By Divya Sharma
Hindutva has three major strategies. One is to popularize religious communities through communal violence. In this, after the decade of eighties when the communal violence took a big leap, the decade of nineties saw massive violence in Mumbai and then the beginning of the violence against Christians. In 2002, the Gujarat carnage was more of an anti-Muslim pogrom and later Kandhamal in Odhisha was the one to intimidate the Christian minorities on a bigger scale. Since then violence against Muslims is also taking place in sporadic way, not the huge spectacle like Mumbai or Gujarat but like the ones in UP. It is low scale and continuous. In non-BJP states the violence is being kept alive. At places the changing nature of the violence is being kept in Dhule, where the Muslims were killed not by the Hindu mobs but by targeted firing by the police. The foundation of this is the “hate other” based on misconceptions about the ‘other’ communities. This negative ‘social common sense’ about other communities has by now become widely prevalent.
During the last couple of years Hindutva strategy has also been to create disillusion about the parliamentary system of democracy. This was witnessed when they cleverly infiltrated and shaped the ‘anti-corruption movement’ of Anna Hazare, Arvind Kejriwal and Baba Ramdev. Government mishandling apart, RSS did everything to prop up these agitations and to take them to the limit of discrediting the present parliamentary system and the UPA II. The fact of the matter is that corruption is a problem related to the system, lack of answerability of elected representative and gross inequality in the society. By restricting movement distracts the attention from the deeper problems related to the system. Hindutva continues with its infiltration method, infiltration in state machinery, media and education. This process becomes facilitated whenever BJP is ruling in the states. Also it is trying to influence religion-cultural mechanisms.
