What do you think? Will RSS be successful in the system change that the narrative of is coming out in the open?
I'm scared. There is a social revolution that is taking place, the replacement of a thin film of people all of the same class, the same background, the same education at the same schools and colleges, the same family relationships - in Calcutta, if you know 300 people, you effectively know the whole of society that matters - and a tight in-group.
What these new people represent is the demographic wave flooding in from the small towns and villages, and bringing their habits and social attitudes with them. They are also in possession of English, which is the criterion for sorting out who matters from who doesn't: Nancy Mitford's U and non-U, or what is otherwise PLU and PLT, People Like Us and People Like Them. They are not bothered about the earlier self-restraint on religion, and are quite blunt about wanting a majoritarian regime, stuff that was unthinkable even a generation ago.
To answer your question, in chess terms, the RSS plays Queen's side openings. They plan ahead decades. They corrupted Gujarat over decades; it was once one of the most Gandhian states, and had brought in, or rather, retained prohibition of alcohol when everybody else had given it up as a silly idea. It was over decades that they propagated their brand of communal poison, and identified and captured the major social groupings (=castes). When Godhra happened, they were very well prepared, not only in terms of having won the elections at state level, but being organised to spread out and kill.
That itself had an impact. Others who had been similarly brainwashed, but were hesitant, saw that the centre and the courts could do nothing about it, or did do nothing about it (there was a BJP government in power at the centre at the time), and that gave them the courage to start making trouble, more than through the small, cowardly incidents, the booing and cat-calling, the offensive remark within earshot, the deliberate neglect of availability of small things that everyone else took for granted, a whole programme of hateful and very petty harrassment.
What had additional impact was their early adoption of social media. It is widely known by now that it is not just a joke about the Chinese: there are fifty-cent people in India, and they all belong to the Sangh Parivar. Nobody else seems to have a similar apparatus. What you see on PDF is a voluntary version of the same. Please look at the age of these terribly aggressive new members, and look at the relatively recently acquired membership of some of them (the old lag who gets kicked out several times a month, and gets back in again on an ID that he had made up years ago). They are the net kiddies, with no views that the RSS has not perfected and put on-line for ready assimilation by less advantaged bhakts.
Will they succeed? No, but the highwater mark has definitely moved higher over the years. When they are thrown out, it will be tougher to erase the damage that they are doing, even as we talk. There is likely to be no return to the days of old, and the general level of discourse is unlikely to return to what we have left behind.
We have to brace for that.
