Beyond Left and Right: Decolonising Hindu Political Language

You are following an argument about a temple, a history textbook, caste, Goa, or religious freedom. Someone calls the offending view “leftist”. The reply is issued in the name of the “right wing”. Within seconds, everyone knows which camp to applaud, but the claim itself has barely been examined.

You can break that habit without abandoning political analysis. The practical task is to replace labels that merely sort people with categories that reveal the premise, standard, institution, consequence, and proposed remedy. That gives you a sharper way to defend Hindu interests, recognise genuine criticism, and expose hostility that travels under respectable political names.

Start with the conflict, not the political tribe

“Left” and “right” can be useful descriptions of coalitions or policy tendencies in a particular country and period. They become misleading when treated as permanent moral identities. A person placed on the left can repeat a missionary account of Hindu society. A person placed on the right can justify colonial rule or subordinate Hindu interests to another religious or geopolitical project. Critics of India’s conventional political vocabulary therefore point to a real classification problem: substantially similar anti-Hindu narratives can be promoted by figures described as belonging to opposite Western camps.

That observation does not prove that every Indian liberal, Marxist, secularist, or left-wing thinker is anti-Hindu. It does not prove that every nationalist is pro-Hindu. It proves something narrower and more useful: a political label cannot establish the civilisational effect of an argument.

When you encounter a disputed claim, separate four layers before naming an ideology:

• The proposition: What is being asserted about a Hindu belief, community, institution, or historical event?
• The justification: Is the claim grounded in evidence, a liberal theory of rights, class analysis, missionary theology, inherited colonial description, internal Dharmic reasoning, or some mixture of these?
• The institutional target: Is the speaker criticising a particular practice, demanding reform of an institution, denying a community’s legitimacy, or recasting Hindu civilisation as a social problem?
• The remedy: Does the speaker propose debate, voluntary reform, equal law, state control, dispossession, cultural erasure, or political exclusion?

These layers can point in different directions. A proposal may use the language of equality while imposing an unequal burden on Hindu institutions. An internal reform argument may criticise a custom sharply while affirming the community’s authority to deliberate about it. A nationalist slogan may celebrate Bharat while leaving colonial assumptions about Hindu society untouched. You will miss all three possibilities if you classify the speaker first and the argument second.

Use categories that reveal what is actually at stake

Decolonising your vocabulary does not require you to ban words of European origin. It requires you to stop using them as substitutes for analysis. Each familiar term answers a limited question and leaves the central Hindu question unresolved.

A more precise Hindu political vocabulary begins with the object being protected or contested. Several distinctions are especially useful:

• Civilisational continuity: Can a community transmit its memory, practices, sacred places, languages, and institutions to the next generation?
• Institutional parity: Are comparable religious institutions subjected to comparable rights, duties, restrictions, and standards of scrutiny?
• Epistemic agency: Are Hindus allowed to describe their own traditions through their concepts and internal debates, or must an external framework certify every legitimate interpretation?
• Internal reform: Is change argued for by treating Hindu society as a living moral community capable of self-correction?
• External delegitimation: Does criticism move beyond a specific wrong and depict Hindu identity, authority, or continuity as inherently illegitimate?
• Political sovereignty: Who has the authority to decide, and is that authority accountable to the people and institutions affected?
• Reciprocity: Would the same principle, evidence, language, and remedy be applied to another religious or cultural community?

These categories do not tell you in advance which side is correct. They tell you what evidence would settle the dispute. That is precisely why they are more useful than tribal shorthand.

Apply a six-question decolonisation test

Use the following test when you read an essay, assess a political speech, prepare a social-media response, or decide whether to support a campaign. Write down the answers. If you cannot answer one of the questions, you probably do not yet understand the dispute well enough to label it.

1. What is the exact claim? Rewrite it as one proposition that could be true or false. Remove descriptions of the speaker. “This is a leftist attack” is not a proposition about the issue; “this policy places Hindu institutions under a restriction not imposed on comparable institutions” is.
2. What evidence would establish it? Demand the chronology, rule, text, institutional practice, or comparison on which the claim depends. A slogan about oppression, tradition, modernity, or national interest is not evidence by itself.
3. Which moral standard is doing the work? Identify whether the argument appeals to harm, equality, autonomy, historical repair, scriptural authority, social order, national unity, or another principle. Then ask whether the speaker states that principle openly.
4. Is the standard reciprocal? Change the community while holding the facts constant. If the conclusion changes merely because the subject is Hindu, the argument has exposed an asymmetry that needs justification.
5. Whose agency disappears? Notice whether Hindus appear as thinking participants with internal disagreements, or only as objects to be managed, reformed, civilised, blamed, or protected. Also notice when elite Hindu voices erase the agency of local communities within Hindu society.
6. What remedy follows? Distinguish criticism from coercion. A call for discussion, an equal legal rule, state takeover, criminal prohibition, historical correction, and destruction of an institution are materially different proposals even when their rhetoric sounds similar.

Your final classification should be a sentence, not a nickname: “This argument uses an unequal standard, removes the affected Hindu community’s agency, and proposes state control without showing comparable treatment of other institutions.” A reader can test that sentence. “This is woke” or “this is fascist” gives the reader almost nothing to test.

Example: turning Goa into a religious morality play

Consider a claim that recasts India’s 1961 liberation of Goa as an upper-caste Hindu state waging war against Christians. Calling the claim “leftist” does not identify its structure. The useful questions are whether religious identity is being presented as the cause of the action, what evidence supports that causal account, how Portuguese colonial authority is treated, and whether colonial and post-colonial power are judged by the same standard.

