“He is Ravan. Burn him and his books!”
- 1 The Indian National Congress (often shortened to “Congress”) is India’s oldest national political p (...)
1At six in the morning on 21 September 1995, Punjab’s leading public-facing rationalist-activist and author, schoolteacher Megh Raj Mittar, received an unexpected phone call. “The idols of Lord Ganesha are drinking milk in the temples of Ambala (a Haryana town near the Punjab border). What are you doing about it?” the caller demanded. It was the first of many. Within an hour, Mittar had received sixteen calls from friends, opponents, and journalists alike, all pressing him for a response. Although initially taken aback by the news, Mittar resumed his usual routine of preparing for school. However, when his nephew rushed in to announce that a crowd had gathered at the house of a local Congress MLA (state legislator)—convinced that a small Ganesh idol (the elephant-headed Hindu god of wisdom and success) was drinking milk—he decided to intervene.1
- 2 The rationalist movement in India encompasses a diverse array of regional and national organisation (...)
2Reflecting on the moment in his memoir Paid Jo Kafila Bani (Mittar, 1998a), Mittar wrote, “Initially, I was taken aback as it seemed the idol was actually drinking milk. However, I silently observed for a couple of minutes with a critical eye and grasped the entire situation... I explained to them the scientific principle behind the phenomenon, which was a combination of capillary action and surface tension”. Realising that a rapid response was necessary, he immediately drafted and printed 1,000 pamphlets titled Idols Drinking Milk is No Miracle, which were distributed across Barnala town, a small town in southern Punjab, by noon. Rather than calming the fervour, this swift rebuttal stoked it further. Such acts of exposure were characteristic of India’s rationalist movement: a loosely affiliated constellation of groups advancing sceptical critique and often privately held atheism, now increasingly studied under the rubric of “non-religion”.2
- 3 Though a highly differentiated set of groups and alliances cohere under the banner of Hindu nationa (...)
3The controversy shifted into sharper provocation when rationalist activists expanded their demonstration by feeding milk to a small terracotta statue of a memsahib, an ornament borrowed from Mittar’s own drawing room. Historically, memsahib was a colonial-era term used by South Asians to address a white or upper-class woman with deference. By making this figure “drink” milk, the activists aimed to expose the absurdity of the miracle: any object, properly positioned, would appear to consume the offering. What began as an ironic gesture quickly gained other meanings. Among local supporters of Hindutva (Hindu nationalist ideology), this became an act of desecration: a moment of “rationalist sacrilege” seen as hostile to Hindu devotion and as proof that figures like Mittar carried a lingering colonial contempt for Indian religious convictions.3 The demonstration echoed older nationalist anxieties, with rationalists appearing as heirs to British epistemologies, eager to puncture indigenous pieties from an imported vantage. Within days, the Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal, and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP)—all militant Hindu Right organisations—plastered Barnala town with posters condemning Mittar: “A stern warning is issued to Megh Raj Mittar, chairman of the so-called Tarksheel [Rationalist] Society, who has dared to compare the divine act of Bhagwan Ganesh’s idol drinking milk with the statue of an Englishwoman and thus offended the devotion and belief of Hindus all over the world” (ibid; see Figure 1).
Figure 1: “A stern warning to anti-Hindu elements”.
“On this pavittar dihaṛa (sacred day) of Dussehra, a strong chitavni (warning) is issued to the so-called Tarksheel (in truth, Tarkheen—without reason) Society’s self-proclaimed president, Megh Raj Mittar. By comparing the divine and miraculous event of Bhagwan Ganesh Ji’s idols drinking milk with a mere statue of a mem (foreign woman), he has deeply wounded the shraddha (devotion) and vishvas (faith) of Hindus across the world and has insulted our revered gods and goddesses. These kamine tarksheela (wretched rationalists) are nothing but tools acting on videshi ishare (foreign instructions) to attack this great Hindu religion. On this holy occasion of Dussehra, we wish to firmly remind these corrupt, anti-Hindu so-called rationalists that if they do not stop their kali kartutan (dark deeds), then the Hindu samaj (society), walking the path of Bhagwan Ram, will annihilate these tarkheen elements, just as Ravan was destroyed. We strongly demand that the administration take immediate action against these tarksheel (tarkheenan) individuals who have disrespected our great religion. All anti-Hindu materials must be confiscated and these kamine (scoundrels) must be tightly nath paai jaave (muzzled) at once. If swift and decisive action is not taken against these galat ansara (wrong elements), then the full responsibility for the deterioration of the situation will lie solely with this self-proclaimed leader Megh Raj Mittar.—Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal, Barnala, on behalf of Vishva Hindu Parishad President: Lajpat Rai, Barnala”. “A stern warning to anti-Hindu elements”, militant Hindu Right poster, street walls of Barnala, 1995.
Wall Poster, Barnala, 1995. Megh Raj Mittar Papers, Barnala. Courtesy and copyright: Vishav Bharti. Translated from Punjabi by Vishav Bharti.
4The phrasing of the accusation—Mittar’s “daring” to compare—reveals the deeper logic of sacrilege: the offence arises less from the enunciation of doubt than from the act of placing the sacred alongside the profane in an equivalence that destabilises the hierarchy of value that sustains reverence. As Sloterdijk (2013) suggests, such “compromising imitations” expose the contingent nature of venerated forms by replicating them in an unsanctioned way, eroding their aura of exceptionality. The memsahib statue, a leftover symbol of colonial authority, transformed the divine demonstration into something transferable and indiscriminate, vulnerable to playful mimicry (Gayer and Therwath, 2010). As well as challenging belief, then, the rationalist act of puncture formed an ontological affront by forcing the miracle to compete in the realm of the arbitrary where it could no longer secure its own transcendence. For local Hindutva supporters, the act blurred the line between scientific critique and deliberate desecration, feeding the sense that Tarksheel activists operated as heirs to a colonial impulse that treated Hindu devotion with scorn.
5A self-proclaimed “agent of Rama” filed a case against Mittar. Threats soon grew more pointed. As Dussehra—the annual Hindu festival celebrating the triumph of good over evil in the epic Ramayana—drew closer, politicians from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s main Hindu nationalist party, and VHP activists began weaving Mittar’s name into the town’s Ramlila performances, popular folk dramas that restage scenes from the same epic, casting him as Ravana, the demon-king and chief antagonist. The message was unmistakeable: just as Ravana’s effigy burns each year to cleanse the realm of embodied evil, Mittar’s presence, too, was cast as a pollutant warranting fire. By then, Mittar and his circle had little choice but to prepare defensively. Each night, the family home, Tarksheel Niwas (“Rationalist Abode”), stayed dark, while Mittar and a few trusted allies kept watch in silence with vintage 12-bore single-barrel guns at hand (see Figures 2 and 3). “Because they knew we were prepared to defend ourselves”, Mittar later wrote, “they held back”. But the threat did not disappear. Instead, Hindutva loyalists employed a makeshift mixed-methods strategy for disciplining dissent comprising lawsuits, rumours, street intimidation and denunciatory pamphleteering.
- 4 “Theft of enjoyment” is a Žižekian turn of phrase that we return to later.
6While the so-called Ganesh Milk Miracle spread across India and beyond in September 1995 (Vidal, 1998; Tatke, 2020), its local eruption in Punjab exposed a distinctive tension: how a Hindu moral public reasserts itself as a vigilant minority within a Sikh-majority state, targeting rationalists like Mittar as symbols of dangerous defection. Mittar’s act of puncture achieved something beyond proving a stone cannot drink: it stripped away a fleeting communal joy, exposing pleasure as gullibility and marking the rationalist as a local thief of Hindu enjoyment: a role he would be made to pay for, with threats and calls to burn both man and book alike.4
Photographs, early 1990s, Punjab. Megh Raj Mittar’s personal album, Barnala. Courtesy and copyright: Vishav Bharti.
Photographs, early 1990s, Punjab. Megh Raj Mittar’s personal album, Barnala. Courtesy and copyright: Vishav Bharti.
7This article examines how elements of India’s Hindu Right have sought, intermittently and with shifting intensity, to contain and reframe organised rationalist critique. While the targeting of rationalists by Hindu nationalist actors in states such as Maharashtra and Karnataka since 2013 has generated deserved attention (BBC, 2013; Quack, 2016; Jaffrelot, 2021), Punjab offers an instructive counterpoint. Here, the Tarksheel movement has long advanced rationalist modes of public reasoning and moral critique within a landscape marked by the shifting proximities of Sikh and Hindu traditions, and by a residual but potent Left politics.
