar, India was a pitrbhu (fatherland) and punyabhu (sacred land) only for those whose holy lands lay within its borders, making Muslims and Christians constitutionally alien. Jaffrelot identifies this as the core of Hindutva’s ethno-nationalist logic: the Hindu is the authentic national, the Muslim is the permanent suspect, neither settler nor native but something more dangerous — the intimate stranger whose loyalty can never be verified.

Savarkar’s formulation was composed in direct reaction to the Khilafat movement of 1919–1924. Neo-Hindutva consistently misrepresents it. The movement was not a challenge to India’s sovereignty — the Ottoman Caliphate posed no military threat to India. It was an expression of Islamic international relations thinking: Muslims constitute a transnational community of obligation, and the fate of the Caliphate was a matter of legitimate concern for Muslims everywhere. This is no different in kind from the concern that millions of people of Indian origin, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, feel toward India’s politics. The Hindu diaspora funds political campaigns in India, lobbies foreign governments on India’s behalf, and regards its ancestral homeland as a matter of permanent civilisational attachment. No one calls this divided loyalty. The asymmetry in how transnational attachment is read as patriotism when Hindu, as separatism when Muslim, is not incidental to Hindutva — it is its operating logic. Moreover, an anti-British Caliphate was a natural ally to an anti-British freedom movement: the Khilafat agitation was conducted in formal alliance with Gandhi, and its most prominent leaders, Muhammad Ali, Shaukat Ali, and Abul Kalam Azad, were simultaneously Congress leaders.

What Neo-Hindutva further suppresses is that the Khilafat leaders did not simply participate in the freedom movement as a tactical alliance; they grounded Indian nationalism in Islamic theology itself. Muhammad Ali and Abul Kalam Azad developed the doctrine of Muttahida Qawmiyat, composite or united nationhood, arguing from within the Quranic framework that Islam not only permitted but required solidarity with non-Muslim fellow citizens against colonial oppression. Azad’s Tarjuman al-Quran made the case that the Quran’s conception of divine unity entailed the unity of humanity, and that Indian Muslims’ obligation to their Hindu neighbours was not a concession to political necessity but a religious duty. This was Islamic theology deployed in the service of pluralism, the precise opposite of what Neo-Hindutva claims the tradition produces. The Khilafat leaders were arguing, from within Islamic intellectual tradition, that India and Islam were inseparable.

Savarkar read it as proof of divided loyalty — this reading was an axiom applied to evidence. What distinguished Hindutva from its earliest days was a view of Jews that was simultaneously admiring and instrumental. Savarkar wrote: ‘If the Zionists’ dreams are ever realised, if Palestine becomes a Jewish state, it will gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.’ Yet this admiration for the Zionist project coexisted with explicit endorsement of Nazi Germany’s treatment of its own Jews, as the majority-nation principle applied consistently. As Savarkar argued: ‘a nation is formed by a majority living therein,’ and a majority was entitled to assert its civilisational character against an alien minority. The Jews admired in Palestine as ethno-nationalist pioneers were, in Germany, the minority whose suppression he endorsed as a structural necessity. This is the system: what defines the Hindutva view of any group is its relationship to the majority, not the group itself.

His successor, M.S. Golwalkar, extended both commitments. In We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), Golwalkar codified the RSS’s ‘five unities’ with explicit reference to Jewish nationalism as the model, writing that the Jews ‘had maintained their race, religion, culture and language’ — this was the lesson India’s Hindus should learn. In the same text, ‘Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of Semitic races,’ he wrote, ‘to keep up the purity of the Race and its culture’ — ‘a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.’ Both positions follow the same axiom: the nation belongs to its majority, and minorities exist on sufferance. Golwalkar also listed Muslims, Christians, and Communists as the three ‘internal threats’ to the Hindu nation, the same enemies Zionism names. This shared threat-map, as I argue in Section VIII, is what makes the alignment structurally inevitable. It also explains Hindutva’s hostility to China: atheist, materialist, Han supremacist, everything Neo-Hindutva defines itself against.

What the Jews had done in Palestine, Hindus must do in India — and those who would not accept subordination have no place in the nation.

This logic has not remained in the archive. When Modi describes Muslims as ‘infiltrators’ and warns that a Congress government would redistribute Hindu wealth to those whose holy land lies elsewhere, he is reciting Savarkar’s civilisational grammar: belonging to India requires the land to be your pitrbhu and punyabhu simultaneously. The Muslim, whose sacred geography points toward Mecca, fails this test by definition. The Savarkar-to-Modi line is doctrinal.

