ABSTRACT
Introduction During the last two and a half decades, the political scenario in India has undergone a sharp transformation. This has been running parallel to the process of globalization at the economic level and the emergence of a uni-polar world at the political level. At the political horizon in India, while on the one hand we witnessed the rise of job losses and industrial closures, a rise in unemployment, a change in labour practices for the worse and a decline in the labour movement, on the other hand there was a greater hegemony of newer types of production processes, the rise of information technology industry and the affluence of a small section of the population. Sections of society started being affluent, a section of the middle class benefited from this trickle down affluence while a larger section started getting trapped in the pangs of destitution. This deprived section formed the major chunk of the foot soldiers of the pogroms, unleashed by religious nationalism. The dominance of religious nationalism ran parallel with the change in different facets of popular culture. The dominant politics during this phase ‘manipulated the social mechanisms, used public platform for percolation of its cultural nationalism, through the “saffronization” of text books. . . The conservatism in society went up by leaps and bounds. Even earlier the relay of the serials Ramayan and Mahabharat had created a fertile ground for the rise of religiosity and blind faith, which was to see its furtherance in the coming up of innumerable babas, Acharyas and Sri Sri’s who ruled the roost at cultural level’ (Puniyani, 2008: 11).
