Even the BJP and the RSS are held in contempt for not pursuing the goal of Hindu supremacy seriously enough.
Aishwarya Iyer
Yesterday · 06:30 am
Popular in online 'trad' groups are images of Parshuram, an angry Brahmin defender of the faith in Hindu mythology.
The road to the Hindu Rashtra runs through the history of Vatican city, a participant proposed in a live audio discussion on Twitter Spaces on January 11.
The topic of the discussion was: “HinduRashtra w/o Trads - Possible? How would it look?”
Hindu Rashtra is an alternative polity that Hindu supremacists aspire to. According to them, it will be created by dismantling India’s secular Constitution and commandeering existing institutions to give primacy to Hindus.
Trads, as a handle called ParthaSarthi, who was hosting the Twitter Spaces discussion put it, “are basically traditionalists who are conservative Hindus who believe in the original Hinduism mentioned in the shastras”, or religious scriptures.
This shadowy section of the Hindu Right burst into the national spotlight in January, when the police in Delhi and Mumbai arrested six people for allegedly organising mock online auctions of Muslim women on an app called “Bulli Bai”. Online networks of Trads were said to have orchestrated it. They were also believed to be behind a similar “auction” held last year on another app called “Sulli Deals”.
Days after the first arrest, the audio discussion on Twitter offered a glimpse of the Trad worldview.
“The pope is ruling us, because our Constitution is not our own, it is given to us by Christians,” said ParthaSarthi. According to her, it was meant to serve the “goals and propaganda” of foreign institutions.
A Twitter user going by the name of Agni offered an alternative. “The basis of Hindu Rashtra will be smritis and shrutis [traditional Hindu tenets],” he said. “If that is not the basis, it will be a Western concept.”
Ironically for a group that aspires to weed out western concepts from India, some drew inspiration from western models. A user called NikBruh cited the creation of Vatican City in 1929 under Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, as a possible prototype for the Hindu Rashtra. The treaty recognised the Vatican City as an independent state under the jurisdiction of the pope.
“The Vatican city was created in 1929 under the Lateran treaty – similarly, I am not asking for an independent area but within the realm of cooperative federalism we can have a small area where I will be given the freedom to profess my religion,” NikBruh said. “This could be Ayodhya, Kashi or Haridwar.”
He argued that conditions were ripe in India for a new political order. “It is only possible when there are tensions in society,” he said.
Over the last three months, Scroll.in has been tracking these conversations on Twitter, Clubhouse, Reddit and Instagram to piece together a picture of India’s Trads. It isn’t just fascist Italy from which they seek inspiration. They also draw upon the world of the American Alt-Right to give expression to their violent fantasies of subjugating Muslims, Dalits, women and sexual minorities.
Impatient for a Hindu Rashtra, they abhor India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, for not pursuing the goal seriously enough.
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