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How does the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral support emerge in rural West Bengal where Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s organisational presence, temple-centred mobilisation, and party infrastructure remain limited or absent? Using long-term ethnographic engagement in two villages in Birbhum and Murshidabad, supplemented by 2026 polling-station-level electoral data, it engages Suman Nath’s account of Hindutva’s organisational-cultural expansion.
Soumya Saha’s review of Caste, Marginalisation, and Resistance: The Politics of Identity of the Naths (Yogis) of Bengal and Assam by the present author is the focus of this discussion. While Saha provides insights into the key arguments of the book and some shortcomings, additional arguments need to be presented to better understand the identity assertion of the Nath Yogis of Bengal and Assam.
Recently, two back-to-back—different yet ideologically connected—incidents occurred in West Bengal (WB) that pose a challenge to the long-standing myth of “Bengali exceptionalism” with regard to caste discrimination. The myth portrays WB as an exception, where caste-based discrimination hardly manifests, when compared to many other Indian states.
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