What is Hindutva and why should New Zealand care?
Saturday, 4 July 2026
Mohan Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and Director, Centre for Culture-Centered Approach to Research & Evaluation (CARE), Massey University.
OPINION: Narendra Modi is coming to Auckland, and with him comes a word most New Zealanders have had no reason to learn: Hindutva.
It is usually translated as Hindu nationalism, but the translation is too gentle for what it names. Hindutva is not a religion but a political project that speaks in the name of one, and it is the project that now governs India.
Hinduism, among the world’s oldest and most plural religious traditions, has no founder, no pope and no single book; nobody has ever spoken for all of it.
Hindutva is a political doctrine barely a century old, formulated most influentially by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who argued in 1923 that India was in its essence a Hindu nation and that to be truly Indian was to be Hindu.
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The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded two years later, spent the following decades building that idea into a disciplined mass movement.
The India that won independence in 1947 was built deliberately on the opposite idea. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, whatever their differences, agreed that the new republic belonged equally to Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and nonbelievers, and the constitution they left behind refuses to define citizenship by faith.
That vision had enemies from the beginning: Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist who had passed through the RSS. The movement waited at the edges of Indian politics for decades, and in 1980 its political wing took its modern form as the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The BJP is today the most powerful political machine in India, and Modi, a lifelong RSS man, has led its government since 2014 and is now in his third term.
Supporters see in Hindutva cultural confidence, national unity and overdue recognition of a civilisation they believe was diminished by colonial rule and constrained by post-independence secularism.
Many admire Modi not simply as a politician but as the leader who restored India’s global confidence and ambition, and for sections of the Indian diaspora that confidence has become a source of pride, renewing emotional ties to a rising India.
Critics argue that this confidence comes at a democratic cost: that Hindutva redraws citizenship along religious lines, elevating the Hindu majority while pressing Muslims, Christians and other minorities towards the margins of national life. Nor is this simply the complaint of the losing side.
The Varieties of Democracy Institute, the world’s most comprehensive comparative measure of democratic performance, has documented sustained erosion in India’s freedom of expression, association and electoral integrity, and its recent reports classify the world’s largest democracy as an electoral autocracy.
The change is visible in law and in stone. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 introduced religion into Indian citizenship criteria for the first time, offering a path to migrants from neighbouring countries provided they are not Muslim.
In 2024, Modi personally consecrated a grand temple to Ram at Ayodhya, built where a 16th-century mosque stood until Hindu nationalist crowds demolished it in 1992.
Each step moves the republic further from the Gandhi-Nehru settlement, in which the state stood carefully apart from every faith, towards a state that increasingly speaks in the idiom of one.
These arguments travel, because migrants do not surrender their politics at the border. The proposed Kia Ora Modi gathering in Auckland announces its lineage in its own name, echoing the Howdy, Modi rally that filled a Houston stadium in 2019.
Many attending will simply want to welcome their prime minister or celebrate a culture they love, which could not be more legitimate, but the movement’s adherents will read the same event as a declaration of arrival, and warm crowds are how such declarations are made.
None of this is a criticism of Hinduism, or of New Zealand’s Indian communities, who enrich this country’s economic, cultural and civic life. Nor is the diaspora politically uniform: many Hindus, in India and abroad, are among Hindutva’s most articulate critics, insisting that the contest over India’s future is not between religious communities but between rival visions of the nation.
New Zealand is right to draw closer to India, and the free trade agreement recognises an indispensable partner in a contested Indo-Pacific.
But mature relationships require political literacy as much as economic optimism, and that begins with one distinction held firm: Hinduism is a religion of extraordinary diversity, while Hindutva is a modern political project that seeks to define the nation in religious terms.
New Zealand is preparing a warm welcome, and it should know precisely what it is welcoming.