8Such an approach contributes to the field of non-religion studies (Bullivant and Lee, 2012; Blanes and Oustinova-Stjepanovic, 2015; Zuckerman and Shook, 2017; Copeman and Schulz, 2022; Schulz and Binder, 2023; Lancien, Portier and Zwilling, forthcoming) by examining how non-religious subjects are constructed as threats within religious nationalist projects. While Tarksheel members self-identify as rationalists rather than atheists, their strategic positioning reveals broader patterns in how organised disbelief navigates hostile environments. The Punjab case illuminates how religious nationalisms respond less to theological disagreement than to the visibility of non-religious alternatives: forms of life that expose religious belonging as contingent rather than inevitable. By tracing the genealogy of Hindutva’s disciplinary responses to rationalist critique, this article demonstrates how non-religious subjects become focal points for anxieties about conversion and the boundaries of legitimate citizenship. The “crematory re-disciplining” examined here represents one variant of how religious nationalisms can seek to eliminate rather than merely refute organised forms of disbelief.
- 5 Sikh holy text revered as living Guru.
9In its earlier decades, Tarksheel members navigated threats and sanctions from Sikh militants who regarded certain forms of rationalist exposé as affronts to the sanctity of the Guru Granth Sahib5 and Sikh sovereignty more broadly. With the decline of armed separatism by the mid-1990s, these threats receded, but did not resolve the deeper tensions between public rationalist practice and dominant ideas of communal integrity. The underlying tensions assumed new forms. As Hindu nationalist organisations consolidated in this new regional religious and political climate, they too came to cast Tarksheel activists as adversaries, accusing them of affronting Hindu sensibilities and corrupting public sentiment.
- 6 While—reflecting the state’s demographic profile—most activists are of Sikh origin (primarily Jats) (...)
10This pattern has not taken a single form. At times, it has involved carefully staged moral denunciations; at other moments, orchestrated legal action or calls for violent retaliation. Episodes such as the backlash to Megh Raj Mittar's 1995 pamphlet at the time of the “Ganesh milk miracle” and an attempt in 2008 to ban rationalist publications illustrate how moral policing and state sanction can converge, even in a region where Hindutva’s hold is otherwise partial. These episodes draw on and extend older strategies of repression, including criminalisation attempts under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, a law shaped by Punjab’s early twentieth-century disputes over religious injury and offence in print (Nair, 2013; Adcock, 2016; Zecchini, 2020). Central to these accusations is the claim that Tarksheel targets Hinduism with disproportionate intensity, ignoring other faiths and thus betraying a selective animus. What begins as a charge of insensitivity—a failure to shield Hindu belief from ridicule—drifts into deeper suspicions of anti-Hindu partiality. These accusations do more than delegitimise rationalist critique; they frame it as betrayal from within, recasting unbelief as a covert passage toward religious defection. In this configuration, rationalism becomes a scandal of proximity: its challenge to Hindu belonging is all the more intolerable because it arises from those seen to have once participated in it.6
- 7 This wider account is the focus of the forthcoming book Dissentiments: Non-Religion, Violence, and (...)
11This article draws on a range of sources—including letters from the movement’s early years and newly gathered testimonies—to situate Punjab’s rationalists within a wider account of how religious nationalisms respond to organised disbelief.7 It shows how Tarksheel’s strategies—combining pamphleteering, local dispute arbitration, theatrical exposés and calibrated silences—challenge the idea that Hindu belonging is innate and indivisible. Rather, they make visible its potential for renunciation, inciting forms of disciplinary response that have not been limited to threats of direct violence but include moral delegitimation and symbolic erasure.
12In revisiting this trajectory, the discussion clarifies how Punjab complicates the notion that Hindutva’s suppression of rationalists is a recent or straightforward extension of its communal logics. The case also highlights the enduring tension between state endorsements of “scientific temper” (a fundamental duty of every citizen enshrined in the Indian Constitution) and political currents that mobilise religious offence to circumscribe its reach. By foregrounding how rationalist activism and Hindu nationalist reaction shape each other within Punjab’s layered religious and political landscape, this article traces a regional trajectory that enriches debates on how religion and nationalism intertwine today. It shows how Hindutva engagement with rationalist critique drifts between moral stigmatisation and legal threat, punctuated by gestures that aim to absorb dissent back into an acceptable moral fold. Rather than depicting rationalists as distant outsiders, these strategies recast them as errant kin whose scepticism threatens the coherence of communal belonging and thus calls for careful containment. Together, these insights show how Punjab’s rationalist controversies unsettle the fragile edges of citizenship, testing what kinds of sceptical speech a moral public can absorb before it turns punitive.
13Within Hindutva’s political theology, unbelief appears as a disruptive presence that fractures the imagined unity of Hindu belonging. The rationalist becomes a troubling figure because they expose the reversibility of Hindu identity, and with it, the ever-present possibility of renunciation. Even worse, rationalist unbelief is often treated as a particularly unstable absent presence: a transitional threat that signals movement towards conversion to Christianity or some other anti-Hindu allegiance rather than a destination in itself. What this article also demonstrates, however, is the reverse: that adherence to Hindu Right or reformist positions can also function as a kind of halfway house: a transitional space from which some later adopt rationalist or atheist commitments.
Hindutva is a veritable spectrum of positions, issues, approaches, and debates that run the gamut from the ideologically definite to the diffuse and “fringe”.
– Deepa S. Reddy (2018)
- 8 Though see Copeman et al. (forthcoming) for an extended treatment of Tarksheel specifically in rela (...)
14Hindutva’s vernacular expressions vary as widely as the country itself, and are crucial to track if we are to understand how such politics are lived beyond the clichés of standard critique (Reddy, 2018: 3). In the case of Punjab, it is worth noting that while a substantial literature addresses the rise of Hindu communalist ideologies in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods (Jones, 1976; Tuteja and Grewal, 1992), and the role of Hindu mobilisation around Partition (Jalal, 1998; Brass, 2003), very few studies (though see Singh and Shani, 2021) have examined Hindu nationalism in the state’s more recent history. The focus here on recent Hindutva formations and their encounter with rationalist activism addresses a dimension of Punjab’s political life that has hitherto received virtually no scholarly attention.8
15Punjab’s version of Hindu communalism emerged as a historically jagged, locally entangled project of self-assertion and defensive minoritarianism, rather than an inevitable flowering of pan-Indian Hindutva. This took place, first, within a Muslim-majority setting and then, after Partition—and especially once Haryana and Himachal had been culled out of Punjab in 1966—a Sikh-majority one. Its earliest consolidation owes to the Arya Samaj’s late nineteenth-century venture of purificatory revivalism: a rationalised, Vedic Hinduism repurposed for the emergent Punjabi Hindu mercantile and professional classes who, buffered by colonial education and administrative advantages, were able to convert cultural humiliation under British rule into a combative communitarian pride (Tuteja and Grewal, 1992). The Arya Samaj’s agenda of denouncing brahmanical ritualism while attacking Sikh practice as a fallen sectarianism laid the groundwork for a militant, self-policing Hindu identity that instrumentalised shuddhi (reconversion) as both spiritual cleansing and a tactic to block the entry of untouchables into Christianity or Sikhism.
16By the early twentieth century, this consciousness had outgrown spiritual uplift to become a tool for civic and economic leverage: a vernacularised communal platform for securing political representation and economic advantage against the Muslim peasant majority (Tuteja and Grewal, 1992). Its content was fiercely sectarian but also opportunistically modernising: Hindi was promoted as the rightful language of governance and identity, while Urdu was recast as alien. Ritual discipline was elevated as moral high ground, positioned in contrast to perceived excess. Cow protection emerged as an emotive rallying point: a means of policing religious boundaries and asserting Hindu self-respect. Arya Samajists morphed into organisers of the Punjab Hindu Sabha and, later, feeders into the embryonic Hindu Mahasabha, thereby crafting, in effect, a north Indian corridor for the nationalising Hindu Right.
17Partition violently reconfigured this matrix: west Punjabi Hindus, traumatised by displacement and pogroms, transplanted their memory politics into the Sangh Parivar’s anti-Muslim core, even as actual Muslims nearly vanished from east Punjab’s social landscape. In this Muslim-vacuumed Punjab, Hindutva’s anti-Muslim energy was displaced sideways, towards Sikhism. The colonial and Singh Sabha-era fear that Hinduism would “swallow” Sikhism (the boa metaphor, endlessly recited) hardened into post-Partition discourses insisting Sikhs are Hindus: a point that flares whenever linguistic or territorial claims threaten Hindu numerical security (Moliner, 2011).
