A few days ago, I wrote that the Sansad Chalo protest of July 20 was Sanatana Dharma in action. Young people had come from different corners of India, from different faiths, castes, regions and backgrounds. For those hours, these identities seemed almost irrelevant. They stood together for education, a cause larger than themselves. They displayed peaceful protesting, restraint and resilience. They shared food and water, made space for strangers, protected one another and somehow became a community without first asking who belonged to which community.
To me, that was Sanatana Dharma. Not a slogan or religious identity. Simply human beings recognising themselves in one another and acting from that recognition. But the term met with a huge backlash. My response section got filled with labels. Sanghi. BJP stooge. RSS sympathiser.
It made me wonder: how did an idea at the heart of Indian civilisation for millennia become a political password? When did speaking of Sanatana Dharma automatically place you on one side of India’s political divide? Perhaps the problem is not Sanatana Dharma. Perhaps the problem is what politics has done to it.
To understand this, remember what many Indians thought they were voting for in 2014. It was more than a change of government. There was a deeper restlessness, almost a longing for renaissance. After generations of looking at ourselves through borrowed eyes, Indians were beginning to look inward again. Millions, especially the young, wanted more than economic growth. They wanted to rediscover themselves.
The BJP understood that longing better than any other party. It presented itself not merely as an alternative government but as custodian of India’s Hindu inheritance. In doing so, it gradually came to define what “Hindu” politics looked like. But what if much of what we now associate with that politics is precisely the opposite of the tradition invoked in its name?
Sanatana Dharma is not an identity to be defended against another identity. It is a discipline of living: sat before propaganda, nyaya before power, dhairya before intimidation, purvapakshya, enquiry and understanding the opponent’s point of view, before indoctrination, self-mastery before anger and lokasangraha, the harmonious welfare of all, before one’s tribe.
Measured against those principles, perhaps what we have witnessed in the last 12 years is not the flowering of Sanatana Dharma but its shrinking: a vast philosophical inheritance reduced to electoral identity, its symbols amplified while its values eroded.
Consider intolerance and stereotyping. If you question the government, suddenly you are labelled anti-national, foreign-funded, a Chinese agent, a traitor. How did this happen in the land of the Upanishads? Our foundational texts are conversations, dialogues, debates. Nachiketa questions Yama about death. Gargi challenges Yajnavalkya. The Bhagavad Gita exists because Arjuna questions Krishna chapter after chapter. Krishna does not silence him. He answers him patiently.
Hindu thought accommodated an astonishingly diverse spectrum, from Charvaka’s materialism to Advaita’s non-dualism, alongside Buddhists, Jains, Mimamsakas, dualists, theists and sceptics. Disagreement was not evidence that the tradition was weak. It was evidence that it was alive.
This is why stereotyping in popular culture troubles me too. When films such as Dhurandhar repeatedly place Muslim or Pakistani characters within a familiar silhouette of villainy, I worry not only about the social consequences but about the storytelling. Real human beings are inconveniently complicated. Veer-Zaara understood this. Its power came from crossing the India-Pakistan and Hindu-Muslim boundaries we expected to separate its characters. Schindler’s List gave us a German industrialist who could change even within the horror of Nazi Germany. Great storytelling unsettles our prejudices. Propaganda confirms them.
Then I get into my car and meet Ehsan, my driver. He is Muslim and has one daughter. He does not plan to have more sons but aspires to educate her, empower her and give her choices his generation did not have. The stereotype collapses. The human being returns.
Most of our population or social reform that we lazily turn into a religious problem is often an education and development problem. An educated, economically secure Muslim family may have fewer children than a poor Hindu family in rural Bihar. When we start focusing on education, women’s agency, healthcare and economic security, many of these problems begin to change on their own.
But secularism must also mean equality before the law. If India is secular, why should governments run temples? What forms of state support for religious pilgrimages are justified? And why should marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption or polygamy be governed differently depending on one’s religion? Religious freedom cannot mean unequal citizenship. These are precisely the questions a Uniform Civil Code should allow us to debate openly. Reform what needs reform, but through Parliament, law, education and reason, not by turning an entire community into the problem.
A living society questions. A confident government answers. And therein lies the deeper challenge before the BJP. If Sanatana Dharma is truly the inheritance it seeks to protect, it cannot appear only in temples, speeches and election campaigns. It must become the fabric from which governance itself is woven, visible in the conduct of ministers, the fairness of institutions, the integrity of public communication and the everyday behaviour of the karyakartas and pracharaks who carry these ideas into India’s homes.
Sri Aurobindo said at Uttarpara, “When it is said that India shall rise, it is the Sanatana Dharma that shall rise.” He was not announcing the triumph of one religion over another. He was speaking of the rise of a way of being that places inner transformation above outer conquest and recognises a deeper unity beneath our differences. And, India’s awakening, in his vision, was never for herself alone. She was to rediscover within herself something that she could offer to humanity.
Seen this way, the opportunity before the BJP was extraordinary. It was given both the political mandate and the cultural moment to reclaim Sanatana Dharma from centuries of neglect, not merely by restoring its symbols, but by building a modern India upon its principles. An India confident enough to question, just enough to protect the dissenter and inclusive enough to embrace diversity. Dharma asks something infinitely harder of us than defending Hindu identity. It asks us, ultimately, to transcend identity. To encounter the person before the label. Ehsan before Muslim. The daughter before the demographic statistic. The human being before the vote. That would be Vishwaguru: not India preaching her wisdom to the world, but living it well enough for the world to take notice and emulate. That would be her renaissance.
Whether the BJP becomes the instrument of that renaissance is now up to the BJP itself. Will it reduce Sanatana Dharma to slogans, symbols and electoral capital, or allow its deeper principles to shape how it governs, speaks and exercises power? Sri Aurobindo’s evolutionary vision is larger than any party, and history does not wait indefinitely for one instrument. If the BJP can live the Dharma it claims to defend, it may yet play an extraordinary role in helping India fulfil her destiny as Vishwaguru, a spiritual teacher to the world. If it cannot, another instrument will emerge to carry that work forward. Sanatana Dharma does not need the BJP to survive. The question is whether the BJP will choose to become worthy of Sanatana Dharma.
The writer is founder, Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh
Sanatan Dharma is not an identity to be defended against another. It is a discipline of living. (C R Sasikumar/File) 
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