Hindu Mahasabha

• 1. Introduction

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  Hindu Mahasabha was founded in 1915 at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, born from a political moment that had been building for a decade. Its opening conference drew not just Hindu nationalist organisers but also Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Shraddhanand, who stood in support of the new body. That detail alone tells you something about how contested Indian politics was in those years, and how many different visions of the nation were circulating at once.

  The organisation would go on to espouse an ideology called Hindutva, develop a bitter rivalry with the Indian National Congress, enter coalition governments with the very Muslim League it publicly despised, and count among its members the man who shot and killed Gandhi on the 30th of January 1948. How did a body that started as a broad Hindu solidarity movement end up at the centre of independent India's darkest political moments? And what happened to it afterward?

• 2. Origins in Bengal

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  The partition of Bengal in 1905, ordered by Viceroy Lord Curzon, set the stage for what would eventually become the Hindu Mahasabha. Curzon divided Bengal into two new provinces: one, Bengal, with a Hindu majority; the other, East Bengal and Assam, mostly Muslim. The British administration justified the split on religious grounds, which alarmed Hindu leaders who saw it as a strategy to weaken Hindu political solidarity.

  The formation of the All India Muslim League in 1906 deepened those anxieties. When the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 created a separate Muslim electorate, the pressure to form a rival Hindu organisation intensified. That same year, Lal Chand and U.N. Mukerji established the Punjab Hindu Sabha, describing it not as a sectarian body but as an "all-embracing movement" to safeguard the interests of the entire Hindu community.

  On the 21st and the 22nd of October 1909, the Sabha held the Punjab Provincial Hindu Conference. Speakers at that conference criticised the Indian National Congress for failing to defend Hindu interests. Some leaders went further, proposing that Hindus required a separate nation and that Muslims should be granted no rights within it. Over the following years, similar Hindu Sabhas appeared in the United Provinces, Bihar, Bengal, Central Provinces, Berar, and the Bombay Presidency.

  An early attempt to unite these regional bodies under an All-India umbrella was made at the Allahabad session of Congress in 1910. A committee headed by Lala Baij Nath was tasked with drafting a constitution, but factional strife stalled the effort. On the 8th of December 1913, the Punjab Hindu Sabha passed a resolution at its Ambala session to try again, proposing a general all-India conference during the 1915 Kumbh Mela in Haridwar.

• 3. Founding and Madan Mohan Malaviya

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  Preparatory sessions were held at Haridwar on the 13th of February 1915, at Lucknow on the 17th of February, and at Delhi on the 27th of February. In April of that year, the Sarvadeshak Hindu Sabha was formally constituted at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar as an umbrella body for the regional Hindu Sabhas.

  Among its earliest prominent figures was Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, a four-time president of the Indian National Congress and the founder of Benaras Hindu University. He was a nationalist and educationalist of the first rank, and under his influence the Mahasabha pushed for Hindu political unity alongside Hindu education and economic development. Malaviya also advocated for the conversion of Muslims to Hinduism.

  Two other early leaders shaped the organisation's character: the Punjabi populist Lala Lajpat Rai, and Lajpat Rai's own mentor, Navin Chandra Rai of the Hindu Samaj, who had chaired the special Congress session of 1920 in Lahore that called for non-cooperation with British rule.

  At its sixth session in April 1921, presided over by Manindra Chandra Nandi, the organisation renamed itself the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha, meaning All-India Hindu Grand Assembly. It amended its constitution to remove the clause pledging loyalty to the British and replaced it with a commitment to a united and self-governing Indian nation. The name in use today, Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, reflects a further, later adjustment from that 1921 form.

• 4. Savarkar and Hindutva

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  Vinayak Damodar Savarkar gave the Hindu Mahasabha its most durable and most divisive intellectual inheritance. Under his leadership in the 1930s, the Mahasabha transformed from a pressure group into a distinct political party, and Savarkar developed the ideology of Hindutva, a Hindu nationalist framework that identified India as a Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu Nation.

  Savarkar's position on the question of Muslim and Hindu nationhood was unusually candid. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar noted in his book Pakistan or the Partition of India that Savarkar and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, widely seen as adversaries, actually agreed on one fundamental claim: that India contained two nations, a Muslim nation and a Hindu nation. Where they differed was on the conclusion. Jinnah argued the two nations must have separate states. Savarkar argued they should share one state, but under a constitution that gave the Hindu nation a predominant position and confined the Muslim nation to, in his framing, subordinate cooperation. Ambedkar called the idea illogical, even if bold and clear.

