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Category: Religion

  • The Atheist Who Invented Hindutva: The Mirror Turned Inward

    The Atheist Who Invented Hindutva: The Mirror Turned Inward

    Series Prologue: Part 3

    Series: India’s Strategic Choices and Civilisational Responsibilities

    The ideology that today presents itself as the authentic voice of Hindu civilisation was constructed by an atheist using conceptual tools borrowed from European ethnic nationalism — the very tradition most alien to India’s own pluralist philosophical inheritance.

    In the previous two posts in this prologue, I traced the material foundations and ideological engine of five centuries of Western domination. I argued that India’s civilisational traditions offer a fundamentally different foundation for the emerging world order: pluralist, ethically grounded, and rooted in the universal kinship expressed in Kanian Poongundranar’s “Yaadhum Oorey, Yaavarum Kelir” and the Thirukkural’s vision of Aram, Porul, and Inbam. But intellectual honesty requires that the mirror be turned inward. Because the logic of exceptionalism — the claim to a uniquely chosen identity that exempts a community from the ethical constraints applying to others — is not exclusively a Western pathology. It is a temptation that every civilisation faces when political power finds it useful. And India is not immune.

    The ideology known as Hindutva, which exercises dominant political influence in India today, must be examined with the same analytical rigour we have applied to Western and Zionist exceptionalism. Not because the comparison is comfortable — it is not — but because intellectual integrity demands it, and because India’s civilisational integrity depends on it. The examination is best conducted in three stages, because the ideology was not built in one.

    Stage One: The Founder Who Separated the Nation from the Faith

    The first and most important fact is one the movement rarely acknowledges: “Hindutva is not Hinduism.” Hindutva was founded by an atheist, and it was not, in its original formulation, a religious idea at all. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who coined the term in his 1923 pamphlet ‘Essentials of Hindutva’, was a self-declared atheist, rationalist, and materialist. He rejected scripture, ridiculed cow worship and ritual superstition, and championed European scientific temper over what he saw as the dead weight of religious tradition. He was explicit that Hindutva was not Hinduism. He defined a ‘Hindu’ not by religious belief but by three criteria: Pitribhumi, a common fatherland; Jati, a common race or descent; and Sanskriti, a common culture. A Hindu, in Savarkar’s definition, need not believe in any god at all. What mattered was that India was both his fatherland and his Holyland — a territorial and ethnic test, not a spiritual one.

    Savarkar defined a ‘Hindu’ not by religious belief but by three criteria: Pitribhumi, a common fatherland; Jati, a common race or descent; and Sanskriti, a common culture.

    Johan Caspar Bluntschli

     

    Where did this conception come from? Not from the Vedas, the Upanishads, or any Hindu philosophical source. It came from Europe. Savarkar’s framework of organic ethnic nationalism drew on the nineteenth-century European tradition of the nation as a racial-cultural organism — the tradition of the Swiss-born jurist Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, who worked within German Staatslehre and distinguished between a nation’s racially rooted ‘principal’ people and those he regarded as alien to it. It drew, too, on the ethnic nationalisms then ascendant across Europe, the same intellectual currents that were hardening elsewhere into far darker forms. This is the first irony, and it is foundational: the ideology that today presents itself as the authentic voice of Hindu civilisation was constructed by an atheist using conceptual tools borrowed from European ethnic nationalism — the very tradition most alien to India’s own pluralist philosophical inheritance.

    Stage Two: The Fusion of Ethnic Nationalism with Religious Sentiment

    If Savarkar’s Hindutva was a rationalist, secular-ethnic nationalism, how did it become the religiously charged mass movement we see today — mobilising temple, festival, deity, and devotional feeling for political ends? The answer is that this was a second and distinct stage, carried out by different men, for a different purpose: mass mobilisation.

    M S Golwalkar

    M.S. Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from 1940 to 1973, shifted the register decisively. Where Savarkar grounded the nation in race and territory and had little use for religion as such, Golwalkar infused the project with Hindu spiritual and metaphysical content — the sacredness of Bharat, the dharmic mission of the Hindu people, a civilisational destiny cast in religious language. Deendayal Upadhyaya’s doctrine of ‘Integral Humanism,’ adopted in 1965 and later made the official ideology of the Jana Sangh and then the Bharatiya Janata Party, further anchored the political project in a claimed Hindu spiritual essence. The reason for the shift is not difficult to understand. An abstract theory of ethnic nationalism, however rigorously constructed, cannot move a population. Religious sentiment — festival, symbol, deity, the deep and genuine devotional attachment of hundreds of millions of people — is among the most powerful mobilising forces in human affairs. The movement discovered what its rationalist founder had not prioritised: that to win a nation, you must reach its heart, and in India the heart is substantially religious.

