Javed Gaya’s book, Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India, is worth reading as much for the substance of its argument as for the author’s tone. The tone of this work indeed reflects the difficulty of being a Muslim in India today, and this is not the least of its merits. Gaya, a renowned lawyer, may belong to his country’s elite, but he is on the defensive and feels the need to justify his community’s presence on Indian soil, as if its legitimacy was contested. The chapter comparing the Hindu Personal Law and the Muslim Personal Law is typical: on the one hand, Gaya downplays the modernisation process that the former is said to have undergone with the Hindu Code Bill, and on the other, he challenges the notion that Sharia law cannot be reformed. Similarly, he compares the Aryan invasions to those of the Mughals to better demonstrate that Hindus are no less “foreigners” than Muslims. The author thus strives to counter the dominant narrative at a time when India’s Muslims live in constant fear of being relegated to second-class citizen status. In this sense, Hindu nationalists have achieved their goal by forcing members of the country’s largest minority to live in fear.At its core, Gaya’s book is worth reading for its analysis of India’s trajectory. One could summarise his thesis by saying that ever since Partition – the major turning point for India’s Muslims in his view – this minority has experienced a multifaceted decline, but that Modi’s rise to power in 2014 sealed the fate of Indian-style secularism. While most of the India specialists would agree with this analysis, two issues arise as Gaya does not clearly point out whether the difference between the pre- and post-2014 eras is one of nature or degree and does not name precisely who is responsible for this evolution either. ‘The road to theocracy?’Gaya’s definition of “the Indian version of secularism” is counterintuitive but highly convincing: “I believe that contrary to the supposition that constitutional secularism was seeking to banish religion from the mainstream of society and political discourse, it actually privileges religious thinking, practices, customs, and culture to an extent not even found in some theocracies” (page 138). This paradoxical definition echoes the analyses of experts on the subject such as Rajeev Bhargava and leads to a paradox: by legitimising the role of religion in the public sphere in the name of multiculturalism, secularism paves the way for the political use of religion – and thus for the Hindu “majoritarianism” that gives the book its title. At the end of his book, the author asks, “whether appeals for votes should be made in the name of religion” (p. 229). But was this avoidable, given his definition of secularism? Here, what needs to be scrutinised is the difference between religion and ideology, between Hinduism and Hindutva, because. Javed Gaya emphasised that M.S. Golwalkar – following in the footsteps of V.D. Savarkar – equated “Hindus with Aryans, confusing ethnicity with religion” (p. 111). But the author does not explore this subject – which has nonetheless given rise to a whole body of rigorous scholarship – but concludes that the Modi government is leading India down the “road to theocracy” (p. 147), suggesting that the regime is more religious than ethnic. Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThe fact that India is on the “road to theocracy” is supported by recent events, ranging from the unprecedented role of a priest – Adityanath – at the head of Uttar Pradesh, to the blessing of the new Indian parliament by monks guarding a sacred scepter in 2023, and including the status of high priest of Hinduism that Narendra Modi assumed during the inauguration of the Ayodhya temple in 2024. Javed Gaya, Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India, Westland (2026)Under this new regime established by Hindu nationalists, there is no longer any place for minorities, except in a subordinate role, as the author clearly demonstrates by cataloging the forms of discrimination, segregation, and even persecution to which they are subjected – ranging from attacks on Muslim herders in the name of protecting the sacred cow to forced conversions. Surprisingly, the movement against “love jihad” is not mentioned, nor, for that matter, the network of vigilantes who act as a cultural police force designed to control “deviants,” whether they are Muslims or Hindu “sickularists,” to use a term currently in vogue. A concrete description of the Bajrang Dal’s daily activities would have been helpful here to fully convey the scale of the challenge facing Indian society. But this omission is consistent with the author’s approach. Indeed, responsibility for India’s “majoritarian” drift is not primarily attributed to the Hindu nationalist movement. The RSS’s establishment of a vast network of shakhas and unions is not mentioned, nor is its strategy of exploiting the Ayodhya issue from 1984 to 2024 – 40 years during which this matter has dominated Indian public life.The culmination of a continuum?The originality of this book lies in its emphasis on factors that had previously been considered by scholars of the subject as merely part of the broader context. The first of these factors is none other than what Bruce Graham called “Hindu traditionalism.” This term refers to a school of thought ranging from the right wing of the Congress party (embodied after independence by Vallabhbhai Patel) to the Swatantra Party, which was characterised by a militant and exclusive defence of Hindu culture. Javed Gaya quite aptly attributes the decline of Urdu in northern India to this movement. The excellent chapter in his book devoted to this issue clearly shows how, in North India, the “three-language formula” sealed the fate of a language that embodied a culture and even a civilisation. Thus, when Hindu nationalists say they are finally creating a “civilisational state,” they are admitting that they are also destroying another one.Also read: The Demise of the Cultural MuslimSimilarly, in the chapter on the judicial system – where Javed Gaya demonstrates his mastery of the subject – he attributes judges’ current backtracking in the face of the executive branch to their weakness of character, arguing, here as well, that the problem lay in the Collegium system for appointing Supreme Court justices, that has been problematic for years and has only been “more so since 2014” (p. 206). This analysis raises two questions: is there only a difference of degree between Manmohan Singh’s India and Modi’s India in this regard? And haven’t the judicial institutions been a prime target of Hindu nationalists, particularly through a highly sophisticated strategy of infiltration that has been well documented by other experts? The same line of reasoning tends to underpin the author’s analyses when he examines issues of citizenship. Rightly focusing his analysis on Assam, he offers a nuanced examination of the state’s crackdown on foreigners in that province, where many Bangladeshis – though not exclusively – have settled. To do so, he traces the process back to its origins in the 1980s and argues that it “is now at its apogee” (p. 183). But hasn’t the very nature of the issue changed with the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 and the creation of a National Register of Citizens, which, as Javed Gaya notes, has “identified” 1.9 million “doubtful citizens” facing deportation? That we have entered a new era seems to be confirmed by the remarks of the RSS leader, who assured Hindus – who make up about half of these 1.9 million people – that they would never be sent out of their country, with religion thus becoming proof of their nationality.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Overall, Javed Gaya offers a twofold perspective: he does not rule out that India is on the path to a regime change, but sees it as the culmination of a process that began in 1947 and for which Hindu nationalists are not the sole or even the main culprits – as their movement figures only in the background. This interpretation contrasts with those of authors – myself included – who place the Sangh Parivar’s strategy at the center of India’s current evolution and who describe a trajectory marked less by linearity than by dialectics. As I have written elsewhere, the Hindu nationalist mobilisation that brought Narendra Modi to power – in the wake of Anna Hazare’s movement – can also be seen as a reaction to the rise of the ‘lower’ castes (from Mandal 1 to Mandal 2), the granting of new rights (Right to Information, Right to Education, Right to Food…), the implementation of certain recommendations from the Sachar Committee, the flourishing of a form of federalism fostered by the coalition system, and the prosecutions launched against RSS leaders in the wake of attacks such as the Samjhauta Express bombing. Now, it is important to consider the peripheral actors who contributed to the BJP’s success as Gaya does because there is little doubt that the reactive (or even reactionary) dimension of Hindu nationalism indeed appealed to some of those who feared for their interests: members of the higher castes pitted against the OBCs, Hindus against Muslims, and people from the North wanted to change the course of politics to maintain their dominance. India is not the only country where the far right has come to power with the help of the right – since the interwar period, this has been the norm in Europe. Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.