To tweak his slogan of “sabka saath, sabka vikas” a little, it is now “sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabkey liye Hindutva”.

The expectations of the prime minister apparently is that even as India becomes a modern, industrialized country with its smart cities, bullet trains and widely available digital communications, it will also be a country where the ethos of Hinduism will be the dominant feature of educational and cultural life with the religions of the minorities being accorded a secondary status.

In accordance with what the saffron brotherhood considers the identifying characteristics of Hinduism, Indians in general will speak Hindi and eat vegetarian food.

Hence, the covert and overt propagation of Hindi in official communications and the calls for banning the sale of meat on the festival days of what has been called Indic religions or those faiths whose birthplace is India such as Hinduism and Jainism.

It is possible, of course, that too energetic a pursuit of these linguistic and culinary ideas can create problems for the Modi government.

For instance, while Buddhism and Sikhism also originated in India, their followers have no compunctions about eating meat. It is a matter of history that Lord Buddha (563-483 B.C.) died after consuming pork which was apparently contaminate or had been poisoned.

The imposition of Hindi, too, will not be easy. It is again a matter of history that such an ill-conceived attempt by the Hindi zealots let to an anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu, persuading then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru to say that English will continue as an official language (along with Hindi) as long as the non-Hindi speakers want it.

There is no evidence that the latter have changed their minds since the mid-1960s when the anti-Hindi feelings were at their height.

However, a journal of the RSS has tried to impart a spin to the agitation by saying that “conspiracies were hatched to organize other Indian languages against Hindi”.

This is the first time that such a weird theory has been articulated without a shred of proof. In any event, nothing can be more absurd than to suggest that Bengalis, Odiyas, Marathis, Malayalis, Kannadigas and others ganged up with the Tamilians to denounce Hindi. If anything, it was a natural resistance against being forced to neglect their mother tongue in favour of a language which they barely understood and could only speak with difficulty.

But, what the ridiculous proposition of the saffron magazine shows is the extent to which the Hindutva brigade is willing to go to press their case for advancing the “cause” of Hindi.

However, as a party which emerged from the dingy provincial towns of Bihar and U.P. with its slogan of Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan, the BJP’s emphasis on the language is understandable.

Moreover, it seems to have convinced itself that the party’s first ever majority in the Lok Sabha gives it a carte blanche to impose and implement its views on whatever is close to its heart.

While to an overwhelming majority of people, the verdict in favour of the BJP in the last general election was a compendium of several factors – anger against the Congress over the charges of corruption and the party’s feudal tradition, the hopes aroused by Modi’s promise of development – to a saffron columnist it was an “Hindu mandate (to the BJP) to rule India” which was generated by the “cumulative force of historical memory” against the violation of the “spiritual code of ancient Hindus” by the Muslim invaders.

Given this kind of a grandiose interpretation of a routine change of guard in a democracy, it is not difficult to understand why the BJP sees its present period in office as a divinely ordained manifest destiny when it has the right to mould the country’s institutions to its own liking.

It has already done so by planting saffron apparatchiki in revered institutions like the Indian Council of Historical Research, the National Book Trust and the Film and Television Institute.

It also plans to introduce text books in schools with their invocations to Goddess Saraswati which can hardly be acceptable to the Muslims and Christians.

This relegation of the minorities to the status of second class citizens is also evident in the Union culture minister Mahesh Sharma’s proposal to include the Hindu epics Ramayan and Mahabharata in the school curricula but not the Bible or the Quran.

Arguably, xenophobia can coexist with industrial progress as the examples of pre-World War II Europe and America show where the blacks and browns had a lowly status even as the individual countries prospered.

But, India is far too diverse and has too long a tradition of tolerant interfaith relations dating back to Asoka (273-232 B.C.) and Akbar (1556-1605) to subscribe to a fascistic worldview.

Besides, the promotion of weird ideas like calculating the “exact” date of birth of Lord Rama, or claiming that Pushpakvimans were like today’s airplanes, will run counter to the scientific temperament needed in a digitalized world. A modern country cannot be built on the insular foundations of a “Hindu” nation. (IPA Service)