The concept of Hindutva, as put forth by V.D. Savarkar in his 1923 treatise Hindutva—Who is a Hindu?, is used by contemporary Hindu nationalist groups within the Sangh Parivar as both an idealised, essential quality of national identification, and as a rallying point around which political discourse is mobilised. Because the Hindutva is not stable, the attempts made to present it as a concrete quality of the Nation are in itself phantasmic; the spectre here—which is cultivated from Savarkar's ideals into the contemporary nationalist themes—is a homogeneous Hindu identity, a universal ideal in which 'true' Hindu values and culture, shaped by the discourse of Hindu nationalism, are exemplified through Hindutva. Passages from Hindu Nationalist literature that refer to it as 'the great nationalist ideology', 'inherently secular', and 'a way of life' continually reinscribe Hindutva as a focal point in political discourse. This phantasm of 'Hinduness' is an impossible site of identification which reveals the disparity between India's conceptualisation of its pluralistic nature and historically motivated reaction to the identity of the 'other'.