Kerala: Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva

The Hindutva movement in India is an uneven project that has consistently expanded, electorally and otherwise, into regions that were previously terrae incognitae to it. In the post-2024 general election scenario, scholars wonder whether the Hindutva movement and its political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) might have electorally peaked in India’s north and west, making its relocations to the south and the east particularly intriguing. In light of this, this article explores the Hindutva movement’s growing presence in the southwestern state of Kerala, analysing how the state features in the movement’s broader expansion strategies. While the BJP’s performance at the national level in the 2024 elections may have been relatively disappointing, it is unlikely that this is considered a major setback. As this article will show, the party’s and the movement’s larger strategy of political intervention in Kerala has been to take the long view to build political and social hegemony. Hindutva pursues this primarily through active civil society interventions and religio-cultural entrenchment, and only subsequently via electoral politics. Thus, Hindutva’s longue durée vision of the political accords less significance to immediate electoral gratification – despite great efforts and energy invested in the latter as a quick driver of social change – a strategy as true of Kerala as Uttar Pradesh. That said, the BJP won a Lok Sabha (LS) seat here for the first time ever and increased its vote share to a substantial ∼20% in 2024, which indicates the effectiveness of Hindutva entrenchment strategies and provides positive growth prospects for the BJP. This article charts some of these entrenchment strategies in the context of Kerala and attempts to shed more light on the Hindutva movement’s efforts of socio-cultural transformations at the local level.