- 9 In Punjab, the Arya Samaj retains a distinctive vitality compared to much of India, sustained above (...)
18Punjab’s Hindutva is structurally constrained. It operates from a demographic minority position (about a third of the population) within a region where Sikh communal mobilisation has repeatedly proved capable of countering the RSS’s discreet infiltration (Moliner, 2007, 2011). Consequently, the Sangh Parivar has alternated between low-profile co-optation—such as through the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, an RSS-affiliated organisation that promotes Hindu-Sikh unity under a broader Hindutva vision—and selective anti-minority moral panics, including anti-Christian and anti-Pakistan campaigns. The Arya Samaj persists more as cultural common sense and in the form of its network of Arya schools and Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) colleges, than as a street-force.9
- 10 “Punjabiyat” refers to a cultural movement among Punjabis aimed at reaffirming and strengthening th (...)
19Though the BJP cannot autonomously dominate the state, its repeated alliances with the moderate Sikh party the Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal)—Punjab’s most prominent regional party, which until recently held a dominant position in the state’s coalition politics—have given Hindutva priorities a durable foothold in Punjab’s political fabric. Since the mid-1990s, coalition governance under the banner of “communal harmony” and “Punjabiyat”10 has enabled a form of post-militancy normalisation in which Hindu nationalist logics are embedded less through direct confrontation than through the rhythms of governance and dependency. This arrangement—shaped in part by chronic regional debt and economic reliance on Delhi—has helped naturalise Hindutva’s moral influence, providing local affiliates with leeway to contest perceived affronts to Hindu sensibilities in ways that echo national patterns of cultural policing (Singh and Shani, 2021). The moral atmosphere has been shaped by shifts in urban demography and middle-class aspiration, reinforced through the Badal family’s informal mechanisms of policing dissent. Even during Congress rule after 2017, BJP-affiliated actors retained a moral claim to speak for Hindu sentiment, helping to sustain a climate in which rationalist critique remains vulnerable to charges of disloyalty and sacrilege.
20Punjab’s moral terrain is complex and layered. Residual traces of Sikh militancy persist alongside forms of Hindu nationalist assertion, shaped further by local economic pressures and anxieties (ibid). Rationalist critique enters this terrain as an intervention that unsettles multiple frames of authority at once. Hindutva’s targeting of rationalists can be understood as an attempt to manage this entanglement: to prevent certain forms of dissent from gaining traction across lines that are already strained. The aim is often to curtail circulation, especially where public scepticism threatens to disrupt loyalties that remain under negotiation.
21Partition, then, endowed Punjabi Hindutva with a foundational trauma—the remembered loss of ancestral homelands and a perpetual anti-Muslim imaginary. Yet with few Muslims left in situ, its vigilant energies found new targets in conversion anxieties and Dalit mobility, with rationalist provocateurs becoming a particularly prominent focus. Contemporary incineration of sceptical pamphlets or threats to burn down rationalist houses belong to this longer symbolic repertoire of purificatory violence. These acts dramatize Hindutva’s broader discomfort when reasoned doubt appears as a collective, organised challenge rather than private heresy. In this sense, the Tarksheel movement inherits an older print-based culture of polemics, amplifying Punjab’s long history of religious contestation—and Hindutva in turn recalibrates its minoritarian strategies to contain this volatile, domestic “enemy within”.
22This background shows that Punjab’s Hindutva story is less a story of spectacular clashes than of moral normalisation that flows through coalition governance and everyday power bargains: precisely the subtle ground where flashpoints emerge with Tarksheel.
23Tarksheel’s centre of gravity is literary. Its work emerges from books, pamphlets, journals, and slogans—materials issued in periods of confidence yet suppressed when risk dictates. While the role of literature in rationalist movements elsewhere is well known, in Punjab its prominence acquires a distinctive intensity. Writing functions as both medium and method, serving simultaneously as the movement’s lifeblood and its most exposed nerve. Texts circulate to expose superstition, yet they also provoke hostility and generate risk. The content of texts matters, but so does their visibility.
- 11 The organisation was originally named the Rationalist Society Punjab. Following the 1986 split, bot (...)
- 12 While Tarksheel has not always foregrounded atheism in its public messaging—largely to ensure its c (...)
24Two organisations carry the name, both based in Barnala. A split in 1986, soon after the founding moment, led to the creation of Tarksheel Society Bharat (TSB) and Tarksheel Society Punjab (TSP).11 The divergence stemmed from interpersonal tensions combined with differences in emphasis. This article focuses on TSB. While members generally affirm atheism and scientific materialism, neither group foregrounds these commitments. Instead, they present themselves as rationalist social movements committed to social justice through critique of superstition and exploitative ritual practice. The word “atheist” (nastik) carries stigma, leading to strategic self-presentation. As one member explained, “When people see us as nastik, they don’t even wish to take our help… It is hard to identify as an atheist even now, especially if you are in the hinterlands. We call ourselves tarksheel [rationalist] so as to not alienate people” (Gurmat, 2024).12
Figure 4. (Left) ...Te Dev Pursh Haar Gaye’s first edition, which marked the beginning of the Tarksheel Movement in May 1984; (Right) a 2015 cover of Tarkbani.
Book Covers, 2015, Barnala. Megh Raj Mittar Papers, Barnala.
Courtesy and copyright: Vishav Bharti.
25This is a provincial rationalism. It shares reference points with other sceptical formations but speaks to Punjab’s own priorities. Both organisations conduct school outreach, publish literature, stage melas and distribute pamphlets. TSP runs a study programme for children (Chetna Parkh Prikhaya), with a syllabus that focuses on scientific thinking, the irrationality of ritual, biographies of scientists, and clashes between orthodoxy and science (Singh, 2019: 17). Wall slogans remain popular: “Tarksheel says astrology is a fraud”; “When rationalists hoisted the flag, the quacks started running”. Members pledge to forgo religious rites at home. TSB membership requires abandonment of caste surnames. Theatre groups such as People’s Art Group, Barnala and Art Centre Samrala stage local performances that puncture belief and provoke discussion. Some mock astrology, others turn dowry into farce. Many rework folk idioms to communicate the movement’s message in accessible form. These performances sit alongside the printed page and the painted wall. Each form of address carries exposure; each leaves a trace.
- 13 Typically dominant-caste cultivators of Punjab-Haryana.
26The movement is widely recognised across the state. Its energy rivals that of Maharashtra’s rationalist scene (Quack, 2012). Women have contributed as editors and organisers, though its public face remains overwhelmingly male. Most activists are Sikh by origin, predominantly Jat13, with a smaller presence of Hindu-background members such as the Mittar family.
27The movement emerged through a combination of political turmoil and literary encounter. Many early leaders had connections to the Naxalite movement. Figures such as Punjabi revolutionary hero and atheist Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) and Marxist revolutionary Chairman Mao (1893-1976) served as exemplars, and Marxist frameworks shaped its early publications. That the Tarksheel movement bears faint traces of Maoist inspiration only intensifies Hindutva’s antipathy. As Reddy (2018: 7) notes, Hindutva should also be read as a critique—particularly of the Indian Left, whose secularist and rationalist legacies it treats with suspicion or outright hostility. Rationalism here becomes more than heretical provocation: it is perceived as a political vestige, a vehicle of a rival moral order.
28Meanwhile, the movement’s first book opened with the lines: “The struggle against superstitions and blind faith can be won only by joining it with the battle for the liberation of the proletariat”. Its cover featured a Chinese peasant with an axe, ready to strike a nobleman (Mittar, 1998a: 90). Today’s activists reimagine the axe as a tool for striking superstition (Figure 4). Another publication, Tarkbani, shows a godman brandishing skulls, but his own skull is destroyed by a rationalist pen. Elsewhere, the pen appears bloodied. These images stage writing as both fragile and forceful. They anticipate critiques of rationalism as a mode of “epistemic violence” (Quack, 2012: 245) while proposing superstition itself as the greater harm.
29Some early members joined after withdrawing from revolutionary affiliations. Mittar later stated that the movement was a response to the escalation of communal violence, particularly attacks by Sikh militants on Hindus and heterodox Sikh sects. He traced his founding impulse to the 1978 Nirankari conflict: “If and when an opportunity came my way, I would create or join a society… to liberate people from the falsehood of religious beliefs” (Mittar, 1998b: 50). He described a time in which “uttering a single word against religion was to invite death for self and family” (ibid: 53). He recalled that Hindu neighbourhoods came under fire, and that those associated with communist groups or the police were frequently targeted.
