Orissa and Karnataka have been in the news lately for the violence unleashed by the Bajrang Dal in response to “forcible religious conversions”. The Bajrang Dal was born in mid-’80s when Vinay Katiyar undertook a yatra to campaign for a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. The agenda for the outfit — strident Hindutva, cow protection, religious conversions and moral policing — has rarely changed. It’s the crests and troughs in the outfit’s lull-and-storm timeline that give an insight into this loosely-organised bunch of semi-literate Hindu youth.

Consider the ’80s that ushered independent India’s first wave of globalisation, besides marking the beginning of the end of the Congress dominance in national politics. Karnataka, in contrast, is often showcased as India’s incubator of information society, and now has a BJP superstructure, crafted exclusive of the RSS. Most of today’s Orissa remains untouched even by the industrial revolution.

The spread of an absolutist cultural great tradition, facilitated by a mushrooming mass media, against this backdrop creates multilayered societal conflicts. Emile Durkheim captured the phenomenon as “anomie”. No surprise then that the Bajrang Dal workers often thrive on a sense of “imaginary hurt” that gets reinforced every time there’s even a mention (often imaginary) of conversions or something that they perceive as an assault on “Indian values” (Valentine’s Day). If the state turns a sympathetic observer, as was the case in Karnataka, these elements manage to hog headlines.

As posited against this breed of trishul-brandishing, rootless youth, an RSS worker would almost come across almost as a voice of reconciliation. The Bajrang Dal thus fulfils a great functional need for the BJP/RSS parivar.

A significant section in the party, however, has been acutely aware of the bad name that outfits like the Bajrang Dal have brought to the BJP. It’s in this context that the recent BJP policy statement on the need to “de-link Islam from terror” is important. With divergent — and competing — strands of thoughts, Advani (egged on by an aide and, insiders say, columnist-author M.J. Akbar ), insisted on making the “terror-Islam” distinction clear. Some other ideologues, who perceive themselves to be in the Karl Rove mould, of course, would have liked otherwise.

Advani’s detailed statement on terror recently, had two key ideas. One, stressing on de-linking Islam from terror, the BJP’s PM candidate said that the interpretations of the Quran often cited by terror agents were plain erroneous. Two, he also held forth on the new phenomenon of the “low-cost, low-intensity terror and the invisible enemy”.

BJP General Secretary Arun Jaitley, who along with Narendra Modi has emerged as a prominent voice of the second school of thought, has also expressed surprise at the new phenomenon of “home-grown terror and educated Muslims taking to terror”. It’s not difficult to comprehend this though.

In his seminal study on the US army during World War II, Samuel Stouffer found out that well-educated, middle-rung (against low-ranked) soldiers often felt discriminated vis-a-vis various service conditions. Stouffer called this “relative deprivation”. If relative deprivation is the first step towards manufacturing temporary identities, it’s the educated class — aware of the subjective conditions — that acts as its agent. It’s for this reason that it’s rare to come across an illiterate Bajrang Dal cadre (they are often semi-literates, nursing half baked ideas on issues ranging from nationalism to women’s honour).

Handling them, therefore, could be an extremely tricky affair. While the Sangh Parivar remains oblivious to larger societal changes, Advani has been clever enough to rope in new-age Hindu saints — their Hindutva is often more accommodative and the RSS cannot outright dismiss them. No wonder then, that Advani got Rishikesh’s Swami Chidanand Saraswati to mediate between the Bajrang Dal and Christian community leaders in Orissa.

The Congress has, however, not adequately understood the import of endogenous community responses. While its leaders like Mohsina Kidwai advocated the need to back Deoband-like anti-terror declarations, the party was found wanting when faced the Jamia Nagar shootout.

Consider, for instance, if a team comprising leaders like Mohsina Kidwai, C.K. Jaffer Sharif, A.R. Antulay, Salman Khursheed, Rashid Alvi and Noor Bano had visited Jamia Nagar immediately after the shootout with two talking points — that deviants sympathetic to terror needed to be isolated, and that they (and hence the largely Muslim populace there) represented the idea of India as much as Delhi Police Inspector M.C. Sharma (who died in the encounter there) did. They would thus have would have taken the wind out of the BJP’s sails on its most-potent campaign issue. More importantly, India’s Grand Old Party would have been spared the embarrassment that it has recently had to face.

suman.jha@expressindia.com