Vajpayee’s writings reveal continuity in Hindu nationalist thought, where Muslims are asked to “merge” into majority culture—a demand echoed in Modi’s era
In a recent interview with eminent social scientist and scholar of Hindu majoritarian politics, its leaders and their writings, Christophe Jaffrelot said that Atal Bihari Vajpayee once alluded to Muslims not remaining “full citizens” of India if “they don’t pay allegiance to the Hindu culture.”
Jaffrelot’s statement was in response to a question regarding reported deliberate deletions of some sections of Muslim voters under the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. He asserted that the government and the Bharatiya Janata Party were “doing what was already on their agenda for decades.”
The scholar emphasised that “we need to read what Hindu nationalists have written for over hundred years now.” He mentioned that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s iconic leader MS Golwalkar, too, said if Muslims do not pay allegiance to Hindu culture, they should not be recognised as citizens of the country.
Vajpayee’s writings on Muslims resurface
Jaffrelot suggested that this piece of Vajpayee’s writings may have now been “eliminated” or removed, like some of Golwalkar’s articles have been from his book of collected essays, Bunch of Thoughts, after being declared as “out of context” by the RSS.
Also read: India moving closer to a unitary state under BJP, says Christophe Jaffrelot
But Vajpayee’s article has not been removed from the archives, as Anwesh Satpathy found. He posted on X shots of a book/publication written “by ‘moderate’ Atal Bihari Vajpayee, wherein he suggests that there are 3 ways of treating Muslims — ‘tiraskar’ (boycott), ‘puraskar’ (appeasement) and ‘parishkar’ (erasure by teaching them ‘samskara’).”
Interaction with Satpathy led me to an online link of the Organiser, the official organ of the RSS. It was a link to Vajpayee’s article headlined with his quote “The Sangh (RSS) is my soul”, and was republished on the sixth death anniversary of the veteran’s death on August 16, 2024. The article was pegged on “his association with the RSS and why he liked Sangh,” but had a significant section on his views about Muslims and how they should be treated.
In a speech delivered in December 2001, Vajpayee said Muslims had adopted a “different style of living, different traditions and customs with a view to proving that they were different from Bharatiya society.” Muslims are, therefore, primarily anti-national because “they were not prepared to acknowledge Rama and Krishna as their forefathers.” After contending that there is a “problem” with Muslim presence in India, Vajpayee postulated that there are three ways to “treat” Muslims: Tiraskar, puraskar, and parishkar (shun or reject, honour or award, and purify or reform).
Assimilation as the Sangh’s second objective
After preliminary story-telling about how he was drawn into the RSS, Vajpayee formulated the “two-fold” task or objective of the organisation. This first, he said, was “to organise the Hindus. To build a strong Hindu society, well-knit and rising above caste and other artificial differences.”
The second purpose of the RSS, Vajpayee continued, was “to assimilate the non Hindus, like Muslims and Christians in the mainstream. They can follow the faith of their own conviction.... But this country must be looked upon as the Motherland for them. They must have a feeling of patriotism for this country...”
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The intention to “assimilate” a section of people who are not Hindus is problematic. Demanding that the country should be considered as Motherland or Goddess, as the Sangh Parivar and its supporters do, is also an unreasonable demand.
The Vande Mataram controversy
This was at the heart of the “problem” with Vande Mataram, a view held by Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore too, that it was not appropriate to demand that Muslims should treat the nation as a goddess.
The two backed the Congress decision to use only the first paragraph of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s song in party functions and in independent India too.
This decision was reversed in February 2026 by the current Union government, effectively making it mandatory for Muslim citizens to accept the nation in a divine form, a directive that violates their faith.
Patriotism as a contested demand
Furthermore, Vajpayee rephrased a part of the second goal of the RSS, as an expectation that non-Hindus should “have a feeling of patriotism”.
This is also a tricky demand. Can the sense of patriotism in an individual be calibrated? Furthermore, who would decide if a person is patriotic or not – the State or a vigilante group?
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However, it would be fair to state that every citizen of the country must consider India as her or his country. But, unless there is evidence to the contrary, no non-Hindu at any point should be asked to “prove” their patriotism, as it is often being demanded by vigilante mobs in contemporary India.
From Organiser article to PM-candidate
Vajpayee’s article was originally written and published as The Sangh is My Soul in the Organiser in May 1995 (importantly, just six months later, in November 1995, he was resurrected as the party’s PM-candidate for the impending Lok Sabha elections in the first half of 1996 because he was perceived as a “moderate” as against LK Advani’s “hardline” image).
