If you have free time and want to hone your special interests, why not join a club or society? There are many options these days. If you are interested in community service, there is the Rotary Club or the Lions Club. Looking to mix fitness with pleasure? Try the laughter yoga club. Do you want to expand your mind? There are many book clubs in the cities.
Or you can just join the Hindu ecosystem. Becoming a member is very easy. You fill out a form and join, with no application fee. On November 16, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra, best known for delivering incendiary speeches on the eve of community violence in northeast Delhi this year, tweeted a link to the membership form.
The next day, I was claiming 18,000 members added.
‘Special interests’
It is not yet clear what the activities of the ecosystem team are. Mishra tweeted that “it would work on the ground and on social media and in court for the Dharma and for others.”
The membership form asks you to specify whether you will join the team “online” or “in the field” or both. It also asks you to name a “special area of interest.” Applicants can choose from a variety of options. Some of these options are historical concerns of the Hindu right, especially the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
There is “gauraksha”, cow protection, which promises to be a less bucolic activity than “gausewa”, cow care. There is also the ghar Wapasi ”, the Hindutva project of converting minorities so that they can return to the Hindu fold from which they had apparently deviated. Other options are the construction of temples, “sewa in general” and “Hindu ekta”, the original RSS project to establish the unity of Hindu society.
But over the decades, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has moved in mysterious ways, choosing to keep her vast network of organizations and membership low-key while working on long-term civilization projects. Mishra’s new venture has the exuberance of a startup, with all its talk of teams and numbers, its adoption of social media advertising.
Knives out
There are two other options that potential members of the Hindu ecosystem can choose as “special interests”: “halal”, which refers to Islamic dietary laws, and “fight love jihad”, which refers to a conspiracy theory. invented by Hindutva groups claiming a campaign by Muslim men will marry women of other faiths in order to convert them to Islam. It also has nothing to do with Hinduism or what its practice has come to represent.
The idea of the Hindu ekta, integrated into the RSS, was always implicitly about Hindu society closing ranks against so-called external threats, characterized more frequently as Islamic invaders but also Christian missionaries. The Hindu ecosystem makes it explicit. Without an alleged Islamic threat to protect itself from, the system appears to be unable to sustain itself.
The new formation takes shape at a time when several states governed by the BJP plan to pass laws that militate against the “jihad of love”, which to date has no legal definition. But right-wing groups have used the deception to criticize interfaith marriages in general, infantilize women and remove jewelry ads. Increasingly, the Hindutva ideology is reduced to an anti-Muslim hate agenda and the Hindu ecosystem seems to be configured as an executive arm. This may not be the type of community service you had in mind.
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