III. The intellectual upgrade — four formations, five axioms

What I am describing is the emergence of a new political species: the Neo-Hindutva Civilisational State. Unlike earlier Hindutva, which relied on RSS organisational structure and street mobilisation, the new formation is diffused across every WhatsApp group, court petition, and consumer boycott. Neo-Hindutva does not require a uniform or a shakha. It requires only the five axioms.

I identify four intellectual formations that propagate these axioms. The Civilisational-Constitutional Theorists, led by J. Sai Deepak, whose India That Is Bharat has become the movement’s foundational text, argue that secularism is civilisational erasure and Hindu identity is the constitutional baseline. The Historical Memory Engineers, Vikram Sampath’s Savarkar biographies, and Meenakshi Jain’s temple-demolition histories convert medieval history into a moral ledger: every wound an entitlement to present correction. The Diaspora Counter-Academics, Rajiv Malhotra’s Breaking India framework, recast every human rights critique as a civilisational assault. The Movement-State Ideologues, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Ram Madhav, translate all of this into governance common sense: the nation precedes the constitution; homogeneity is tradition, and dissent is betrayal.

Across all four runs, there is a shared architecture of five unspoken axioms. First: civilisation precedes ethics. Second: the majority culture equals neutrality. Third: history confers moral entitlement. Fourth: pluralism is conditional. Fifth, most consequential: minorities exist within the nation, never alongside it — there is no legitimate Muslim political identity that does not derive its permission from the Hindu civilisational state. This fifth axiom explains the systematic dismantling of Muslim institutional life: the Waqf Amendment Bill, passed in August 2024 and contested before the Supreme Court; the Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code which, like codes in France and Turkey, bans polygamy, but unlike those secular codes is explicitly framed as a correction of Islamic personal law; the Citizenship Amendment Act which fast-tracks citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from three countries while explicitly excluding Muslims, the only religious group barred by name; and the steady collapse of Muslim representation to historic lows.

The fifth axiom carries a territorial ambition that mirrors Zionism. The RSS speaks of Akhand Bharat — undivided India, encompassing Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar as the Hindu civilisational state’s true boundaries. The display of the Akhand Bharat map at the inauguration of India’s new Parliament building in 2023 provoked formal diplomatic protests from neighbouring governments. Zionism carries its own parallel: Eretz Yisrael, the biblical Greater Israel, animates the settler movement and shapes the ideological horizon of the Israeli right even when disavowed as formal policy. Both projects hold an expansionist vision in permanent reserve — the existing state as mere first realisation of a larger, divinely mandated geography.

This is the third dimension I am adding: Hindutva and Zionism are, as far as I can identify, the only two political ideologies in the modern world that have successfully integrated divinity with territoriality into a single indissoluble project and, crucially, realised it as a functioning state. Other civilisational movements — Serbian Orthodoxy’s claim to Kosovo, Tibetan Buddhism’s to the plateau, Armenian Christianity’s to Ararat carry versions of this fusion but have not converted it into a sovereign state governing millions. All other major ideologies contain a universalist surplus: liberalism claims to speak for humanity, Communism sought global solidarity, and political Islam has transnational obligations. Hindutva and Zionism are different. In each, the land is sacred because it is ancestral, and the ancestry is sacred because it is territorial. This fusion — divinity made flesh in a specific geography gives both movements their extraordinary mobilising energy and their extraordinary resistance to critique.

IV. The decolonial inversion, the divine shield, and divine postmodernism

The most dangerous intellectual move I see in the Neo-Hindutva arsenal is the Decolonial Inversion: the theft of the moral authority of the oppressed. The argument is that India suffered not one colonisation but two — the acknowledged British, and the suppressed Islamic. Islam is repositioned not as an Indian religion but as a settler-colonial ideology comparable to British imperialism. The Indian Muslim is recast as either a descendant of colonisers or a native who surrendered their indigenous roots to a foreign faith. The Waqf Amendment Bill is framed as ending an ‘Islamic State within a State.’ The CAA’s exclusion of Muslims from its refugee pathway is theorised as correcting partition’s colonial logic. The Uttarakhand UCC criminalises polygamy and certain Islamic inheritance practices under the language of gender justice and national unity.

