London: The word Hinduism itself is not ancient. Neither is it native nor organic. The very suffix “ism” within the word Hinduism reeks of Western taxonomy aiming to confine the civilisation within rigid, dogmatic lines much like the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam. Such a framework is violently alien to Sanatan Dharma, which never sought reduction into a closed creed.
The Hindu civilisational experience is fluid, plural, evolving, contradictory and unapologetically non dogmatic. As Atal Bihari Vajpayee observed in his 1998 interview with Javed Akhtar, India’s secularism flows naturally from Hindu civilisation itself. Hindu thought binds no one to a single prophet, a single book, or a compulsory theology. One may be astika or nastika, devotional or sceptical, ritualistic or philosophical, and still remain within the civilisational fold. There is no concept of blasphemy, apostasy, or enforced belief.
“Hinduism” was not born in Kashi or Kanchipuram. It was midwifed in colonial census offices and missionary tracts. European orientalists and British administrators required a neat category to govern, classify, and evangelise. In doing so, they lumped together diverse Indic traditions (Vedic, Tantric, Bhakti, folk), under a single label, often distorting them to fit monotheistic templates. The term gained currency only in the early 19th century. By freezing Sanatan Dharma into “Hinduism,” colonialism hollowed out its essence morphing to fit it within their monotheistic template.
Hindutva, contrary to hysterical propaganda, does not destroy this civilisational ethos but it vociferously exposes the artificiality of the colonial box it was forced into. Hindutva is not ritualistic “Hinduism” but when etymologically translated from Sanskrit, it simply is the essence of being Hindu—a civilisational consciousness rooted in land, memory, culture and continuity. It encompasses all Indic traditions. Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism included, bound by culture, history, and geography, not narrow dogma. One does not need to pray to Ram to be Hindu. One does not even need to believe in God. One only needs to belong, belong to a civilisational inheritance that predates and outlives religious dogma.
This is precisely why Hindutva terrifies the pseudo-liberal establishment. Pseudo-liberals peddle the lie that Hindutva endangers “Hinduism”. This is inverted propaganda from a deracinated elite, conditioned by Macaulay’s education system. In truth, Hindutva is the purest secularism India has ever known. Unlike Western secularism’s hostile separation of state and faith, or India’s pseudosecularism that panders to Muslims while demonising the Hindu, Hindutva treats all born of this soil as heirs to a common civilisation. It demands loyalty to Bharat first, allowing diverse dharmas to flourish without privileging imported exclusivism. This is true pluralism: equal cultural dignity, not appeasement.
Colonialism weaponised “Hinduism” to divide. It was deliberately marketed as superstitious paganism ripe for “civilising.” Reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, while alleviating genuine social evils, inadvertently reinforced colonial frameworks by engaging Hindu civilisation in Abrahamic terms. Ironically made possible precisely because the Hindu was never a codified faith and therefore remained open to reform in a way dogmatic religions like Islam are not. Post-Independence, Nehruvian secularism entrenched minorityism, alienating the majority while left-leaning narratives painted any Hindu assertion as “communal.”
Hindutva is accused of being “majoritarian” by the very people who reduced Hindus to a religious minority within their own civilisation. They denied them cultural rights while enthusiastically funding, protecting and politically mobilising every other faith identity.
India’s Anglophone elite, left-leaning intelligentsia conditioned by colonial education and Nehruvian secularism, loathe the term Hindutva not for any supposed majoritarianism (their go to smear), but because it ruthlessly exposes their lingering colonial hangover. Hindutva asserts an unapologetic, indigenous civilisational identity tied to India as a civilisational land, history and ethos, shattering the superiority complex these elites inherited from Macaulay’s system. Conditioned to see India’s value system backward or in need of Western “civilising,” they embraced abstract secularism, Muslim appeasement and cultural alienation as badges of progress. Hindutva strips that facade, reclaiming agency for the rooted majority, highlighting their detachment from the masses, unease with confident Hindu assertion and the hollowness of power built on post-colonial mimicry rather than authentic heritage. It forces uncomfortable self-reflection on their enduring mental colonization and that’s precisely why they hate it.
In Bengal, this conditioning runs deep. The Bengali intelligentsia, shaped by the Bengal Renaissance and later Marxist dominance under decades of Left Front rule, has long leaned leftward. They are often virulently anti-Hindutva, viewing it through a lens of colonial-era secularism and Soviet-inspired atheism. Calcutta’s elite, influenced by British education and communist hegemony post-1947, internalised narratives dismissing Hindu civilisational pride as retrograde.
This brings us to the upcoming spectacle. On January 11, 2026, at the prestigious Calcutta Club, the Calcutta Debating Circle (in association with the Telegraph) hosts a debate on the motion “Hinduism Needs Protection From Hindutva.” For the motion are relics like Mani Shankar Aiyar and Ashutosh, feral loud mouths like Mahua Moitra and distorians like Ruchika Sharma peddling tired pseudo secular tropes. Against the motion stand stalwarts like Swapan Dasgupta, J. Sai Deepak, Agnimitra Paul and Sudhanshu Trivedi, who unlike the flustered opposition, conduct themselves armed with logic and history.
The left-leaning intelligentsia, long cocooned in culturally alienated narratives are in for a total feast. For decades, they’ve parroted that Hindutva is “fascist” or “majoritarian,” ignoring how it liberates Dharma from colonial chains. This event will hopefully pierce that bubble, forcing confrontation with truths, that “Hinduism” is the real threat to authentic Dharma, and Hindutva its saviour. Hopefully, by the end, even the most conditioned will glimpse the propaganda they’ve swallowed, emerging informed and even perhaps awakened.
The death knell of that construct has sounded. Hindutva is not a threat but a reclamation. Not destruction, but resurrection. And it is precisely this mirror, held up to enduring mental colonisation, that its critics find impossible to face.