30Literature offered a mode of counter-action. Bhagat Singh’s famous essay Why I am an Atheist gave a certain local credibility to disbelief (Rinehart, 2015). Meanwhile, Tarksheel’s own texts reference Punjabi Sufi traditions and the reformist teachings of Guru Nanak (first Sikh guru) as further inspirations. Though tensions with Sikh orthodoxy persist, many households display rationalist literature. Tarksheel writings lay great emphasis on the deep roots of rationalism in Punjab (e.g. Singh, 2019). It is particularly important to point this out in light of critiques by the Hindu Right—and also prominent postcolonial scholars (Nanda, 2025)—that rationalism in India owes its existence to foreign influence and functions, at times, as a proxy for religious conversion.
31The movement’s foundation is frequently traced to a single book: the Punjabi translation of Abraham Kovoor’s Begone Godmen (1977). Kovoor’s exposés of astrologers inspired rationalists across India. Mittar came across the book by chance in August 1983 and shared it with his fellow teachers. “From now on this book became our favourite topic of discussion”, he later recalled (Mittar, 1998b: 57). The translation, produced informally in the evenings, led to the formation of the group. They were told they required a name and settled on “The Rationalist Society of Punjab”, with Mittar as president. The book (Kovoor, 1984) sold over 150,000 copies, was adapted for stage, and prompted a steady stream of letters from readers. Many asked to start local branches. By 1995, TSB reported over 60. It was the book, rather than a strategic plan, that built the movement. Meanwhile, the excitement it generated was as much related to its mobility as its content. This is where Tarksheel’s literary culture intersects with Hindutva concern. Books that move freely across caste and religious lines complicate existing scripts of belonging. What began as translation came to function as a different kind of reformation, one grounded in the idea that critical thinking, once printed, carries its own momentum.
32But literature also caused internal rupture. Some argued for bolder street-level debunking; others, including Mittar, preferred a calmer mode of engagement. TSP later commented that its success lay in reaching the masses before attracting the intelligentsia—an indirect critique of TSB’s approach. Despite the split, books remain the primary channel for both. TSB runs a publishing house in Barnala; TSP distributes materials via a travelling “Literature van” (Singh, 2019: 19). TSB’s press began in 1989 after an external publisher withdrew under threat from Khalistani groups (Sikh separatists seeking an independent homeland). The house struggled at first, but found stability under the stewardship of Amit, one of Megh Raj’s sons, who subsidised rationalist titles through sales of more popular volumes.
33The written word is a source of both energy and exposure. Tarksheel readings of scripture are literal in method, irreverent in effect, with texts approached as texts, stripped of sanctity—a principle that unsettles, and sometimes endangers, those who apply it. Its disturbance emerges from tone and address as well as from a refusal to flatter the forms of grievance that increasingly define public legitimacy. Its discreet momentum exerts pressure by unsettling inherited moods and crossing lines that Hindutva actors have sought to stabilise: of caste deference, religious respectability, devotional expectation, and authorised forms of hurt. Each of its texts carries the possibility of becoming a matter of concern. This is the level at which Hindu nationalist actors have increasingly responded: through warnings issued to publishers and allegations that rationalist writings offend collective sentiment. Thus, while Tarksheel’s gestures remain mostly spare, they gather force over time and across settings—enough to draw repeated attention from Hindu nationalist actors in Punjab.
- 14 Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council); founded in 1964, it pursues a staunchly Hindutva-based (...)
34The military defeat of Sikh separatists by the mid-1990s reoriented religious nationalism in Punjab, with the policing of rationalist critique no longer the preserve of Sikh actors but increasingly an explicit project of Hindu nationalist forces. Yet such concern had in fact emerged earlier: by the mid-1980s, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) was already identifying Tarksheel as a threat, anticipating the shift in guardianship of religious offence that would follow the decline of Sikh militancy, as we shall now see.14
35This section traces when and how Punjabi rationalism became audible as disturbance to Hindu nationalist formations. Letters, as already noted, were central to Tarksheel’s emergence. It is through these, along with the society’s minutes and magazine reports, that we begin to glimpse the murmur of friction: signs that something was already registering as morally intrusive.
- 15 Letter to Mittar dated 2-2-86.
36The VHP had identified rationalists in Punjab as an ideological threat as early as 1986. At that point the Tarksheel Society was scarcely a year and a half old, yet had already sold tens of thousands of copies of its Punjabi translation of Kovoor’s Begone Godmen (…Te Dev Pursh Haar Gaye) and established thirty branches and 400 active members across the state. In a letter dated 2 February 1986, Amarjit Shastri, leader of the Gurdaspur unit, describes attending a VHP meeting in which the movement was openly discussed.15 Shastri’s account, written from the vantage point of a covert observer, reveals how even village-level Tarksheel units had already become a watchful minoritarian force, scanning the horizon for threats. He writes:
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a [Vishva] Hindu Parishad meeting, where our movement was explicitly discussed. It was stated that vikrit (degenerate) individuals would pose a significant threat to us in the 21st century. A new organisation emerging in Punjab under the name of Tarksheel could become a danger at any moment. Communists and Tarksheel rationalists alike could rise as adversaries at any time across the country. This issue was raised in their pamphlet Chetavni (“Warning”), which was read aloud during the meeting. It is therefore imperative that we organise ourselves effectively so that we may guide the oppressed people who have been exploited for centuries. However, we have the support of the majority, and thus, we should not be fearful of these challenges.
37The term vikrit does important work here. It implies deviation from an imagined internal order: an aberration to be corrected rather than an external threat to be confronted. The rationalist is cast less as a heretic than as a fallen insider: a figure to be absorbed or excised. This framing positions the rationalist outside a dialectic of debate and instead within a moral hierarchy that requires purification. What we see, even in this early moment, is the gesturing toward a Hindu order in which intellectual divergence appears as pollution. The Chetavni pamphlet explicitly names Tarksheel as a problem of the coming century, pairing it with communism as a comparable vector of destabilisation.
- 16 Letter to Mittar dated 1-2-89.
38A second letter from the mid-1980s raises a question that has long stalked the rationalist movement in Punjab: why, when exposing miracle claims and scriptural exaggerations, did Tarksheel writers appear to leave Sikhism untouched?16 (Figure 5). Addressed to Mittar, the letter recounts a conversation in which a reader observes that while Tarksheel publications regularly critique Hindu beliefs, and occasionally Christianity, they seem to avoid addressing the miraculous tales associated with Sikh gurus: such as the claim that Guru Nanak halted a giant boulder mid-air or that Baba Deep Singh continued to fight after his beheading. The writer does not accuse Mittar directly, but suggests an explanation that has continued to trail the movement: perhaps the silence is due to fear: “I answered as best I could”, he writes, “saying that these stories are also baseless… But only one explanation came to mind—the same as the one that man suggested: perhaps you fear for your life at the hands of extremists if you criticise Sikhism”.
Figure 5.“Letter to Mittar – 1 February, 1989”.
Page 2 of the three-page letter, Barnala, 1989. Megh Raj Mittar Papers, Barnala.
Copyright: Vishav Bharti.
- 17 “Pseudo-atheism” mirrors the better-known accusation of “pseudo-secularism”; viz., atheists were no (...)
39The letter is revealing in multiple ways. It testifies to the difficulty of sustaining a uniform atheistic stance in a landscape where some forms of critique carry exponentially greater danger than others. It also prefigures a major line of Hindutva accusation that would gain force decades later; viz., that rationalists are pseudo-atheists: strategic actors who cloak their real agenda beneath selective critique.17 If some Hindutva ideologues position state secularists as “appeasers” of minority religions, rationalists come to be framed as partial heretics: freethinkers with suspicious blind spots. Here, even the act of which religion gets critiqued becomes a matter of loyalty or betrayal.
- 18 See Chapter 4 (“From then on, to feel fear was normal for us”) in the forthcoming monograph Dissent (...)
40Punjab’s history of armed militancy, and the Tarksheel movement’s own experiences of threat and attack, gave rise to what might be called a graduated sacrilege: a form of selective engagement born less from preference than from practical survival. Miracle tales associated with Sikhism are indeed mostly absent from the movement’s official publications during this period. Yet they were occasionally addressed, with some stories challenged in passing or via pseudonymous tracts, indicating that silences were tactical rather than ideological.18 Far from being signs of bad faith, such editorial strategies reflect a careful navigation of danger: a choreography of voice and silence that allowed the movement to remain audible in an environment primed for offence.