This inversion converts the dominant majority into the victim and the vulnerable minority into the historical oppressor. Anyone who protests domestic civil society or international human rights bodies is recast as complicit in the original colonisation. This is the Divine Shield: once the anti-Muslim project is theorised as decolonisation, it becomes immune to the liberal human rights critique. That is why the UN Human Rights Office’s description of the CAA as ‘fundamentally discriminatory’ produces no political consequence inside India.

But the shield operates at a deeper metaphysical level through what I call Divine Postmodernism. To understand it, recognize something Neo-Hindutva exploits but rarely names: classical Hinduism is already a form of divine postmodernism. Its genius was the accommodation of multiple, sometimes contradictory, truth-claims within a single civilisational framework — the six darshanas, the Jain anekāntavāda, the Buddhist pratītyasamutpāda, the competing Vedantic schools. The Rigveda‘s Ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names, is the oldest recorded statement of philosophical pluralism. Hinduism accepted that ultimate reality could not be captured by any single system, and that multiple God-hierarchies, multiple ritual paths, could each point toward truth without any one exhausting it.

What Neo-Hindutva does is weaponise this inheritance. Classical Hindu pluralism used multiplicity to limit the claims of any single tradition — no school could declare itself the sole path. Neo-Hindutva uses it to immunise a single political programme against all external standards of justice. The inconsistency between Hindutva’s Dharmic claims and its actual policies — bulldozer demolitions, communal discrimination, and the manufacturing of a Muslim underclass is not a vulnerability. Divine Postmodernism absorbs it: if dharmic truth is contextual, what looks like oppression from outside is, from within, civilisational self-expression. The result is postmodernism with totalitarian underpinnings: philosophical sophistication as the function of political closure.

This is most potent in its synthesis with caste and capital. Caste in its varna origin was a categorisation of professional functions — the Brahmin as custodian of knowledge, the Vaishya as merchant, and so on. Hindu intellectual tradition contains alternatives to this: the Bhakti movement challenged Brahminical hierarchy from within; Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism declared that caste was not essential to India. But the dominant trajectory was the reification of these functional categories into hereditary, cosmologically ordained hierarchies of purity and pollution — one of the most dangerous systems of institutionalised inequality in human history. In neoliberal India, this reification assumes its extreme form: particular castes become the natural benefactors of capital. Piketty’s analysis of India’s wealth, documenting the transition from ‘British Raj to Billionaire Raj‘, shows the top 1 percent holding approximately 40 percent of national wealth, a concentration that has accelerated sharply since 1991 and maps onto caste lines with disturbing precision. The Baniya mercantile castes are not simply rich; they are structurally positioned as the natural owners of liberalised India by a system that presents commercial dominance as cosmic entitlement. And Divine Postmodernism provides the insulation: to critique this as structural privilege is to be anti-Hindu, anti-civilisational, a tool of foreign interests.

V. The Waliullah Trap — why no Muslim tradition escapes

The decolonial inversion is reinforced by what I call the Waliullah Trap: an epistemic construction that forecloses the possibility of any Indian Muslim being recognised as a fully loyal citizen regardless of their conduct or affiliation.

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) was not a separatist. He was the foremost Islamic intellectual of 18th-century India, defending an existing Mughal political order, not constructing an identity against a Hindu nation that did not yet exist. His most controversial act was writing to Ahmad Shah Durrani, urging him to repel the Maratha Confederacy, which had sacked Delhi and reduced the Mughal emperor to a figurehead. The Third Battle of Panipat on 14 January 1761 followed, one of the 18th century’s bloodiest engagements, with tens of thousands killed and prisoners massacred the following day. Neo-Hindutva deploys this letter as the founding document of Muslim separatism.

The actual context: Waliullah was appealing to a regional Afghan ruler within the Persianate diplomatic world connecting Delhi, Kabul, Isfahan, and Bukhara to defend the Mughal structure against the Marathas, whose own armies included significant Muslim contingents. The Rajput rulers of Jaipur and Marwar wrote similar letters to Durrani. This was the fractured politics of a declining empire, not a civilisational jihad against Hinduism. Applying modern nation-state categories: Hindu Rashtra, Muslim separatism, civilisational loyalty to an 18th-century Mughal political crisis is a historical confiscation.

