Marian Fitzwalter sends this in.
==
Neil Gray on the rise of "Hindu Nation" :
The abject poverty and extreme wealth divisions created by the ‘brutal simplicities’ of neo-liberal economic regimes require legitimising forms of national ideology to mediate and obfuscate their wrath. In the context of deepening neoliberalism, cultural nationalism has come to the fore as an ideology which gives coherence to the activities of the nation-state and capital, and which best serves and manages the conflicting requirements of accumulation and legitimation for neoliberal elites. Thus Radhika Desai contends:
... the deployment of the language of particularity, of cultural difference and nationalism, in counterfeit answer to the accelerating universalism of capitalism, which it supports and promotes, is the ingenious reality of the right today.i
In India, the chief cultural nationalist movement is Hindutva: a communalist Hindu nationalist ideology seeking to conflate the very idea of ‘Indian-ness’ with ‘Hindu-ness’. The core practitioners of Hindutva are organised under the umbrella of the Sangh Parivar organisation, which is avowedly inspired and influenced by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) a ‘social and cultural organisation’ with a known fascist pedigree and a Hindu majoritarian political agenda. The importance of this movement, a deeply conservative multi-headed Hydra, can be measured by the presence within its ranks of the former ruling party of India, now the main party of opposition, the Bharitiya Janata Party (BJP).