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New Delhi: The recent protests over newly framed equity rules by the University Grants Commission (UGC) mark a new – yet inevitable – turn in the Hindutva politics of victimhood. For 11 years, the Sangh parivar has amplified the notion that the Hindus, the majority community constituting nearly 80% of the country’s population, has been shortchanged in independent India. It has repeatedly portrayed the Hindus as vulnerable despite evidence to the contrary.

From fears of being outnumbered in an unspecified future to concerns about losing economic and cultural resources to Muslim communities, the Hindutva campaign has peddled widespread alarm among Hindus. The Sangh, aided by the ascendant Narendra Modi, has woven an extensive narrative of Hindu victimhood, blaming opposition parties that, according to them, historically engaged in minority appeasement.

Political parties founded on principles of caste-based equality, practicing Mandal or Dravidian social justice politics, were labelled as casteist. Terms such as “vote bank politics” and “tushtikaran” (appeasement) were regularly used pejoratively, even as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) normalised the use of Hindu religious identity as a tool for political consolidation and projected ‘Hindu unity’ as a legitimate cause.

Also read: The Two Faces of Hindutva’s Dalit Agenda

The Sangh successfully flipped the narrative of who is privileged and who is disadvantaged to advance its goal of building a Hindu majoritarian state. Measures taken by previous governments towards affirmative action for vulnerable groups such as the Dalits, Muslims and Adivasis were spun as “vote bank” politics and portrayed as detrimental to national progress. Welfarist policies that created avenues of upward mobility for minorities and other marginalised communities were........

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