Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday described the anti-Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka as an assault on “our composite culture” at the National Integration Council meet. In an apparent reference to Delhi’s Jamia Nagar shootout, he said that while there can be no compromise with terrorism, “any impression that any community or sections amongst them are being targeted or that some kind of profiling is being attempted should be avoided”. Both these sentiments, that have also spawned a new politics in the last few weeks, need to be scrutinised and debated.

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.

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