Ramraksha: Ram-ifying the Society and Modi-fying the State 161We have established clearly that the Sangh Parivar as much as the BJP-
led government has cashed in on the symbolic capital rather prodigiously
by producing and marketing their sociopolitical discourses through mass-
mediated cultural and religious symbols. As we have concentrated enough
on the production and distribution side of the Sangh Parivar's symbolic
politics (with little substantive progressive political worth) in the previ-
ous chapters, a brief investigation of the consumption pattern and con-
sumer behavior will shed light on the other side of this transaction. The
Sangh Parivar's attempts to direct these symbols and emotions toward the
communal direction may have fetched some short-term excitement and
political gains, but the long-term schemes have been proved difficult if not
immobilized altogether.SILENT MESSAGES: BATTLES AND BALLOTS
To discern the inner workings of any civil society can only be a matter of
conjecture, even with all the modern tools such as opinion polls, surveys,
and so forth. Having looked at the popular memory that is engineered
by the Sangh Parivar's symbolic politics, we could look at the communal
strife and the electoral performance of the BJP after 1992 to fathom the
interiority of the Indian civil society to some extent.
Consider first the recurrent phenomenon of communal riots. Gyanen-
dra Pandey argues that the communal riots are treated as aberrations in
the sense that it is "an exceptional moment" in the history of India, and as
absences because the history of violence is almost always about context,
and the violence itself is assumed known. There is little effort to inves-
tigate its contours and character, and its forms. This history of sectarian
strife has always been written up as a secondary story to the primary one
of India's independence struggle. This collective amnesia generated by
the nationalist historiography, journalism, and filmmaking is due to their
reluctance to open up the old wounds. Leaving little room for human
agency (emotions, feelings, perceptions) and human responsibility, the
usual accounts describe the essential and unchanging character of the
majority of the people concerned. This "totalizing standpoint of a seam-
less nationalism," or the "yearning for the 'complete' statement" and such
privileging of the general over the particular, the larger over the smaller,
the mainstream over the marginal have to be challenged.^38
The spate of communal tension and distrust in India during the 1980s
had been mooted largely by the recession of social reformation and the
occupation of that political space by communalism, aided by the elec-
toral politics of major actors such as the ruling Congress and the resur-
gent Sangh Parivar. Various political developments coupled with the link
between the crisis of Congress hegemony and the rise of the BJP, and the
disparity between the ambiguous efforts of the Congress to secure both