The deeper concealment is genealogical: Waliullah is the intellectual patriarch of virtually every major tradition in South Asian Muslim thought. The Deobandi tradition traces its hadith methodology directly to Waliullah’s scholarly framework. The Barelvi tradition derives its classical legitimacy from Waliullah’s grounding in Sufi orders. The Aligarh modernist stream was a direct response to the tradition of Islamic scholarly authority he institutionalised. Muhammad Iqbal drew on Waliullah’s insistence that Muslim ethical and political life must be continuously reconstituted in response to historical conditions. Even the Jamaat-e-Islami, ideologically opposed to both Deobandis and Barelvis, engaged with Waliullah’s foundational insistence on the integral relationship between Islamic governance and ethics. The Ahl-e-Hadith stream, too, was enabled by his direct hadith scholarship. It is worth noting, in passing, that even within the Hindutva political universe, the RSS has found it necessary to create the Muslim Rashtriya Manch, a body of Muslims who affirm Hindu cultural nationalism, precisely because the Waliullah Trap cannot be publicly named as the framework for governance. The Manch’s existence demonstrates the trap’s logic: the only acceptable Muslim is one whose legitimacy derives from the Hindu majority’s permission.

By tarring Waliullah as a separatist, Neo-Hindutva retroactively criminalises the entire tree. The trap is perfectly closed at every exit. If a Muslim is visibly religious, they demonstrate extra-territorial loyalty to an alien civilization. If they are secular, liberal, or left-leaning, they are framed either as a product of Western modernity that has corroded their authentic identity, making them culturally displaced and therefore doubly alien, or as practising taqiyya, strategic religious dissimulation, concealing their true civilisational allegiance beneath a performance of assimilation. And if a Muslim claims to be culturally Indian: celebrating Diwali, speaking Hindi, participating in shared civic life, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has offered the precise frame into which this is absorbed that such a Muslim is acceptable only insofar as they are, in effect, culturally Hindu, their Indian-ness derived from participation in the Hindu civilisational substrate rather than from any independent Islamic-Indian identity. No available Muslim identity escapes the threat-category or the subordination-requirement. Every piece of lawfare against Muslim institutions rests on this premise: that the Muslim’s presence in Indian public life is a security problem rather than a citizenship right. And in We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), Golwalkar stated the ultimate legal consequence of this logic: ‘The non-Hindu people of Hindusthan … may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation.’

VI. The political economy — cheap labour, caste management, and the new untouchable

Before tracing the economic mechanisms, I need to formalise the structural position that Neo-Hindutva assigns to Muslims because the political economy only makes sense once that position is understood. Within the Neo-Hindutva paradigm, the Muslim occupies a precise and functional location: they are the constitutive enemy whose presence is required for the Hindu majority coalition to cohere. The Hindu majority, fractured across caste, class, language, region, and sect, cannot be consolidated on any positive programme alone. BJP’s electoral mathematics requires that the Brahmin, the Baniya, the OBC, and the Dalit all vote as a bloc. They share no common economic interest. What they can share is a common threat. The Muslim is the political technology that makes this possible: the Dalit is offered the dignity of being Not-Muslim, the OBC is offered civilisational belonging above the religious outsider, the upper caste is offered restored hierarchy. This ideological requirement, the structural necessity of Muslim enmity, is not incidental to Neo-Hindutva. It is constitutive of it. And it explains a consequence that I return to in Section VIII: BJP cannot condemn a state engaged in the mass killing of a Muslim population without delegitimising its own domestic architecture. The fortress needs a siege to justify its walls.

What I am arguing is that Neo-Hindutva’s anti-Muslim politics serve not only electoral consolidation but the material interests of the upper-caste elite at the apex of India’s political economy. The mechanism is what Marx called the Reserve Army of Labour — the structural maintenance of a surplus population that disciplines wages and conditions for the employed. The British Empire used Indian labour as this reserve: cheap, abundant, legally constrained, stripped of institutional recourse. Throughout Indian history, Dalits have occupied the same structural position, their labour extracted at sub-market rates, their mobility controlled through caste prohibition. A striking contemporary parallel is pre-October 2023 Gaza: Palestinian workers entered Israel daily to perform construction and agricultural labour that Israeli capital required at wages Israeli workers would not accept, their movement controlled by permits, their political rights non-existent, their presence tolerated only as a productive body. What Neo-Hindutva is engineering follows the same structural logic.

Through the CAA, the Waqf Amendment, the Uniform Civil Code, the National Register of Citizens’ processes, and the systematic exclusion of Muslims from formal employment through communal discrimination, the structural conversion of 200 million Indian Muslims into a captive reserve of cheap labour is underway, available to the upper-caste elite at below-market cost, without legal protection or institutional voice. As Muslims are stripped of economic assets, driven from formal employment, prevented from operating businesses through targeted boycotts, and ghettoised through ‘bulldozer justice’ demolitions — ‘several BJP state governments demolished Muslims’ homes, businesses, and places of worship without due process… as apparent collective punishment against the Muslim community for communal clashes or dissent’ (Human Rights Watch, 2024) — the Reserve Army takes shape. This is not an unintended consequence of communal politics. It is part of its design.

