Revisiting History and Society: Understanding the Impact of British Era Policies in Shaping Present-Day Hindu Right-Wing Ideology

This chapter aims to highlight three policies of the British that led to the death of a united India and eventually led to resulting communal disharmony in present-day India. The policies—Divide and Rule, Partition of Bengal, and the Indian Councils Act (1909)—have led to the exponential rise of a relatively new phenomenon—political Hindutva which morphs into Hindu nationalism. This chapter argues that the rise of Modi and the isolation of Muslims in BJP-ruled India are a long-term result of the successful implementation of the three British policies. Findings of the chapter suggest that there has been a significant rise of communal disharmony, and present-day Indian politics partly runs on the same ideology that the British operated in India. The chapter also argues that the current imagined reality of India as a Hindu nation and the rise of BJP are a result of colonialization. The chapter also argues that communalism in India was constructed during the British era and also reconstructed the notion of society from an unorganized community into a fuzzy community divided by enumeration. It concludes by arguing that the British rule has successfully constituted India into sets of homogenous communities riddled with religious conflict and states that the future of Indian communities would be based on two distinct imagined communities—the Hindu bloc and the Other.