The VHP’s core mission was ‘to bring sadhus, sants and mahatmas of various sects on one platform’,81 thus uniting all those ‘sampradayas [religious denomination and sects] that originated in India’.82 Like with Savarkar’s formulation of Hindutva, this included traditional Hinduism as well as Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism, but excluded Christianity and Islam. The aim was to solve the problem of ‘authority’ in Hinduism by creating, for the first time, a Hindu Vatican.
