Part-II Two republics, one Flag: affect and anxious nationalism in eighty years of Indian politics

Part II:

Nationalism rooted in affection, and nationalism maintained by anxiety — a chronicle of the incidents a nation has chosen to forget, across eighty years of Indian politics

The Fringe That Could Afford to Wait

While Congress was busy discovering enemies of convenience, a rival design for the nation had been patiently gestating since the 27th of September, 1925 — Vijayadashami, the day Hindu tradition marks good’s victory over evil — in a modest office in Nagpur, where a physician named Keshav Baliram Hedgewar gathered fifteen or twenty young men and built, from that small circle, the conviction that Indian-ness and Hindu-ness were, at bottom, a single coin with two faces. It was not, in its infancy, a popular design. Tainted by the bullet a former member fired into Gandhi’s chest on the 30th of January, 1948, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was banned within days and spent sixteen months in something close to social quarantine before the government, unable to produce evidence of conspiracy, lifted the ban in July of 1949 — on condition the organisation swear a written oath of loyalty to the Constitution and the very tricolour its founders had once refused to salute. It would be banned twice more before the century was out, during the Emergency in 1975 and again after the Babri Masjid fell in 1992, and each time it returned sturdier, having learned that a ban survived is a credential no election can buy.

A ruin that became a fault line in the republic: Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya after the 1992 demolition. Picture Credit: https://akm-img-a-in.tosshub.com/indiatoday/images/photogallery/201704/babri-site_041917122915.jpg?VersionId=H1j3jujhbRKw4lqTYtTiw2vpFpsCzVSJ&size=686:*

Its enduring theology was set down, in the end, by Hedgewar’s successor. In Bunch of Thoughts, published in 1966, M.S. Golwalkar named what he called India’s three internal threats — Muslims, Christians, and communists — each accused of nursing a loyalty that pointed somewhere other than Nagpur¹². The RSS would later disown the book’s harsher passages, but the architecture outlived the disowning: an anxious nationalism needs, above all, a durable cast of suspects, and Golwalkar had supplied one that required no revision for the rest of the century. The organisation understood, correctly as it turned out, that it had all the time in the world, because fear can always afford to wait for love’s failures to make its argument for it — and its patience found its first great public rehearsal in 1990, when BJP president L. K. Advani set out from the Somnath temple in a bus dressed as a chariot, bound for Ayodhya, until Bihar’s chief minister had him arrested on the 23rd of October and the yatra ended in a forest guest-house rather than at the disputed mosque¹³. Two years later the mosque came down anyway, at the hands of a crowd rather than a chariot, and the fringe had found its centre.

Gujarat, and the Manufacture of a Model

The performance of loyalty found its clearest modern stage in Gujarat. On the 27th of February, 2002, a mob set fire to a coach of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra station, killing fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya; within a day, riots convulsed the state for close to three months, killing more than a thousand people by conservative counts, the overwhelming majority of them Muslim. Narendra Modi, a party functionary sworn in as Chief Minister only months before the train burned, stood accused by widows like Zakia Jafri — whose husband, the former MP Ehsan Jafri, was among sixty-eight people hacked and burned to death at Gulberg Society — of having allowed, if not enabled, the violence that followed. A Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team spent a decade on the question before closing its file in 2012 with no prosecutable evidence,' a finding the Supreme Court itself upheld in June of 2022, dismissing Zakia Jafri’s final appeal as devoid of merit. The verdict, however, arrived two decades after the fires, and suspicion, as suspicion does, had already outlived the courtroom’s patience: in March of 2005 the United States State Department denied Modi a diplomatic visa and revoked his existing one under a statute barring entry to any official found responsible for severe violations of religious freedom — the first and only time Washington has invoked that law against a serving Indian chief minister.

Rather than ending a career, the riots relaunched one. Gujarat’s reputation abroad took a battering it did not entirely deserve or entirely escape, and Modi, with the instinct of a man who has learned that a wounded brand needs a new story faster than it needs an apology, pivoted to industrial parks, Vibrant Gujarat summits, and capitalists both domestic and foreign, manufacturing the Gujarat Model — development delivered with the crisp efficiency of a man who does not waste time explaining himself to critics. By February of 2014, the very American ambassador whose government had once barred his entry was shaking his hand in Gandhinagar, and by May that year the model — with the Hindu-nationalist inheritance quietly bundled beneath it — was ready for national release.