    One need not impute cynical motive to any individual to observe the structural result. A political ideology founded on secular-ethnic lines was, over subsequent decades, fused with the religious devotion of the Hindu masses — and in that fusion, the crucial distinction Savarkar himself had insisted upon, between Hindutva the political-national identity and Hinduism the faith, was quietly erased. The movement that claims to defend Hindu dharma was built on a foundation laid by a man who had little personal use for dharma as religion at all.

    And Savarkar himself never crossed over. He remained an atheist and rationalist to the end of his life — campaigning against ritualism and caste orthodoxy through his Ratnagiri years, opening the Patit Pavan Mandir to all castes, arguing for care of the cow as a useful animal rather than worship of it as a sacred one. His relations with the RSS were notably cool; he scorned its abstention from politics, and Golwalkar’s mysticism belonged to a register the materialist Savarkar never adopted. His death in 1966 was a final statement: he ended his life by voluntarily renouncing food and medicine, justified in a rationalist essay, and his will forbade religious rites — no priests, no rituals, a motorised hearse in place of the traditional bier. The founder kept Hindutva and Hindu religiosity separate for eighty-three years, to the point of a ritual-free funeral. The fusion of the two was not his evolution. It was a second construction, built around him and after him — which is precisely why it can be unbuilt.

    The Zionism Parallel: A Precise Structural Homology

    This two-stage pattern is not unique to Hindutva. It follows, with striking precision, the trajectory of political Zionism — and the comparison is instructive rather than incidental. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was a secular, largely non-religious Viennese journalist. His 1896 work Der Judenstaat is a political and national argument, not a religious one; early political Zionism was in large part a secular nationalist movement, and many Orthodox religious authorities initially opposed it precisely because it presumed to force a national project onto what they regarded as a matter of faith and divine timing. Only later did the movement fuse itself with religious claim — the theological reading of the land, the mobilisation of scripture, and the memory of the Holocaust deployed as a unifying and legitimating force. The structure is identical to the Hindutva trajectory: a secular founder formulates an ethnic-national ideology; later leaders infuse it with religious sentiment and collective memory to achieve mass appeal and to place the project beyond ordinary political criticism.

    The Warning: Where this Trajectory Leads

    Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor brought out this report after the first year of war in Gaza by Israel. It has now been on for more than three years and has engulfed the entire West Asia.

    And here the parallel carries a warning that thoughtful Indian people cannot afford to ignore. For if Hindutva’s path resembles Zionism’s in how the ideology is built, we must look honestly at where that path has led. The fusion of a secular-ethnic nationalism with religious claim did not strengthen the moral standing of the project it produced. It corrupted it. The state that emerged now stands, in the aftermath of Gaza, in a condition of profound moral and political isolation — its conduct condemned across much of the world, its claim to act in the name of an ancient faith increasingly repudiated by the faithful themselves. Many Jews who practise Judaism as a religion and a moral tradition have publicly dissociated themselves from the actions of the Israeli state, insisting on the very distinction this essay draws: that a faith is not the same as a political-national project conducted in its name, and that the project does not speak for the faith. Judaism, one of humanity’s great ethical traditions, has been ill-served by what has been done in its name.

    Many Jews who practise Judaism as a religion and a moral tradition have publicly dissociated themselves from the actions of the Israeli state, insisting on the very distinction this essay draws: that a faith is not the same as a political-national project conducted in its name, and that the project does not speak for the faith. Judaism, one of humanity’s great ethical traditions, has been ill-served by what has been done in its name.

    The warning for India is exact. Hindutva today shows every sign of being on a similar trajectory — the same fusion of ethnic nationalism with mobilised religious sentiment, the same erasure of the distinction between a faith and a political project, the same tendency to place that project beyond criticism by wrapping it in the sacred. If it continues down that path, it risks doing to Hinduism what political Zionism’s corruption has done to Judaism: isolating it, discrediting it, and betraying its deepest moral content — all in the name of defending it.