The caste dimension compounds this analysis. India’s Hindu society is fractured along caste lines that run at least as deep as class divisions, and one productive way of understanding caste is precisely as class reified into a cosmological hierarchy, a structure that naturalises the Brahmin-Baniya economic alliance as sacred tradition rather than material interest. Caste is not reducible to class; it carries its own ontological weight, its own ritual logic, its own forms of social reproduction that cannot be collapsed into a Marxist schema. But it can be read through that schema as a supplementary lens, and when it is, what becomes visible is this: the concentration of wealth in India’s mercantile castes, the dominance of Baniya business families in India’s billionaire class, the capture of regulatory institutions by networks rooted in these communities reflects not market efficiency but the compounding of structural advantage across centuries. The Neo-Hindutva state does not resolve Dalit and lower-OBC deprivation; it manages it by ensuring there is always someone further down. This management requires what Du Bois called the psychic wage, the dignity of relative superiority offered to those who are not at the bottom. Here, the ‘New Untouchable’ performs that function politically: the Dalit is offered the social dignity of being Not-Muslim, the license to participate in communal policing as a citizen-patriot, the wage of belonging to the civilisation rather than being defined against it. The BJP’s 2024 electoral coalition showed signs of fracture, OBC and Dalit communities mobilised by opposition parties around unemployment and economic rights but it did not collapse. The social technology of the New Untouchable still holds.

VII. Three costs — why the BJP cannot afford the other axis

My argument now returns to geopolitics. India cannot partner with the China-Russia-Iran axis on structural grounds: the unresolved Himalayan border dispute, the 2020 Galwan Valley clash killed twenty Indian soldiers in the deadliest confrontation on the India-China border in over four decades, China’s pursuit of regional dominance, and Pakistan’s position as China’s South Asian client. But there is a deeper layer of constraint: that axis would directly threaten the domestic ideological architecture that keeps the BJP in power. The costs are three.

Cost 1: Iran and Pakistan would raise India’s Muslim policies

It is a common misconception that China and Russia would leverage Muslim solidarity against India. They would not: China systematically suppresses international scrutiny of its own persecution of Uyghur Muslims — the OIC commended China’s treatment of its Muslim citizens in a 2019 resolution, and Russia has consistently supported Chinese Xinjiang policies at the UN. Neither is in a position to use Islamic solidarity as a diplomatic instrument. The pressure on India’s treatment of its Muslims comes specifically from Iran, Turkey, and at Pakistan’s persistent behest, the OIC, which has repeatedly criticised the CAA and discriminatory practices against Muslims across Indian states. Iran and Kuwait formally complained to India in 2022 over Islamophobic remarks by BJP officials. Genuine alignment with the China-Russia-Iran axis would require accepting this pressure institutionally, submitting India’s Muslim policy to sustained scrutiny from Tehran and Islamabad. For the BJP, this is existentially intolerable.

Cost 2: India would have to accept the shadow of China and Russia’s record

A China-led Asian order has no space for the civilisational pride that is central to the BJP’s brand, the rising Vishwaguru, the ancient civilisation reclaiming its destiny. China represents not merely a strategic rival but a civilisational enemy: atheist, materialist, Han supremacist — everything Neo-Hindutva defines itself against. The Russia dimension adds a further irony. The Soviet Union systematically suppressed Islamic practice across Central Asia and the Caucasus for seven decades: mosques were converted to warehouses, the pilgrimage to Mecca prohibited, Islamic courts dissolved, and Muslim clergy executed or Gulag-bound. Russia’s Muslim-majority republics — Chechnya, Dagestan, and Tatarstan have been governed through cycles of military suppression. An India that aligned with Russia as a counterweight to Western pressure on its Muslim policies would be aligning with one of history’s most violent suppressors of Islam, a fact that Hindutva’s base finds not disqualifying but reassuring.

Cost 3: The axis requires normalising Pakistan

Pakistan is China’s South Asian client. Genuine alignment with China requires a modus vivendi with Islamabad. Pakistan functions in BJP politics as a structural necessity; its existence as an enemy validates the entire national security framework and animates the domestic anti-Muslim narrative. Normalise Pakistan, and you dissolve one of the BJP’s most durable political resources. The enmity is not merely a strategic problem; it is a political asset.