41What this letter captures, then, is the early sedimentation of an accusation that has become a central weapon in Hindutva’s rhetorical repertoire. Long before the assassinations of rationalists in Maharashtra and Karnataka—and the rise of slogans branding them as “toxic atheists”—the language of anti-Hindu bias and of rationalism-as-crypto-conversion had already begun to take shape. Punjab reveals this genealogy clearly: the idea that rationalists disguise their agendas and aim their critique at Hinduism while sparing others. Further, Hindutva actors perceive that rationalists do all this less from principle than from animus. Evidently, such notions were already present in these early complaints, etched in ink across the pages of letters.
- 19 Letter to Mittar dated 1-2-89.
42If suspicion and silence shadowed the rationalist project, the movement also attracted unexpected forms of devotion. One letter from a new “convert” traces a winding path: from idol-worship, via the reformist critique of the Arya Samaj, to an active embrace of rationalism and the willing performance of sacrilege.19 If earlier we saw rationalists accused of cowardice for failing to critique Sikhism, this reveals a different, but equally fraught, trajectory: the unexpected slide from Hindu revivalist reform to full rationalist defection. Here, the Arya Samaj—long cast by Hindu nationalists as a bulwark against Christian or Muslim conversion—becomes, ironically, a vestibule for atheism. A young man, once an idol-worshipping Hindu, recounts his passage through the Arya Samaj text Satyarth Prakash—(“The Light of Truth”, 1975 [1883]), an influential 19th-century work that condemned idolatry and priestcraft and called for a return to Vedic principles—into the bolder literature of Tarksheel. The gateway meant to purify Hinduism becomes, instead, a breach: a halfway house whose anti-idolatrous ethos is sharpened into disbelief:
Six months ago, I was a devout Hindu, a worshipper of idols. One day, I happened to come across a worn-out copy of the Arya Samaj book Satyarth Prakash. Many of its arguments, such as the rejection of idol worship and criticism of priests, resonated with me and seemed reasonable. That marked a turning point in my thinking…
For the past two months, I have been reading your [Mittar’s] books: …Te Dev Pursh Haar Gaye (Begone Godmen), Dev Daint Te Roohan? (God Demons & Spirits), Tarkbani (Rational Sermons), Tarkjyoti (Flame of Reason), Roshni (Light), and Bhootan Pretan Naal Yudh Kiven? (How We Fought Ghosts and Spirits?)… I am now almost completely rationalist in my outlook.
43The letter is a window into vernacular rationalist subject-formation and the layered genealogies that make the binary of “Hindu” versus “atheist” untenable. It offers proof of what Hindutva polemicists find threatening: that the rationalist subject may not be a Western-influenced outsider, but a product of intra-Hindu purification movements gone “too far”. As in the Netherlands, where Calvinist scrutiny of doctrine helped incubate Dutch atheism (Holland, 2019; see also Berlinerblau, 2017), the Arya Samaj’s text-bound, anti-idolatrous rigour can unintentionally prepare the ground for deeper unfaith. Indeed, the reader’s testimonial narrates just such a slide from sanctioned purification to unsanctioned doubt. The worn copy of Satyarth Prakash does not seal him within Hindu reformism; it sets him on a path toward Tarksheel literature and bolder sacrilege.
- 20 For full elaboration of this term, see forthcoming book Dissentiments: Non-Religion, Violence, and (...)
44In one episode, he and a friend urinate on a saint’s grave, a site where devotees light lamps and seek blessings. “Reading your books has significantly boosted our self-confidence,” he writes, “and nothing happened to us—nor will it”. His act echoes a genre of “rationalist sacrilege”20 practised as demonstrative unbelief rather than rage: a controlled affront calibrated to expose false miracles. Rather than simple desecration, such low-level but narratively potent sacrilege is feared because it unsettles the architecture of faith from within. Here, the urination, like the rationalist mocking of the memsahib statue, is less a performance of hatred than of refusal: a deflationary rite against what is locally experienced as a sanctified lie. The grave-urination story, then, is a tactical inversion of miracle-making: a counter-testimony against fear which embodies a practical atheism that is witnessed and contagious.
45The episode also troubles a foundational fiction voiced by the VHP and other Hindu nationalist organisations in respect of rationalists; viz., that they are either “pseudo-atheists” or fronts for conversion. Ironically, it is precisely because the writer reads the Arya Samaj that he ends up joining Tarksheel. If Hindutva groups claim that rationalism is a step on the road to Christianity or Islam, here it is the Arya Samaj—a proud fixture of Hindu nationalist history—that serves as the true threshold. Its legacy of purification sharpens into defection, its rejection of idol worship recharged into full non-belief. This is, of course, hardly accidental. The Arya Samaj’s internal ethic of anti-idolatry and textual devotion (Bayly, 2024) shares strong affinities with rationalism’s own stance against superstition and ritual excess. But where the Arya Samaj seeks to renew Hinduism from within, the rationalist movement radicalises that impulse until it breaches the boundary of belonging. The letter’s author is one such breacher: a product of what we might call over-successful purification.
46This vernacular defection from Hinduism via Arya Samaj reveals the discreet subversion at the heart of reformist revivalism. If Hindutva’s crematory logic seeks to cauterise all routes out of Hinduism, this letter discloses how some of those routes begin precisely in the folds of internal reform. What the Arya Samaj gathered under the sign of moral clarity, the rationalist movement carries forward as disbelief: an outcome neither intended nor easily contained. In Punjab’s tangled topography of pamphlet wars and devotional vigilantism, this remains the movement’s true offence: it refuses to stay where it began.
47If the letter from the former Arya Samaji showed that someone could move from Hindu reformism to rationalism, the following account traces that kind of shift in more detail and over a longer period. Indeed, the case of Manoj Malik, a former RSS volunteer who renounced the RSS to become a humanist organiser, offers an electrifying counter-narrative to mainstream Hindutva’s projection of ideological certainty. Rather than a sudden break, Malik’s departure from the RSS took shape as an accumulation of questions, doubts, irritations, and, above all, books.
- 21 “Dalit” is a term of self-identification adopted by those historically oppressed under the Hindu ca (...)
48Malik’s story unfolds across decades. Raised, once again, with Arya Samajist sensibilities—anti-idolatrous, caste-sceptical—he joined the RSS in 1995 and gradually rose through its ranks. For years, he repeated the familiar phrases: Hindu culture, appeasement, temple desecration, historical grievance. However, even at the height of his commitment, dissonance lingered. At a state-level meeting on Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) outreach, he asked who among the hundred and fifty assembled pracharaks (full-time RSS campaigners) came from a Dalit background.21 None did. “Roti-beti” (the sharing of food and kinship ties across caste), he proposed, needed to move beyond mere sloganeering: it needed enactment. The suggestion hung, unanswered.
- 22 Interview with Manoj Malik conducted in Mohali by Vishav Bharti, 12 June 2024. It was later transla (...)
49His shift began through reading. Savarkar’s neglected rationalism—mostly hidden from official hagiography—intrigued him. A copy of Jyotish Jhooth Bolta Hai (Mind Pollution of Fortune Telling), published by Tarksheel but read outside its orbit, ignited something deeper. From there, Malik wandered into Abraham Kovoor, Richard Dawkins, Bhagat Singh, Bertrand Russell, Hemant Mehta. One website led to another: freethinker.co.uk, infidels.org, humanist.org.uk. Books once distributed by him as an RSS educator were now replaced by essays on human development and scientific temper. Rationalism emerged through friction within rather than arriving from the outside, in Malik’s case as Arya Samajist purificatory zeal tipped into disbelief. Savarkar became a ghost in the archive: a figure whose atheism was hidden, whose Vigyanvadi Nibandh (Rationalist Essays) were, he discovered, quietly removed from the collected works. “Had the RSS followed Savarkar’s Hindutva,” Malik later remarked, “I might never have left”.22 But it had chosen a different path. The rationalist Savarkar—who declared cows useful rather than sacred, Vedas worthy of the museum rather than the future—had been buried under Brahmanical inheritance.
Figure 6. “Mittar responds to the miracle”.
