Mark Twain once famously said that India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great-grandmother of tradition. Fast forward to present time, there is ‘Bharat, The Mother of Democracy’, a prosaic branding exercise by PM Modi to sell an invincible government at home and a hollow Vishwa Guru image abroad.
RSS-BJP ideology of Hindu Supremacy
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was formed in 1925 to strengthen the foundation of Hindu society. It deliberately operated as a cultural organization and avoided any confrontation with the colonial state. Sardar Patel maintained that the Sangh never participated in the freedom struggle in any substantial way, and none of its leaders went to jail for India’s independence.
Then came 1980, the formation of its political child, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), rooted in Hindutva and Integral Humanism. This is an outfit that never celebrated the hard-earned birth of a democratic and pluralistic India. It dismissed the 1947 Freedom as a ‘false notion of nationhood’, openly declaring that in Hindustan, only the Hindus form the nation, based on Hindu culture and traditions.
The Sangh rejected the Indian Constitution as being framed “at the cost of the Hindu majority” and demanded the archaic Manusmriti in its place. Viewing Saffron as sacred, they favoured the Bhagwa Dhwaj (Saffron flag with Om signage) and refused to hoist the Tricolour National Flag until they were legally forced in 2002.
Its legacy is not fighting colonialism but spreading communal division and hate, an ideology that ultimately culminated in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. In independent India, the RSS has been banned three times.
The Myths of Decolonization
Today, from the absolute vantage of state power, bankrolled by crony capitalists, the Sangh brigade is reconstructing India exactly as it imagined it, not a constitutional republic but a Hindu Rashtra. A new Parliament to house the ambitions of a self-declared Vishwa Guru, the Sengol installed as a sceptre of divine power, India rebranded as Bharat, colonial Rajpath whitewashed as Kartavya Path, military ensigns redrawn, and the IPC and CrPC repackaged as BNS and BNSS. This is part of the decisive shift being attempted to change the national script.
However, there is a parallel trend that challenges this reinvention: an erosion of India’s democratic values. IPC 124A is gone in name, but returns wider and more draconian as BNS 152. Detention under CrPC was 15 days, under BNSS it is stretched to 90 days. The names are Indian but the soul is more colonial than the British were.
Autonomous institutions that were meant to be repositories of neutrality have all been brought to heel. The Election Commission, once feared by the ruling party, now announces elections when it suits the ruling party, while ordinary citizens have to beg and fight for their right to vote (SIR). The ED and CBI have become the colonial police of the BJP, with 95% of their cases targeted against the Opposition. Governors act as Viceroys of the Centre, sitting on Bills passed by Opposition states.
Vice-Chancellors in Universities are now pure ideological appointments, foot soldiers of the RSS with an abhorrence for the Macaulay system. Pillars of democracy like the mainstream media are run and scripted directly from the PMO.
In the last ten years, over 20,000 NGOs have lost their licenses and their right to foreign funding through the weaponization of FCRA. Government authorities have used financial audits and tax-related raids against a wide range of civil society groups documenting hate crimes, air pollution, or hunger. Their crime was not financial fraud or destabilizing Bharat. Their crimes were research, dissent, and asking questions.
Farmers who feed the nation are branded as Khalistanis and anti-nationals and their year-long protest, demanding a legal MSP, has been washed away from public memory, just like the future of students whose papers were leaked before they were even written.
This Vishwa Guru would lecture the world on climate at COP, while at home it plots to desertify the Aravallis and auction off Great Nicobar, a biodiversity hotspot, without the consent of the Gram Sabha, a betrayal of its own Antyodaya philosophy.
And now to seal its power forever, the ruling dispensation brazenly pushes to carve out a centralized, north-weighted parliamentary majority and advance its cultural-nationalist agenda. It has recast dissent as anti-national, hollowed the Opposition through induced defections and selective deployment of enforcement agencies.
This is Democracy MODI-fied. A systematic dismantling of the firewalls of the Union of States, curtailing diversity, federalism, minority rights and civil liberties, and turning the Constitution into a weapon of majoritarian rule, hyper-nationalism and surveillance. In one word, saffronization.
1947 India integrated a Subcontinent, 2014 Bharat cannot integrate a Valley
Nehru inherited a wounded country. The horrors of Partition, 90% illiteracy, famine as a recurring reality, 32 years life expectancy and more than 560 princely states to be integrated. But Nehru did not build temples to commemorate freedom. He invested scarce resources in infrastructure and institutions like IITs, AIIMS, IIMs, and INCOSPAR that would drive national development and produce CEOs for Google and Microsoft decades later. Nehruvian steel plants at Bhilai and Bokaro still achieve record-breaking output, fuelling present-day infrastructures.
While every other newly independent state fell to coups and authoritarianism, 1947 India thrived as a democracy because Nehru made ‘Unity in Diversity’ a foundational philosophy of nation building, recognising that differences and dissent are not to be eliminated but are indispensable components of democratic life.
Modi, on the other hand, inherited a consolidated republic, true to Nehru’s vision, with functioning institutions, a diversified economy, an industrial base, a growing middle class, global diplomatic presence, and decades of administrative experience.
Over the years, the RSS-BJP has converted narrow electoral victories into expansive mandates to break the constitutional consensus on federalism, secularism, social justice and institutional autonomy. In the guise of reform, it has sold assets like Air India, LIC and other PSUs built over decades, obsessed with short-term balance sheets. Nation-building has been replaced by auction.
India, born of a non-violent struggle, is today being dragged back from the vision of the freedom-fighting generation that framed the Constitution. The Nehruvian ‘Unity in Diversity’ is now replaced by Moditva ‘Hindi-Hindutva-Hindustan’.
While Nehru surprised the world by building a thriving democracy in an illiterate, poor, diverse nation from scratch, the Modi regime is seen by global agencies and experts as a phase where an institutionalised democracy is being systematically aggrandized by the executive and made into a majoritarian theocracy.
The Path India must tread
The idea of India has always been its extraordinary diversity, of languages, religions, cultures and traditions, ideas and aspirations. The Constitution transformed that diversity into the foundation of national unity. It affirmed that justice, liberty, equality and fraternity are not abstract ideals but practical principles for governing a vibrant society.
Perhaps the greatest challenge before India today is not merely economic or technological. It is philosophical, the very idea of India rooted in the Constitution. As India moves toward the centenary of its independence in 2047, there is an opportunity to renew constitutional promises.
The constitutional safeguards for cultural diversity, federal powers, minority rights and civil liberties are fundamental, not impediments. And it is only imperative for “We, the people” to reclaim the inclusive Constitution and the transformative legacy of the freedom movement.
(The writer is a student of Political Science, based in New Delhi)
(The views expressed are those of the writer and not of the newspaper)
