combination of street violence with administrative collusion even
in a city where the December riots were relatively localised and minor(1), right
next to a central government which is said to have banned the RSS, the VHP, and the
Bajrang Dal. Peace activists trying to do things as innocuous as singing songs, distributing
leaflets calling for harmony: and staging street plays have been repeatedly attacked:
the police come a little later, ignore the RSS-Bajrang Dal elements supposedly under
a ban, but arrest and harass anti-communal groups. Even a peace march led by men
as distinguished as P N Haksar and Habib Tanvir was obstructed by the police, while
a Delhi University student in an anti-communal group whose name begins with Ram was
slapped by a Policeman who had arrested him: a man with such a name, he wasnatural' product of popular will expressing a legitimate
'Hindu hurt', however, as the organised forces of Hindutva sedulously propagate,
this consent is something constructed and carefully nurtured, a product of more than
60 years of strenuous and patient effort. The RSS, founded way back in 1925, and
spawning from 1950s a whole series of affiliates manned at crucial levels by its
cadres (among which the Jan Sangh/BJP and the VHP have been the most important),
concentrated for many years on unostentatious, slow, 'cultural' work. Shakhas combined
physical training of young men with indoctrination through bauddhik sessions, a chain
of schools was built up, ideas were disseminated through personal contact and conversation,
and even a very popular Hindu comic series was brought out (the Amar Chitra Katha
extolling Hindu mythical or historical figures). It was for long, almost, a