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Ever wondered why the Indian right wing reacts to the word “Marx” the way a vampire reacts to garlic? Why “leftist,” “urban Naxal” and “woke” are treated as communicable diseases? Why anyone who mentions caste, land, or the looting of India by the Corporates owned by Satvik vegetarians is instantly denounced as anti-national?

The official answer is that the right loves the motherland. The actual answer is written in salt.

Namak halal, namak haram – to eat someone’s salt is to owe them loyalty. A beautiful idea, until you ask: whose salt? If your master is starving the village, then being faithful to him means being faithless to everyone he is starving. The idiom hides a choice. It is a question disguised as a virtue.

Consider Vibhishan. He looked at his elder brother Ravana, noticed the small matter of an abducted woman and an entire civilisation being dragged into ruin to protect one ego, and said so. He was abused, exiled, and finally crossed to Rama’s side. By any honest reading he is the moral hero of the epic’s second half – the man who chose dharma over kula. And yet in the modern Hindu right’s storytelling, Vibhishan is a slur, a gharkabhedi. Meanwhile Ravana – abductor, tyrant – is rehabilitated as a learned........

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