“Dear Fellow Residents of Barnala, In your city of Barnala—and indeed in many other cities across Punjab—idols of Lord Ganesha are reportedly ‘drinking’ milk. You may be surprised by this phenomenon and wondering whether science can offer any explanation at all. But friends, that is not the case. Science has an answer for everything. Whatever is happening with these idols is entirely in accordance with the laws of science. Just as you may have seen a red-coloured toy (sold in shops) that appears to bounce continuously, or water from the ground reaching the tops of trees, the same kind of process is taking place in the case of the Ganesha idols. In English, this phenomenon is known as the capillarity effect. The finer the pores or cracks, the higher the liquid can rise above its original level. These idols too contain microscopic pores, invisible to the naked eye. Through these pores, milk or water is drawn upwards and eventually flows down into the plate below. To better understand such occurrences, you can refer to rationalist literature available at Punjab Book Depot, Navchetan Book Centre, or near the Bus Stand, Barnala. Finally, let us remind you that you have already dispelled many superstitions—like the worship of stoves as deities, miraculous appearances of hawks, or the belief that tea leaves can produce chapatis—with your scientific thinking. Try to understand this latest phenomenon too in the light of science. Always in service of the people, Megh Raj Mittar, President, Tarksheel Society Bharat.” A flyer, Barnala, 1995. Megh Raj Mittar Papers, Barnala.
Courtesy and copyright: Vishav Bharti. Translated from Punjabi by Vishav Bharti.
50What makes Malik’s testimony especially striking is its affective cadence. Rather than triumphalist, the tone is reflective and at times rueful. He speaks of shifting from Chandigarh to escape the awkwardness of having once sung ideological paeans to the very people he now seeks to dissuade. He avoids joining Tarksheel, wary of another creed. Instead, he becomes a humanist: centrist, mildly Savarkarite, critical of Islam but no less scathing of Hindutva spectacle. His readings become his conversion: towards refusal rather than to belief.
51If Hindutva imagines rationalists as corrupting intrusions, Malik’s journey discloses something more troubling: that the Sangh can incubate the very scepticism it seeks to suppress. The texts it half-admires—Savarkar’s essays, Bhagat Singh’s letters—carry dormant viruses of doubt. As in the earlier case, the Arya Samaj’s scriptural rigour tips into disbelief. Rather than a foreign pollutant, humanist atheism emerges from within the folds of Hindu revivalism itself, its critique forged less through disdain than through a desire to make Hinduism accountable to its own exalted claims. In this way, Malik’s story reveals a genealogy of defection born of over-consistency: the purification campaign that purifies itself out of the fold.
52Malik’s journey invites a further question. If the rationalist threatens the coherence of Hindu belonging by example as much as by departure, what happens when others begin to follow? In his own words, reflecting on his humanist outreach efforts: “Twenty children have embraced our ideology; 100 to 150 have been influenced by us”. The numbers are modest but the anxiety remains significant. The early encounters, then, consisted of internal fissures as much as external confrontations. Manoj Malik’s case refracts the very logic of Hindutva discipline, showing that what it frames as desecration may, in fact, be an unintended consequence of its own reformist inheritance.
53On that morning of 21 September 1995—the moment discussed at the outset—south Punjab was just one of many places where Ganesh appeared to consume milk. Across India and far beyond, temples became scenes of extraordinary fervour. From Delhi to Durban, devotees gathered to witness what many described as proof of divine presence: Ganesh idols “drinking” milk offerings. The phenomenon moved rapidly, propelled by television broadcasts and telephone rumours that pulsed through temple networks, with reports emerging from the USA, UK, Thailand, and Argentina (Vidal, 1998). What began as local rumour became, by midday, what anthropologists have called Hinduism’s first globalised miracle. It functioned as a kind of referendum: a test of the gods’ enduring presence in the world (Vidal, 1998). For leaders of the VHP and RSS, the miracle marked a turning: a “herald of a new era in Hinduism” (Tatke, 2020). Some of the earliest temples to report the event were operated by these groups, underscoring the ease with which devotional thrill could be folded into Hindutva affirmation.
54When Tarksheel intervened, as we described above, they disrupted more than the claim: they interrupted a fleeting public pleasure. What followed involved both fury and theatre. Posters denounced Mittar’s actions as a desecration. A Shiv Sena notice accused him of insulting Hindu feeling worldwide. In Dussehra processions, his name was paired with Ravana’s. But behind the familiar choreography lay a more intimate injury: Tarksheel’s demonstration had siphoned the pleasure from the event. Their intervention may be understood less as refusal than as theft. This is where Hansen’s (1999, 2001) Žižekian reading remains instructive. For Hindutva’s affective politics, the enemy is rarely a dispassionate denier. He is one who steals what others enjoy. In the moment of the Ganesh miracle, rationalists became such figures. They were seen to have reached into a communal intimacy and drawn its pleasure away.
- 23 See Mittar (1998b: 93).
55This dynamic shaped Hindutva’s rhetorical reversals. When Mittar explained the miracle through capillary action and surface tension (Figure 6), a local pro-Hindutva newspaper declared victory: “Since the idol has gulped down the milk offered, we have won”.23 Rationalist refutation was absorbed into a claim of divine triumph. The miracle became a field of possession, and to question it was to trespass. Scientific explanation, framed by rationalists as dispassionate analysis, was reclassified as affront. As critics of the rationalist movement argued at the time, Tarksheel’s interventions carried a tone of secular arrogance, a tone increasingly portrayed as foreign to Hindu sentiment and hostile to its expressions (see Nanda, 2025).
56By identifying Mittar as Ravana, Hindutva activists were staging his ritual destruction as a necessary purging of an ideological pollutant. This marked a performance of symbolic incineration: a figural prelude to the lethal attacks that would follow, a foreshadowing in fire of what would later be enacted through bullets and blades. It also mirrored how Narendra Dabholkar was vilified in Maharashtra for his organisation’s sceptical response to the same “miracle”. After his rationalist group, the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (ANiS), publicly challenged it, rumours spread that he had physically “attacked” Hindu idols, smashing them to pieces. Effigies of Dabholkar were burned, and notices circulated warning that his head would be smashed next (Dabholkar, 2018). The intensity of this response was part of a broader trajectory of escalating violence against rationalists. In Mangalore, rationalist leader Narendra Nayak was physically attacked while conducting a demonstration debunking the miracle, sustaining scalp wounds that required hospitalisation (Tatke, 2020). The message was clear: to interrupt Hindu nationalist pleasure was to commit an act of violence against Hinduism itself—and violence, in turn, would be its just reward. The Barnala confrontation mapped a structure of conflict that would recur in Punjab, even as it echoed a broader repertoire of retaliatory spectacle emerging across India.
- 24 Sarhad Kesri, 17 March 2008.
- 25 The Hindi word gherao literally means “encirclement”. In political and protest contexts, it refers (...)
- 26 Sarhad Kesri is a Hindi-language daily newspaper published in the Fazilka (Firozpur district) regio (...)
57In March 2008, Tarksheel activists in Fazilka became the focus of an intensifying clash with Hindutva groups. What began as a local protest against rationalist literature soon scaled into a state-wide agitation, with BJP leaders demanding a ban on Tarksheel books. The publications in question had circulated for decades without controversy but were now denounced as insults to Hinduism. BJP figures accused them of “misrepresenting Hindu scriptures and using abusive and derogatory language against Hindu gods and goddesses”.24 A combined strategy took shape: criminal charges were pursued while open threats were issued. Book burnings were staged, swords brandished, activists publicly assaulted, and offices vandalised. Gheraos25 and processions added to the sense of siege. Together, these tactics signalled a shift in Hindu nationalist tactics, one that sought to expel rationalist critique from the space of acceptable public discourse about Hinduism. As Sarhad Kesri26, the local Hindutva newspaper, warned, “The government will be responsible for any damage due to agitation if they don’t act within 15 days against those who insulted Hindu deities” (26 March 2008).
58The chapters included Surjit Talwar’s Ramayan Jhoot Boldi Hai (Ramayana Tells Lies) (Mittar, 1987), which questioned the plausibility of the Ramayana’s narratives and its moral framework; Bhagwan Ram-Charitar De Kujh Pahaelu (Some Aspects of Lord Rama’s Character) (Mittar, 1986), which interrogated Rama’s assassination of Bali and his treatment of Dalits; and Manusmriti Da Satyanaas (To Hell With Manusmriti) (Mittar, 1987), which attacked Brahmanical legal structures and caste hierarchies. Also targeted were Gita Tarak Di Kasauti Te (Gita: A Rationalist Analysis) (Mittar, 1987), which critiqued the Bhagavad Gita for legitimising caste oppression and violence, and a Punjabi translation of Abraham Kovoor’s Gods, Demons and Spirits (1985), which ridiculed mystical claims within Hindu theology. These texts—long overlooked by Hindu nationalist organisations—were now revived as provocations, treated as deliberate affronts to Hindu belief.
