The most common scare tactic employed by western media and their Indian marionettes, includes the notion that a Hindu rastra would be a theocracy and would destroy the secularism inbuilt in the constitution of the Indian republic. The trope is that India has been a bastion of tolerance and religious harmony for the better half of a century until it was destroyed when the "fascists" that run the RSS took over the levers of the Indian state.

To understand this better, one needs only look at the headlines that made the covers of major western papers on the consecration ceremony of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. The majority of them declared India to now be a theocracy run by far-right Hindu extremists who used state resources and government time to conduct the ceremony. According to them, 22nd January indicated a moment that turned the Indian state from a secular republic into a Hindu theocracy.

The main problem with this narrative is that a Hindu theocracy is both conceptually and practically impossible. Establishing a Hindu theocracy would require the very destruction of a majority of the schools of philosophy and legal thought, which would render Hinduism to be a limited and uninteresting counterfeit of its abrahamic counterparts. Establishing a Hindu theocracy at the expense of its diversity is an end that neither the adherents of the faith, nor the members of the sangh parivar nor the BJP ever wanted. This is clear through the writings of Savarkar, Golwalkar, Vivekananda etc on the objectives of Hindutva and political Hinduism.

Furthermore even if this task was to be undertaken, an archaic text such as the Manusmriti or the Yajnavalkya smriti would have to be chosen as the chief dharmashastra to be followed as the lawbook of the land, which would be met with great resistance across the country even among the Hindus. These lawbooks were formulated centuries ago and they express ideas such as the repression of women, shudras etc and other antiquated ideas which are rejected by the vast majority of what constitutes the Hindutva movement. It is safe to conclude that the BJP will never undertake the exercise of enforcing the codes of conduct from these texts as the state of the nation, civilisation and republican institutions has immensely progressed since the times when these were written, and Hindutva's objective is a dynamic one- to adapt with the times to secure the civilisation's future as a powerful and prosperous one.

It is also an obvious fact that in a decade of BJP rule, never was once an explicitly Hindu law, grounded in Hindu scriptures ever passed, in whole or in part as the law of the Indian republic.

There is also the more obvious problem that Hinduism is too colossal to be distilled into a legal machinery for a theocratic state. Multiple sects and schools of thought make this an impossible task to undertake. Firstly the Vasihnavas, Smartas, Shaivites, Shaktas, Ganapatyas and several more must decide their lowest common denominators to be able to present a united common code, and then the even harder task to be able to reconcile that with whatever is overlapping with the Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists and so on, and even among that there would be vast differences between the philosophical traditions- Nyaya, Mimamsa, Vaiseskika, Vedanta and so on, each of which being several times more complex than the average protestant christian denomination. Pramanas (evidences) accepted by each of these schools is also completely different, which makes jurisprudence an impossible task.

There is also the other problem with their claim, which is that Hindu is less of a religious term and more of a civilisational and political term (sanatani being the religious term). Rashtra means country in sanskrit, not state/republic/government contrary to popular opinion. Rajya means a state. By this, India is already a Hindu rastra and has always been, for nearly 7000 years. India was a Hindu rastra not only during the Marathas and the Vijayanagara empire but also during the Mughals and the British Raj.

It is therefore a futile exercise by both a fringe of the Hindutva movement as well as large parts of the left to paint the movement as that of a violent theocratic lobby seeking to undermine secular laws and replace them with regressive ones. It is either intellectual dishonesty or deceit of the greatest order and is not a blunder that can be attributed to ignorance, when the facts are so clear.