Disclaimer: The identity of the author has been kept anonymous.
Let’s face it – Left chauvinism is obnoxious. I sometimes wonder these days if the left exists because of its own ideology or if its existence is just determined by the existence of the right.
It is a well-known fact that the right uses crafty tactics to agitate the left and advertise itself in the process, not to say that what is wrong should not be spoken against.
The Left has definitely failed on many fronts, and I am here to discuss one such territory – Yogi Adityanath or Adityanath Yogi.
Grassroots movement and Adityanath
I am skeptic if the Left really understands how meticulously Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) works, and I somehow believe they don’t have any interest in it. But Yogi’s success is carefully intertwined with the organisation’s apparatus.
After the Lok Sabha polls, RSS spread in UP – risen to about a dramatic 8,500 branches.
The success of RSS is not just because the population is gullible. Of course, there will be anti-social elements everywhere. The population had to be channelized.
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While the Left was too busy grappling with serious discourses in their own comfort zones, crafting complex language and that too in English, which more than half of the population will never get, the RSS started its operations from the most basic level – households.
The work to promote RSS had already begun when the Samajwadi Party won the last elections in 2012.
I remember my cousins who live in Ghaziabad telling me how there were shakhas operating in their area. Sevaks under the RSS often came door-to-door, asking people to join their morning drills in the community parks (which eerily reminds you of how militant Buddhist groups operated in Sri Lanka).
My cousin must have been 6 or 7 and she already knew that Muslims were terrible people. She already knew that Muslims kill Hindus and destroy their temples and they want everyone to convert to “their religion”.
When people have been fed with violence and hatred every day of their lives for the past, say three years, they normalize violence to an extent.
This is why even when Aditynanath’s video resurfaced in which he threatened that Muslim women will be dug from their graves and raped, it did not have an impact on the present population because they had been made immune to criticism by being fed violence every day.
This is why they were taught in the morning drills that Muslims are a threat to the nation so that killing Akhlaq will be justified.
The Left cannot and should not simply mock people who subscribe to Hindu extremist beliefs. It should be a point to understand – what motivates people to religious extremism?
Dissing people by calling them insular is not really the solution. Where was the Left when it was really needed? Where was the Left when all this was happening right under our noses? In the library, I suppose.
The Thakur-Brahmin Divide
Rajnath Singh was accused of spewing “Thakurwaad” in the BJP when he was the President in 2014.
The Brahmins in the party have often complained that he was responsible for widening the Thakur-Brahmin divide.
Adityanath is a profound unifying figure. He ascended to the status of a Brahmin from a Thakur and is now being accepted within the Brahmin community as one of their own.
The Left fails to see this unification of the rift. BJP successfully pacified the dissatisfaction of the Brahmins.
And even if the Left has failed to see this divide, I am shocked that it again fails to see the implications of this peace between the two castes.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s Buffalo Nationalism has mentioned how Hindu extremist groups take the SCs and OBCs as their manpower to fulfill their anti-social goals.
With the unification of the Thakurs and the Brahmins, it would essentially mean that the RSS will not even need the SCs and the OBCs anymore. Anything that was limiting them from carrying on with their actions because they feared this loss of muscle power has been kind of negated because of the Thakur fidelity Adityanath would have brought with him.
I am not sure if there is any sociological study on the fidelity Thakurs share among each other. But I can ascertain it from what I have read.
For example, I was reading about dacoits in the country and there I came across a very interesting piece of information – in UP, Thakurs supported dacoits who killed Brahmins because they believed this can ruin the Brahmin hegemony, and give the former power over people.
I hope you can calculate how pacifying Adityanath is to both sides. He is a Brahmin and a Thakur. He is what drives 15% of the upper caste population against 85% of lower castes and minorities.
I am sure there must be leftists who had already assumed that I support Adityanath and am a closet Hindu extremist myself. Do I care? No. Should the Left care? Yes, about the violence which is going to flood UP very soon.
Image Credits: Google Images
