Savitri Devi The European Nazi Mother of Hindu Nationalism.

Jahangir Mohammed of the Ayaan Institute traces the links between European fascism and Hindutva nationalism and argues that those whose ideas are rooted in constructing a society based on racial hierarchy and racial supremacy will always feel threatened by Islam and Muslims whose beliefs and values are fundamentally opposed to such ideas.

There are rumours that  Tommy Robinson has been invited to visit India later this year by Hindutva nationalists. What affinity could a White far-right nationalist have with Indian Hindutva nationalists? Well for one, Hindutva is a fascist (far-right) ideology, and a lot of hatred for Islam and Muslims comes out of India these days. Robinson also actively promoted Hindutva propaganda against Muslims during the disorder between Hindu and Muslim communities in Leicester in 2022.

There is already a confluence of narratives around Muslims and Islam between White Nationalists and Hindutva Nationalists on social media. This poses a danger of an alliance between the two which has already impacted Muslim communities and community cohesion in countries like the US, Canada, and the UK.

The right-wing neo-conservative think tank the Henry Jackson Society appears to be allying with Hindutva Nationalism in the UK against the Muslim community, under the guise of combatting “Islamism” after Hindutva sparked disorder in Leicester in 2022. Also, during this summer’s anti-Muslim pogroms in the UK, Hindutva social media accounts and trolls were again active in spreading disinformation about Muslims.

The Influence of European Fascism on Hindutva

European fascism inspired the father of Hindutva ideology Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. This has been well documented, and we have previously written about it. What is less well known is that a French woman of English/Greek heritage, Maximine Julia Portaz aka Savitri Mukherjee Devi developed a fusion between Nazi Aryan supremacy and Hindu supremacy. She can be considered the mother of Hindutva nationalism.

More alarmingly Savitri Devi’s ideas are increasingly assuming importance in the media of White supremacist networks of the Alt-Right in the US, but also of those likeminded thinkers such as René Guénon (before he adopted Islam, and became Abdulwahid Yahya), Julius Evola, Miguel Serrano, and Koenraad Elst.

In 2022, Counter-Currents a website dedicated to white nationalism in the US published a tribute to Devi on her birth anniversary which they remember each year, and linked a list of her works. To mark her 100^th birth anniversary in 2011, they also published a glowing tribute to her life and philosophy.  Greg Johnson the White nationalist who founded Counter-Currents maintains a website that details her life and works, and her name crops up from time to time in other far-right and Nazi outlets. The MAGA movement in the USA is linked to Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon and is also rooted in White Nationalism (called White nativism).

Maximine Julia Portaz was a Nazi who became attracted to Brahmin Hinduism which she deemed to be the purest form of the Aryan race. She considered the hierarchy of the Hindu caste system as the best form of racial organisation of a society. Like Koenraad Elst, a Flemish nationalist who was an adherent to the Hindutva ideology, Devi promoted the mythical notion of indigenous Aryanism, also known as the indigenous Aryans theory (IAT) or the out-of-India theory (OIT). This is the belief that the Aryan master race is indigenous to India and the Indo-European Aryan languages radiated out from their homeland in India into regions of Europe such as Greece and Germany. Elst is considered an Islamophobe, and mass murderer Anders Brevik was known to have referred to his works.

An Ideology of Racial Supremacy

Devi was a complex character who combined ideas of paganism, fascism, esoteric Hitlerism (a belief in Nazi occult/mysticism), national socialism, antisemitism, ancient paganism, Hindu nationalism, vegetarianism, animal rights, and ecology.

She moved to India in 1930 and spent her time developing and promoting Hindu Nationalism (Hindutva), creating a fusion between Hindutva with Nazi ideology and politics. She collaborated with the Hindu Mission a centre for Hindu nationalist campaigning and missionary activity. The politicisation of India’s vast range of religious/spiritual beliefs into a single Hindu religion started under the British Raj. The Hindutva movement developed those ideas into Hindu nationalism. They argued that the Hindus were the true heirs of the Aryans of the Indic civilisation, and that India was a Hindu nation in which Muslims and Christians were alien invaders. During her 18 months at the Mission, Devi was influenced by the Hindutva ideas of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.

