Explained : Hindutva Finds Applause in Kolkata and Its Impact

Kolkata: In Kolkata, that bastion of liberal thinking that has India misty-eyed, the loudest applause, whoops and cheers in a debate on Hinduism and Hindutva on Sunday (January 11) were for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s speakers.

No amount of historical inaccuracies, the twisting of facts or the open use of that vaunted skill of dog whistling could stifle the joy that a section of the audience at a Kolkata club took in the words of Swapan Dasgupta, Agnimitra Paul, J. Sai Deepak, and Sudhanshu Trivedi in a debate organised by the Calcutta Debating Circle.

The four held forth in their effort to oppose the motion, ‘Hinduism needs protection from Hindutva.’

Supporting the motion were Mani Shankar Aiyar, Mahua Moitra, Ashutosh and Ruchika Sharma. 

Debaters spoke for and against the motion alternatively. 

The topic and the selection of speakers lent themselves to what was destined to be a partisan debate. It was telling that three of the four defenders of Hindutva were active members of a single party – Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – while those opposed to it were connected to three different political movements. 

The audience primarily comprised people who had bought tickets of Rs 200, along with members of the club, who occupied the front rows. The organisers said about a thousand had gathered, but the final turnout could be more.

‘Thugs and murderers’

A veteran Congress leader and a former Union minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar began the debate by quoting Swami Vivekananda – who would turn out to be quite the favourite that evening. 

Aiyar said that Hinduism was entirely capable of protecting itself and that Hindutva is the ‘pervertor’ of Hinduism. He pitted the Hindutva of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar with the Hinduism of Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi. 

“Hindutva is a BJP leader slapping a blind, hungry tribal girl because she attends a Christmas lunch in a Church. Hindutva raids shopping malls to tear down Christmas decorations,” he said. 

Hinduism cannot rely on thugs and murderers to protect itself, said Aiyar.

When he mentioned the tearing down of mosques and the wanton use of bulldozers in the name of Hindutva, so great was the collective murmur that the moderator – cardiovascular surgeon and news channel regular Kunal Sarkar – had to ask the audience to keep its emotions to itself.

‘The geography of India’

Next was Swapan Dasgupta, a former MP nominated by the BJP to the Rajya Sabha, Dasgupta was called a “Hampstead Hindu” by Aiyar in his speech, and he retaliated by accusing Aiyar of regurgitating a “script which we first heard 25 years ago.” Audience members seemed merrily entertained at this. 

When Dasgupta thanked the organisers for “finally recognising the force of an idea which has captivated India and taken India by storm” and “which hopefully in the coming months will also overwhelm Bengal,” the applause fell in peals. West Bengal is likely to have assembly elections in March or April this year. 

Dasgupta said there are “wrong assumptions” about Hinduism, that it is an amalgamation of various beliefs, quite poly-istic in its faith and cited how his Shakta fail is “strictly non-vegetarian”. A day before Dasgupta made this claim, the Ayodhya administration reportedly banned the delivery of non-vegetarian food within 15 kilometres of the Ram Temple built at the site of the Babri Masjid, to say nothing of the assault and dictums inflicted upon non-vegetarian eaters in the rest of India by the BJP and its supporters.

A historian by training, Dasgupta claimed that pilgrimages defined the geography of India, citing the four Dhams and the Shakti Peeths. He said that the latter stretched from Chattogram in Bangladesh to Hinglaj in Balochistan of Pakistan and added that the faith of Sanatan Dharma is “linked to the geography of India” – sweeping a broad brush over two countries which are decidedly not India and with whom India’s ties are at present nothing to write home about.

Dasgupta was eager to divorce Savarkar from the discussion, decrying that he does not have a proprietary hold on Hindutva. “A Bengali person Chandranath Basu in fact used the term in 1894,” he said. 

Bringing up the man of the hour – at least in parliament – 19th century writer Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Dasgupta, who studied in England, rallied against the “weakest of human beings, the half-educated anglicised and brutalised Bengali babu, who congratulates himself on his capacity to dine off a plate of beef as if this act of gluttony constituted in itself unimpeachable evidence of a perfectly cultivated intellect.”

When he said that Hindutva has taught Indians the importance of fighting back and of not taking things lying down, the audience was delighted and responded with furious clapping. 

‘The man who gave us Hindutva’

Moderator Sarkar introduced Mahua Moitra by noting that she had quoted Maya Angelou’s line “but still I rise” after the Supreme Court denied bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam but claimed – strangely – that he did not wish to bring the two up by name. The audience laughed but it is unclear what the shared joke was. 

Sarkar then said that Moitra is a person whom national media follows for her politics and “for her sarees as well”.

A Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP, Moitra is likely to have noticed how vocal large sections of the Kolkata audience were to references to her party’s government in West Bengal. So it was not very surprising that she jumped into the fray by all at once fact-checking Dasgupta (“he ad libs so much…Chandranath Bose coined ‘Hindutva in 1892, not ‘94!”), reminding him of his “beef-eating days at Oxford” and making a sarcastic reference to the BJP’s bogey by saying that there were “ghuspaithiyas (infiltrators) in the audience.”