A gallery of faces, a republic of unresolved grief: Survivors look at the pictures of the Gujarat riots victims at a photo exhibition held to commemorate its 10th anniversary in Ahmedabad in February 2012. Photograph: Reuters. Image Credit: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/2c7d82_d22d9023c75a4e8b8308e1d245e618ca~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_960,h_540,al_c,q_85,enc_auto/2c7d82_d22d9023c75a4e8b8308e1d245e618ca~mv2.jpg

The Provinces Learn the Same Grammar

No party escapes the temptation once it has tasted power long enough, and the Left — which governed Bengal for thirty-four unbroken years — learned the fortress’s grammar as fluently as anyone. In January 1979, barely eighteen months into its first term, the CPI(M)-led Left Front turned its police launches on Marichjhapi, a Sundarbans island where several thousand Dalit refugees, having fled East Pakistan and refused a barren resettlement colony inland, had built a self-sufficient village against the government’s own earlier promises. Declaring the island a protected forest reserve, the government imposed a blockade and, when that failed to clear it, opened fire on unarmed fishing families. The state’s own account listed a handful of dead; the historian Ross Mallick, writing in the Journal of Asian Studies, and survivors gathered decades later put the true toll at several hundred to well over a thousand. The state's capacity for this particular cruelty was not limited to policy. On the 30th of May, 1990, three health officials — two from the West Bengal government, one from UNICEF — were returning from an immunisation drive in the Sundarbans when their car was stopped outside a CPI(M) party office at Bantala; the driver, trying to flee, overturned the vehicle, and a mob that soon swelled past twenty dragged all three women into a paddy field, raped them, and beat the driver to death alongside one of the officers, Anita Dewan, whose body bore injuries too brutal to require further description here. It later emerged that Dewan had been investigating the diversion of UNICEF development funds by CPI(M)-linked panchayats in the district — that she was, in other words, murdered for doing precisely the kind of oversight a functioning state depends on. Chief Minister Jyoti Basu's response to the killing was to remark that such things keep happening; his health minister offered, with a straight face, that the mob had mistaken three government officers for child kidnappers. Six men were eventually sentenced to life imprisonment, a rare conviction in a state where, as Marichjhapi and Kannur both show, the party's shield tended to prove more durable than the law's reach.

The habit outlived Bengal: in Kannur, the Kerala district that has spent five decades as the front line of a private war between the CPI(M) and the RSS-BJP, loyalty has been enforced not merely by ballot but by blade, with some seventy politically motivated murders recorded between 2000 and 2016 alone, the dead split almost evenly, the deserter marked more reliably for death than the lifelong opponent ever was.

Nor is the pattern confined to Delhi. In West Bengal, the party that unseated the Left after thirty-four years learned its predecessor’s grammar with startling speed. Within days of the Trinamool Congress’s May 2021 landslide, the state convulsed into what the National Human Rights Commission’s own inquiry documented as retributive violence by the ruling party’s supporters against the defeated opposition, with local police declining to register cases in six visits out of ten. Workers on both sides died in Cooch Behar, Malda, and Hooghly that same fortnight, the violence travelling in both directions even as one side held the machinery of government.

The scams, when they came, came in cash by the crore. In July of 2022 the Enforcement Directorate arrested Partha Chatterjee, until recently the state’s education minister, after raiding the flats of his close aide Arpita Mukherjee and hauling out roughly fifty crore rupees in banknotes, along with gold and foreign currency, from a scheme in which teaching posts across the state had allegedly been sold to the highest bribe rather than awarded to the most qualified candidate²³. Eight months earlier, in the village of Bogtui in Birbhum district, the torture had been considerably more literal: after a local Trinamool panchayat official was killed in a bomb attack in March 2022, a mob returned within hours, beat a dozen villagers unconscious, barricaded them inside their homes, and burned ten people alive, among them three women and two children; a CBI charge sheet would later name the Trinamool’s own Rampurhat block president as the man who ordered the reprisal and kept the police away while it happened, and the case’s chief accused was himself found dead — hanged, by the official account — inside the CBI’s own guest house before he could stand trial.

Two years later, in the marshy Sandeshkhali block, the pattern repeated at intimate scale. For a month beginning January 2024, women came out by the hundreds to accuse local Trinamool strongman Sheikh Shahjahan of seizing their land and assaulting them under cover of his party badge, while he remained mysteriously unreachable by state and central agencies alike for nearly seven weeks. He was arrested only after the Calcutta High Court asked why he had not been; a sting recording surfacing months later muddied at least some individual claims, and the party quietly suggested the episode had been stage-managed. Whatever the precise truth in that marsh, the shape is a familiar one: a local enforcer granted years of impunity because his loyalty was, for a season, more useful than the safety of those he governed.

Six months before Sandeshkhali, Bengal had already lost faith in its own institutions of protection. On the night of 8–9 August 2024, a thirty-one-year-old trainee doctor was raped and murdered inside a seminar room at her own hospital, R. G. Kar Medical College, Kolkata. A civic volunteer, Sanjay Roy, was arrested within a day, but the state police investigated so unconvincingly that the Calcutta High Court stripped them of the case within seventy-two hours and handed it to the CBI. The hospital’s principal, mysteriously transferred out of his post and just as mysteriously reinstated a month later, first offered the observation that the doctor shouldn’t have been alone in the seminar room — then was himself arrested three weeks on for financial corruption at the hospital he ran. Junior doctors struck for forty-two days; on the midnight of 14 August, women by the thousand walked out across Bengal, Delhi, Pune, even Times Square and London, in a movement called 'Reclaim the Night'. Roy was convicted that January and sentenced to life rather than death, the judge ruling the crime fell short of rarest of the rare — after which the same state government that had fumbled the early investigation appealed for the death penalty it had nearly cost itself the standing to demand. An institution, once again, that guarded its own reputation rather harder than it guarded the woman inside it.

