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How do Religious Beliefs affect Politics?
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction 3
2. Explanation through the lens of International Relations for Religion and Politics 3
2.1 Problem-solving approaches 3
2.2 Critical approaches 4
2.3 Reflection in the case study 4
3. Critical Reflection & Argument 5
3.1 Hindutva reshapes the meaning of secularism and democracy 5
3.2 Hindutva mobilises religious belief as a geopolitical project 5
4. Conclusion 7
References 8

1. Introduction
Religion is not new in the world of politics, but International Relations (IR) has at times set religion at the periphery of politics, assuming that we live in a non-religious world where religious aspects are matters of individuality. The current revival of religious nationalism in the United States, as well as the performances of political Islam in the Middle East, question this hypothesis. This is the most evident in India, where Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) is redefining the nature of religion and politics. The promise of religious pluralism of being a secular nation that the Indian constitution promised has been threatened by intervention in the narration of Hindu beliefs as the foundation to Indian citizenship, democracy, and foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The essay will pose the following question: What impact do religious beliefs have on politics? Taking the case study of Hindutva, this paper posits that religion not only influences politics but also forms political order by reinventing secularism through the nation state and through civilisational projection over the globe.
2. Explanation through the lens of International Relations for Religion and Politics
2.1 Problem-solving approaches
International Relations (IR) has always attributed religion as a subsidiary cause of politics and not a central motivation of politics within the mainstream, problem-solving International Relations (Chadha, 2022). The premise on which the liberal and realist paradigms are based is that the choices of political behaviour are mostly inclined by rational considerations of power, security and interest, where religion can lend a tinge to the state behaviour but cannot be determinant overall (Hashmi and Ishaque, 2021). The Huntington (2004) Clash of Civilisations thesis reflects the process of framing: religion is described as the marker of identity that divides between the civilisational fault lines, a potential threat to the state system. On the same note, rationalist analyses of political behaviour explain religious mobilisation as a matter of voter preferences or elite behaviour, which places religion as an explanatory factor in contests between political elites or the eruption of conflict. In this perspective, Hindu nationalism in India can be considered as an electoral instrument of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (Kinnvall, 2021). Religion serves as a tool to gain a firm political foundation through the common symbols and rituals, just like it is the case with ethnicity or language in other locations (Shani, 2021). The state and the secular international order are not in question; however, the problem-solving approach seeks to establish how religion influences the operations of the systems. What is lacking, actually, is the questioning of whether the secular-liberal state itself is informed by religious histories and exclusions.
2.2 Critical approaches
Critical IR approaches seek to call the marginalisation of religion into question, through doubting the secular assumptions of the discipline. Postcolonial theorists have contended that the separation of secular and religious is in fact artificial, and itself a creation of European colonial modernity, which it exported to the rest of the world insofar as it established its empire. According to Wohlrab-Sahr and Kleine (2021) and Bozonelos (2021), secularism is no longer presented as something without religion, but as how the religious difference is defined, controlled, and even punished politically. In that regard, religion is not merely an intervening variable, as it is part of the political order (Khan et al., 2024). Feminist IR has also drawn attention to the role of religious standards in the construction of gender relations in the exercise of power in family law, bodily autonomy and women’s political role. Meanwhile, according to critical security studies, religion becomes securitised, and groups identified as religious others are treated as existential threats. In this sense, Hindu nationalism cannot be equated with electoral politics; it is an affirmative action of turning a Hindu majoritarian state that re-defines democracy, secularism, and security itself. In this way, the critical perspectives highlight that religious beliefs are not marginal in relation to politics (Shannon et al., 2022). Instead, they reveal the historicity of political terms, democracy, citizenship, and sovereignty are all used in terms of historically contingent dispositions of religion and authority.
2.3 Reflection in the case study
The case of India explains the tensions that exist between problem-solving and critical religion accounts in politics (Kapoor et al., 2022). In terms of issue-solving, the emergence of Hindutva is viewed as influencing voters’ preferences in the largest democracy in the world. The unfortunate politics of the BJP in itself mobilising Hindu identity to win elections is noted by analysts, as are the religious polarisation, stoking communal violence, or religious nationalism and its policy implications in terms of temple building or personal law (Anand and Lall, 2022). Such explanations are still useful as descriptive accounts of what goes on in the process of political competition, but do not explore what lies behind the more fundamental political transformation of the Indian state. In an alternative critical approach, however, Hindutva is placed in wider contexts of colonialism, nationalism and secularism. It points to the ways before the colonialist census norms actively solidified religious identities and after independence, secularism codified religion as an administrative category, as well as how modern Hindu nationalism is reinventing citizenship and belonging. The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, whereby certain non-Muslim migrants are granted citizenship on a fast-track basis, offers an illustration of how religion can be exploited to remap the boundaries of the political community itself. In this sense, the role of religion is not merely shaping Indian politics, but rather acting as the promoter of a new political order with democratic institutions being redesigned around religious majoritarianism.
