Jaffrelot, Christophe. "India's Democracy at 70: Towards a Hindu State?". Journal of Democracy, Vol.28, No.3 (2017): 52-63.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. "India's Democracy at 70: Towards a Hindu State?". Journal of Democracy, Vol.28, No.3 (2017): 52-63.

• Since the 1990s Hindu nationalists have successfully mobilized to make Hinduism the dominant faith of the public sphere, hollowing out some of the religious protections enshrined in the 1950 Constitution and the 1976 amendments (52).
• "The Constitution remains unaffected, and only a couple of new laws have been passed, as mentioned above. But in practice minorities have been subjected to fresh forms of domination. The country’s rulers have publicly and repeatedly pledged allegiance to Hinduism at the expense of the official, secular character of the state, and they have stood by while Hindu militias have imposed novel types of brutal cultural policing on Muslims and Christians" (59).
• Hindu nationalism originates with the Hindutva movement of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, founded in 1923, who claimed that only Hindus were the true citizens of India and that other religious groups were essentially foreign. He demanded that to be considered Indian, someone needed to respect Hindu customs or be Hindu (52).
• The main Hindu nationalist organization is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS], founded in 1925. This organization has a number of political offshoots, the most prominent of which is the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. Collectively, these groups are called 'Sangh Parivar' (53).
• The main paramilitary organization associated with the RSS is Bajrang Dal, founded in Uttar Pradesh in 1984. It has over 2,000 branches across India. It has primarily been involved in threatening artists who challenge Hindu identity (55).
• While the initial position of the Indian National Congress was opposed to this kind of Hindu nationalism, a number of Congress politicians, especially in the north, have used politicization of Hindu or Muslim identity to mobilize voters. This became fully mainstream in 1989 when Rajiv Gandhi's election campaign repeatedly used Hindu nationalist issues to mobilize support (53).
• The 1989 election also marked a turning point due to the success of the BJP. Although the necessity of forming a coalition government prevented the formation of an actively anti-secular state, it allowed the BJP to became a major political force and the government in multiple states (53).
• Further restraints on secularism ended in 1995, when in December of that year, the Supreme Court decided that Hindutva represents a secular concern about the Indian way of life, meaning that Hindutva-based campaigning was not banned as it would be if the Court had considered it a primarily religious platform (54). 
• The 2016 regional election in Assam featured prominent Hindu nationalist themes. The BJP, including Mr. Modi, actively allied with xenophobic regional party and based its campaign on resentment of the significant Bengladeshi immigrant communities in Assam, which local Hindus view as a threat to a Hindu-majority state (58).
• The 2017 election campaign of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh was also based on Hindu nationalism, with Mr. Modi, Amit Shah, and other BJP leaders implying that other parties represented Muslim interests, including inferring connections between these parties and Pakistan-backed terrorists, leading to attacks on Muslims during the campaign. The Chief Minister there, Yogi Adityanath, is also deeply controversial, having founded a paramilitary linked to deadly communal violence in Gorakhpur (58-59). 
• The 2014 election of a BJP-majority government has not resulted in the immediate end of Indian secularism, instead Hindu nationalism has mainly manifested in an uptick in vigilante violence. In control of Haryana and Maharashtra, the BJP has criminalized the sale or possession of beef. In Maharashtra, they have also introduced restricts on converting to Christianity or Islam (54).
• More worrying for religious pluralism are the beliefs and opinions on religion expressed by many leading members of Hindu nationalist groups. In 2016, a Shiv Sena MP said Muslims should be disenfranchised, and the BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh claimed that Saint Maria Teresa was secretly plotting Christian separatist movements (55).
• A number of prominent Christians and Muslims, as well as secular defenders of the Constitution have expressed their concern over what they perceive to be an increasingly unfriendly attitude towards other religions since 2014 (57).
• Hindu nationalist groups have been active in civil society, fomenting public outcry over conventions to Islam or Christianity and organizing armed groups to defend cows from slaughter. The 'cow protection' militias appear across India, most prominently in Maharashtra and Haryana, and use force to investigate places suspected of beef trafficking. The members of these militias are mostly drawn from Hindu nationalist groups, and have been linked to numerous attacks on Muslims (56).
• Narendra Modi publically condemned the abuses of cow protection militias in August 2016, although he faced backlash over this from the RSS (57).
• The author proposes three possible reasons for why Mr. Modi has such passive rhetoric on secularism and religious issues, yet is prepared to pass policy along the extreme Hindu nationalist line of his party: he agrees with the extremists within the BJP but will not publicly admit so; he disagrees with Hindu nationalists, but cannot afford to antagonize the RSS; since 2014, the rhetoric of Hindu nationalism has accelerated so quickly that Mr. Modi has been unable to keep up with it (57-58).
• The author suggests that India is becoming an ethnic democracy, where only the majority ethnic group has fully rights and other non-core groups are oppressed and faced coercion and diminished opportunity (59-60).