If the claim assumes that Indian sovereignty is presumptively sectarian while European colonial sovereignty is treated as politically neutral, name that asymmetry. If evidence instead demonstrates a specific act of religious discrimination, address that evidence. The classification must follow the argument; it cannot be borrowed from the public reputation of the person making it.

Example: claims about Brahmins and a Hindu majority

Suppose a writer argues that upper-caste actors manufactured the idea of a Hindu majority. Replying “Marxist” does not answer the empirical questions hidden inside the verb “manufactured”. Did the writer mean that a modern political category was constructed, that shared Hindu identity did not previously exist, or that elites strategically reorganised older identities? Those are different claims and require different evidence.

You should also ask how the account treats non-elite, regional, devotional, temple, ascetic, and customary participation in Hindu life. If those communities appear only as passive victims of Brahmin design, the account may be erasing the very subaltern agency it claims to recover. At the same time, criticism of a Brahmin institution or historical hierarchy is not automatically hatred of Brahmins or Hinduism. The boundary is crossed through evidence of collective essentialisation, unequal standards, inherited guilt, or a remedy aimed at delegitimising a people rather than correcting a wrong.

Example: disputes over a customary practice

When a controversial custom is defended as indigenous and attacked as intolerable, do not assume the defender is right-wing or the critic liberal. Ask who practises it, who bears its consequences, how participants explain it, what kind of harm is alleged, and whether reform can occur without denying the community’s cultural agency. A decolonial approach neither romanticises every inherited practice nor assumes that an elite external observer possesses automatic moral authority over it.

Do not replace one borrowed cage with another

The language of “colonised” and “uncolonised” can itself become a crude binary. It is useful when it identifies a dependency in thought: an inherited account is treated as unquestionable, an external institution is granted automatic authority, or Hindu categories are excluded before discussion begins. It becomes intellectually weak when it is used to declare every dissenter a collaborator or to deny Indians agency whenever they reach an unwelcome conclusion.

Judge colonial influence through observable features, not presumed inner motives. Look for patterns such as these:

• An external moral vocabulary is presented as universal and neutral, while Hindu concepts are treated as sectarian merely because they are Hindu.
• A missionary or colonial description of Hindu society is repeated without examining its assumptions, purpose, or fit with Hindu self-understanding.
• Hindus are permitted to speak only as witnesses to injury, while outside interpreters retain authority to define what Hinduism really is.
• A comparable institution is called cultural when it belongs to another community but oppressive when it belongs to Hindus.
• Indian reform is considered legitimate only after validation by an external intellectual, religious, media, or political authority.
• The proposed remedy transfers control away from the affected community without establishing necessity, parity, or accountability.

None of these features proves a person’s entire mind is colonised. They identify a defect in a particular argument. Keep that distinction. People can reason independently on one issue and reproduce inherited assumptions on another.

You should also preserve degrees of criticism. An argument may be mistaken, poorly evidenced, selective, paternalistic, institutionally discriminatory, or explicitly anti-Hindu. Those descriptions are not interchangeable. Reserve “anti-Hindu” for an argument or pattern that targets Hindu identity, dignity, freedom, continuity, or institutions through demonstrable contempt, collective blame, unequal restraint, or denial of legitimate existence. The seriousness of the term is a reason to substantiate it, not a reason to avoid it when the evidence is clear.

Dehumanising abuse should have no place in this work. It hides the burden of proof, encourages supporters to imitate contempt, and lets an opponent dismiss a valid criticism without answering it. If your sentence works only after the adversary has been humiliated, it is not yet a strong argument. State the distortion, show the asymmetry, identify the consequence, and propose the correction.

Decolonisation also does not require a sanitised account of Hindu history. A civilisation capable of internal reasoning must be able to examine hierarchy, exclusion, institutional failure, political compromise, and abuses committed in its name. The decisive questions are whether the criticism is truthful, reciprocal, attentive to Hindu agency, and directed towards justice rather than civilisational erasure.

Key takeaways

• Use “left”, “right”, “liberal”, “secular”, “Marxist”, and “nationalist” only for the limited political features they actually describe.
• Do not infer a position’s relationship to Hindu civilisation from the speaker’s conventional political camp.
• Reduce every dispute to a testable proposition, its evidence, its moral standard, its institutional target, and its remedy.
• Test reciprocity by asking whether the same principle would be applied to another religious or cultural community under comparable conditions.
• Distinguish internal reform from external delegitimation by examining agency, purpose, method, and proposed control.
• Describe colonial dependency as a feature of an argument, not as an all-purpose identity assigned to a person.
• Name anti-Hindu hostility when evidence supports the charge, but do not use the charge as a substitute for that evidence.

Try this method on the next political argument you share. Circle every use of “leftist”, “right-wing”, “liberal”, “secular”, “Marxist”, and “nationalist”. Beside each one, write the exact claim, the governing standard, the institution affected, and the remedy proposed. Delete any label that adds no information after those details are supplied.

What remains will usually be calmer and harder to evade. That is the political language a Hindu renaissance needs: rooted enough to recognise civilisational interests, disciplined enough to correct its own side, and precise enough to turn indignation into judgement.

References

• Hindu Human Rights Blog – Hey Hindus Decolonise Yourselves! There’s No Such Thing As a Indian Leftist/Liberals/Secularists