The Assembly elections in four States—Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, and Assam—and the Union Territory of Puducherry next month will provide an opportunity to gauge the lure a putative, even de facto, Hindu rashtra has for the few oases where the ideals of India being a secular Republic still exist in varying shapes. These oases are largely confined to the south and the east, which the RSS and the BJP, the progenitors of Hindu rashtra, seek to conquer.
The BJP is in power on its own in 14 States, and has a preponderant say in the coalition government that it heads in Maharashtra. In the east, the BJP already rules in Assam and is expected to soon lead the governing coalition in Bihar. Should the BJP conquer West Bengal in the election in April, in addition to making eyebrow-raising gains in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the bells will truly begin to toll for the secular Republic of India.
The bells will toll because the RSS-BJP have shown through their political practices and legislative measures that they can overturn constitutional principles of equality of citizens and protection of religious minorities without having to rewrite them. The overturning of principles acquires certain permanence not only because the judiciary fails to reset them, but also because the BJP repeatedly wins some States, such as Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Thus, foreclosed is the possibility of the BJP’s decisions being reversed by a new dispensation.
The Constitution, in other words, does not have to explicitly state that India is a Hindu rashtra in order to become one. There are, indeed, two Indias operating under the same Constitution. The India that is rapidly expanding is where the prototype of Hindu rashtra is being shaped and refined. The oases constituting the secular Republic are the last redoubts against the BJP’s ideological onslaught. Every cycle of elections has, in fact, become a test for checking whether the reality of the secular Republic will simply become memory.
Although the RSS-BJP have not explicitly defined the idea of Hindu rashtra, its contours are vividly outlined through the Sangh’s practices. These entail intrusion upon the personal sphere of the people, dictating what they should eat or who they should marry or the history they should read or even the language they should learn.
They also seek to subsume the multiple, competing identities of all Hindus—caste, class, and linguistic, for instance—in their larger religious identity, Hinduise the public sphere, and depict Hindus as more equal than others by establishing their domination over religious minorities.
It is the unity of Hindus they seek, not of all those constituting the nation. The excluded are to be othered and terrorised. Until the Constitution is rewritten to legalise the subservience of religious minorities, their inferior status can only be enforced through a discriminatory exercise of state power and vigilantism. The fear of the state is supplemented by the terror of the mob.
The Odisha example
No wonder there is a spurt in violence whenever the BJP comes to power in any State. Odisha is an apt example. In less than two years of the party dethroning the Biju Janata Dal, in 2024, the State has witnessed seven mob lynchings and 54 incidents of communal riots, including in Cuttack last year, until then celebrated for its syncretism. Let alone the violent targeting of Christian priests and Muslim cattle traders, in June 2025, two Dalit men ferrying a cow and two calves in Odisha’s Ganjam district were brutally assaulted, compelled to eat grass and drink drain water, and crawl for nearly two kilometres.
Hindutva assertion in the first flush of the BJP’s victory in Odisha will soon get normalised. This has been the template for creating a de facto Hindu rashtra in the States the BJP rules. Apart from spawning the culture of vigilantism, all of them viciously engage in hunting for “infiltrators”, a euphemism for Bengali-speaking Indian Muslims, projected as having illegally come from Bangladesh. In Gujarat, a crackdown on illegal immigrants, carried out in the wake of the Pahalgam massacre last year, resulted in the detention of at least 850 people, and demolition of 12,500 homes around Ahmedabad’s Chandola Lake. Thousands of Indian Muslims were rendered homeless.
Uttar Pradesh initiated the trend of demolishing the houses of those accused of crimes or opposing the state without following due process, and most of the affected are Muslim. Expressions of Muslim religiosity in the public arena invite retribution, and disputes over the religious character of places of worship are fanned to polarise the people. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has engaged in hate speech on countless occasions, routinising and justifying the state’s discrimination against religious minorities.
Just about every BJP-ruled State has prohibited religious conversion through misrepresentation, force, undue influence, coercion, and allurement. Their imprecise definitions have led to the emergence of a new category of cases being filed against religious minorities. Proscribed is also conversion by marriage, aka love jihad, with an avowed aim of countering the alleged conspiracy of Muslims to fake love for girls belonging to other faiths in order to proselytise them before or after marriage. In Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, punishment for unlawful conversion includes life imprisonment. No data have been furnished to establish that India is witnessing the phenomenon of religious conversion of alarming nature.
The aforementioned elements do not largely exist in the public culture of States and Union Territories that the BJP has yet to rule on its own—for instance, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Jammu and Kashmir. These elements, though, are present in the States where the BJP had been in power previously—for instance, Karnataka, Jharkhand, and Himachal Pradesh. These recede in the popular consciousness because the BJP is unable to create, without power, a prototype of Hindu rashtra to incite people, requiring as it does the enactment of discriminatory laws, condoning or tacitly encouraging vigilantism, and engaging in hate speech with impunity.
It is more than a possibility that Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will succeed in thwarting the BJP’s bid to capture power in West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu and Kerala will deny the party significant electoral gains. This will undoubtedly come as a relief for the opposition parties. Yet, at the same time, they cannot remain blind to a large swathe of India having been turned into a de facto Hindu rashtra. Each of them needs to look beyond victory and defeat in its own turf to together launch a national movement for reclaiming the territories where the secular Republic is a fast disappearing reality.
Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
Also Read | On the cusp of a breakthrough in Puducherry
Also Read | It’s a do-or-die election battle for the Left in Kerala: M.G. Radhakrishnan