Atalji’s words should be a guide to the BJP at a time when the party has been forced yet again, after its defeat in the 2009 parliamentary elections, to search for much-needed clarity and consensus on what its core ideology is. The moot question is whether the BJP should allow different—and, indeed, conflicting—interpretations of Hindutva to have a free play within the organisation. The problem for the BJP gets further compounded when some in fraternal organisations preach and practise a patently anti-Muslim and anti-Christian version of Hindutva. The BJP’s inability to counter it in a timely and effective manner extracts a heavy price in political, electoral and image terms. Sadly, the party has often chosen to pay the price rather than join issue with the hotheads in the ideological fraternity.

It is instructive to remember that the BJP and its predecessor, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, did not adopt Hindutva as their foundational ideological representation. The BJP’s party constitution does not use the term. Instead, it states that ‘Integral Humanism’, a profoundly inspiring philosophical treatise by Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916-1968), the foremost ideologue and organiser of the Jana Sangh, is the party’s guiding ideology. Notably, the word ‘Hindutva’ does not appear even once in ‘Integral Humanism’. L.K. Advani, who led the Ayodhya movement, popularised it as ‘Cultural Nationalism’ during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the context of his robust ideological counter to the practitioners of psuedo-secularism. But even he drew a Laxman Rekha when some in the Ayodhya movement projected it in Hindu-only or Hindu-first terms that betrayed anti-Muslim prejudices.

... contd.