The Majoritarian Bargaina

The Majoritarian Bargaina (May 2, 2020, India Today)

When the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) held a much-publicised three-day lecture series in New Delhi in September 2018, attendees were greeted … the occupant of the adjoining panel: Bhimrao Ambedkar, the 20th century’s most formidable and trenchant critic of that very ideology.

If this effort to appropriate Ambedkar, and with him, Dalits, seems incredible, Bhanwar Meghwanshi’s potent insider account of the RSS reveals that attempts like these are but the polished tip of a vast and menacing iceberg. In I Could Not Be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS, Meghwanshi guides the reader into the parallel universe of those RSS schools, shakhas and camps that target the youth of disprivileged castes for indoctrination and training in militant ethnoreligious nationalism.

No other book exposes so viscerally the instrumentalism of the RSS effort to woo the disprivileged castes even while nurturing casteism deep in its savarna heart. In the present moment, when the Faustian bargain that Hindutva extends to Dalits and backward castes has never been more politically salient, the lessons of Meghwanshi’s searing memoir could not be more urgent.

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Book: I Could Not Be Hindu : The Story of a Dalit in the RSS

Author: Bhanwar Meghwanshi; Tr. Nivedita Menon

Reviewer: Joel Lee

Publisher: Navayana Publishing Pvt Ltd, 155, Second Floor, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi 110049, Phone: +91-11-26494795 Email:  anand@navayana.org

Online available at: https://www.amazon.in/