    Why This Matters: And What is at Stake

    This is why the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva is not academic hair-splitting. It is the difference between a civilisation and an ideology that has captured its name. Hinduism is one of the oldest and most philosophically sophisticated traditions on earth. It has no single founding prophet, no single canonical scripture, no orthodoxy, and no mechanism for excommunicating heretics — because diversity of belief and inquiry is not a problem to be solved but the natural condition of a tradition too vast for any single formulation to contain. Its foundational statement, from the Rigveda, is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one, the wise call it by many names. It gave the world the Upanishads, the Jain Anekantavada — the many-sidedness of truth — the Buddha and Mahavira, the Bhakti and Sufi streams, the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. It is, arguably, the most spiritually plural and philosophically generous civilisational inheritance humanity possesses.

    Hinduism is one of the oldest and most philosophically sophisticated traditions on earth. It has no single founding prophet, no single canonical scripture, no orthodoxy, and no mechanism for excommunicating heretics — because diversity of belief and inquiry is not a problem to be solved but the natural condition of a tradition too vast for any single formulation to contain.

    Hinduism’s foundational statement, from the Rigveda, is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one, the wise call it by many names. It gave the world the Upanishads, the Jain Anekantavada — the many-sidedness of truth — the Buddha and Mahavira, the Bhakti and Sufi streams, the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. It is, arguably, the most spiritually plural and philosophically generous civilisational inheritance humanity possesses.

    A country with over 200 million Muslim citizens — the second-largest Muslim population in the world — cannot credibly champion the Global South, the voice of universal human dignity, or the reform of the world order, if its dominant political ideology frames those citizens as the internal Other. And an ideology founded by an atheist on borrowed European ethnic-nationalist theory, later dressed in religious sentiment for political mobilisation, cannot be the authentic voice of the tradition of Ekam Sat and Anekantavada. It is, in the most precise sense, that tradition’s negation.

    The strongest argument against Hindutva, therefore, is not secular liberalism, and not the critique of any political party. It is Hindu philosophy itself — the Upanishads, the Thirukkural, the Anekantavada, Vallalar’s Ocean, the Sangam world’s ‘Yaadhum Oorey, Yaavarum Kelir’. These traditions do not need political exceptionalism to survive; they are diminished by it.

    “Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one; the wise call it by many names” – Rigveda

    Safeguarding India’s civilisational soul from the exceptionalism now deforming it from within is not an act of opposition to Hindu culture. It is its most authentic defence — and it is a task for every Indian who understands the depth of what is being risked.

    — This is the third and final part of the series prologue. The series proper begins with the next post.

    A companion essay, ‘The Constitution or the Manusmriti: India’s Civilisational Choice,’ extends this argument and is available at thepeninsula.org.in.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), grounded in the conviction that India’s greatest strength is its civilisational pluralism — and that any ideology, domestic or foreign, that threatens that pluralism threatens India itself.

    Further Reading:

    On Savarkar, his atheism, and the formulation of Hindutva:

    Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Essentials of Hindutva (1923); republished as Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1928).

    Janaki Bakhle, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva (Princeton University Press, 2024).

    The definitive intellectual biography; on Savarkar’s atheism, rationalism, and the territorial-ethnic (not religious) definition of the Hindu.

    Vikram Visana, ‘Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India, c. 1900–1920,’ Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

    On Savarkar’s debt to European ethnic-nationalist thought, including Bluntschli.

    Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, The Theory of the State (1875; English trans. Clarendon Press, 1885).

    Bluntschli was Swiss-born (Zurich, 1808), working within the German tradition of Staatslehre.

    On the shift to religious mass mobilisation — Golwalkar and Upadhyaya:

    M.S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1966).

    Deendayal Upadhyaya, Integral Humanism (1965).

    Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (Hurst, 1996).

    On the RSS’s development and the religious infusion of Savarkar’s originally secular-ethnic framework.

    Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Berg, 2001).

    On political Zionism, its secular origins, and Jewish dissent:

    Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) (1896).

    Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009).

    Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Fernwood/Zed Books, 2006).

    On the theological and secular Jewish opposition to political Zionism, from its origins to the present.

    On Hindu philosophical pluralism:

    Rigveda, 1.164.46: Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti.

    Ramalinga Adigalar (Vallalar), Thiru Arutpa, Sixth Thirumurai, Verse 3907.

    Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural. Trans. P.S. Sundaram (Penguin, 1990).

    Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (Penguin, 2005).

    Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009).

    Feature Image Credit: Savarkar and Hindutva – image made with AI assistance.

  • The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    Series: India’s Strategic Choices, Civilisational Responsibilities, and the Contest for the Emerging World Order

    This is the second of a three-part prologue to a series on India’s strategic choices, civilisational responsibilities, and the contest for the emerging world order.

