 Let me begin with the dizzying plurality and changeability that we see in the process of circulation of issues behind hate crimes. What causes hate crimes? The kinds of hate crimes, they are so diverse and they change from one second to the other and what's the logic behind it? Especially since 2014, but much, much before that, as long as I can remember, we have been running helter-skelter trying to make sense of first Ram Mandir violence, then conversion-related violence, then pogroms that masquerade as retaliation, as it did in Gujarat 2002, one after the other or all in tandem with one another. If 2014-15 was dedicated to Love Jihad campaigns, 2016 went to assaults against anti-so-called anti-nationals and 2016-17 seems to be reserved for cow violence. It seems that somebody is very deftly, skillfully shuffling and reshuffling a pack of cards. Now whipping this one out, now that one, now you see something, now you don't. Let me warn though, none is redundant, none is irrelevant or put into the, on the back burner forever. Each is replaced as soon as maximum possible hatred is milked from it and kept in reserve for future use. Why? Naomi Klein in another context has called this kind of quick change artistry shock treatment or shock therapy. When a new regime introduces seismic changes, radical, transformative changes in the body politic, it has to block a full understanding of how much is changing and in what direction are things changing. And it does that, it tries to block that full understanding by delivering one blow after another in rapid succession to obscure its real direction. So while critics grapple with the implications of one change, another even deadlier change is already in place and another one yet before the last is fully digested. So we are always running many steps behind what is going on and what is going to happen. The strategy of this I think has two functions. First obviously to deaden a full understanding and by that means to deaden a full critique and by that means to deaden a full blossoming opposition. Second to relentlessly up the ante, raise the threshold of tolerance, normalize what just a moment back was unthinkable by throwing up something that is even more dreadful and doing it all the time, all the time. The horizon of the new normal thereby expands continuously and we get habituated to more and more impossibles. So yesterday's brutality seems like, you know, something rather innocent and inoffensive today by today's standards. When we engage with cow violence we leave behind and how much can a human being cope with. When we engage with cow violence we leave behind pellet guns in Kashmir and the human shield. When we start mobilizing against CBI attacks on NDTV we overlook the Gujarat PSUs which have been ordered to cuff up I think something to the tune of 250 crores to build a humongous statue first of that pedal displacing hundreds of Adivasis from the area and threatening to submerge that entire area in, you know, flood. It's like neighborhood thugs imposing levies. While we reply to threats against Pathochatiju's brave article we have already forgotten Ramjas College and its aftermath. We have forgotten that in Delhi University colleges now or in Delhi University now every seminar has to first place a full agenda, names of speakers, summary of contents of what they are going to say before and get it cleared by the police which then gets it cleared by the ABVP and then a policeman sits through the seminar. We have forgotten the implications. We have forgotten to even ponder the implications of that. So we can never gauge the full extent of our losses at any given moment. So I am concerned with what underlies the endless supply of seemingly disparate hate crimes and I think merely exploring local tensions and interests they are valuable, they are absolutely essential but they will not fully clarify the larger picture. They will not fully clarify the real source of energy behind hate crimes, the nature of its purpose, the nature of the hatred behind them. And I'll just recall a very minor but very personal experience. Nivedita is not here today but it involves her. In 1992-93 after Babri Masjid demolition a group called People's Movement for Secularism and we were all part of it. We used to visit tension spots in Delhi to sort of reason with the local people. And on such a visit at Nehru Place we were all of a sudden we were distributing leaflets. We didn't even mention the RSS in those leaflets. We were merely talking in a very anodyne manner about peace and so on. We suddenly were surrounded by a mob of a few hundreds rushing at us with war cries. And there were little children, Rajiv Bhargav's children with us and you know, undeflected they were rushing at us and the police managed to cordon us off and threw back the mob. This was a common experience for us those days but I remember this one particularly because of something that Nivedita then said. As I looked at the mob coming towards us as advancing I said, I can't believe what I'm saying. And with perfect and chilling seriousness Nivedita said, Tonika, we will see everything in our lifetime. Here the midnight knock, we will see the gas chambers. I've never forgotten those words. Not because they are chilling in themselves but I know this, she said what she said because of the look on the face of the crowd. Earlier this year another very very important threshold has been crossed at Ramjas College. And the other day we had a meeting after which a Ramjas College teacher, one of the chief targets Mukul Manglik said, I want to ask you all this is going to happen again and what are we supposed to do in such a and I think we need to take it with us and think about it very seriously. Anyway there was as we know the ABVP went on a violent rampage against students and teachers, men and women flogging them brutally, strangling them telling young women Bhagrande Bhag