59From the outset, the confrontation turned less on rationalist argument than on the physical presence of the books themselves. Hindutva activists sought to erase them from public space. The struggle became one over the right of rationalist texts to exist. Pamphlets were photocopied and distributed at temples and marketplaces, reframed as dangerous artefacts or insurgent objects, stripped of their argumentative scaffolding and recirculated for effect. This mobilisation of text as threat reflects what Karin Barber (2007) describes as the performativity of text, with meaning, far from being fixed or activated through authorial intent, arising instead through circulation and selective emphasis.
- 27 Some of the organisations were listed by the Hindutva press: “Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, R (...)
60Under the direction of BJP MLA Surjit Kumar Jyani, thirty-seven Hindutva groups launched coordinated processions across Punjab.27 Roads were blocked and trains stopped. Booksellers were issued with direct threats. According to Sarhad Kesri (18 March 2008), the marchers were “carrying naked swords, tridents and other weapons. They had saffron scarves around their necks and slogans Har-Har Mahadev (Hail Lord Mahadev), Jai Shri Ram (Glory to Lord Ram) and Bajrang Bali Ki Jai (Victory to Lord Hanuman) being chanted by the youngsters were echoing in all four directions”. One leader warned that “the self-proclaimed rationalists will be taught lesson at their residences” (Sarhad Kesri, 26 March 2008). Another speaker announced that “this fire will cool down only after burning those who have been causing insult to Hindu deities as well as other religions.” Plans were laid to “march to Barnala to gherao (contain and immobilise) the publisher of the books against Hindu deities” (ibid). A separate article vividly depicts the “hurt” caused by the books, with Hindu women described as “weeping” upon hearing of the “insult to deities” and the “objectionable and obscene language used in the books published by Tarkbharti [Tarksheel] Publishers” (Sarhad Kesri, 26 March 2008). The president of a local VHP unit stated: “The way rationalists have spewed venom by printing derogatory remarks against our deities has hurt our religious feelings” (Jagbani, 24 March 2008).
61Multiple organisations had joined forces under the banner of the Hindu Dharam Raksha Manch. According to Dainik Jagran (16 March 2008), the Manch “threatened to set all the shops on fire which will try to sell the books published by the rationalists.” The Bajrang Dal called for “severe punishment” for the “writers and publishers of such books”, declaring that “no book seller will be allowed to sell rationalist literature.” The Manch also claimed that rationalists were working with foreign forces: “They are insulting Hindu deities and Hindu religion and converting people to atheism.” Mohinder Dhingra added: “It can’t be ruled out that rationalists are hand in glove with the Christian missionaries” (ibid).
- 28 However, the use of legal mechanisms against rationalists by Hindutva forces did not begin in 2008. (...)
62The 2008 book agitation thus once again exemplifies how the “law of force” has become a dominant mode of governance in India (Hansen, 2021), where political actors increasingly assert authority through public violence and coercion in tandem with the use of legal institutions. Hindutva forces moved ahead of the state, demanding a ban but also turning to intimidation and staging their own enforcement through public threat and physical assault. Protests once more took form in fire. The fire was theatre, but also threat: a way of staging what should follow. The idiom of combustion—so central to Dussehra’s pyrotechnics—returned, repurposed to immolate the rationalist word. On the legal front, the harassment of Punjabi rationalists follows a well-worn Hindutva script, with Section 295A of the Indian penal code, which deems “deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs” punishable by law, serving as the primary instrument. In January 2024, Tarksheel leaders Surjit Daudhar and Bhupinder Fauji were charged under section 295A for remarks questioning the existence of Ram, just as Hindutva forces were amplifying their Ram Mandir campaign. This was only the latest iteration of a strategy that had been sharpened during the 2008 agitation. Such efforts to regulate religious discourse form part of a broader ideological project to establish Hinduism as a monopolistic and exclusive epistemic domain. As Sharma (2015) notes, Hindutva’s ideological forebears, from Arya Samaj founder Dayananda Saraswati to Savarkar, sought to purify Hinduism of internal diversity, reducing it to a singular, textually codified essence. The contemporary use of de facto blasphemy laws continues this logic as a means of establishing Hindutva’s exclusive authority over what constitutes Hindu belief.28
63However, the attempt to criminalise rationalist literature did not go unchallenged. In Ferozepur, a mass mobilisation of over 10, 000 people—with support from unions and farmers groups, joined by local intellectuals—forced Hindutva groups onto the defensive. The protest shifted the debate from a Hindutva-driven moral panic to a confrontation over free expression and state complicity. Following the Ferozepur protests, Punjab’s SAD-BJP government quietly withdrew from enforcing the book ban. Although they had theatrically announced the prohibition in the state assembly (Vidhan Sabha), the legal case against the books was never pursued.
- 29 Punjab Vidhan Sabha, 20 March 2008. (Mr Speaker [Sardar Nirmal Singh Kahlon] in the Chair).
64The debate in the state assembly illustrated how readily the state aligned itself with Hindutva demands. Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal’s declaration that “action will be taken today itself ” was issued without any review of the books and without legal scrutiny. When a member noted that some of the texts had previously received government approval, the Transport Minister, Master Mohan Lal, responded: “These books have been duly approved by the Directorate of Public Instruction”.29 The government’s stance faltered, requiring quiet retreat in the days that followed.
65Lawfare did not displace threat but became one of its dialects. The charge was insult, but the true offence lay in perceived betrayal. Tarksheel, it was alleged, received foreign funding—Christian funding in particular—to weaken Hinduism from within. As in Maharashtra and Karnataka, rationalist critique was reframed as imported defection: a rejection dressed in the language of internal reform. In this script, to criticise was to convert, and to convert was to betray. Hindutva leaders accused Tarksheel of working “hand-in-glove with Christian missionaries.” The language of the press cast rationalist literature as destructive of Hindu sentiment and as weapons aimed at the Hindu religion. These framings reveal a deeper suspicion: that atheism functions less as a stance and more as a passage: an ideological bridge to non-Hindu affiliation. The atheist becomes one more figure in the roster of internal enemies: added to the lists that already include Christians, Muslims, secular liberals, and some Dalits. This is the terrain of crypto-conversion. The offence is not just what is said, but what it signals. The danger lies in what critique might become.
66The 2008 agitation against Tarksheel’s books formed part of a broader effort to control textual authority and eliminate works that challenge Hindu nationalist narratives. A similar logic shaped the legal campaign that led Penguin to pulp Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History in 2014, as well as attacks on historians such as D.N. Jha, whose work on beef consumption in ancient India has provoked violent threats. These incidents point to a form of censorship that goes beyond religious offence. The aim is to purge alternative accounts of Hinduism and assert a purified national culture (Doniger, 2011). In this sense, the agitation in Punjab served as one expression of Hindutva’s ongoing project to police the boundaries of legitimate knowledge by dictating what may circulate, and what must be withdrawn.
67The confrontation revealed the composite tactics Hindutva groups have used against Tarksheel: street performances, private pressure, abrupt legal summonses, and the fusing of devotional injury with criminal charge. But it also exposed the stakes of rationalist literature itself. Tarksheel was born through a translation: Kovoor’s book gave it both purpose and platform, and its success funded further publications. Books carried the society’s address; hence, letters followed and the replies formed relationships. Some of those who wrote went on to found local branches. In this way, literature was more than doctrine: it was infrastructure. Commentary on scripture doubled as a call for contact and the circulation of books became the circulation of affiliation. To attack the books was to strike at the medium that held the movement together. The texts carried offence, but also carried the means through which Tarksheel cohered and reproduced itself. To variously burn or ban them signalled more than outrage; it worked to dismantle the architecture through which the movement held together.
- 30 Punjab was then governed by a BJP-Shiromani Akali Dal alliance (see above on alliance politics).
68The 2008 confrontation also, of course, begs the question of why long-published texts suddenly became intolerable for local Hindu Right agitators. The answer lies in the nature of local Hindutva’s vernacular offence archaeology as the temporal structure at play in the 2008 flare-up. Rather than explaining the eruption in Fazilka through a change in leadership or the reappearance of forgotten books, the notion of “offence archaeology”—originally coined by De Boer (2017)—helps us situate it as an instance of Hindutva’s recursive, self-replicating timework: a form of moral mobilisation that depends on the periodic excavation of older texts to generate fresh wounds. For his part, Mittar (2018) reflects on the case with a characteristically direct answer: “In Punjab, ‘their’ government was in power and the local MLA also belonged to the BJP. So, they decided to teach a lesson to the rationalists.”30 At one level, this does indeed explain a lot: the permission structure is present, providing political cover for a local leader to stir the pot, seeking to make a name for himself.