Devi then developed what the British had started and the ideas of Savarkar in his “Who is a Hindu” and Hindutva. The Hindu Mission published Devi’s book “A Warning to the Hindus”  in 1939, with a foreword by Ganesh Damodar Savarkar (brother of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar). In it, she outlines her ideas on how India needed to become a unified Hindu nation. She alerted Hindus to what she saw as the threat of submergence and cultural alienation, which she saw as resulting from the disproportional growth of the Muslim population in India (a common trope of racial nationalists in India and the far right in the West even today). Like Savarkar, she saw Christianity as a threat to Hindu unity, but also as a Jewish perversion. She talks about Hindudom and how India is the last great country of the Aryan civilisation of “Aryan tongue and taste.” She stated  “The last stronghold of living Aryan Paganism: India. But how long is India going to last? That is to say: how long is Hindudom going to last in India?”.

As an outspoken Nazi, she criticizes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as creedal religions, for being narrowly anthropocentric (human beings are seen as the most important of creation), in contrast with Hinduism, which is presented as biocentric (viewing all living beings as having equal importance). An extension of her beliefs and vegetarianism was her view that taking animal life should be punished with execution. That of course happens in India today, where Muslims are being killed by cow vigilantes for trading in or consuming beef.

Devi considered Adolf Hitler to have been an Avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu (within the Hindu context an Avatar is the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god- for Devi Hitler was a deity in human form). She viewed Hitler as being sent as a sacrifice for humanity that would end the worst world age, the dark age of Kali Yuga, which she argued was induced by the Jews, whom she saw as representing the powers of evil (Kali Yuga is the fourth and shortest age or cycle when religious and political leaders instead of promoting virtue become the chief criminals of society). For the Nazis, the Jews were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy and a source of evil. Devi believed the caste system, by forbidding intermarriage between castes, had preserved the pure Aryan race in India. She argued Hindus were the true heirs of the Aryans and that India was a Hindu nation that would resurrect the ancient pure Aryan civilization. Some of these ideas of a dark age and a momentous struggle against the forces of darkness, with the emergence of a new Aryan civilisation, can be found among White nationalist narratives in the US.

In 1940, Devi married Asit Krishna Mukherji, a Hindu nationalist Nazi sympathiser who had praised the Third Reich and saw commonalities between the goals of the Hitler Youth and the youth movement of Hindu nationalism, the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh (RSS). Mukherji was later discovered to be spying for the Japanese against the Allied forces.

Links with Global National Socialists and British Fascism.

With the defeat of Nazi Germany and the death of Hitler, Devi became disillusioned and adjusted her beliefs, claiming that Hitler was not the predicted Avatar to lead the world out of darkness, but only someone who was paving the way for the arrival of the final Avatar. She returned to Europe and the UK after obtaining a British passport. Devi developed links with Neo-Nazi/far-right groups. In the UK Devi became close to Neo-Nazi activist Colin Jordan of the British National Socialist Movement and his wife Françoise Dior the Neo-Nazi niece of the famous fashion designer Christian Dior.

In 1962, Devi helped found the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS) with Colin Jordan through which she met George Lincoln Rockwell, the longest-serving leader of the American Nazi Party. When she passed away in 1982 her ashes were buried next to him in the USA. Jordan and Devi were associates of John Tyndall of the British National Front whose activities and “Paki bashing” in the 1970s and 1980s, many first generations of Asian migrants remember. Jordan and Tyndall were both neo-Nazis who focused their activities on Jews and immigrants. However, the National Front found the new Race Relations laws difficult to navigate when it came to race hate.