3. Critical Reflection & Argument
3.1 Hindutva reshapes the meaning of secularism and democracy
The problem-solving account of Hindu nationalism as an exercise in electoral politics must be left behind in offering a critical reflection of religion and politics in India. Rather, Hindutva distorts the discourse of secularism and democracy by superimposing majoritarian religious identity on the institutions of the Indian state itself. India does not require the systematic removal of religion from public life, as the French laïcité model does. It is not based upon it but sarva dharma sambhava, equality towards any religion (Shankar, 2023). This pluralistic system was supposed to be inclusive of India-derived religious diversity and state neutrality. The implications of the Hindutva ideology are, however, that secularism is nothing more than a biased approach, always favouring the minority, the Muslim population in this case, and therefore a departure from the Hindu majority (Shaban, 2021). Under the BJP, secularism is not recast as the absence of favour; instead, it is recast towards a preference for the Hindu cultural heart of the country.
This is seen with the recent 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA): by overtly excluding Muslim migrants from the scope of protection of the Act, the latter defines religion as a component of belonging to the Indian polity (Amnesty International, 2020). Likewise, the abolishment of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir is seen as an act of enforcing a homogenised interpretation of the Indian nation on the Muslim-majority identity of the region (Hussain, 2024). Such a redefinition of secularism rearticulates democracy itself. The forms of democratic institutions may still be in one piece, with elections and legislatures and courts operating, but substantively they are gutted by the decline of equal citizenship. According to scholars, this transition is back to what is referred to as ethnic democracy, where the majority usage of identity controls the quality of participation (Jaffrelot, 2021). The Hinduisation of political community through the mobilisation of Hindu beliefs shows that religion does not merely influence politics; it is precisely in mutually structured forms that politics redefines categories of secularism and democracy as understood by liberal expectations of neutrality.
3.2 Hindutva mobilises religious belief as a geopolitical project
In addition to its internal connotations, Hindutva mobilises religion on a more geopolitical scale. Even so, Hindu nationalism is able to provide a transnational posture based on electoral politics to re-conceptualise the Indian nation internationally in the terms of a civilisational state. Both the promotion of the International Yoga Day to the United Nations and the attempt to project India as the ancient land of Vishwaguru (world teacher) are frequent examples of how the Modi government appeals to Hindu symbols and narratives in foreign policy (Kugiel, 2024). Religion is not incidental in this case and is core to the way India tries to find legitimacy and power in the international system. Such civilisational framing relates India to other states attempting religious nationalism, like Israel or Turkey, that position themselves as a secular nation-state because their role is to safeguard a cultural-religious heritage (Trigunayat, 2022). Simultaneously, the geopolitics of Hindutva affirms hostility towards identities, especially in the case of Pakistan, where religious nationalism is deployed against it. Hindu victimhood and Muslim threat ridicule in a populace is transferred to foreign policy stances, intensifying regionalism (Singh, 2024).
Importantly, such mobilisation spreads over into diaspora politics as well. Hollywood versions of Hindu nationalist organisations operating in other countries–including the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) organisation in India–persist in advancing the Modi vision among the diaspora community, through lobbying, voting, and cultural diplomacy (Sinha, 2024). The casting of Hindu beliefs as a source of civilisational pride means that Hindutva create a transnational political identity that imagines itself in other directions and beyond India. A critical approach to IR, this demonstrates the identification of religion as an intangible entity in relationship, not a personal concern independent of accountability, but a tool in which sovereignty and nationhood are articulated, and it is also a factor of global identity. Hindutva suggests the possibility of the embedding of religious nationalism within the frameworks of democratic and geopolitical projects, going against the assumption of secular nationalism as a natural aspect of political modernity. Religion is therefore in the nature of a constituent in the order of domestic governance as well as international order, and not a peripheral role.
In addition to these initiatives by the state, Hindutva is also geopolitically active in webs of soft power that conflate religion and culture with business initiatives. Efforts like the branding of India and the Incredible India campaigns strategically make use of Hindu symbols, mythology and spirituality as a way to market the country to the rest of the world by Grandstanding Hinduism as a civilisational resource as well as a global product (Hussain, 2024). Such application of cultural diplomacy helps in boosting the Indian image in the international arena, and balances the scales of Hindutva in their own land, making Hindu values appear to be universal. It does this, though, at the cost of marginalising minority traditions in ignoring that this is just one part of Indian civilisation. In a critical analysis of IR, this is one way of religion getting entrenched into not only foreign policy but also the political economy of the world, which makes the Hindu belief a tool of soft power as well as ideological hegemony.
4. Conclusion
The case study of Hindu nationalism in India has discussed the impact that religious beliefs have on politics. Whereas mainstream IR tends to see religion as a mediating role between voter behaviour or conflict, a critical understanding cannot and does not see religion in such a mediating capacity but rather as a component in the life of politics. Hindutva enacts this shift in shaping the contents of both secularism and democracy nationally, constructing citizenship as a majoritarian Hindu project, and activating Hindu identity as a geopolitical instrumentality in international affairs. All these weaken the liberal premise that religion and politics are distinct, and demonstrate how religion and power interact in the structuring of the modern state and its foreign orientation. By contextualising Hindutva both inside and against a global background, the essay has suggested that religious phenomena should not be considered a side effect of political life but a force constitutive to the process of political order-building.
References
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