On May 15, the Indian actress and parliame­ntarian Kangana Ranaut wrote an angry post on X. In it, she expressed anger towards US President Donald Trump for not coming to India’s aid during its recent war against Pakistan. The post was accompanied by a photo of a battle-clad Ranaut, fiercely riding a white horse into some mythical battle. 

In the post, she called Trump an “alpha male”, but then asked whether Trump was “jealous” of the Indian PM Narendra Modi because Modi was the “father of all alpha males” [“our PM is sab alpha males ka baap“]. She then grudgingly deleted the post because, according to her, her party Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) national president requested her to do so. 

Ranaut’s original post had in it something that can be quite telling for those wanting to understand the political and cultural fallout of Hindu nationalism in India. Ranaut admires ‘alpha males’ and perceives Modi as the ultimate male of this kind. But her outburst wasn’t just the product of a sophomoric fan-girl. It was actually rooted in what began to be shaped — in the 1920s — as Hindu nationalism and/or ‘Hindutva’. Hindutva seeks to establish Hinduism as the dominant/hegemonic system of belief and culture in India. 

Ranaut has been a fervent supporter of Modi’s ruling BJP, which is also India’s largest Hindu nationalist outfit. It is especially popular among India’s growing middle classes that benefitted greatly from the ‘opening up’ of the Indian economy from the late 1980s onwards. 

Indian social media posts babbling about alpha males, and the larger confusion in the country’s polity, are the result of a crumbling of the sense of security that was seeded by the BJP and Modi’s ‘masculinised nationalism’

The BJP........

© Dawn (Magazines)