All three costs derive from the same structural source: the axis India cannot afford geopolitically is precisely the one that would challenge the ideological foundations of the BJP’s domestic order. And the axis India is gravitating toward the US, Israel, and the far-right West is the one that shares and validates that order.

VIIb. The neighbourhood that slipped — and the civilisation India chose to abandon

India’s geopolitical trap, as I see it, is not only about the global axes. It is equally visible in its immediate neighbourhood and the losses there are not incidental but structurally connected to the same ideological choices.

Since 2022, every major country sharing a border or maritime proximity with India has either drifted toward China or cooled toward New Delhi. Bangladesh’s ouster of Sheikh Hasina in 2024 ended a decade of pro-India alignment; the interim government under Muhammad Yunus has sought billions in Chinese investment while anti-India sentiment has become openly mainstream. Nepal’s 2025 youth uprising swept out K.P. Oli, India’s preferred interlocutor. Sri Lanka is structurally embedded in Chinese infrastructure, Hambantota Port, Port City Colombo, following its sovereign debt crisis. The Maldives elected a president in 2023 on an explicit ‘India Out’ platform. Myanmar and Bhutan are each renegotiating their regional position outside Delhi’s framework.

The pattern is not random. A government that frames its national identity as Hindu civilisational recovery cannot convincingly present itself to its Muslim-majority and religiously plural neighbours as a benign regional hegemon. The display of the ‘Akhand Bharat’ map — showing Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Myanmar as parts of India — at the inauguration of the new Parliament building provoked diplomatic outrage across the region. The domestic ideology exports itself as geopolitical hostility.

Most consequential is what India has sacrificed with Iran. India and Persia share over a thousand years of civilisational entanglement in language (Urdu is a Persianate construction), in architecture (the Taj Mahal is a Persian-inflected monument), in literary tradition (the ghazal, the qawwali, the ruba’i), in philosophical exchange (Sufism’s South Asian flowering drew directly from Iranian mystical traditions). The Chabahar port, India’s strategic gateway to Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan, represents the most recent expression of this connectivity, an investment of $120 million that India abandoned in all but name when Modi embraced Netanyahu two days before US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities began. India’s alienation from Iran is a civilisational self-amputation, the BJP discarding a millennium of shared history to validate a framework that treats all Islamic connections as an existential threat.

But self-amputation is only half the picture. The other half is what is being grafted in its place. The ideological and commercial embrace of Israel, $20.5 billion in arms transfers over four years, joint defence production, and a ‘Special Strategic Partnership’ announced as Iranian nuclear facilities burned, is a civilisational substitution. Hindutva is proposing to replace a millennium of Persianate entanglement with an alliance whose ideological grammar is identical to its own: ethnic homeland, besieged majority, subordinated minority, divine territoriality. The question this substitution poses is not primarily strategic. It is: what does a state reveal about itself when it discards the cultural inheritance it shares with its own citizens, including the tens of millions of Shia Indians for whom Iran is the seat of their supreme spiritual authority in favour of ideological kinship with a state those citizens’ tradition regards as the occupier of holy land and the architect of their co-religionists’ dispossession? The answer is not a foreign policy error. It is a foreign policy declaration: India’s Muslims are not partners in civilization but the domestic face of the external enemy whose subordination is the project’s purpose. The substitution of Iran for Israel is an act of communal disavowal, written in the language of international relations.

VIII. The fortress civilisation: a century of kinship confirmed

I want to be precise about the India-Israel relationship: it is not a product of post-October 2023 strategic convenience. Its ideological roots run a century deep. Savarkar’s admiration for Zionism, his conviction that what the Jews had done in Palestine, Hindus must do in India, was not a rhetorical flourish but a foundational doctrine, expressed directly in Essentials of Hindutva. Golwalkar formalised this admiration through the five unities framework, holding up Jewish diaspora cohesion as the precise model for Hindu civilisational continuity across centuries of dispersal. The structural grammar was identical in both cases: a majority of people constitutively besieged by Islam; a state that is the avatar of the civilisation; and minorities who must accept subordination or leave. This is not a coincidence. It is intellectual genealogy.