Moitra then unveiled Chandranath Basu’s politics, saying that he espoused chastity in women, was against their education, opposed widow remarriage and raising the age of consent from 10 to 12. “This is the man who gave us Hindutva, who you are proud of,” she said.

Savarkar, she also said, looked down on the “suicidal Hindu necessity” for chivalry. To a gasp from the audience, Moitra said that Savarkar relied on a fake Purana – one which referred to Queen Victoria and a bunch of other anachronistic details like the days of the week as we know them, named after Hellenistic deities.. 

Moitra also brought up the fictional threat of ‘love jihad’ – espoused in the name of Hindutva – and said that there is one word between Hinduism and Hindutva, “adversarial.”

‘Pseudo-secular’

West Bengal’s Asansol Dakshin MLA from BJP, Agnimitra Paul began her debate slot by lighting a candle for the “innumerable lives lost in Bangladesh, Pahalgam, West Bengal, and Bharat.”

She then recited the names of Dipu Das, Sarat Chandra Mani, Rana Pratap Bairagi, Khokon Das, Baijandra Biswas, and Joy Mahapatra – who have been killed or died as a result of attacks by religious fanatics in Bangladesh.

Paul thundered as she would have from a BJP stage, “Why is Hindu suffering met with secular silence?” The audience thundered back in applause. 

To even more applause, Paul decried those who have raised their voices for “Gaza, Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela,” gesticulating wildly at the danger posed by anti-genocide campaigners.

She said that the motion debated an imagined threat. “Must a civilisation apologise for recognising itself?” she asked.

All but inaugurating the BJP’s poll campaign in Bengal, Paul asked where secular outrage “disappears” when Hindus are attacked, presenting a litany of Hindu suffering that has somehow continued despite a decade of Hindu nationalist rule. 

“Just like our forefathers who had to flee from Bangladesh, why do Hindus have to flee from our own land in Bengal?” Paul asked. Not finding mention in Paul’s speech is the particular proclivity of the BJP government in New Delhi of pushing anyone but especially Bengali Muslims into Bangladesh on suspicion that they are undocumented.

Entering further into a communal mode to the delight of the audience, Paul claimed that Muharram rallies “get priority” over the immersion of Durga idols in Bengal and that while weapons are brandished in the former, police cases are only registered when Hindus brandish sticks at Ram Navami rallies. 

The loudest applause for Paul, however, came when she brought up the “pseudo-secularism” of those “whose pen weeps for Umar Khalid” – the activist and historian who has awaited trial in jail for five years now.

“I am also a proud Hindu… and we will not stop till we achieve your goal,” she thundered. 

‘Minorities’

A veteran journalist, Ashutosh, who followed Paul, called Hindutva a political tool. 

He brought up Mohammad Akhlaq, the Muslim man lynched on suspicion of possessing beef and from whose attackers the BJP administration in Uttar Pradesh is keen to withdraw the criminal case. 

The former AAP politician emerged as the only one in the debate to centre the argument on the accused mistreatment of Muslims and other minorities, citing examples of how multiple BJP governments – at the Centre and in states – have tolerated and encouraged this violence and espoused a politics of war between Hindus and Muslims. 

“In the Hindutva framework, the truth, non-violence and tolerance are called perverted virtues,” Ashutosh said of Savarkar’s works.

He cited how rapists of Bilkis Bano were feted upon their release from jail. “Is rape justifiable because it is seen through the prism of civilisational war. This is not Hinduism,” he added. 

“We lost Gandhi [as a result of Hindutva, which his killer was a believer of], are we ready to lose Hinduism?” he asked. 

‘Masculinity’

Lawyer J. Sai Deepak took the stage to massive cheers and announced that Hinduism needed protection from secularism. 

He accused Aiyar – who was born in Lahore – of still being on the other side of the border “for conflating Hindutva with Savarkar.” 

Deepak then charged Moitra for going against Basu’s worldview engaging in the brand of dog whistling that has earned him lakhs of followers on X. He asked if she could not think of “any other non-Hindu worldview which has a problem with reform,” which continues to support child marriage and violence. He said he did not want to say more because he likes his head on his torso. 

Deepak said he did not want to call the reformer Rammohan Roy “Raja” because that “was a Mughal epithet” but at later points in his speech, ends up calling him “Raja” anyway. 

He cited Aurobindo Ghosh, claimed he was a vociferous proponent of Hindutva, and then scrolled on his phone for a few seconds to find the exact point of his Uttarpara speech to quote to the audience. He claimed that Hindutva was the “organic Shakta response to the colonial invasion of Bharat.” 

Positing Calcutta as the birthplace of this politics, Deepak claimed that it was Bengali masculinity that informed Hindutva – in a point that appeared to take the vigour out of his applauders who despite their ready support for his firebrand delivery found themselves unable to decide whether that was a good thing or bad. 

