MANDAL VS MANDIR

Both causes seemed to erupt all of a sudden—in one year—on the long-static canvas of Indian politics. Both infused new idioms and unlocked new energies, in ways that still define us

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Mandal and Mandir. It's perhaps no coincidence that they appeared together in history, this double helix on which contemporary India's political genetic code is inscribed. The old 'Congress consensus' had petered out into platitudes; its big tent, which once held all contraries, had collapsed. Around the peripheries of the nation, insurgencies were asserting regional separateness. But these were insurgencies within the main body of the nation—expressing a bristling anger at not being sufficiently accommodated and articulated within the master narratives.