Skip to main content

From Vote Bank to Identity Bank


Poverty has many uses.  One is that the poor can be made vote banks easily.  Many political parties have ascended the stairs of power by bribing the poor with gifts during election time.  The Congress is one party that now carries the charge of having used the entire poor of the country as vote banks through what is rather imaginatively called “appeasement”.

When the Congress and other political parties stand accused of having “appeased” the poor, the new dispensation is proving that it is indeed “a party with a difference.”  It is not using the poor as a vote bank; it is wrenching their religious identity from them.

Rulers with imperial ambitions have always used the strategy of stripping people of their religious identities.  The Muslim conquerors and the Christian imperialists found their own unique ways of implementing religious conversion in regions captured by them.  While the former relied on brute force, the latter made use of gentler missionaries. 

The reigning BJP and its allies are now employing a mix of both force and lure to convert the poor belonging to minority communities into Hinduism.  A few hundred (the number varies in the media reports) Muslims in Uttar Pradesh have been converted with the lure of money, residential flats, aadhar cards and other enticements.  The strategy is also being employed in Bihar and West Bengal.  Soon it will spread its tentacles to other states where poverty is rampant.

The BJP is not hankering after votes since it already enjoys a “brute majority” (an interesting phrase) in the Lok Sabha and is confident of winning such majority in coming elections thanks to the popularity of the Prime Minister who is all set to become the Time’s Man of the Year.  What the BJP wants is not votes but identities.  Ever since the inception of the Jana Sangh, the Sangh Parivar’s primary concern has always been the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra in India.  The infinity of social identities (religious, cultural, linguistic, regional, and even racial) in India always circumscribed such an irrational ambition. 

Empires overcome obstacles through marauding strategies. The religious conversions sponsored by the Parivar belong to those strategies and effectively utilise the imperial ambitions that underpin Mr Modi’s personality.  Mr Modi and the Parivar feed on and nourish each other. 

Will they be successful, however?  The poor are as malleable and ductile as gold.  Their identity can be placed on the anvil again and again and beaten into many shapes and designs (and distortions too).  Such works of craftsmanship may help to inflate certain figures in the country’s Census.  Will it create any genuine Hindu or Hindustani?  Can people’s hearts and souls be reshaped under the hammer?

More importantly, will the Parivar actually succeed in its ambition to create a Hindu Rashtra with a monolithic Hinduism?  Already south Indian leaders like Vaiko have raised the banner of dissension.  He has made it clear that he won’t support the Parivar’s plans to Sanskritise India and impose one region’s culture over the entire country.  Will Kerala embrace the Parivar’s dreams?  What about the North-east?


Ultimately, a few thousand poor people mostly in North India will end up struggling to absorb a new religious identity.  That’s the only major difference that “the party with a difference” will make, it seems. 

Comments

  1. Its hopes and only wishes turned into hopes that we have ..... Loved the "the poor are as malleable and ductile as gold"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One person's hope is another's nemesis in a man-eat-man world of jingoism and capitalism yoked together with a dictator holding the rein.

      Delete
  2. The poor are as malleable and ductile as gold. This is right but why should take it on today's scenario only and for RSS only ? Long ago earlier when most of the Hindus were poor ( still they are ) what the missionaries and Islam fundamentalist did ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yogi, yours is the typical sort of logic that goes above my head which is proudly rational :) When I say "elephant" you hear (or choose to hear) "rhinoceros".

      Please read the article again and see whether your comment is related to it.

      Anyway, since you raise the issue...

      1. Wherever Christianity took roots it brought education and healthcare. Look at the number of Christian schools and colleges and other educational institutions as well as hospitals, all run very efficiently providing state of the art service to society, in Kerala and the North-east where Christianity has a significant hold.

      2. When did Muslims ever have power in India except till the Mughal empire? In the days of Kings and Emperors which common man benefited irrespective of religion? Did the Muslim in India benefit from the Islamic reigns?

      3. Once India became democratic and independent, did Christianity or Islam have any power in Delhi so that they could do anything to anybody?

      4. Don't tell me that 827,578,868 Hindus in India are facing the threat of extinction from 138,188,240 Muslims or 24,080,016 Christians or even from both of them together (which would still be less than a quarter of the Hindu population). [All figues from http://censusindia.gov.in/(S(1l34d145aeludfaekj0mrhjv))/Census_And_You/religion.aspx]

      5. Even if the Hindus in India did suffer because of certain skewed policies of previous govts, does the solution lie in repeating the mistakes of the past?

      There are far too many questions raised by your comment than I can answer here.

      Delete
  3. History across the globe down the centuries is replete with such similar events in the past, Cultural cannibalisation and coersion existed from time immemorial.Sacred books of religions are replete with the narration of such events.Humanity over the centuries prevailed in its endeavour to progress and thats how the civilization grown across the region. Any act of history is evaluated by the test of time.Civilizations took birth ,grew, existed and many dont exist now.So too languages.Change in nature is imperative and humanity will continue to evolve alongside with and despite culture, religion,politics,science and technology.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. While history can throw much light in understanding the present, we should not forget that the present is much different from the past. Technology has make too much difference. Hence the India of 2014 is infinitely different from that of 1857 when the first War of Independence began. A thousand times different from 1947. And quite different from a few months back when Mr Modi had not been crowned the Emperor.

      Delete
  4. Great post!
    Would u like2follow each other on GFC ?

    www.ananyatales.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Face of the Faceless

“When you choose to fight for truth and justice, you will have to face serious threats.” Sister Rani Maria, the protagonist of the movie, is counselled by her mother in a letter. Face of the Faceless is a movie that shows how serious those threats are. This movie is a biopic. It shows us the life of a Catholic nun who dedicated her life to serve some Adivasis of Madhya Pradesh [MP] and ended up as a martyr. If it were not a real story, this movie would have been an absolute flop. Since it is the real story of not only a nun but also the impoverished and terribly exploited Adivasis in a particular village of MP, it keeps you engrossed. It is a sad movie, right from the beginning to the end. It is a story of the good versus evil, the powerless versus the powerful, the heroic versus the villainous, the divine versus the diabolic. Having said that, I must hasten to add one conspicuous fact: the movie does not ever present Christianity or its religious practices as the only right way

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart

All the light we cannot see

Book Review Title: All the light we cannot see Author: Anthony Doerr Publisher: Fourth Estate, London, 2014 Pages: 531 What we call light is just a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most part of the electromagnetic spectrum remains beyond ordinary human perception. Such is human life too: so many of its shades remain beyond our ordinary perception and understanding. Anthony Doerr’s novel, All the light we cannot see , unravels for us some of the mysterious shades of human life. Marie-Laure LeBlanc leaves Paris with her father Daniel who is entrusted with the task of carrying a rare diamond, Sea of Flames , to safe custody when the second world war breaks out. The National Museum of Natural History, Paris, has made three counterfeit diamonds of the Sea of Flames. Four men are assigned the task of carrying each of these diamonds to four different destinations. None of them knows whether they are carrying the original diamond or the counterfeit. Marie-Laure a