Maybe, with the Congress still a marginal player in the fight in India’s most populous state, the party leadership feels it has little to lose by raising the pitch. The controversial line in Khurshid’s book may enable the author to sell a few more copies, and Rahul Gandhi’s video may have gone viral, but it is unlikely to garner their party any extra votes, especially in the Hindutva heartland of Uttar Pradesh (UP). But can the Sangh’s idea of a Hindu Rashtra, for all its disturbing anti-constitutional perversions, be seriously compared to the IS, a heavily armed jihadi terror organisation with a global footprint whose avowed credo is a violent takeover of nation-states? The more toxic forms of political Hindutva have certainly ruptured Hindu-Muslim relations, normalised hate politics, even led to terrible acts of violence in the name of religion - the gau rakshak vigilantes and the Bajrang Dal lynch mobs are examples.
In effect, Gandhi, without specifically endorsing the Khurshid line, is also calling for an ideological war on the Sangh Parivar.Īs a purely academic argument, the Hinduism versus Hindutva binary is worth debating but to stretch it to suggest that a version of Hindutva is “similar” to IS-Boko Haram can only further muddy the troubled waters. Even Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has waded into the strident debate by claiming that “Hinduism isn’t about hate or killing innocent individuals but Hindutva is”. Khurshid has since attempted to clarify that he was only trying to distinguish between classical Hinduism as a dharmic faith and Hindutva as its political exploitation, but the damage has been done.