Mahabali Shaw is the man I summon whenever my laptop starts to splutter. Mahabali, the son of migrant parents from Uttar Pradesh, travels all over Bengal making a living by fixing antiquated computers like mine. The other day, while trying to resurrect the ancient machine, Mahabali, who is solidly built but of gentle disposition, made an intemperate remark about Muslims. When I asked him what the matter was, he confided that Digital India - Narendra Modi's dream of bringing governance to the people through technology - is unlikely to succeed because religious leaders of the minority community - mullahs, to quote Mahabali - have reservations about computers.
I tried telling him that blaming Muslims was unreasonable. Resistance to innovation - the culmination of limited awareness, collective diffidence and, usually, the fear of losing leverage over the community on the part of clerics - is characteristic of conservative leadership across all faiths. I resorted to empirical evidence. Muslims constitute a little over 14 per cent of India's total population. By that logic, even if one were to accept, for argument's sake, Mahabali's absurd inference, Digital India would still succeed. Mahabali stopped what he was doing, turned, and said that the Muslim population had been growing exponentially and that Hindu women were being lured away by "handsome" Muslim men to bear their seed. The Ghar Wapsi campaign, he added, was thus a necessity. Having said this, he went back to work.
When I asked him for proof, he said that he would take me to a local shakha where I would come to know of such grave realities. My experience of writing about societies vulnerable to polarization - Gujarat, Hyderabad and Kashmir, to name a few - has made me abidingly curious about different models of indoctrination. So, the following morning, wet and gloomy as any other, Mahabali and I headed for the shakha, at Bakultala in Behala, to have a discussion with its patron. I could not meet the other members of the shakha: heavy rain and water-logging had kept them indoors. But I did meet Paban Chowdhury, who, albeit inadvertently, revealed how the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh holds citizens like Mahabali under its spell.
Chowdhury, a middle-aged man, had been inducted into the RSS as a child. Over the years, he climbed the ranks with his diligence and skills. (He was employed at the Grand Hotel, and is an experienced accountant.) He has now been given the task of assisting affiliate organizations - the Hindu Jagran Manch, of which Mahabali is a member - to propagate the parivar's ideas of seva and nationalism.
Our introduction was short. I was asked to provide details of my residence, and whether I was married. Chowdhury seemed to appreciate my surname in particular. Then we began to talk.
Blessed with wit and insight, Chowdhury held the attention of his sparse audience with ease. Mahabali, I watched from the corner of my eye, was completely engrossed in the stories of Chowdhury's journeys across this vast land to help those who remain excluded from the State's welfare programmes. Chowdhury even claimed to have earned the respect of the cadre of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) as he went about his mission to mobilize the people with minimal resources. He repeatedly drew attention to the fact that the RSS, which believed in the principle of selfless service, preferred to shun the limelight.
A gifted mobilizer like Chowdhury would be an asset to any cadre-based organization. But the additional advantage of the RSS is that its organizational structure, while remaining centralized, is still remarkably fluid. To outsiders, including journalists, the parivar appears to be a disjointed entity, consisting of combative, but also internally competitive, groups among which the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Durga Vahini, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, and so on, make headlines on contentious grounds. But Chowdhury explained that affiliates of the RSS, many of which are founded on a particular cause but fold up over time, remain organically connected and resemble a loose confederation of allies. He mentioned the names of outfits that continue to work unobtrusively in such key fields as education, health and labour unions. Unsurprisingly, I had not even heard of the names of some of these little-known chapters.
It is this fluid organizational edifice that gives the RSS its cloak of invisibility. This, in turn, widens its reach and penetration, qualities that make the RSS appear all-pervasive to Mahabali who has limited social mobility. Chowdhury told me that if Mahabali or I ever needed assistance - from permission to visit a peeth to admission to a renowned cancer hospital's residential facility in Rajarhat - his organization had the ability to arrange things.
But, for Mahabali, the magnetism of the RSS cannot be explained merely by the influence it wields on institutions providing crucial services. What drew Mahabali to the Hindutva groups are their supposedly accommodating spirit. It is not without reason that Mahabali, whose Bengali is inflected with an accent, relies on his access to the shakha as a means of social leverage to be assimilated into a culture that remains alien to him in many ways. Mahabali's journeys to participate in the RSS's seva missions have also helped him differentiate between the home and the world. The former is a sphere of being indulged: Mahabali admitted that his mother and sister attended to each of his needs. The RSS, however, had taught him the importance of self-reliance.
This belief in the ability of the RSS to kindle in its members - in particular migrants, adivasis and the dispossessed - a sense of self-worth is critical to understand the latter's passive consumption of its majoritarian agenda and reverence for the status-quo. Chowdhury's claim on equality notwithstanding, the RSS stands for the belief that not every citizen can have an equal stake in forms of social capital like power and prestige. Chowdhury pointed out that the fact that Mahabali and I - two individuals with distinct caste identities - were sitting together inside his house bore evidence of the RSS's progressiveness. Yet, he was adamant that modernity has to accord the Brahmin his lofty perch because this has been ordained by parampara. That the RSS's idea of India violates the tenets of secularism and pluralism also went unchallenged. It made me wonder whether unequal access to a liberal, but objective, education is an imperative for propaganda to succeed.
The impressionable Mahabali's endorsement of the conflation of myth and history was as enthusiastic. Chowdhury, miffed with my dismissal of his distorted interpretation of history, ended up saying, "We need to start to school you from the beginning." More worrying was Mahabali's silence regarding the strategic utility of violent retaliation even as Chowdhury gloated over the fact that the majority of localities in Canning in the South 24 Parganas had been mobilized to ward off the threat posed by Muslims. (The subterranean communal tension in some of the villages in the Gosaba and Basanti blocks of the Sundarbans would be evident to perceptive visitors.)
Chowdhury and I parted on uneasy terms. He graciously invited me to visit Keshav Bhavan, the heart of the RSS's activities in Calcutta. In return, I managed to extract a promise to accompany him to a shibir to see him implement his version of seva. As we talked before leaving, Mahabali - Chowdhury's loyal foot soldier and my acquaintance - stood between the two of us, as if stuck momentarily between two vastly different worlds.
