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The revanchist government of the day was clearly canny enough to understand that removing Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the rural employment guarantee scheme (MGNREGA) which was an enforceable right-to-work budgeted endowment would be seen as an egregious enormity, a veritable red line even for compliant Hindu followers.

So, they pressed into service the only entity that could be considered a higher-up in the spiritual pecking order, namely, Lord Ram.

The calculation clearly has been that opposition to this gauche displacement would not but be amenable to propagation as doing dirt on Bharatiyata, now interchangeable with denominational majoritarianism.

That many Indians in the Hindi belt are by now readied to giving assent to this gimmick is of course a tragic testament to the success of the mercantile, transactional, and however unscrupulous state-politics of the last decade or so; as also to the collapse of secular-democratic forces who espouse constitutional rule.

The “rising” middle classes sold out on the vacuous slogan of “development” could not c are less: their pilgrimages continue to be undertaken in tandem with a canny eye on the main chance.

But the vast majority of genuine Ram bakhtas (devotees) may well be........

© The Wire