The National Front eventually became the British National Party (BNP) first under Tyndall’s leadership but was replaced by Nick Griffin in 1999. Griffin switched the focus of the BNP towards being more of an anti-Muslim party, mainly because the Race Relations laws did not cover religion, and partly to make it more electable in the aftermath of 911 when being anti-Islam and anti-Muslim became an acceptable prejudice and targets (The Human Rights Act covering religion only came into force in 2000 and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act only came into force in 2007).

It was under Griffin that the first anti-Muslim marches/riots occurred in the North of England in 2001 boosting the electoral fortunes of the BNP. Griffin and the BNP were the first far-right party to have electoral successes, even gaining two seats in the European Parliament in 2009 (including Griffin). Griffin and the BNP made anti-Muslim narratives mainstream. Eventually, a former member of the BNP Tommy Robinson created the English Defence League taking up the far-right anti-Muslim agenda with Britain First, while UKIP and Nigel Farage mainstreamed the anti-migration narrative (now Reform).

Why Do They Hate Islam and Muslims So Much?

The War on Terror has fuelled so much anti-Islam and anti-Muslim prejudice and narratives in the last 23 years that it is now mainstream and there is no longer a need for a far-right party in the UK. However, the vitriol against Muslims that comes out of White, Hindu, and Jewish supremacists/Zionists is at a completely different level.

After a considered analysis and reflection, we consider this hate the result of differences between political ethics, values, and vision for society (whilst it has a racial dimension).

A Hindutva nationalism constructed out of European racial fascism and Brahmin elitism, rooted in a belief in a hierarchical caste system, with Muslims and Christians outside the lowest caste, will always feel politically threatened by those whose fundamental religious and political values embrace the notion of racial equality, multi-cultural society and justice between rich and poor. In India, the greatest vitriol among Hindutva nationalists is directed at Muslims, Christians, and Dalits, but also to a lesser extent against communists/leftists because they believe in equality and reject a society based on racial hierarchy.

The same can be said for Zionist/Jewish supremacists in Israel whose propaganda wings spend time and resources demonising and dehumanising Islam and Muslims (under the smear/charge of Islamist, Islamism, extremism, Islamo/left alliance) because they oppose the political ideology of Jewish supremacy and its practice of racial apartheid in Israel.

Unlike past Islamic societies, European societies have little historical political experience of multicultural society based on racial or religious differences (even the Jews were not tolerated) except as colonial masters/supremacists.

White nationalist supremacy is fundamentally opposed to a multi-racial and multi-cultural society. It seeks the preservation of racial hierarchy and an end to any attempts at racial harmony and multi-culturalism in Europe or the UK (this agenda extends to neo-conservative think tanks and right-wing politics). Among Muslim communities in the West, they see vast racial and cultural diversity and feel threatened by it. They reference past Christian society not as a commitment to Christian belief, but as an identity marker of past White mono-cultural and White societies. In the USA, this hostility extends to any left, liberal, critical race theory, and a non-existent Marxist ideology in government that preaches racial equality and multiculturalism.

Whilst past Islamic states and empires were not perfect, and racism (even structural) and slavery certainly existed; no one can deny that the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ unequivocally made racial/tribal inequality and racial supremacy haram. Of course, it is expected that those who hold the opposite ideas and values would hate Islam and Muslims for that more than others and see them as threats.

In the UK, the White nationalists cannot reverse the makeup of British societies by repatriation as once demanded. They now adopt other tactics on the streets as seen in this summer’s attacks on Muslims. However, they also have a mainstream political strategy to target Muslims through policy and legislation. The goal was well stated by Douglas Murray in 2006  when he called for conditions to be made “harder across the board” for Muslims in Europe.

In India, Hindutva nationalists eliminate or marginalise Muslims through violence on the streets, legislation, and even the use of the Police and the RSS paramilitary to dispense vigilante “justice.”  It is therefore not surprising that nationalism and nationalists rooted in racial supremacy find common ground against Islam and Muslims. This summer’s attacks against Muslims should not have been a surprise to anyone.