    Ideological Engine crafted with Religious Endorsement

    In my previous post, I traced the material foundations of the current world order — the knowledge borrowed from the Islamic world, the wealth extracted from the Americas, two-thirds of humanity colonised and enslaved. It was the extraction, the enslavement, and the colonial architecture that built Western dominance. But material power alone does not sustain five centuries of global domination. It requires an ideological engine — a moral framework that converts extraction into mission, conquest into duty, and atrocity into the necessary price of civilisation. That engine was exceptionalism. And it was powered by religion.

    The mechanism was constructed with precision. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, authorising the King of Portugal to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans, and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ” and “reduce their persons to perpetual servitude.” Three years later, Romanus Pontifex extended this authority to conquer the lands of infidels for “the salvation of all”. In 1493, following Columbus’s return from the Americas, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera — the foundational document of the Doctrine of Discovery — declaring that any land not under Christian rule could be seized, its peoples subjugated, and its resources claimed, in the service of Christianising the world.

    Columbus at the court of Barcelona. Christopher Columbus standing before the King and Queen of Spain, presenting Indians and treasures from the New World, 1493. (Newscom TagID: whphotos146159.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

    These were not peripheral theological documents. They were the legal and moral architecture of the colonial project, establishing in explicit terms sanctioned by the highest religious authority in the Western world that non-Christians were less than human, that killing them was not a sin, and that converting or enslaving them was a sacred duty. The Doctrine of Discovery was subsequently incorporated into the legal systems of the United States, Canada, Australia, and other settler-colonial states, where it shaped land law, property rights, and indigenous dispossession for centuries. The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery only in 2023 — more than five centuries after the damage was done.

    And here is what makes that repudiation hollow: the doctrine did not stay in the fifteenth century. It became the operating law of the settler-colonial states, and it remains so.

    In 1823, the United States Supreme Court, in Johnson v. McIntosh, formally incorporated the Doctrine of Discovery into American law. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Indigenous peoples did not own their lands once those lands had been “discovered” by Christian colonists — that discovery itself conferred title on the discovering Christian nation, reducing the original inhabitants to mere occupants on their own soil. Marshall himself conceded the principle was “extravagant.” He made it law regardless. It has never been overturned. Two centuries later, it remains the foundation of all federal Indian law in the United States.

    Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place.

    The living force of this doctrine was demonstrated in 2023 — the very year of the Vatican’s repudiation. In Haaland v. Brackeen, the US Supreme Court affirmed the modern form of the doctrine: the “plenary power” of the federal government over Native peoples. The term is not incidental. Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century Popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place. The Vatican renounced the doctrine in March 2023. Three months later, in June, the highest court of the United States reaffirmed its modern expression as settled law. One institution let go of the fiction. The other continued to build on it.

    Terra Nullius and the Concepts of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny

    The pattern is not confined to the Americas. In Australia, the entire continent was claimed under the doctrine of terra nullius — the legal fiction that the land belonged to no one, that sixty thousand years of continuous Aboriginal civilisation and hundreds of distinct nations simply did not count as habitation. The Australian Constitution, when it came into force in 1901, contained Section 127, which declared that “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” The original inhabitants of the continent were constitutionally excluded from the population of their own country. That exclusion was not removed until a referendum in 1967. The fiction of terra nullius itself was not overturned until the High Court’s Mabo judgment in 1992 — one hundred and ninety-two years after colonisation began.

    The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is the point that must be understood clearly. The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is not a distortion of Christianity. It is the documented institutional expression of a specific tradition within it: the doctrine that one’s own community occupies a uniquely chosen position in the divine order — that the Other is not merely different but lesser, and that this difference legitimates domination.

    The same logic operated, in different institutional forms, across other traditions. The conquering caliphates that used the concept of jihad to justify forced conversion were not the whole of Islamic tradition, which contains rich pluralist and humanistic streams. They were the weaponisation of religious exceptionalism by those who held political and military power. Political Zionism, in its most extreme contemporary expressions, follows the same pattern: the theological claim to exclusive divine right over territory and the dehumanisation of non-Jewish populations, ruthlessly visible from the Nakba in 1947-48 to the present conduct of the Gaza war, in full view of the world and with endorsement by the West. It follows the same pattern: religious exceptionalism converted into political licence for dispossession and violence.

    The pattern is not one religion. It is a specific logic — the claim to divine chosenness that exempts a community from the moral constraints that apply to others – that has been institutionalised, at different moments and in different traditions, wherever political power has found it useful.

