If you pay attention to the grainy details Anand presents, you will know that the murders of rationalists and attacks on activists critical of the government, the attacks on Muslims and Dalits in the name of cow protection, attempts at distorting history, the targeting of university students under the guise of sedition, are not disparate events. The connections are deep, intricate and frightening. Behind all these lies a well-organised and concerted effort to entrench a narrowly defined Hinduism or Hindutva as the dominant ideological force in our society. The BJP government and the Narendra Modi phenomenon is a product of these processes and is in turn helping to expedite them.

At the head of this effort is an organisation called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a self-proclaimed cultural organisation working towards organising Hindus. Organise Hindus? Very well. Against whom though? Attempting to answer this question, Anand takes us back into India’s colonial past. The encounter between the East and the West had set off a train of ideas and practices that promised to free women and subordinate castes from the throngs of Brahminical oppression. The resultant insecurities among upper caste Hindus, combined with increasing self-organisation of Muslims, produced such anxieties among the former that led them to redefine Hinduism as Hindutva.

According to Anand, the redefinition and subsequent efforts to organise Hindus along such lines marked an attempt to cage a fluid, multi-dimensional culture into a narrowly defined “divine” agenda pitched in opposition to “reason”. Over the decades since independence, as that agenda has found takers in the nooks and crannies of our society, the RSS has managed to infiltrate institutions such as the police force, and are working hard to establish themselves in educational institutions in the guise of curbing the “anti-national” tendencies of students of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad Central University and the Film and Television Institute of India. Importantly, it is no longer the RSS alone that works towards such ends. Organisations such as Abhinav Bharat and Sanatan Sanstha, the film tells us, may be smaller in scale but have struck deep roots at local levels.

Do not underestimate the power and reach of militant Hindutva, Anand seems to tell us again and again. The murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, Gauri Lankesh and M.M. Kalburgi, the appropriation of Shivaji by Hindutva, the attacks on Dalits in Una, the lynching of Akhlaq, the botched investigation of the Malegaon blasts and the suspicious death of police officers such as Hemant Karkare (who was on the verge of nailing down Abhibav Bharat for those blasts), all point to the fact that the tentacles of Hindutva have spread far and wide. These are all singular episodes in the battle between “divinity” and “reason”; one that seems to be perpetually unfolding in and around us and one that is yet to reach a definite result. We are already part of the battle and it is up to us to fight it well, the film suggests.

Through a masterful juxtaposition of the multiple sites where the battle has been taking place, Anand produces a sense of urgency that is bound to leave its mark on the viewer. We find his camera in streets, in meetings and public gatherings of the Hindutva organisations, in press conferences, in police stations, in private homes of activists under attack and in the memorial meetings of Kalburgi and Pansare. Soon after we hear Narendra Dabholkar’s wife commenting on her late partner’s life-long commitment to the common people, we are taken to a public meeting where Hindutva hardliners proclaim that people like Dabholkar were enemies of Hinduism because they campaigned against blind faith and superstition and therefore deserved to be killed. We even find ourselves at a press conference in Mumbai where the Sanatan Sanstha, eager to deny any involvement in the attacks on activists, threatened to physically assault Anand and “break his bones” unless the police did so!