Hindutva
and Islamism are both movements of revanchism and annihilatory impact,
which claim to speak in the name of a pure religious tradition that has
been tainted and threatened by alien influences. In a zone of cultural
confluence such as South Asia, these global movements are at war with
one another: to Hindutva, secular modernity as well as Islam and
Islamism are the enemy; to Islamism, secular modernity as well as
Hinduism and Hindutva are the enemy. In actuality, these seemingly
opposed movements are twins, mirror images, with deep foundations in the
same thematics of avant-garde revolutionary activity, ethnic
purification, total war and perpetual violence towards the Other, which
characterised several early-20th-century ideologies including Nazism,
Fascism, Bolshevism, Trotskyite theory and Carrelian biology. Arising
out of the modern, Hindutva and Islamism have little sanction in
Hinduism and Islam, respectively: the traditions in whose name they
claim to speak and act have no place for them. Indeed, Hindutva and
Islamism are products of the 20th century: ideologies that employ the
sinister possibilities of the modern to overturn the emancipatory
possibilities of the modern, which leads me to regard them as projects
in counter-modernity.
Ranjit Hoskote
Ranjit Hoskote
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