The building was buzzing too, with a human hum. I followed the sound and found most of the staff gathered in Professor Habib’s office and his desk littered with placards: UNITE AND FIGHT SAFFRONIZATION –THE SAFFRONIZATION THE MAIN DANGER TODAY – DON’T COVER UP SAFFRONIZATION IN THE MOCK FIGHT AGAINST ‘GLOBALIZATION’. I wasn’t enlightened. Another imperative, leaning against a cupboard, offered a clue: SAY NO TO VEDIC ASTROLOGY DEPARTMENTS IN UNIVERSITIES. In a lull in the debate one of the lecturers explained. A conference on higher education was taking place, and many of the faculty had been picketing it in protest at government plans to fund the teachings of astrology and other occult Hindu sciences in universities. It had even been suggested that the new course components should include palmistry and levitation.

Hand-reading would be a devil to examine, at least in its applied form; but levitation?…Somebody had been reading too much of Harry Potter. ‘You’re joking’, I said.

He wasn’t. Serious money was being earmarked for the scheme and the inspiration behind it was not Hogwarts School for Witches and Wizards but the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or Organization of National Volunteers. In a sensible world, the RSS too would be a joke: with their uniform of forage caps and Boy Scout shorts, they look like some offshoot of P.G.Woodhouse’s fictional foot-bagged fascists, the Black Shorts. But they too are deadly serious and with the Prime Minister and many of his party elite as members immensely powerful. Sartorially Stanley Matthews and ideologically Joseph Goebbels, the RSS are Brahminical supremacists who regard India’s 140 million-odd Muslims – not to mention all other non-Hindu minorities – as at best aliens to be tolerated on sufferance, at worst insufferable parasites.[1]