Invitation to World Religions

The History of Hinduism  137

major force in that country. The political backlash following Gandhi’s assassination led many Mahasabha members to leave the party and ally themselves instead with a new political organization, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Indian People’s Alliance), which was founded in 1951. Its founder, Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953), had been a member of both the Mahasabha and the RSS. Bharatiya Jana Sangh was a Hindu nationalist party specifically created to oppose the Indian National Con- gress, the more moderate party of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. In 1981, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh became the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Today, the BJP and the Indian National Congress are the two major parties in India’s political system. In 2014, the BJP won a landslide victory in India’s national election. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been one of the party’s most visible leaders. Today, organizations espousing Savarakar’s hindutva ideology are under an um- brella group called the Sangh Parivar (Family of Associations). The RSS is the cul- tural wing, the BJP is the political wing, and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP; World Hindu Council) is the religious wing of the Sangh Parivar. The RSS contin- ues to attract mostly lower-middle-class male youth, who feel empowered by the strong sense of cultural identity that it advocates. The RSS has awakened a deep sense of cultural pride among Hindu youth, but in recent years some of its members have been leading participants in sectarian violence against Muslims. Hindu Nationalism and Violence

In 1991, the BJP led a pilgrimage around India gathering bricks to build a temple to Rama in Ayodhya, India. This was to be no ordinary temple. The pilgrims claimed that a fifteenth-century ce Islamic mosque called the Babri Masjid had been erected over an older Hindu temple that marked the exact birthplace of Rama. Their pur- pose was to tear down the mosque and build a grand Rama temple in its place. Members of Sangh Parivar rallied around the cause, which culminated in 1992 with more than 200,000 participants converging on Ayodhya and demolishing the mosque with their bare hands. RSS youth then targeted the local Muslim commu- nity, destroying other mosques, ransacking Muslim homes, raping Muslim women, and murdering Muslim men. The backlash of these events echoed throughout India and Bangladesh, resulting in more than a thousand incidents of riots and commu- nal violence perpetrated by both Hindus and Muslims. By the time calm had been restored, more than 4,000 people had been injured and at least 1,100 had lost their lives. In a highly significant new stage in the ongoing saga of the Ayodha site, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in August 2020, initiated construction of a new Hindu temple. Opponents regard this, and many other moves on the part of the Prime Minister and his BJP party, as dangerously inflammatory and unfair to the Muslim majority, who also face the prospect of being legally declared of less stature in terms of Indian citizenship than Hindus and members of other religious traditions. The BJP has also employed less aggressive strategies in its campaign to create a thoroughly Hindu India. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, it attempted to PROPERTY OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS