dubious achievement was appropriated by Purohit to persuade sceptics that Abhinav Bharat was more than either a letterhead or part of a fantasy world.

The extent to which the Malegaon blasts of September 2008 in which seven people were killed was the handiwork of a few crazies out to pin collective responsibility for jihadi terror on the entire Muslim community or was merely the tip of a grand conspiracy to establish a Hindu Rashtra will, hopefully, emerge in the course of the trial. Without prejudging the outcome, some larger political observations may be in order.

First, it is clear that the network of Hindu activists which met periodically last year to plot, scheme, raise funds and, more often than not, conspire against each other, were driven by the conviction that an exasperated India was ready for a Hindutva revolution. This belief stemmed from two different impulses: to begin with, the network was overburdened by anger at the state’s inability to control Islamist subversion. This was complemented by the their disgust at what they saw as the influx of Bangladeshis, Christian evangelism, and the violation of Hindu sacred space by secularists — the moral collapse of India in its quest for modernity. This burning anger was accompanied by the conviction that Hindu energies were being dissipated by organisations such as the RSS and the BJP. Like Marxist sects that assume the revolutionary potential of the working classes are being consciously derailed by the Communist parties, the Abhinav Bharat mindset identified the Sangh Parivar as the main obstacle to the Hindu revolution. The Hindus, it was believed, were rearing to go; yet the established Hindutva movement was putting a lid on Hindu energies. The RSS, with its emphasis on organisation, consensus and gradualism, was for them as inimical to India as jihadis.

... contd.