    In Western civilisation, this logic found its most durable and consequential expression in American exceptionalism. In 1630, Puritan leader John Winthrop, preparing to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called for the creation of a community that would be “as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.” This was not yet a global claim.  It was a theological self-conception: a chosen people, on a divinely appointed errand, under special divine scrutiny. But the seed was planted. Two centuries later, in 1845, John L. O’Sullivan gave it political form: “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” God-given expansion across a continent — regardless of the peoples already living on it — was reframed as destiny, not conquest.

    The indigenous peoples of North America experienced what that destiny meant in practice. At Sand Creek in November 1864, a Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village whose chief, Black Kettle, was flying both an American flag and a white flag of truce. Roughly 150 people were killed, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly; the soldiers mutilated the dead and paraded body parts through the streets of Denver. Three separate investigations — two congressional, one military — condemned it as a massacre. Not one man was ever indicted. The campaigns that defined the conquest of the West — villages destroyed, food supplies burned, non-combatants killed as a matter of strategy — were not the excesses of rogue commanders. They were the method.

    And the men who carried them out were not disgraced but memorialised. George Armstrong Custer, who at dawn on the Washita River in 1868 attacked the village of that same Black Kettle, who had survived Sand Creek and was again seeking peace, killed him and his wife in the assault,  while his aggressive forces killed a large number of unarmed women and children. Custer was mythologised into a national hero, his death at the Little Bighorn recast as a noble sacrifice. This is exceptionalism completing its work: not merely committing the atrocity, but converting it, in the national memory, into valour. The conversion of conquest into heroism is not a distortion of the exceptionalist project. It is the project.

    It is worth pausing to see precisely how this engine is built, because it reveals something the comfortable version of history conceals. There are two broad models of colonialism, and they are not the same. Extractive colonialism — the Spanish in Peru, the British in India — needs the colonised population alive: to mine the silver, to work the plantations, to pay the taxes. It subjugates.

    But settler colonialism, of the kind practised in North America and Australia, does not primarily want the people. It wants the land. And a population that comes to stay on land already inhabited requires something darker than subjugation: it requires removal. The historian Patrick Wolfe named this the ‘logic of elimination’ — the observation that in the settler-colonial project, invasion is not an event but a structure, and the indigenous inhabitant is not a labour force to be exploited but an obstacle to be cleared. This is why the settler variant needed its ideological engine to run at maximum power. To subjugate a people, you need only believe they are lesser. To eliminate them, you must first erase them — conceptually, legally, theologically — before you erase them in fact. Terra nullius, the empty land; the savage without real title; the wilderness awaiting God’s chosen — these were not decorative rhetoric. They were the necessary vocabulary of replacement.

    A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    And here is the fact that removes every excuse: the conscience was present. It was not that no one knew, or that no one objected. Roger Williams argued in the 1630s that the Crown had no right to grant land it did not own, that it had to be purchased from its actual inhabitants — and he was banished for saying so. The Quaker John Woolman condemned the dispossession on moral grounds a century before it reached the Mississippi. When the Indian Removal Act came before the United States Congress in 1830, it passed by 102 votes to 97 — a bitter, closely fought debate, not a silent consensus. When the Cherokee took their case to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that they possessed sovereign rights the state was bound to respect. President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling and carried out the removal regardless; on the Trail of Tears that followed, thousands died. This is the point that must be held onto. A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    The same logic was exported globally. In 1898, the United States entered the Spanish-American War, having suggested to Filipino independence fighters that it was their ally against Spanish colonial rule. When Spain was defeated, the Philippines was not given its independence. It was purchased for twenty million dollars and then colonised. The Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 Filipino combatants and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians through violence, famine, and disease. McKinley called his policy “Benevolent Assimilation.” The Philippines did not receive full independence until 1946 — forty-eight years after the liberation that was promised.

    This is the pattern that repeats from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to Iran: intervention justified as liberation, freedom invoked to mask extraction, and sovereignty violated in the name of the values that sovereignty was supposed to protect.

    The Civilisational Alternative 

    Now consider the contrast. India, China, and Persia are rooted in civilisational traditions that are fundamentally pluralist in their relationship to truth and the divine. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism do not claim exclusive possession of truth. They understand the search for ultimate reality as a path that admits multiple valid routes — that the divine is too vast and complex for any single tradition to comprehend fully. This epistemological humility produces a fundamentally different relationship to the Other: not as a lesser being to be converted or eliminated, but as a fellow traveller on a different path through the same reality — or, in the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image, rivers of many names flowing to a single shoreless ocean.

