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 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

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...

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...