Will Hindutva Survive After 2024?

The idealogy of Hindutva faces a challenge in staying relevant

- Ajay Gudavarthy

IDEOLOGY is not about the world out there but how we desire to view it. It is a way of organising the chaos of our desires. While, most philosophers of the 20th century liken ideology to consciousness, philosophers of the 21st century see in it the workings of the sub-conscious.

Ideologies allow us to represent the world in a way that allows us to relate to it and make it less inhabitable. While there has been some talk of the world entering a post-ideological phase, political philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, rather counterintuitively, that this "end of ideology" signifies that ideology has "come into its own" as it is now so entrenched that it is invisible. Ideologies are powerful when they no longer work as explicit ideologies but begin to become the "collective subconscious" or simply the commonsense of our times.

Further, ideology has conventionally been associated with the political domain. Ideologies are political, belonging to dominant political parties and political mobilisations. Ideologies were associated with governments and the State. Ideologies were imposed top-down, and consumed bottom-up. Global thinking on this has changed to recognise that if ideologies are about representing the world and help us relate with a sense of belonging then it cannot be exclusively political but also necessarily about culture. Culture here refers to values, ideas, symbolism, ethics and emotions. Ideologies are collective expressions of individual experiences. Ideologies help us to connect disparate looking “inner environments” within us to collective being. Ideologies connect psychological drives to collective imperatives.