What makes this alignment structurally necessary, rather than merely ideologically convenient, is this: Zionism and Hindutva are territorially mutually exclusive projects, each claims a specific land as the singular civilisational homeland of a specific people, with no remainder. Neither competes with the other for territory. But they share a common set of enemies: Islam, which both frame as the primary historical aggressor against their civilisational sovereignty; Christianity, which both regard with suspicion as a universalising force that erodes ethnic particularity; and Communism, which both reject as an internationalist ideology that dissolves the national into the collective. Because their territorial claims do not overlap and their enemies do, the alignment between them is not a strategic convenience subject to revision; it is structurally overdetermined. They do not merely share goals; they share threats, share immunisation strategies against human rights critique, and share a theory of what a legitimate state looks like. Both have built coordinated institutional networks, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad America working explicitly with evangelical Zionist groups on anti-Muslim narratives and pro-Israel mobilisation. The architecture of kinship was always there. Modi’s Knesset visit made it a sovereign policy.

For BJP, Israel is the proof of concept, the most sophisticated ethno-nationalist state in the world has looked at the same problem and reached the same conclusion.

This theoretical twinning explains what purely strategic analysis cannot. When Modi told the Knesset that ‘India stands with Israel, firmly, with full conviction,’ he did so 48 hours before the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, a country with which India has over 75 years of diplomatic history and in which India had invested $120 million in the Chabahar port development. India was the only founding BRICS member that refused formally to condemn the attacks. It dissented from the SCO’s joint condemnation of Israeli strikes on Iran, the only SCO member to do so. It subsequently co-sponsored a UN resolution condemning Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf states, without naming Israel’s initial aggression. Between 2020 and 2024, India accounted for 34 percent of all Israeli arms exports, totalling approximately $20.5 billion according to Israeli Ministry of Defence data. Indian companies, including Adani-Elbit Advanced Systems, continued supplying components to Israel through the Gaza war, with video evidence of missile remains bearing ‘Made in India’ markings found in Gaza’s rubble. This is not foreign policy. It is a civilisational obligation.

The domestic architecture I described in Section VI completes the geopolitical argument. Because Hindutva’s majority coalition requires a permanent Muslim enemy, the BJP cannot condemn a state engaged in the documented mass killing of a Muslim population without delegitimising the very framework that holds its coalition together. To condemn Gaza would be to legitimize Muslim grievance. To condemn the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader would be to humanise an Islamic enemy. The alignment with Israel is not merely an ideological affinity. It is the logical expression of a domestic political architecture in which Islam must remain, permanently and visibly, the civilisational threat. The fortress needs a siege to justify its walls.

IX. The trap closes: what must change

My concern is not only with Neo-Hindutva itself, but with why the opposition to it has consistently failed to engage this theoretical architecture on its own terms. The secular-liberal response defends the 1950 Nehruvian constitutional settlement, which Neo-Hindutva has already framed as civilisational erasure. By vacating the ‘sacred’ entirely, secular liberals have ceded the terrain where Hindutva actually operates: the vernacular, the emotional, the metaphysical.

Muslim political leadership has fought real and important battles; the Babri Masjid demolition was a genuine desecration of a historic site, Aligarh Muslim University’s minority status is a matter of constitutional right, and Urdu’s marginalisation represents a concrete cultural dispossession. These fights were not symbolic; they were substantive. But they have not been matched by an equal mobilisation around the socioeconomic conditions of Muslim communities at large: political representation proportionate to a population of 200 million citizens, policy intervention to address documented disadvantage in formal employment and access to credit, institutional protection from targeted demolitions and communal violence, and meaningful presence in the civil service and state legislatures, all of which have fallen to historic lows under BJP governance. The cultural battles are necessary. They are not sufficient. A Muslim politics anchored equally in representation, economic rights, and policy accountability and capable of building coalitions around shared material interests with Dalits, OBCs, and other marginalised communities — is one necessary axis of response to the Waliullah Trap. B.R. Ambedkar, who understood both the caste system’s material brutality and the political dangers of communal identity, remains the most important unread ally in this project: his insistence that constitutional democracy must be anchored in social revolution, not merely procedural rights, is the corrective that both Muslim political leadership and the secular liberal tradition have failed to absorb.

But there is a second axis, equally important and currently almost entirely absent: the generative presentation of Islamic intellectual tradition as a resource for solving shared human problems. The Waliullah Trap works by making Islam permanently synonymous with threat and civilisational demand. The counter must be generative and specifically Indian. Consider what the Indo-Islamic synthesis has contributed and is being expunged: Urdu as India’s most expressive literary language, the dargah as a shared devotional space, the Sufi musical tradition as India’s most distinctive contribution to world music, the Mughal architectural legacy as its most globally recognised face, and less visible but equally consequential, the administrative and governance traditions of the Mughal state, which gave India its first sustained experiment in multi-religious bureaucratic administration: its revenue systems, its judicial structures, its diplomatic protocols, its syncretic court culture. These are co-constitutive achievements, not foreign impositions. They are being erased from the official record precisely because their erasure is required for the Decolonial Inversion to hold: a Muslim who contributed to the governance and administration of India cannot simultaneously be repositioned as a foreign coloniser.