this time however the police stood aside for two whole days when the beatings went on. This is the difference that three years of Modi governance has made. Victims and targets went underground for a while as threats of gang rape and torture and murder poured in and those who faced the invasion after months they still are traumatized when they recall the blood lust on the face of the crowd which attacked them and they keep saying they were out to kill us. What continues across more than two decades is the killer instinct not among thugs and criminals not among the desperately dispossessed the desperate destitutes that historians generally identify as the classic mob or the typical mob but students, professionals or in the case of Kanhaiya's public flogging last year lawyers, a BJP MP middle-class men and women. At Khurja some of us were investigating a riot in 1991 and a 10-year-old Muslim boy who had survived the riot told us I saw my teacher kill my father and most of all unforgettably at Ahmedabad in 2002 another small boy said that when the mob came towards us my mother told me to run to my friend's house to my Hindu friend's house because we had played together and when we were running there we saw the parents of our playmates among the mob which had set upon my parents. So these are not straws in the wind nor spontaneous outbursts here today, gone tomorrow and sanity returns the morning after. This is what we have been told time and again there's something indestructible in the idea of India, in the Indian spirit and civilization and I just do not believe it. I haven't seen the Holocaust but I have we have all heard about it we all know about the structural violence endless violence that is caste that is gender, that is poverty so I don't believe we have anything special that will save us from what's happening now and what's going to continue and I know it will grow and grow no matter who controls the government. I am very clear about that. This is spreading among so called secular parties who with all their differences share some of the deep prejudices and some of the values. I have talked to at least the leftist, I don't know congresspeople but you know in Maharashtra legislator asked Muslim legislators to sing Bandhe Mataram and threaten that otherwise they would be expelled. The BJP said they would be suspended the congress said they would be expelled and we know what Amrinda Singh said very recently. But even the leftist yes yes we are opposed to it, we are leftists and I am talking of Bengal not Kerala here but you know we are also refugees and you wouldn't know the pain of Hindu refugees. All of a sudden 70 years after the fact there is a sudden upsurge in Bengal about the pain of Hindu refugees and children have grown up with from nursery school have been to their houses, they are now pretending that they came destitute empty handed from East Bengal and they were scrabbling for survival which is absolute nonsense. I mean there were there was a lot of pain of partition and lots and lots of people suffered, they were not among them but suddenly they have become the votaries of the pain of Hindu refugees which non-refugee wouldn't understand. So I think that there is right now no political will except among a few marginal actors to combat Hindutva seriously. How did this happen and when? We still do not know the full story for we know so little about what lies behind the violent will and violent action. We say Hindutva but we do not know what it is what it means. It is a shadowy substance we only think we know it. We don't even know who are its constituents, what are their names where does each of them operate, how are they related to one another, what is the division of labour among them. We don't know anything. An important point I think to remember and this is rather unpalatable is that the haters have tweaked a broad Hindu common sense into a political agenda true but they have not actually invented the ingredients from the scratch. So the issues that lead to hate crimes do have old and deep roots in entrenched Hindu religious and social norms, temples as the actual abode of God, not something man-made, cow worship which clash with ritual compulsions, dietary habits and livelihood of large numbers of Muslims, Dalits and the poor. Endogamy which lays the basis for honour killings whenever cross community and cross cast romances take place. So Hindutva has the great advantage of working along rather than against the grain of a powerful belief structure. The structure is surely many-sided, polyvalent. It's usually, it has many other valuable resources, it's usually non-violent and non-combative but it does contain these norms and habits of thought, a popular common sense which lends itself easily to appropriation for continuous violence whenever an appropriate organisation channelises it them in a particular direction and the RSS is such an organisation and what I will say about it is no news to you but I would still ask you to reflect on the concrete implications very deeply. It's a 92-year-old organisation and it has been working since its inception with a single-minded agenda and though it sounds harsh I would say it's been working at it harder than any other political formation I know of. There had indeed been local clashes over Kauslauter from the 1890s, a communalised literary imagination from the 1980s, 1890s, there have been even earlier communal conflicts over land acquisition from pre-colonial times but I'm very clear violence assumed an organised, systematic, continuous and sub-continental character only from the 1920s and why. This is the time when the RSS was being formed and why. Undoubtedly the immediate context was created by two interrelated forces and the RSS played a nice sub-game of substitution which I'll come to. One was the grant of Muslim separate electorates which threatened Savarna Hindu ascendancy and ambitions. Almost