“The Ideology Deficit: Hindutva Movement’s Real Crisis Is Not Its IT Cell, But Its Intellectual Coherence”, Swarajya, February 26, 2026
“The machine works. I have argued as much. In a previous piece, I made the case that the BJP’s 21st-century welfare-delivery apparatus (the JAM trinity, the Direct Benefit Transfer pipeline, the labharthi revolution) represents the most effective vote-harvesting machine in Indian democratic history, and perhaps one of the most effective anywhere in the world. I argued that this machine is not something to apologise for. It is something to be proud of. I stand by every word.
But a machine, however magnificent, runs on fuel. And the fuel of a political machine that aspires to civilisational transformation, not merely electoral victory, is ideology. Not ideology in the thin, bumper-sticker sense that Twitter warriors deploy between breakfast and lunch. Ideology in the thick sense: a coherent, hierarchically ordered system of beliefs that tells every participant in the machine what to think, what to prioritise, and, crucially, what to sacrifice when two good things come into conflict with each other.
This is the Hindutva movement’s actual crisis. Not the “IT cell.” Not the memes. Not the “toxicity” that sends the liberal establishment reaching for its smelling salts. The crisis is that the movement which seeks to transform the civilisational basis of the Indian state does not possess, and has never possessed, a coherent ideological system. It has sentiments. It has grievances. It has a shared enemy. What it does not have is a shared intellectual architecture. And this deficit is now becoming existential……”
Read full article at swarajyamag.com
