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 was formed in 1980. A large part of it emerged from a now defunct Hindu nationalist party, the Akhil Bharatiya Jana Sangh. Like Jana Sangh in the past, BJP too has roots in militant Hindu nationalist groups, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The RSS has been around since 1925. It was formed to politically and culturally manifest the ideas of one of Hindu nationalism’s pioneering ideologists, Vinayak D. Savarkar.

From the late 1980s, BJP began to enjoy increasing popularity in India. A lot of this popularity was mustered by the party’s willingness to act in an iconoclastic manner. It openly challenged the supposedly pacifist/‘Gandhian’ ethos of India’s politics and society, established by the country’s founding party, the Indian National Congress (INC). BJP also confronted Indian secularism, which it accused of being tilted in favour of India’s non-Hindu groups, especially Muslims. BJP also moved to popularise and bring into the mainstream a particular take on Hindu mythology. 

The INC had interpreted Hindu mythology as symbolic of Hinduism’s tolerant, pluralistic and even secular nature. But INC did not treat this mythology as substantiated history. BJP does. It understands this mythology in a literalist manner. BJP’s aggressive push in this regard managed to find traction among India’s upper and middle classes when they had begun to fully enjoy the fruits of economic liberalisation and deregulation. 

During the INC’s multiple stints in power from the 1950s till the mid-1980s, Indian ‘gurus’ preaching spiritual calm and warning about the psychic ills brought on by materialism were a dime a dozen in India and in the ‘spiritually bankrupt’ West. In the early 1970s, Uxi Mufti, son of the Pakistani intellectual Mumtaz Mufti, wrote that India was exporting ‘Indian spiritualism’ to the West and that Pakistan, to counter this, should export Sufism there.

Uxi viewed the Indian export as a ploy by India to portray itself as a spiritually rich and peaceful country compared to its more militaristic neighbour, Pakistan. 

But the economic and political rise of the Indian middle classes saw the decline of the INC’s portrayals of India and Hinduism. According to the Indian political scientist Sabyasachi Chaudhury, India’s post-1980s’ neo-liberal economic policies won the endorsement of the country’s new middle class and dominant upper castes. This became the primary ingredient of the formula for establishing a “muscular Indian nation state.” This then saw Indian democracy taking an illiberal turn. 

Gradually, the once sidelined musings of early Hindu nationalists began being mainstreamed. In a 2019 essay, the political scientist Jyotirmaya Sharma wrote that “loss of manliness” was a major theme in early Hindu nationalist discourse. The discourse lamented that Hindus had become feeble and soft, incapable of either retaliating or defending themselves. Hence, they suffered humiliation and perpetual subjugation, first at the hands of Muslim invaders and then by the British. Therefore, Hindu nationalist ideologues took upon themselves the responsibility of ‘making men’ out of the Hindus.

Demolishing ancient mosques, insulting Mahatma Gandhi (by calling him a eunuch), beating up Muslims and lower caste Indians, recreating on film and TV mythical stories of war in an imaginary ancient India, wishing the complete annihilation of “terrorist Pakistan”, attacking Christian missionaries, lynching beef-eaters etc — all these can be seen today in India as manifestations of a ‘Hindu society’ apparently being masculinised by the “baap of all alpha males.” 

But what’s the role of the Hindu women in all this? In her book Make Me A Man, the professor of gender studies Sikata Banerjee writes, “Women enter this masculine environment through roles such as heroic mother, chaste wife and celibate warrior.” 

According to the American political theorist Cynthia Enloe, nationalist ideologies tend to stem from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation and masculinised hope. Indeed, but — as we have seen — Indian nationalism began as a secular and a rather feminised understanding of Hinduism and India. However, from the 1990s onwards, the once sidelined masculinised variant pushed out the earlier variant because economic prosperity among the middle classes shaped a mindset that was a combination of confidence and insecurity. The insecurity leads to the feeling that endorsed masculinised nationalism is a better protector of one’s economic gains. 

A prime minister boasting of having a 56-inch chest (as Modi once claimed) may be an effective way to make middle class India feel secure. But that same prime minister taking the country to an actual war is something entirely different — especially when he loses the war. 

Today, the commotion on Indian media, the confusion in the country’s polity and in X posts babbling about alpha males, are the result of the crumbling of that sense of security, seeded by masculinised nationalism. 

Remarkably, this nationalism started to come apart immediately after the military and diplomatic losses India suffered in its latest war against Pakistan. The 56-inch chest shrank, throwing middle-class India into an existentialist and identity crisis.

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 25th, 2025