simultaneously from 1909 onwards came the colonial discovery that quote-unquote lowercastes actually constitute a much larger proportion of the population than had been thought before and that untouchables they took their time to get to this untouchables are excluded from Hindu sacred rituals, sides and worship. Then the question was raised in colonial circles are untouchables then a different community altogether is counted as such for electoral purposes this is 1909-1910 onwards. The question got buried for a time but it threatens Savarna authorities even more especially with the steady growth from this time onwards in non-Brahman and later untouchable agitations in the south and in the Bombay presidency from late 19th, early 20th century culminating in Ambedkar's mass mobilization demand for separate electorates and eventually his secession from Hinduism his demand for annihilation of caste and Peria took a different opted for a different course he opted for atheism when he left Hinduism this is the context for the birth of the RSS exactly at the same time. May I also add that 1925 was also the year when the communist party was formed not entirely accidental Dalits I think are the inner demons of Hindutva. In Bengali we have a saying you can't swallow it nor can you spit it out and Dalits are exactly that for Hindutva they cannot be named as enemies as Hindus must be shown to be organically homogenous monolithic. One substance they must therefore be integrated but they must be integrated without the slightest structural reform in the Hindu caste order without a single movement for social justice and equality for human and civil rights all that is designated as colonial influence as western alien influence. So Savarkar provided the perfect recipe for integration within hierarchy nothing unites the community he says and makes the community into a nation as does the presence of an enemy outside very important words all non Hindus he said are beyond and against the pale of the Indian nation as their faiths were born outside by that logic of course Christianity should be alien to western civilization they are the enemies of the nation so you need the anti-national before you can have the nation the anti-national is the foundation of the nation Golvalkar we all know prescribed in 1938 that non Hindus should be treated exactly the way Hitler treated Jews if they are allowed to live in India they must live as second class citizens without any rights these are famous known words what's perhaps less known is that he also defined democracy as a piece of rotting meat on which greedy crews flock it shows the brahmanical repugnance for non vegetarianism just the other day a BJP stalwart has said that those who eat beef have no human rights if we look at issues for hate crimes we find a pattern violence is mobilized around the sacred Hindu land the sacred cows, sacred temples and the sanctity of Hindu women all are sacred all are perpetually we are told threatened and undermined by Muslim lust conquest, divisiveness and terrorism they form parts of a single chain Savarkar wrote a multi volume history of the medieval period where Muslim conquest he showed were a result of one thing not imperial designs for conquest which is universal to all empires or empire builders but it was solely motivated by Muslim greed for Hindu women, for Hindu queens the entire Mughal history is there represented as a series of attacks by Hindu queens, cows and temples the greed for women spills over into the sacred land into Bharat Mata the ultimate sacred figure and definitionally an exclusively Hindu goddess thereby ensuring that the land cannot possibly belong to non Hindus eventually land itself is abducted as a portion of it goes into Pakistan so Muslim crimes and sins have no end to them partition moreover is made to stand out for sexual cruelties against Hindu women above all and anyone who has interviewed VHP or RSS knows how lovingly they dwell on details of rape I tell you they have got rape on their brain they can really build a discourse on rape for two and a half years we have seen that so it is Pakistan now continues its designs on Indian territories with terrorism a continuous seamless narrative it's like a palimpsest of serially arranged layers of which none can become dormant whenever one of them is invoked one of them is invoked memories of all the others are activated of course the saga of Hindu loss is paralleled by a Muslim expansion especially their numbers they are 5 what is it? as if you know that the logic is so funny whether a woman or four women are impregnated by one man or by four different men the number of children remains the same but we don't need to think of that Muslim breeding therefore is a strategy for conquest in 1990 we were told by the VHP that look at us Hindus when we die our bodies are burnt and nothing remains and look at the Muslims when they die a plot of Hindu land so whether they are born, whether they procreate whether they die, it's all an act of conquest a Muslim is always conquering through the normal life cycle that he goes through the basic ideology is unending hate speech simple thin but the rhetorical strategies that frame them are dense and innovative and the most interesting device is a history that stitches up divine mythological time with human historical time so we all heard that Ram's adversary was the emperor and Baba's progeny vivisected the Hindu motherland and now Pakistan plots to overrun India with terrorist conspiracies now why is history so important because what has happened to history in history is indelible it cannot be undone, none of this cannot be undone if we believe in them as history, none of them not partition, not temple destruction not invasions, they cannot be undone therefore lay the groundwork for perpetual vengeance everlasting anger, endless violence that's why history is so important how is