    A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    The distinction I am drawing must be stated carefully, because it is easy to misread as a claim that one civilisation is virtuous and another is wicked. That is not the claim, and it would be false. The impulse to dress conquest in sacred language is close to universal — it appears wherever power seeks to launder its crimes, and no civilisation, India’s included, is innocent of it. Ashoka built his empire by the sword before he turned to the dharma. India’s own caste hierarchy was given cosmic sanction, as I have argued elsewhere in examining the Manusmriti. The human capacity to summon the transcendent in defence of the indefensible is not the property of any one people. What differs is not the impulse to justify but what each tradition installs as its highest principle — and therefore what any justification of atrocity must first overcome. A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    One can still commit atrocity within such a tradition — humans always can — but one cannot easily make the tradition’s own highest principle bless it. A covenantal structure built on a chosen people, an exclusive truth, and a promised land contains that raw material at its theological core. It does not compel atrocity, and most who inherit it are decent people who read it toward mercy — the abolitionists and Roger Williams drew on it too. But the doctrine of chosenness is available to be weaponised in a way that Ekam Sat structurally is not. That is the civilisational difference that matters: not that one people is depraved and another pure, but that traditions differ in whether their deepest ideal resists the engine of exceptionalism or supplies its fuel.

    Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    This civilisational disposition is not merely philosophical. It expresses itself in conduct. In December 1971, India made the decision to intervene militarily in East Pakistan in response to one of the most egregious humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century — the Bangladesh genocide. The intervention was swift and decisive. Indian military forces liberated Bangladesh in thirteen days of formal war. Pakistani forces surrendered on December 16, 1971. The Indian military then withdrew completely. No occupation. No extraction. No installation of a client government. No strategic bases retained. Full sovereignty was transferred immediately to the people of Bangladesh. India returned over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war through the Simla Agreement. Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    These are not coincidental differences. They are civilisational ones. The world is now in contest over what the emerging order will be built upon. The declining Western order was built on exceptionalism — the claim to divine chosenness that converts domination into duty, secularised into legal doctrine but never abandoned. The Asian civilisational alternative — pluralist, non-exclusivist, epistemologically humble — offers a different foundation. India’s 1971 conduct is the most precise proof available that this alternative is not merely philosophical. It has been demonstrated operationally.

    The question is whether India — in Gaza, in Iran, in the institutions of the emerging world order — is willing to act consistently with the civilisational tradition it inherits.

    — This is the second in the series prologue.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), grounded in the conviction that power without ethics is tyranny — and that India’s civilisational traditions offer the world something Western exceptionalism cannot.

     

    Further Reading:

    On the Doctrine of Discovery and the Papal Bulls

    Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, 18 June 1452. Full Latin text and English translation: Doctrine of Discovery Project, doctrineofdiscovery.org.

    Pope Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex, 8 January 1455.

    Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, 4 May 1493.

    Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford University Press, 2010).

    Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008).

    On the Vatican’s 2023 repudiation

    Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, ‘Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery,’ Vatican, 30 March 2023.

    On the incorporation and persistence of the Doctrine of Discovery in US law

    Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).

    Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U.S. 255 (2023).

    On the affirmation of ‘plenary power’ over Native peoples as the modern descendant of the Doctrine of Discovery, see the analysis by Peter d’Errico and the essays in the ‘200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh’ series, Canopy Forum, 2023.

    Robert J. Miller, ‘The Doctrine of Discovery in American Indian Law,’ Idaho Law Review, 42 (2005).

    Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (Oxford University Press, 2005).

    On Australia, terra nullius, and constitutional exclusion

    Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.

    Section 127, Constitution of Australia (repealed by referendum, 1967).

    Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Penguin, 1987).

    Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Allen & Unwin, 2003).

    On Section 127 and the 1967 referendum: National Museum of Australia, ‘Indigenous Referendum,’ and George Williams’ analysis of the ‘race power’ in Australia’s constitutional history.

    On American exceptionalism — Puritan origins and Manifest Destiny

    John Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’ (1630).

    John L. O’Sullivan, ‘Annexation,’ The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(1), July–August 1845.

    Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (Hill and Wang, 1995).

    Hilde Eliassen Restad, American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Made a Nation and Remade the World (Routledge, 2014).

    On the Sand Creek Massacre and the conquest of the Plains

    U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians (38th Congress, 2nd Session, 1865).

    The contemporary Congressional investigation that condemned the massacre; the primary documentary record.

    Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).

    On the Washita (1868), the killing of Black Kettle, and the pattern of village attacks; also on the mythologisation of George Armstrong Custer.

    Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Viking, 2010).

    On the Philippines, 1898–1946

    Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (Random House, 1989).

    Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

    On India’s 1971 Bangladesh liberation

    Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, 2013).

    On Asian civilisational pluralism

    Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Penguin, 2005).

    Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009).

    Ramalinga Adigalar (Vallalar), Thiru Arutpa, Sixth Thirumurai, Verse 3907.

    The metaphor of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. See thiruarutpa.org.

     

  • Clausewitz’s War Within the Chains of Reason versus Girard, the Apocalypse, and the Far-Right Christian Movement in the U.S.

    Clausewitz’s War Within the Chains of Reason versus Girard, the Apocalypse, and the Far-Right Christian Movement in the U.S.

    To lend greater legitimacy to his controversial position, Girard explicitly cites the foremost theorist of warfare, Carl von Clausewitz. In his three treatises on the escalation of war, Clausewitz had indeed argued that mimetic rivalry would degenerate into violence that would destroy lives and even human civilisation were it not for the scapegoat mechanism.

    Girard’s tendency toward absolute peacefulness is unrealistic, whereas the religiously legitimised far right seeks to wage the final battle internally and externally. Yet, both refer to the assumption of an impending apocalypse. This is the core of the problem, which leads, on one side, to absolute pacifism and, on the other, to a similarly absolute “battling to the end”.

    The media’s focus on the current U.S. president’s personality can easily lead us to overlook deeper, underlying changes. It is well known that French sociologist René Girard plays a significant role in shaping the self-image of Silicon Valley tech billionaires. In particular, his disciple Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir, is advancing this agenda and strongly influencing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, whom Thiel financially supported during his campaign. This connection leads to a billionaire-backed far-right movement that sees its legitimacy in a fundamentalistic interpretation of Christianity. This has already been amply documented in numerous U.S. discussions. The rather helpless counterreaction attempts to prove that Girard is merely being exploited and misunderstood. He certainly is—but the central problem is that in his book Battling to the End, Girard describes the approaching apocalypse. To escape it, Girard recommends absolute nonviolence, which he sees as realised in Christianity. Peter Thiel and the other tech billionaires, however, believe that in this approaching apocalypse, one must fight to the bitter end to survive. It is no coincidence that the latest book by the U.S. “Minister of War,” Pete Hegseth, is titled American Crusade. Hegseth compared the rescue of the American pilot at Easter to the resurrection of Christ. Girard is indeed being instrumentalised by Thiel and others. However, the problem is that Girard adopts an apocalyptic approach and appears to justify it scientifically by referring to a reductionist interpretation of Clausewitz, arguably the most significant theorist of war. Only through reference to Clausewitz does Girard’s theory of imitation (mimesis) gain the political explosiveness that would otherwise remain confined to academia.

    René Girard’s theories on mimesis, mimetic rivalry, scapegoating, and the role of myth and religion in the emergence of culture provide profound insights into human history and behaviour. So, what is mimetic desire?

     Mimetic desire begins with human needs and desires. While needs are biologically rooted, desires are strongly influenced by others. Girard’s identification of the basis of the human problem is simple: most of the things we desire—be they a person, a relationship, an object, an experience, or a feeling—are based on imitation. We develop a desire for these things through our observation of others who desire or possess them, whether consciously or not. This explains the power of advertising—when we see enough people using something, we want it too—as well as the power of celebrity. We want the kind of house, car, clothes, or wife that the rich, famous, and powerful man has.

    Children learn through imitation, acquiring language and other skills necessary for social success. By learning the ethos of their culture, they become part of the community and eventually pass it on to the next generation. In this respect, mimesis is unproblematic. However, for Girard, mimesis is also the primary cause of social unrest and violence because mimesis leads to rivalry when people compete for scarce resources. Sometimes, class differences separate the object of rival desire, such as when one harbours a mimetic desire for what the rich possess. In this situation, which Girard calls “external mediation,” violent conflict arising from mimetic rivalry is unlikely. However, in situations of internal mediation, where individuals or groups desire the same thing and are close to one another, the possibility of violence is real.

    Girard asserts that this mimetic rivalry is the primary cause of human violence: tribes fight over resources, men for power and wealth, and the contest for power escalates into violence. Examples include tribes fighting over resources, two men desiring the same woman, and envy of another’s wealth, fame, honour, or power escalating into violence.

