ronya posted:

the INC, like many other independence parties across the former Empire, was a coalition of diverse interests whose main unifying theme pre-independence was to kick the British out, and and main unifying theme post-independence was having successfully kicked the British out on acceptable terms. The British tended to favour British-trained English-speaking intellectuals for its negotiating partners, which (given the era) tended to favour broadly moderate Fabian socialists who are personally more secular than the religious/nationalist causes they would champion (you can see this with both Jinnah and Savarkar).

India's a large place. The use of Hindi or related Indo-Aryan languages is most favourable in the north; the southern areas speak assorted Dravidian languages (Tamil, etc.) - roughly 2/3 of the country spoke Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, Urdu, or Bengali in 1951 (post-Partition). A Hindu affiliation is correlated, but not very closely, with speaking a Hindi-family language (with the disjunction most prominently with the large Bengali-speaking group concentrated near the border with East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh; note that Pakistan today also speaks an Indo-Aryan language). A lot of Tamil- and Telugu-speakers are Hindu but don't speak Hindi. Because these languages belong to entirely different families, attempting to switch is especially difficult. Nonetheless, broadly speaking, Hindi-speaking Hindus formed, and continue to form, the largest bloc, even when including what is now Pakistan and Bangladesh. It's not so ridiculous to imagine India conceiving of itself as a Hindu nation in attempting to build a nationalist and socialist identity, despite large minorities; after all, the Raj spoke an entirely alien English and knelt to a Christian monarch.

as the first generation of post-colonial leaders began to fade, a lot of the issues that had been postponed in 1947 (sometimes literally, like the choice of federal government language, which was delayed by twenty-five years) began to pop up. English switched from being the humiliating language of the colonial power to being (for the south) the unifying language of the country, the language of economic prosperity, and, crucially, the bar to Hindi domination. As communal demographics and power evolved over time, concessions to the princely states and guarantees of minority representation began to chafe (for the Hindu nationalists). The decreasing secularity of communal leaders meant that traditional proscriptions began to be taken more seriously - e.g., Savarkar himself, sitting at a table of fellow British-trained intellectuals, condemned the regard of the cow as sacred as a backward superstition that would hold the country back; his successors have been less skeptical. The Emergency forced the opposition blocs together, including the middle classes (who had been the driving force of anti-imperialism, but were now increasingly disenchanted with socialism, especially socialism as practiced by a populist, authoritarian, repressive government that had suspended elections and civil liberties) and the Hindu nationalists (who either had politically survived the three odd decades of irrelevance from Partition to Emergency, or had ditched the INC over its turn away from old nationalist promises).

that coalition then collapsed once the Emergency crisis was over, but that's where the BJP springs from, more or less. Like all large parties in large countries, there's a propensity for its state parties to be more or less extreme than its national messaging, like Republicans running in Massachusetts vs Arkansas, so to speak. In Sikh areas the BJP even positions itself as the party of religious freedom, as opposed to the secular INC.