Political Hinduism expanded by assimilating its own fiercest critics posthumously.

Evidence

In 1947 Pakistan became the world’s first Islamic republic. More than six decades later, as the War on Terror continues in its many avatars, political Islam is turning inwards, narrowing and hardening its precincts. Meanwhile, political Hinduism is expanding and broadening. Today, even the Bhakti movement has been ‘assimilated’ as a form of popular, folk Hinduism. The naram dal, often dressed up as ‘secular nationalism’, has recruited Jotiba Phule, Pandita Ramabai and even Ambedkar, all of whom denounced Hinduism, back into the ‘Hindu fold’ as people Hindus can be ‘proud’ of. Ambedkar is being assimilated in another way too—as Gandhi’s junior partner in their joint fight against untouchability. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 428

Categorization

• XREF: The absorption of radical critics into the very tradition they denounced parallels how religious orthodoxy co-opts iconoclasts, similar to how caste reform figures get sanitized in mainstream nationalist histories. — connects to: Hindutva’s universal claim must annihilate whatever disrupts its completion — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1243
• QUESTION: How exactly does the RSS-affiliated naram dal recruit Phule, Ramabai, and Ambedkar rhetorically given these figures explicitly denounced Hinduism?