    Girard argues that mimetic rivalry would degenerate into violence that would destroy lives and even human civilisation, were it not for the scapegoat mechanism. By creating a scapegoat, one can blame all of one’s problems on that person and cast them out or sacrifice them, thereby stabilising one’s identity and community. Determining who belongs to a community and who does not reunites it. A famous example is Kaiser Wilhelm II before World War I, who declared, “I no longer know of any parties; I know only Germans.” Anti-Semitism, too, was based on this combination of exclusion and the sacrifice of others; in essence, it is elevated to what appears to be a sacred act.

    Girard argues that Jesus’s voluntary sacrificial death broke this scapegoat mechanism once and for all because he took on the sins of the world. However, regardless of any theological assessment, this interpretation clearly does not apply to the Crusades, religious wars of the Middle Ages, colonisation, the two world wars, or the Holocaust. In fact, one could view these events as repetitions of the scapegoat mechanism, where unity is created through the “sacrifice” of others. This raises the fundamental question of whether Christianity is characterised by a particular form of nonviolence, as devout Christians would argue, or by a particular escalation of violence aimed at establishing “eternal peace” on earth, as its universal claim suggests. Historically speaking, societies that saw themselves as Christian have a distinct history of violence (as does Islam, which likewise views itself as fundamentally peaceful). Of course, Christians will say that their religion is fundamentally peaceful and has merely been misunderstood. The victims of colonisation and the Holocaust would disagree. To lend greater legitimacy to his controversial position, Girard explicitly cites the foremost theorist of warfare, Carl von Clausewitz. In his three treatises on the escalation of war, Clausewitz had indeed argued that mimetic rivalry would degenerate into violence that would destroy lives and even human civilisation were it not for the scapegoat mechanism. By constructing a scapegoat, one is made responsible for all one’s own problems and cast out or sacrificed, thereby stabilising one’s own identity and community.

    Clausewitz had, in fact, advocated a nearly mimetic position in his three principles regarding the escalation of war. He accompanies the mutual escalation to the extreme at the beginning of his book with the words “the enemy does the same.” He justifies this, on the one hand, by arguing that whoever escalates the spiral of violence gains the upper hand and wins the war. Furthermore, he argues that as long as I have not subdued the enemy, I must fear that he will subdue and defeat me—thus, it is the fear and dread of defeat that compels both adversaries to escalate further and further. Ultimately, it is the mutual striving for power on both sides that leads to this escalation. Furthermore, in parts of his book, Clausewitz regards the absolute and the extreme as the ideal of warfare. To this extent, one could certainly understand Girard.

    However, Girard overlooks significant differences. For example, Clausewitz’s three dynamics leading to escalation are followed by three dynamics aimed at moderating war. These dynamics occur on both sides. The crucial point is that the desired post-war political state—and thus peace—already exerts a retroactive influence on the conduct of war.

    However, Girard overlooks significant differences. For example, Clausewitz’s three dynamics leading to escalation are followed by three dynamics aimed at moderating war. These dynamics occur on both sides. The crucial point is that the desired post-war political state—and thus peace—already exerts a retroactive influence on the conduct of war. At the end of the first chapter, Clausewitz emphasises that war consists of inherent violence, the interplay of probabilities and chance, and the subordinate nature of war as a political tool. He attributes war to pure reason. Thus, the tendency toward extremes, as interpreted by Girard, is indeed present in Clausewitz; however, it is limited and contained by “pure reason,” with which Clausewitz associates politics. Whether monotheistic religions, which see themselves as peace-loving, harbour a core of violence is a matter of debate. This could be the case when they became state religions, because at that point, they had to legitimise war as an exception. However, religiously motivated war has always brought with it a particular escalation, whether internally or externally. Girard’s tendency toward absolute peacefulness is unrealistic, whereas the religiously legitimised far right seeks to wage the final battle internally and externally. Yet, both refer to the assumption of an impending apocalypse. This is the core of the problem, which leads, on one side, to absolute pacifism and, on the other, to a similarly absolute “battling to the end”.

    Rene Girard Image Credit: From the article ” Peter Thiel, René Girard, and Vance’s Moral Conundrum by Jesse Callahan Bryant

    Vice President Vance misinterpreted a social scientist and, as a result, converted to Catholicism. If you read JD Vance’s 2020 essay (“How I Joined the Resistance”) about his conversion to Catholicism, you’ll learn that his real moment of spiritual transition from atheist to Catholic oddly came during a 2011 talk that Peter Thiel gave at Yale Law School.

    Crucifixion Panel Credit: The Crucifixion, centre panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece (closed view), by Matthias Grünewald, c. 1512–15; in the Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France. www.britannica.com