A foreign outlet interviewed me this week and at the end of it, after we had wrapped up, the interviewer said he was surprised. He said he did not know this was the position India was in, and I find this to be quite a common reaction. Other than the academics who study India and foreign correspondents posted here, few realise how much India has changed from the image they had of it.

I will recap what was asked of me in that interview and how I replied so you can get a picture of what the interviewer grasped. You can also compare it to your own assessment of where India stands today.

He first wanted to look at Hindutva — its origins, ideological foundations and how it differs from Hinduism as a religion. I told him Hindutva combined the word Hindu and the suffix 'tva', meaning Hindu-ness. The word was used in Savarkar's book a century ago, in which he wrote that India and Hindu come from the same root as Indus and Sindhu. He felt that one could only be Hindu — and by extension Indian — if one's holy sites were in India and not in Jerusalem or Mecca or elsewhere.

To the second part, I said Hinduism was a religion concerned with personal belief: gods, prayers, fasts, festivals. Hindutva was concerned about the other person's belief and what they could not eat, where they could not pray, who they could not love and where they could not stay.

He then asked how Hindutva became increasingly........

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