In the piece, Vajpayee also raked up what he worded as the “Islamic division of the world into ‘Darul Harab’ (Abode of War) and ‘Darul Islam’” (Abode of Islam), arguing that such theological classification created an emotional and political barrier to local integration.
Vajpayee’s formulation did not take into account that such classification in Islam does not appear anywhere in the Quran or the Hadith, but this binary was created later.
Islamic classifications and Vajpayee’s framing
Vajpayee referred to, what he presented as, certain foundational and theological classifications within orthodox Islam to suggest that these created an emotional and political barrier to local integration of Muslims into India—both secular India and a Hindu State.
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Vajpayee depicted the categorisation of the world in Islam in black-and-white terms, whereas many theologians did not classify a State on the basis of the religion of its ruler, but rather on the basis of safety and religious freedom: Could Muslims openly practise their faith, including by establishing mosques?
Additionally, besides the two categories of State that Vajpayee mentioned, Islamic jurists also theorised other categories of nations wherein non-Muslim states maintained peaceful diplomatic and trade relations with Muslim states.
Three ways to ‘treat’ Muslims
After contending that there is a “problem” with Muslim presence in India, Vajpayee postulated that there are three ways to “treat” Muslims: Tiraskar, puraskar, and parishkar (shun or reject, honour or award, and purify or reform).
Going beyond virtually labelling Muslims as national outcastes, in a speech delivered in December 2001, Vajpayee said that the “substantial cooperation” of Muslims for the “development of nationalism” was “not forthcoming” because of “their past identification with the foreign power.”
Muslims, Vajpayee elaborated, had adopted a “different style of living, different traditions and customs with a view to proving that they were different from Bharatiya society.” Muslims are, therefore, primarily anti-national because “they were not prepared to acknowledge Rama and Krishna as their forefathers.”
Contradictions in Vajpayee’s moderate image
These words are in complete contrast to his self-perpetuated image of being a soft-liner. Vajpayee’s framework, for acting towards Muslims in three distinct, Sanskrit-derived manoeuvres, was effectively an “expansion” of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s famous political maxim postulated months prior to his untimely mysterious death in early 1968.
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Undeniably the tallest Jana Sangh leader after Syama Prasad Mookerji’s death, Upadhyaya in his presidential speech in Kozhikode (then Calicut) in December 1967 made the proposition which was echoed, developed and popularised by Vajpayee through his speeches and writings, like in the aforesaid article in Organiser.
Ideological continuity within the Sangh Parivar over the past century can be assessed by recalling a contention of its second and longest-serving Sarsanghchalak, MS Golwalkar.
Golwalkar’s uncompromising dictum
In an article in We or Our Nationhood Defined, he wrote, “Foreign races in Hindusthan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen's rights.”
When Vajpayee, and before him Upadhyaya, laid out three ways to treat Muslims, they were merely carrying Golwalkar’s ideological “baton” – unless Muslims agreed to get “assimilated” into Hindu culture, they could not claim citizens’ rights.
Also read: RSS at 100: How Vishwa Hindu Parishad drove the Ram Janmabhoomi movement
The story, however, did not end with that. In September 2016, that too at the National Executive meeting of the BJP, not coincidentally in Kozhikode, Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally inaugurated the year-long centenary celebrations of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birth.
Modi’s Kozhikode pledge and its implications
In his speech to delegates, he recalled the Jana Sangh leader’s words on Muslims and pledged that the government and party under his stewardship would remain committed to the path laid out by Upadhyaya – one of no appeasement, no boycott, and only assimilation or amalgamation of Muslims.
It is also apt here to recall his reply to a question I posed while interviewing him for my biography of his.
I asked – whether Modi likes it or not, he had a “deal” with Muslims, if only because they constitute almost 9 per cent (in Gujarat) people. How then did he propose to deal with them?”
His reply was roundabout. He had no “problem” with Muslims or Christians following their faith, but, and this was the operative part, they must consider the culture of the majority as their own. They must accept the ideals and sages (adarsh and mahapurush) of the majority as their own.
Contemporary realities for Muslims
On being probed further, Modi declared that there was nothing wrong in the argument of spearheads of the Ayodhya agitation that “Muslims must accept Lord Ram as the symbol of national identity, the main philosophy...”
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Now, as contemporary realities for Muslims demonstrate, State policies towards them, especially those who have not “merged” into the national mainstream, are gradually moving in the direction of what Golwalkar onwards, Sangh Parivar leaders have proposed.
His last dictum from the chapter cited previously is uncompromising: “We are an old nation; let us deal, as old nations ought to and do deal, with the foreign races, who have chosen to live in our country.”
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