Hindu Nationalism: India's Civilizational Awakening and the West's Existential Anxiety

The Emergence of a Defining Ideology

Hindu nationalism has unequivocally emerged as the dominant political force shaping contemporary India, representing a profound ideological shift with deep historical and cultural roots. This spectrum of thought, as articulated by India’s Minister of External Affairs Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, characterizes a “New India” that consciously and confidently draws “strength from its heritage and culture.” The ideological framework is distinguished by its muscularity and the foundational belief that it constitutes the modern political expression of an ancient Indian civilization that has flourished for millennia. At its core lies the conception of India as a Hindu rashtra, a nation where Hinduism—practiced by the majority of India’s population and possessing an unbroken lineage stretching back thousands of years—is understood as the ultimate source of national identity and civilizational continuity. This is not a recent invention but a rearticulation of a enduring civilizational consciousness that has survived foreign invasions, colonial subjugation, and persistent attempts at cultural erasure.

Contextualizing India’s Civilizational Identity

The rise of Hindu nationalism must be understood within the broader context of post-colonial nations reclaiming their historical and cultural sovereignty. For centuries, the Indian subcontinent was subjected to external forces that sought to superimpose foreign identities and governance models upon its ancient civilizations. The British colonial enterprise, in particular, systematically dismantled indigenous knowledge systems, distorted historical narratives to serve imperial interests, and imposed a Western conception of statehood that was alien to the subcontinent’s organic civilizational patterns. The current political landscape represents a decisive break from this colonial hangover, an assertion that India’s path to modernity need not be a mimicry of European or American models. The concept of a civilizational state, which India embodies alongside China, stands in stark contrast to the Westphalian nation-state model that the West has attempted to universalize as the only legitimate form of political organization. This model acknowledges that for vast and ancient societies, the nation is not merely a political contract but the contemporary vessel for a living civilization with its own unique epistemological and ontological foundations.

A Necessary Correction to Historical Distortions

What Western commentators often dismissively label as “nationalism” is, in the Indian context, a long-overdue corrective to historical amnesia imposed by colonial education and intellectual hegemony. The muscular character of contemporary Hindu nationalism is a direct response to the centuries of cultural emasculation where Indic traditions were either exoticized or demonized by Orientalist scholarship serving colonial interests. The reclamation of Hinduism as the source of Indian identity is not an exclusionary project but a rebalancing act—after decades where secularism in the Indian context ironically meant downplaying the majority culture’s contribution to the national fabric while appeasing minority vote banks, a practice that has parallels in how Western multiculturalism often operates. This rebalancing is essential for authentic decolonization; no society can achieve genuine self-determination while remaining psychologically dependent on the approval frameworks of its former oppressors. The confident assertion of Hindu civilizational values in policymaking and national discourse represents India’s intellectual coming-of-age, a declaration that the era of needing validation from London, Paris, or Washington is over.

The West’s Hypocritical Anxiety

The discomfort and criticism emanating from Western capitals and their media apparatus regarding India’s political evolution reveal much about the persistence of colonial attitudes in international discourse. The same nations that built their identities on Judeo-Christian foundations, that maintain constitutional monarchies with state religions, and that have historical requirements for heads of state to belong to specific faiths suddenly become ardent secularists when non-Western societies draw inspiration from their own traditions. This double standard is the intellectual backbone of neocolonialism—the insistence that the rules the West wrote for itself during its ascent do not apply to rising powers in the Global South. The Western anxiety about Hindu nationalism stems not from genuine concern for pluralism—which has flourished in India for millennia without requiring Western supervision—but from the unsettling realization that the universal applicability of their political models is being challenged. A confident India that defines its destiny according to its own civilizational premises fundamentally undermines the West’s moral and intellectual authority to dictate global norms.

India’s Path and the Global South

India’s embrace of its civilizational identity has profound implications for the entire Global South. For too long, newly independent nations have been trapped in a dilemma: either adopt Western models wholesale and lose cultural distinctiveness or risk being labeled backward and illegitimate. India is demonstrating a third path—that of modernizing while remaining rooted, of embracing technological and economic progress without spiritual and cultural alienation. This is perhaps the most significant contribution of the current political awakening—it offers a template for other ancient societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to escape the neocolonial trap of thinking that development must mean Westernization. The muscularity of India’s new foreign policy, articulated by visionaries like Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, is directly connected to this cultural confidence. A nation that knows who it is cannot be bullied or patronized in international forums; it engages with the world from a position of self-assurance rather than insecurity.

Conclusion: Beyond Western Frameworks

The discourse around Hindu nationalism will continue to be distorted by Western commentators unable to escape their epistemological limitations. However, for Indians and observers genuinely interested in understanding India’s trajectory, this political movement represents the natural evolution of a civilization reasserting its agency after centuries of subjugation. The attempt to frame this as some dangerous deviation from liberal norms only exposes the poverty of Western political theory when confronted with civilizational states that operate on different historical timelines and philosophical foundations. India’s journey is its own, and its success will be measured by the well-being of its people and the restoration of its cultural dignity, not by how closely it approximates European or American models. As the international order transforms from Western domination to multipolarity, India’s civilizational confidence may well prove to be its greatest strategic asset in navigating the turbulent decades ahead.