The bill, as it always eventually does, came due at the ballot box. In May of 2026, after fifteen unbroken years in power, the Trinamool Congress was routed: the BJP took roughly two hundred and six of the state’s two hundred and ninety-four seats, and Mamata Banerjee herself lost her own Bhabanipur constituency to the same Suvendu Adhikari who had defeated her in Nandigram five years before. Whatever else Bengal’s voters were saying that week, they were saying, among other things, that loyalty enforced by cash, fire, and impunity has a shelf life, and that a government which spends fifteen years teaching its local strongmen they are untouchable eventually discovers its own touchability at the polls.

A city gathered where mourning turned into protest: People gather at Shyambazar Five Point Crossing during a protest against the alleged rape and murder of a trainee woman doctor at the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital, in Kolkata. — Photo: PTI. Image Credit: https://image.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Kolkata-Protest_V_jpg--816x480-4g.webp?sw=1536&dsz=816x480&iw=615&p=false&r=1.25

References:

11.“Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.” Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/topic/Rashtriya-Swayamsevak-Sangh. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

12.“M.S. Golwalkar.” Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biography/M-S-Golwalkar. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

13.“When L K Advani Was Arrested in Bihar during Ram Rath Yatra.” Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/india/when-l-k-advani-was-arrested-in-bihar-during-ram-rath-yatra-869747. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

14 .“Godhra: The Sabarmati Express Fire That Consumed Gujarat in 2002.” The Quint, www.thequint.com/explainers/gujarat-riots-2002-godhra-sabarmati-express-fire-explained. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

15.“Evangelicals, Indian Expats behind US Visa Ban on Modi.” Deccan Herald, International New York Times, www.deccanherald.com/amp/story/opinion/evangelicals-indian-expats-behind-us-2298671. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

16.“Gujarat Riots: SC Dismisses Zakia Jafri’s Plea against SIT’s Clean Chit to Modi.” The Federal, 24 June 2022, thefederal.com/news/gujarat-riots-sc-dismisses-zakia-jafris-plea-against-sits-clean-chit-to-modi.

17.“Issue of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s Visa Status.” U.S. Department of State Archive, 18 Mar. 2005, 2001-2009.state.gov/p/sca/rls/rm/2005/43701.htm.

18.“US Ambassador Nancy Powell Meets Narendra Modi.” Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com/india/us-ambassador-nancy-powell-meets-2176719. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

19.Mallick, Ross. “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 1999, pp. 104–125.

20. Ameerudheen, T. A. “With 12 Political Murders in Kerala’s Kannur since 2016, Families Fear Violence Will Never End.” Scroll.in, 6 June 2018.

21.“Bengal Post-Poll Violence: Court Issues Contempt Notice to Kolkata DCP for Not Protecting NHRC Team.” Scroll.in, 3 July 2021.

22.“At Least 12 Dead in Post-Poll Violence in West Bengal.” Deccan Herald, 4 May 2021.

23.“Partha Chatterjee, Arpita Mukherjee and Piles of Cash: All You Need to Know about Bengal’s SSC Recruitment Scam".OpIndia, 28 July 2022; and “ED Seizes Rs 20 Crore Cash after Raids on West Bengal Minister Partha Chatterjee’s Aide.” Deccan Herald, 22 July 2022.

24.“8 Burnt Alive over TMC Leader’s Murder in WB.” Deccan Chronicle, 22 Mar. 2022; “TMC’s Hossain Ordered Birbhum Killings, Says CBI in Charge Sheet.” Hindustan Times, 24 June 2022; “Bogtui Carnage Main Accused Lalan Sheikh Dies Mysteriously in CBI Custody.” Deccan Herald, 21 Sept. 2022.

25.“Sandeshkhali: TMC Leader Sheikh Shahjahan Arrested in ‘Land Grab, Sexual Assault’ Cases.” The Statesman, 29 Feb. 2024.

26.“Sandeshkhali ‘Tape’ Casts Doubts on Rape Claims but TMC’s Bahubali Woes Remain.” The Quint, 5 May 2024.

27.“West Bengal Election Results 2026: With 206 Seats BJP Ends TMC’s 15-Year Rule.” Republic World, 4 May 2026; “West Bengal Election Results 2026: Mamata Loses Bhabanipur to Suvendu.” India TV News, 4 May 2026.