Beyond the Indian context, Islamic intellectual tradition offers serious resources for the problems that secular modernity and, I would argue, other religious traditions in their institutional forms have failed to solve. I am currently developing a philosophical framework which I call the Philosophic Calculus, and which will be the subject of a separate dedicated essay that begins from a simple observation: every major attempt to organise human civilisation, whether secular or religious, has failed in a characteristic way, and the failures are mirror images of each other. The starting point of the framework is this: knowledge can be asymptotically approached through reason and evidence, the methods of secular modernity at their best, but because of the bounded physical and rational nature of human existence, there is always a surplus that cannot be fully realised or formalised without transcendental revelation. This is not a failure of reason. It is a structural feature of what reason is. Secular ideologies fail by refusing to acknowledge this surplus, bracketing out the dimensions of human existence they cannot measure, the moral, the spiritual, the relational, and then optimising aggressively within what remains. The result is systematic degradation of human flourishing, even when their own metrics are improving. Religious traditions, including much of institutional Islam, have tended toward the opposite failure: possessing revelation but retreating into juridical self-sufficiency, declining to translate it into a language that reason can engage and that anyone outside the tradition can hear. Both failures leave the same human problems unsolved.

The Philosophic Calculus is an attempt to do something different: to reconstruct Islamic knowledge and its applications from all modes of knowing — empirical, rational, and transcendental as a unified framework capable of interacting with, understanding, and responding to other frameworks on their own terms. It does not treat Islam as an exception that requires special pleading or that can only be addressed from within. It treats Islamic intellectual tradition as a framework capable of providing solutions to the problems of the world, problems of political economy, of governance, of human flourishing, and of ecological stewardship in a language that any honest interlocutor, regardless of their tradition, can engage with and evaluate. The framework’s starting point is the unity of knowledge, ethics, political economy, and human flourishing as dimensions of a single integrated reality, what the Islamic tradition calls Tawḥīd, but what the framework derives from the structure of knowledge itself rather than from theological assertion alone. What I offer here are simplified statements about the Philosophic Calculus. The full argument, including its metaphysical architecture and its implications for governance, economics, and law, will be laid out in its own essay.

Dr. Javed Jamil’s Applied Islamics works in a closely related direction and provides the applied dimension of this broader project. His central contribution is a reframing of how we measure the success of a civilisation: not by GDP or economic growth, but by a holistic health standard — physical, mental, familial, economic, and social that captures what markets cannot price and what states consistently fail to protect. An economic system that produces growth while destroying family structures, generating epidemic mental illness, and leaving millions without dignified work is not successful by this standard. It is pathological. A governance system that protects property rights but not the conditions for human flourishing has mistaken the instrument for the goal. The relationship between the Philosophic Calculus and Applied Islamics is one of framework and application: the Philosophic Calculus provides the philosophical foundation; Applied Islamics translates it into a practical standard by which states, economies, and societies can be evaluated and reformed. Together they constitute a counter-theory that does not argue from within the dominant system’s terms but from a different philosophical foundation entirely, one that the Indian context, and the global crisis of secular modernity, urgently requires.

What I believe is needed is first naming the Neo-Hindutva Civilisational State accurately as an original Indian political formation with its own metaphysical foundations, its own theory of history, its own political economy, and its own geopolitical logic. It then requires a counter-theory from within Indian intellectual tradition: one that argues that a strong civilisation has developed mechanisms to engage with difference without dissolving or expelling it; that civilisational strength is measured by the sophistication of its internal pluralism; that decolonisation does not mean replacing one hierarchy with another; that history requires moral mediation, not the conversion of injury into entitlement; and that India’s Muslims are not guests of the Civilisational State but co-constitutive of the civilisation itself.

Until that counter-theory exists and circulates in the vernacular, at the level where Hindutva actually operates, the Fortress will stand. And India’s place in the world, determined by the logic of the Fortress, will remain not chosen but compelled. That is what I am arguing. And I believe the stakes for India’s Muslims, for its neighbours, and for Indian democracy itself make it an argument that can no longer be deferred.

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