10.21587/jsas.2021.27.2.001

After being elected as Prime Minister of Inida in 2014, the first official and diplomatic act of Narendra Modi was to urge the United Nations member states to declare June 21st ‘International Day of Yoga’. The Modi government's efforts to establish International Yoga Day in 2014 and inscribe yoga on the Representative List of UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016 were due to the fact that yoga has been an attractive strategic resource that cannot be missed in economic, diplomatic and political contexts. Since the early days of the Modi regime, yoga has been used in India to solidify the supreme ideology of Hindu culture called ‘Hindutva’. In India, yoga is being used in a project to make India a Hindu State by locating religious minorities such as Muslims outside the national boundary through the ‘politicization of yoga’ by the Hindu right wing. This article attempts to ‘contextualize’ and analyze the series of achievements in India and abroad surrounding yoga and the political aspects associated with yoga within the discourse of ‘soft Hindutva cultural nationalism’. The purpose of this research is to analyze the politicization of yoga in the socio-political process and reinforcement process for national identity in which yoga is appropriated for the Hindu nationalist agenda in the political context of a series of anti-Muslim right-wing movements that have been mobilized since Modi, a right-wing Hindu politician, became Prime Minister of India in 2014. To be specific, this article pays attention to the relationship between a series of cultural and political events in which yoga was mobilized, such as the 1st International Yoga Day in 2015, conducted under thorough planning and directing, and the political discourse related to yoga practice. This study is also interested in elucidating the close relationship between yoga and Hinduism and revival. This study explores that the political appropriation of yoga by Hindu nationalist political forces is characterized as anti-Muslim and cultural nationalist political act for the Hinduization of the country.