the message transmitted we all know that we rarely think about what it means RSS runs daily, bi-weekly, weekly shakhas all across the country imparting combat training and ideological training to from infants to the elderly please see Lalit Vachane's boy in the branch and a man in the tree if you haven't seen them it also runs and it's under explored sadly the largest chain of non-governmental schools in the country it's affiliates and sub-affiliates are legion and we haven't begun to touch even the surface scratch even the surface women's organizations, charitable bodies associations of religious leaders networks of temples, cells in the army media, cultural organizations entertainment, leisure industries you name it they have it together they buy deep into diverse social levels and into the everyday and there's a steady drip drip drip of information so called rumors, reinterpretations of history manufacturing of memory and there you have a committed support base it's ready for action the moment you want to engage in violence a young researcher was just telling me the other day that at Bhopal VHP women go to schools and especially convents and they demand to tell young students about love jihad and if the principal blocks them then they the VHP men come and mob the school gates then they force their way inside and tell students that Pakistan trains Muslim men in how to seduce Hindu women then they elope with them then they forcibly convert them and marry them then they you know extract sexual and domestic labor from them then they are trafficked into the Middle East now we all know this but when the young researcher was telling me about the grizzly details with these stories are conveyed to the very young children the lesson is very evident that let alone love you shouldn't actually even have friendship or minimal acquaintance with a Muslim neighbor or with a Muslim playmate our is in Russia Savika Samiti woman told me in 1999 after a long harangue about Muslim rapes and how they are rapist by nature she said a very memorable sentence they have raped us so much now we must rape them back so great was her anger that she changed gender and she becomes the rape victim and the rapist in the same sentence most important is the VHP's work among temples, Godwara's, Arya Samaj Mandir's Mohan's domestic priests they train domestic priests we are convinced about the ineffable tolerance and unique liberalism of Hindu faith but we do not recognize that religions are material entities they live through establishments organized sex, leaders, laws and norms and much of this has been captured the Sanatan Dharm Mandir's the largest chain of temples, Hindu temples in North India when we first came to interview them in 1990 we asked them what's the most auspicious day in your ritual calendar and they said Vijaya Dashami 1925 not a sacred sacred event mythological event but the foundation of the RSS so they have captured it they have trained domestic priests and religion is a changing thing in the older days it changed from sacrifice to temple temple based worship so if a large enough number of Hindus believe that their true faith lies in hatred of non-Muslims in rituals of violence then that does become a new face of Hinduism let me just end with schools and how we have neglected that area I am talking of West Bengal and we rarely think of that though Apurbananji talked about Navratri and how powerful it was this year Bengal is not just the land of Shakti it is also the land of Vaishnav Bhakti we must remember that more people are Vaishnavs than and Vaishnav worship had led to a lot of riots from the 1920s over music before mosques so you know it goes back a long way you know in 1989 the left front government seemed to be in power forever and the BJP was nowhere in national or in regional politics at that point of time it had the RSS had more than a thousand Shaqas in West Bengal and 20,000 trained Kedars 10 Vanavasi Kalyan Kedars were working in the poorest of Adivasi areas holding annual camps and conversion ceremonies there were 160 trained teachers teaching in 21 schools this is 1989 at Noxalbari where thousands upon thousands of tea garden workers had been laid off and are living in dire distress a small primary school was founded by the RSS in 1999 again when the left seemed to be impregnable it started with two rented rooms it by 2002 it was so popular that it could buy itself two acres of land and go up to class 10 and it's now planning to expand even beyond and they are taking students to do charitable work among the laid off tea garden workers and among the very distressed Raj Bangshi that it's in the locality now whenever I talk about or have in the past talked about RSS schools and so on I've done some work among Delhi schools Delhi RSS schools and they are serious schools they teach seriously with care with thoughtfulness and so on I'm immediately asked but what's the source of funding and it's immediately assumed that they are lavishly funded by international agencies in 1989 however in Bengal full time RSS Pracharak was getting rupees 500 a month and a half time Vistarak was getting rupees 250 a month not a princely sum and on that without any prospect of electoral victory or power in sight they were prepared to work on and on and on in schools and that work consisted of spouting hatred visceral hatred bottomless hatred untiring hatred they were prepared to do that kind of work my question is that if they were prepared to do that in West Bengal where it seemed they had no chance in the 1980s and 1990s why has the left which was another cater based organization not have done similar things in non-left front ruled states why must the left only be active when they have government support behind them now we can think about what is to be done and how we have to approach this problem my fear is that you know with this kind of work we may be quite late thank you