69But the more telling answer is that Hindutva’s moral guardians periodically excavate dormant provocations to re-energise their own coherence. This is offence archaeology: the deliberate exhumation of texts or gestures that have long circulated without incident, so that fresh offence can be performed as an urgent new laceration. This explains why old rationalist books can pass unnoticed for decades and then be declared suddenly intolerable, and also why the movement must constantly manage this ambient risk. While the text on the face of it may “offend”, the act of staging its offensive potential is itself a ritual for Hindutva’s local moral consensus. In temporal terms, this is parallel to other moral policing economies: past statements are re-surfaced and re-dramatised as present crisis, producing cycles of retraction and punishment. In response, Hindutva’s fantasy is crematory rather than corrective. If no admission is offered, the only acceptable resolution is the annihilation of the text and the speaker alike. To burn the book is to cauterise the wound.
70Punjab offers a layered and unsettled terrain of affiliation. Sikh institutions exert enduring authority, but they do so alongside Hindu formations, Sant-led networks, various caste movements (especially Scheduled Caste and Jat-related) and organisations shaped by the Left. These elements jostle and sometimes adopt one another’s languages. Tarksheel took shape within this ferment as part of a contested field of devotion and dissent. Its interventions have drawn fire from multiple directions, yet its persistence reflects the tenacity of plural infrastructures within Punjab’s public sphere.
71Within this context, Hindutva moves through varied expressions across idiom and mode of action. Hansen writes of Hindu nationalism as a formation that draws strength from the cultural sensibilities and everyday moral concerns of many Indians, proceeding through the emotive and moral world of everyday life (Hansen, 1999). The vernacular proves central to this world: it allows for the staging of injury and the defence of imagined boundaries against certain forms of enemies. This moral and affective project is sustained by a decentralised network of organisations, each embedded in its own setting yet bound by shared principles (Jaffrelot, 1996). The Sangh Parivar’s influence derives from the network of organisations that the RSS has patiently developed over the decades. This “tentacular movement” (Mohammad-Arif and Naudet, 2020: 5) includes regional language publications and cultural fronts that generate their own provocations and patterns of escalation whilst amplifying central concerns. Through such means, Hindutva becomes localised: capable of responding to specific histories while drawing on a wider repertoire of offence and moral claim.
72The treatment of rationalists reveals the Hindu Right’s enduring anxieties about epistemic authority and belonging. Rationalists are cast as “degenerate insiders”—figures who have strayed instead of entirely departing—suggesting that Hindu nationalist groups engage in a form of secularised blasphemy regulation. The earliest accusations levelled against rationalists in Punjab were of insensitivity: a refusal to spare Hindu sentiment from mockery or moral exposure. Such claims of injury, as we have seen, would later harden into allegations of betrayal and crypto-conversion, creating complex modes of what might be termed antagonistic symbiosis or constitutive rivalry between atheism and religious conversion, and between organisations like the Arya Samaj or RSS and rationalist thought.
73Crucially, Hindutva perceives atheism as inherently unstable: a passage to different forms of defection rather than an autonomous position. In this view, unbelief must lead somewhere: to Christianity, for instance, or some other form of anti-Hindu allegiance. Rationalists become particularly dangerous because they reveal that Hindu identity is neither essential nor immutable. The Hindu Right’s claim that Hindu civilisation is eternal and uninterrupted faces refutation simply through rationalists’ existence. Their presence suggests that Hindu identity represents a choice—and choices can be unmade.
74The response of dominant tendencies within Hindutva extends beyond defending religious belief to consolidating epistemic authority. Sharma (2015) argues that these tendencies seek to stabilise Hindu identity as a fixed and exclusive formation. Drawing on forbears such as Dayananda Saraswati and Vivekananda, proponents aim to eliminate ambiguity, casting Hindu identity as singular and unchallengeable. Rationalist critique disrupts this by exposing Hindu belonging as contingent and ideologically produced. As Sloterdijk (2009) suggests, zeal systems strive to assert their own truth and erase alternatives. Hindutva shares this drive for interpretive dominance as a political project of epistemic enclosure distinct from theological monotheism. The rationalist appears less as dissenter than as contaminant: someone whose existence renders Hindu identity optional and thus unstable.
75Fire assumes central importance in this logic of purification. In local Hindu nationalist groups’ deployment against Tarksheel activists, fire signifies moral disinfection, performing re-consecration of Hindu space through the staged effacement of contamination—a logic that extends from rationalist texts to those who authored them. As Arnold (2021) argues, cremation in Hindu nationalism signifies sovereignty over memory. By burning books and threatening rationalists with the same fate as Ravana, Hindutva activists seek to ensure that dissenters leave no ideological remains. This represents the cremation of dissent itself, reducing rationalist thought to ashes before it can take root. While cremation has historically marked belonging, with Hindu leaders’ ashes preserved as sites of memory, these Hindutva mobilisations seek to deny rationalists even this afterlife. Beyond mere refutation, their critiques must be eliminated in order to ensure Hindutva remains unchallenged.
- 31 For the specific case of Maharashtra, see Chapter 3 of Dissentiments: Non-Religion, Violence, and t (...)
76The Punjab case contributes to our understanding of this zeal’s regional calibration. While in Maharashtra the solution took the form of spectacular elimination—gunshots that silenced high-profile figures—in Punjab the method remains attritional.31 Both approaches are driven by similar logics: to foreclose rationalism as a public stance and transmute sceptical inquiry into dangerous speech. Epistemological policing masquerades as devotional defence. Legal instruments like Section 295A of the Indian penal code become tools for this ritualised purification. The past is mined for potential insults, which are then summoned forward as if newly inflicted. Rationalists live in the anticipatory shadow of being declared injurious.
77As Sheahan (2022) observes, offence archaeology operates through ideological totalism. No statement, however old, remains exempt from re-evaluation. Hindutva’s “vernacular” version of this draws on dual registers: a drive to defend the dominant religious order coupled with a claim to protect vulnerable, victimised Hindus from psychic injury. The rationalist is thereby cast as both heretic and violator, and the movement’s back catalogue an archive of possible insults: always available for purification by threat or flame. This logic of totalism shares an affinity with what Sloterdijk (2016) termed “total membership”: the demand for absolute coherence in belonging, where deviation cannot be tolerated as partial difference but only as categorical betrayal. In this light, offence stems less from the book itself than from the incompleteness of the speaker’s inclusion, and thus, cremation, more than simply correction, becomes the required resolution.
78In this cosmology, the rationalist desecrates instead of merely erring, becoming a kind of negative mirror through which Hindutva formations rehearse their boundaries. This explains why Tarksheel is treated as more than a set of ideas; instead, it is experienced as an irritant archive, a continual reminder that Hindu identity represents a choice. What is defended through fire, then, extends beyond sentiment to encompass the claim to ontological inevitability. Hindutva’s zeal requires the appearance that no alternative ever spoke.
79Punjab’s rationalist disputes become a window onto the labour through which religious nationalism sustains its moral coherence. If zeal flourishes through adversarial containment, then the rationalist—part doubter, part possible defector—appears doubly hazardous. Scepticism functions as a fragile interval whose resolution remains vigilantly policed as opposed to a terminal condition. To revisit this tension is to grasp how acts of doubt gently prise open the seams of an ideology that must appear seamless while provoking rebuttal.
80This essay has shown that Hindutva-Tarksheel conflict in Punjab constitutes neither aberration nor minor episode. It illustrates the affective and epistemic infrastructures of religious nationalism in regional form: how offence and dissent are staged and contained, and how the borders of belonging are ritually redrawn. Over and above suppressing debate, the crematory disciplining of rationalist thought seeks to prevent certain things from even being posed as questions. Against this, the rationalist’s insistence on explanation remains precarious but persists.
81What emerges here therefore extends beyond a regional footnote to India’s history of religious nationalism. By treating rationalist dissent as an irritant lodged within Hindutva’s moral imaginary instead of a detached counter-force, this discussion reframes how unbelief is capable of unsettling communal coherence from within. Punjab thus illuminates how religious nationalism patrols its own porous edges, crafting limits that hinge on disciplining doubt into near-invisibility.