The BJP s rise to power was powered by sectarian mobilisation based on a notion of cultural nationalism. At the heart of this ideological construct is an equation of Indianness and Hindutva. There are two aspects to the BJP's fundamental ideological position. On the one hand, the party says that all Indians, whatever religion they practise, are culturally Hindu ... It is implied that Hindu culture is constituted by a range of social and cultural practices embracing cuisine, dress, ritual practice,  language which have roots in India's pre-Islamic Brahmanical past. It is this cultural belonging or identity that gives all Indians a distinct national identity.

On the other hand, the BJP's Hindutva ideology excommunicates from the domain of nationalism the space for belonging to alien cultures. This is the exclusionary aspect of BJP s majoritarian ideology. It is just about all right to be Muslim or Christian as long as religious practice is unconditionally subjected to Brahmanical social and cultural practice. The cultural caveat that qualifies the freedom of faith is larger than the right itself.

The majoritarian claims of Hindu culture also underpin conceptions of politics and state. Implicit in the Hindutva ideology ... is the claim ... to be a citizen one has to be Indian, and to be Indian one has to be culturally Hindu. Moreover, the state itself is implicated in the cultural construction of the nation. From one vantage, this means, explicitly, that it is the duty of the state to reconstruct, legitimise and propagate Hindu culture as the basis of nationhood and citizenship. From another, this means more fundamentally that the state or the nation-state is rooted in that Hindu culture which gives the nation its identity. So much for pluralism cultural, social or  ideological.

The politics of Hindutva is by far less ...

sophisticated. From the shilanyas, through Advani s rath yatra to the destruction of the Babari Masjid, the pursuit of Hindutva politics has thrived not so much on notions of Hindu cultural and social practice, however fictional their provenance, but on the intimidation of the minorities by the brute force of popular mobilisation abetted, whenever possible, by the apparatus of the state. It would be tempting to dismiss majoritarian assertion as the aberration of the Hindu Right the VHP and the Bajrang Dal, principally. But there can hardly be any denying that the BJP s rise to power was complicity with the politics of militant majoritarianism ...

.... While the BJP, as a party, has functionally respected the (NDA) government s autonomy, the same cannot be said of the other members of the Sangh Parivar ... The VHP has also tested the Government with its repeated assaults on the Christians ... (which). seem to be a ploy designed more to test the government s resolve to stick to a secular agenda at the top of which, indubitably, the protection of minorities must figure. And in this respect, it must be said the NDA government has not covered itself in glory.

Given the foregoing, Laxman's call for the liberalisation, indeed secularisation, of his party must be greeted with scepticism. There is no call to assume that the Sangh Parivar or the hardliners within the BJP will meekly acquiesce to the abandonment of the party s core agendas ... It is difficult to imagine that cadres in the Hindi heartland who have built the party on the basis of an avowed majoritarian agenda will suddenly jettison it ...

Thus, while it is tempting to see the BJP evolving into a functional version of the ... Congress, this prognosis seems at the moment to be more than a trifle far-fetched. (Source: The Pioneer, 16 September, 2000;