Deepak, nonetheless, said that Kolkata must reclaim its space and delivered a stirring quote on the city being the lighthouse of Hindutva and India from that citadel of historical accuracy, the film The Bengal Files.

“Jai Shri Ram to the people in power here,” he said, ending his speech, noting that Hindutva is the way forward, “which is the writing on the wall that they have a problem with.”

‘An ahistorical understanding’

Historian Ruchika Sharma then raged against the “absolute ahistorical drivel being peddled.”

“My problem with the opposition [those opposed to the motion in this debate] is that they do not know,” she said. 

Sharma highlighted how the opposition was “scared to bring in Savarkar because they know that his idea of Hindutva sucks the soul of Hinduism, is anti-thetical to Hinduism.”

The core of Hinduism is pluralism, she said, adding that Hindutva is exclusionism, that it is casteist, and hyper masculine. “What is there to be proud of?” she asked of Sai Deepak’s claim that Bengali masculinity gave Hindutva its identity. 

Sharma traced the origins of many deities sacred to the Hinduism of today, who had their sources in cultures that were distinct, giving the example of Pampa, Jagannath, Gopal and Pir Baba Haji Ratan Nath. The latter, she said, led to the Nath monastic order of which the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath is a part. 

Sharma said that “an ahistorical understanding of India’s long history is what has led to Hindutva” and is the first to refer to the Brahminism it centralises. 

‘Science’

As the final speaker Sudhanshu Trivedi, one of the BJP’s national spokespersons, took to the podium, a young man behind me said, “Now you see, he will finish her.” 

But Trivedi was not intent upon a point-by-point rebuttal of Sharma. As a veteran of television prime times, he instead tried to make the most of the nine minutes accorded to him by bunching together a disparate bunch of claims and throwing them to the audience to pick up from it what they will.

He spoke of Stayendranath Bose, the scientist who lends his name to the Higgs Boson particle, touching upon the fact that India gifted a Nataraj statue to CERN. He claimed that “secularism and surma (a Persian-origin word for a black eye-pencil colour that is sometimes associated with Muslims)” do not cherish this. 

He also brought up quantum mechanics pioneer Werner Heisenberg meeting Rabindranath Tagore, noting that the latter had explained to him much about the concept of interconnectedness. 

Trivedi said that in a December 27, 2022 social media post, OpenAI founder Sam Altman said that among questions that ChatGPT itself could not answer was one on “the absolute equivalence of atman and brahman”. Except it turns out that Altman was saying this in response to his own question, “What true thing do you believe that few people agree with you on?”

While it is unclear how the point for Hindutva is bolstered by these instances, it is nonetheless interesting that Trivedi felt that the way to a Kolkata audience’s heart was going to be through the promotion of Hindutva’s apparent ability to travel with science. But he need not have tried this hard, the vocal part of the audience had already decided that he had made a compelling point. 

Ending notes

At the end, each debater was questioned by a schoolgoer selected by the organisers. The children are expert debaters and their questions reflected the concerns of many a column and television discussion. A key moment was the youngest participant asking Moitra whether “minority appeasement” foments communalisation. Moitra disagreed with the phrase. 

While Dasgupta offered his young interlocutor a polite answer on Bankim’s Anandamath turning away Muslims from the freedom fight, Paul told her interrogator who had asked her why BJP loses in Bengal that “58 lakh voters” had been deleted – ostensibly referring to the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of electoral rolls that the BJP itself has advocated for. 

To his young jury member, who asked him why Hindutva adheres to leaders who have spoken of fealty to Hitler and his ilk, Deepak said not all thoughts need to be accommodated. By the end of his minute, Deepak had added that he had no problem with Indian Muslims but that his problem was with those who call “Aurangzeb their wali [guardian]”. “What is the problem with new converts, that is the question,” he asked, in what can only be a lesson to the young in skirting the issue. 

But the highlight of this stage was Trivedi, who disputed his schoolgoing interlocutor’s claim that the RSS had not taken part in the freedom struggle by claiming that “1933 onwards there was no freedom movement,” leading to an uproar from the opposing bench and guffaws from some parts of the audience. 

At the end, author Prasenjit K. Basu gave another endorsement of Hindutva, but it was historian Mridula Mukherjee who had the last word. Mukherjee lamented the lack of substance in the pro-Hindutva debaters’ speeches and argued that Vivekanand and Aurobindo – two mainstays of that side – certainly did not know of Hindutva as it exists today. 

A show of hands in the end reflected a divided audience, according to the moderator, with many voting for either side and quite a few, for none. Deepak has claimed on X that his side “won.” Either outcome is a surprise to Kolkata’s image as the point where Hindutva stops and amity begins. As this debate is going to play itself out in television screens and stages big and small across West Bengal as the assembly election nears, it will be interesting to see if it also captures the interest of the state’s youth, who battle joblessness and poverty at levels never seen before.

This article went live on January twelfth, two thousand twenty six, at twenty-four minutes past four in the afternoon.

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