The aircraft drama that a student, Lois Sofia, indulged in on 3 September in Tuticorin provides an excellent example of an engineered event targeting a community and to manufacture outrage. The shouting of political slogans (or, for that matter, any kind of sloganeering) inside an aircraft is an offence. However, the arrest was projected as if it was made for raising a voice against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. While at one level this looks like a typical Congress-Marxist-Dravidianist negative publicity stunt aimed at the 2019 election, the real causes may go deeper.

In 1981, a village predominantly belonging to a scheduled community in south Tamil Nadu converted to Islam. This created shock waves across India. The Dravidian-communist forces started high-voltage propaganda that this conversion pointed to the failure of Hinduism and success of Islam as an egalitarian religion. At that time, even the Congress, which had not completely devolved into a divisive force, was concerned about the extraterritorial radical Islamist forces behind the conversion.

The extreme media attention given to the event revealed two aspects. First, the inter-caste relations in that region, particularly between the scheduled community and the dominant community, were negative and confrontational. This had led the sufferer community to opt for a solution. The second was that there were forces funded by foreign agencies ready to cash in on the social problems that exist in Indian society.

Hindu organisations started a massive outreach programme for social harmony and justice among various communities of Hindu society. Despite having to tackle massive money power and anti-Hindu propaganda by Dravidianist and pseudo-Ambedkarite forces, they were able to stop the cascading effect of conversions, even though they had limited success with the original converts themselves.

However, as decades went by, the situation changed. The Devendrakula Vellalars, the so-called scheduled community targeted for conversion, started asserting its original cultural and spiritual roots and its strong position as an equal contributor to Tamil Hindu civilisational process. They rejected the names imposed on them during the colonial and Nehruvian eras of social stagnation.

With large amounts of data from historical, sociological, and inscriptional sources, they showed that they were in no way a ‘depressed’ or ‘oppressed’ community, as was made to be the case by vested interests. In fact, Dr Krishnaswamy, a lifelong fighter for the rights of this community, now demands that they be placed outside the scheduled category itself.

As if this were not enough, there were voices coming from the converted that all is not well within the promised egalitarian utopia of Islam. The converted were facing double discrimination. Anwar Balasingham, himself a convert to Islam, wrote a short novel called Karuppayi Enkira Noorjahan (Karuppayi Alias Noorjahan) in 2011. The novel, providing a perspective through the suicide letter of a converted girl who could not find a groom, exposed the shocking conditions. Though the writer himself was biased in favour of radical Islam, what he revealed unwittingly showed the inability of Islam to be a solution to the problem.