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Seasoned media persons or bureaucrats are hardly ever impressed by the bubbly froth called news as they know that the real action is taking place somewhere else. Recently, they may have noticed what most others missed in their fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) hurry to cover a ‘non-biological’ who demonstrated India’s ancient ‘duality,‘ by simultaneously tormenting and forgiving cockroaches.

Let us recall two bits of ‘other news’ in the last few days, as they really matter more than what an old man prattles ominously. The first news says how the government has reached out to the opposition (in the midst of the unending uproar in parliament) to discuss the ‘Delimitation Bill’ for a full 50 minutes. The second reports how the government flipped the same legislative pizza on another side by beseeching the opposition to push for the reservation of 33% of seats for women, that has artfully tagged along with the earlier bill. 

But behind both is a deadly plan to ensure forever the hegemony at the core of Hindutva – that the Sangh now identifies as coterminous with Hindi as a language and a civilisation, with Gujarat and a part of Maharashtra added for good measure. The latter postulate is quite true, as the sprinkling of Hindutva over non-Hindi states is rather spasmodic and tokenistic, despite Assam having woven this into its paranoid narrative of illegal immigration.

This master plan of a forever-tilted advantage for the more assured Hindus of the Hindi and adjunct belt depends, however, on the zone’s population numbers being engraved into the architecture of parliamentary democracy, through Lok Sabha seats. And, to make this dead sure, a two-thirds majority has to be procured by hook or by crook, in the 18th Lok Sabha, 2024 to 2029. 

It is assumed that the ruthless juggernaut that benefits enormously in India from the economic policies of the far right (also based in the Hindi and adjunct belt) would go to any extent to retain its preeminence and profits. Engineering such skilled hatchet-games like ‘Operation TMC’ was, as we shall see, an initial expensive exercise to sustain and strengthen the juggernaut’s user-friendly political setup.

After all, it is the divisive politics of this setup that distracts popular attention from real problems of India and also ensures that the hate thus generated is recycled into more votes. This machinery has already perfected the science of winning elections, by raising the expenditure bar far too high for others to cross, and the art of horse-trading in murky post-election scenarios when ‘Plan A’ fails. Over the past decade, state after state has witnessed the costly exercise of luring over of legislators to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), while the higher judiciary has chosen to be a complicit bystander of this post-democratic capture of power. 

‘Grab Trinamool’........

© The Wire