A Nation Without Minorities?
Suryakant Waghmore
“Majority/Minority Politics in South Asia” is an essay collection, co-edited by Mohsin Bhat and Natasha Raheja, that moves beyond nation-specific frameworks to foster comparative, cross-disciplinary, and cross-border inquiry into how majoritarianism takes shape across South Asia. The collection illuminates shared mechanisms of majoritarian rule and the varied forms of opposition they provoke, thus advancing critical scholarship on democratic erosion while contributing to public debates on resisting authoritarianism and rebuilding democratic futures.
Following the violence of partition in northwest India, there was another milder episode of rioting and looting in Western India (now Maharashtra) that followed Mohandas Gandhi’s assassination. While the violence of partition was driven by religious fervor, the violence in western India (also referred to as zaalpol [1]) was about caste—directed against Brahmins. From April 1947 to January 1948, as the decolonized nation traversed partition and zaalpol, the very category of minorities needing protection was shaken. Any community could now be turned into a vulnerable minority in India—from Muslims to Brahmins. This article engages with Brahmin history—from privilege and dominance to facing collective violence to efforts to mobilize Hindu citizenship—and makes a case for reimagining the meaning of minorities and their futures in India.
The Constitution of India does not recognize or emphasize minorities for extension of political rights, except for the minor provision of establishing and administering educational institutions for religious and linguistic minorities. Instead, it has generic provisions that prohibit discrimination on caste, religious, linguistic, or regional lines. The idea that India could have minorities needing political protection was undone after partition. As social justice came to be institutionalized along caste and tribal lines, the idea of protecting minorities was also imagined as perpetuating division that could further partition the nation. While scholars have pointed to Hindu bias in the constitution, Brahmin intellectuals and radicals of the present day mostly disagree, emphasizing their vulnerable status.
Most liberal scholarship on the country emphasizes religious persecution of Christians and Muslims, and that the conditions for these minorities have worsened since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014. A nuanced scholarship would, however, call for problematizing the category of (vulnerable) minority both contextually and continually.
Are Brahmins a minority? If so, are they a vulnerable minority? How a minority is constituted for othering is a function of and largely dependent on how a majority is imagined and mobilized.
Zaalpol – Taming the godly aura of Brahmins
Placed at the highest and purest end of caste hierarchy, Brahmins constitute a privileged varna (and caste) that dominated religious and political spheres in colonial times and has continued to do so in lesser but significant ways under postcolonial democracy. Yet, Brahmin persecution is turning into an acceptable discourse in contemporary mainstream Indian media.
Paradoxically, such victimhood is coupled with eulogizing Brahmin greatness, even Brahmin genes. Claims of Brahmin persecution have increased rapidly since BJP’s rise to power in 2014, so much so that even academically settled concepts like Brahminic patriarchy or Brahminism are now contested as anti-Brahmin and anti-Hindu by Brahmin associations and online groups.
Due to their caste position and purity, Brahmins have historically evoked both curiosity and reverence from non-Brahmins. Scholars, including Ambedkar, who contested racial theories of caste, suggest that caste was originally a social system among Brahmins that turned fashionable for others who sought to learn, mimic, and embody caste, leading to the spread and growth of a caste system.
The politics of representation under colonial rule, however, significantly affected Brahmin privileges, as non-Brahmin movements in southwest India turned anti-Brahmin politics into an acceptable political form.
Brahmins formed their own associations to counter anti-Brahmin currents. They formed and led nationalist Hindu organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)[2] while simultaneously forming jati-specific associations. Their politics thus took an inclusive national form through religious nationalism while sustaining the inner worlds of jati through caste associations.
Chitpavan Brahmans had usurped the Maratha king's power, inevitably leading to feelings of mutual distrust on the part of Marathas and Chitpavans. This usurping of Maratha power by Peshwas in the eighteenth century and resulting polarization seeped into colonial politics of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Marathas displacing Brahmin leadership from Congress and providing Congress with a non-Brahmin character.
The anti-Brahmin violence of January 1948, sparked by Godse shooting Gandhi, spread from then-Bombay to present-day Belagavi in North Karnataka—especially in Maratha-dominated areas. The initial targets were Chitpāvan Brahmins, believed to be close to nationalist Hindu organizations like Hindu Mahasabha and RSS, with several instances of pillaging and arson of their farms, homes, printing presses, factories, etc. Rioters were mobilised and ferried in trucks for targeting Brahmins.
I spoke to elderly Brahmin respondents from Athani Taluka in 2019; most still remembered the environment of fear that lasted for over a month. A respondent in his 80s shared:
“I was seven years old then. The rioters came in [a] truck to burn down the Brahmin locality [at the center of the old town]. However the fauzdar [Police Station Head of Athani] was a Brahmin. [3] He did not let them do much. A few places were burnt down. One house was particularly set on fire which had [the] belongings of RSS. I still remember that site of burning, its in front of my eyes. All the materials used in camps, like plates, rugs, and books, were burning for three days, especially that big rug. I still remember. “
Another respondent, born in 1924 in Madhbhavi village in Athani taluka, told me how his family was affected and displaced from Madhbhavi:
“Trucks came from Maharashtra side then for burning Brahmin houses. My elder brother was Talathi [Village Revenue Officer]. I still remember our well-wishers asked us to vacate our house. We stayed in the house of the Gouda family [the village head, from the Lingayat caste]. However, the Goudas were threatened for hosting us and we had to shift to a Badiger family [carpenter caste]. My parents were in Madhbhavi. My brother had a lot of well-wishers. In those days, getting a 7/12 document [Satbara Utara] used to cost four annas [one quarter of a rupee] and my brother did not even take that from people. They did not burn down our house, therefore, but two neighboring homes were burned down. The police did not arrest anyone. We had a house in Athani. The violence continued for a week. We sold our land in Madhbhavi. We had around 100 acres of land. We sold it in 1950. [The] Tenancy act came, so we sold it to those who were cultivating.”