  Savarkar's logic shaped how the Mahasabha handled the princely states question as well. The organisation took funding from the princely states and supported their continued independence even after India's own independence. Savarkar described Hindu-dominated princely states as the "bedrock of Hindu power" and the "citadels of organised Hindu power", singling out Mysore, Travancore, Oudh, and Baroda as what he called "progressive Hindu states".

• 5. Wartime Alliances

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  The Hindu Mahasabha's conduct during the Second World War sits in sharp contradiction with its public rhetoric. The party officially boycotted the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 and, when the Quit India Movement came in 1942, openly opposed it and boycotted it as well.

  Savarkar, then the Mahasabha's president, wrote a letter titled "Stick to your Posts" instructing Hindu Sabhaites who served in municipalities, local bodies, legislatures, or the military to remain at their positions and refuse any participation in the Quit India campaign. The Mahasabha also organised Hindu Militarisation Boards that actively recruited for the British Indian armed forces.

  While preaching opposition to Jinnah's Pakistan project, the Mahasabha quietly entered coalition governments with the Muslim League in three provinces after Congress ministries resigned in 1939 over Viceroy Lord Linlithgow's unilateral declaration that India was a belligerent in the war. In Sindh, Mahasabha members joined the government of Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah of the Muslim League. In March 1943, that Sindh government became the first provincial assembly on the subcontinent to pass a formal resolution in favour of creating Pakistan. The Mahasabha ministers did not resign; they, in Savarkar's own reported words, "contented themselves with a protest".

  In the North West Frontier Province, Mahasabha members joined Sardar Aurang Zeb Khan of the Muslim League to form a government in 1943, with Mehr Chand Khanna serving as Finance Minister. In Bengal, the Mahasabha joined the Krishak Praja Party-led Progressive Coalition ministry of A.K. Fazlul Huq in December 1941. Syama Prasad Mukherjee, the Mahasabha's Bengal leader and a minister in that coalition, wrote a letter dated the 26th of July 1942 to the British Governor outlining concrete steps the Bengal government could take to ensure the Quit India Movement failed to take root in the province.

• 6. Gandhi's Assassination

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  On the 30th of January 1948, Nathuram Godse shot and killed Mahatma Gandhi in New Delhi. Godse was a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. So were his fellow conspirators: Digambar Badge, Gopal Godse, Narayan Apte, Vishnu Karkare, and Madanlal Pahwa.

  Police also arrested Savarkar on suspicion of being the mastermind behind the plot. The trial resulted in convictions for the others, but Savarkar was released for lack of evidence. The Kapur Commission, however, later stated that all the facts taken together were "destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder" Gandhi.

  The assassination shattered what remained of the Mahasabha's political standing. Its fortunes in post-independence Indian politics diminished sharply, and the party was soon eclipsed by the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.

  Decades later, the organisation's relationship to the assassination remained a live controversy. The Mahasabha officially describes Godse as a "real forgotten hero" of the independence struggle and holds Gandhi responsible for failing to prevent the partition of India. In 2014, following the Bharatiya Janata Party's rise to power, the Mahasabha requested Prime Minister Narendra Modi to install a bust of Godse. The following year, it produced a documentary film titled Desh Bhakt Nathuram Godse, planned for release on the 30th of January 2015, Gandhi's death anniversary, prompting a civil suit in Pune Court seeking a ban on the film.

• 7. Electoral Decline

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  The 1937 provincial elections delivered the Hindu Mahasabha a decisive blow. The Indian National Congress won a massive victory across the country, decimating the Mahasabha's electoral base. The party never recovered its pre-war position.

  In the first Lok Sabha elections of 1951, the Mahasabha won four seats. By 1957 it held two, by 1962 one. Since the late 1960s it has returned no members to the lower house of parliament in most elections, with only isolated single-seat returns in 1971, 1989, and 1991.

  At the state level the picture is similar. In Uttar Pradesh, where the party contested 167 seats in 1969 without winning any, its vote share has remained a fraction of a percent. In Karnataka, contested elections between 1999 and 2023 have produced no seats and negligible vote shares.

  The party has remained formally active and continues to hold the post of president, currently occupied by Chakrapani. In September 2021, the organisation drew public attention when its Karnataka state general secretary, Dharmendra, threatened to kill Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai over the demolition of an unlicensed temple in Nanjangud, Mysuru, and made additional remarks about killing Gandhi. Dharmendra and two associates, Rajesh Pavitran and Prem Poolali, were arrested for the threats.