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).

... contd.