State control by non-Brahmins and policies like the Tenancy Act that envisaged transfer of agricultural land from landlords to tillers eroded Brahmins’ rural power significantly. Most rioters went unnoticed and unpunished.
Violence against Brahmins can be seen as an intended or unintended outcome of colonial governmentality. Incipient ideas of political equality rendered previously stable Brahmin status and privileges vulnerable. Brahmin Sanatanis even feared losing their religious freedom under Indian constitution and postcolonial democracy; several organizations petitioned the members of the constituent assembly to restore their religious rights, including the practice of untouchability.
Brahmin minority to Hindu majority
Nationalist Hindu organizations like RSS (and BJP) have been criticized for Brahmin control and dominance. These movements have, however, played a crucial role in undoing the vulnerable minority status of Brahmins by turning Brahmins into torchbearers of Hindu unity—a long, hard process, carried out first by Savarkar and his contemporaries in the past and now by Hindutva leaders of the present. The project of Hindu nationalism is therefore a liberal project that is intricately and inevitably linked to Hindu reform and the making of Hinduism as a civil religion.
Hindu nationalist organizations have historically mobilized seva, which serves as the outer cover for public-Brahmins to subvert secularist nationalism. Firstly, through strategies of ideology building, a diverse set of socio-religious practices was clubbed under the rubric of Hinduism. Secondly, Hindu nationalism draws on older reserves of religious nationalism (as against modern nationalism) that were central to most forms of Indian nationalism. Finally, Hindu nationalism emerged out of the longest and most successful trajectory of democracy in India—it has succeeded in mobilizing and bringing Hindu consciousness to the fore in public arenas and electoral politics. The alternative civil society that the RSS constructs selectively feeds on other progressive left and liberal civil currents to dynamically evolve and consolidate Hinduism as a civil religion.
The transformation of Hinduism into a civil religion through Hindutva discourses is part of the dialectics within Hinduism. This new Hinduism is a form of sublated Hinduism. The making of Hinduism into a civil religion in Hindutva discourse is, thus, a necessity for both local politics and global cosmopolitan claims. The cultivation and circulation of anti-Muslim and anti-Christian discourse is crucial to the making of Hinduism as a civil religion under Hindutva. Mughal invasion, demolition of temples, slaughter of cows, conversion out of Hinduism, and, more recently, Love Jihad [4] are all framed as dangers that pollute Hindu religion and democracy. Pro-Hindu laws such as a ban on hijabs and cow slaughter as well as the Citizenship Amendment Act mobilize a passionate Hindu solidarity beyond caste.
As the nation turned genuinely Hindu in 2014, PM Modi declared in parliament that India had been troubled by twelve hundred years of slave mentality. [5] Hinduism as a civil religion becomes a national religion, and nationalist Hinduism emphasizes publicness and national mission. In keeping with Hindu nationalist moorings, the nation and its future are now imagined as one that is void of Muslim-Mughal and Christian-colonial impurities.
Majority-Minority
While these achievements—mobilizing Hindu passions and turning castes into Hindus and Brahmins into public-Hindus—are still in process, Brahmins continue to perceive their own victimhood and marginality. With the BJP gaining substantial political power across India, any unflattering portrayal of Brahmins results in Brahmin activists comparing their situation to that of Jews under Nazi Europe. [6] Such ideas have also been advanced by a few scholars from the “Ghent School.” [7]
The Brahmin history of privilege, with episodes of violence against them as discussed here, helps us understand the impermanence of the category of vulnerable minorities in India. Minorities are made through how the majority is imagined, mobilized, and sustained, and through how well passion is mobilized against an imagined minority. While the deep anti-Muslim and anti-Christian currents mobilized through sublated Hinduism may seem like an unstoppable force, social theories of conflict help us understand: India has no permanent vulnerable minorities but rather multiple minorities in flux. Minorities that actively mobilize to form broader political collectives will define both the nature and future of citizenship.
Notes
[1] A Marathi term that literally means fire (zaal) and burns (pol), used to refer to using fire with the intention of burning Brahmin property and causing injury.
[2] Sanatani organizations opposed colonial reform of Hinduism. They also opposed the constitutional principles of equality. See Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution (Penguin 2025), Hindu majoritarianism, however, offered possibilities of a Hindu majority embodying the postcolonial democracy.
[3] All the elderly Brahmins I met and spoke to mentioned the name of this Brahmin police officer who dealt with the rioters sternly.
[4] Framed as a strategic plan of Muslims, the term refers to Muslim men tricking Hindu girls into marrying them so as to convert them to Islam.
[5] Barah sau saal ki gulami ki maansikta humein pareshan kar rahi hai.
[6] See Anuradha Tiwari’s social media post https://x.com/talk2anuradha/status/1853348024564773270
[7] Sutton refers to this group as the Ghent School. See Sutton, Deborah Ruth. "‘So called caste’: SN Balagangadhara, the Ghent School and the Politics of grievance." Contemporary South Asia 26.3 (2018): 336-349.
Suryakant Waghmore is a sociologist and the author of Civility against Caste (Sage 2013) and co-editor of Indian Civil Sphere (Polity 2025).
Thumbnail credit: "Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh drill" by Ganesh Dhamodkar is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Prepared with the editorial assistance of Mishaal Mahmood.