Unlike what Prime Minister Modi and hundreds of RSS pracharaks think, Dalits do not do what they do because it makes them feel spiritual and ennobled. They are compelled by the iniquitous circumstances of their birth as untouchables to dispose of animal carcasses and human excreta to earn a few rupees to feed their own families.

But even the most famous pracharak of all, the former chief minister of Gujarat and the present Prime Minister of India, is unshakable in his belief that Dalits have been doing those filthy things for the sheer divinity of it. In his book Karmayog, which greatly enhanced his stature within the Hindutva fraternity, he has even backed up his views with historical evidence and irrefutable logic—why else would Dalits continue to do it generation after generation since the time the sacred Manusmriti laws of the caste system were laid down.

What gets the RSS’s goat is the way the Ambedkarites are stirring up trouble everywhere and needlessly reopening debates which were settled more than two thousand years ago. As a BJP spokesman said in an accusatory tone during a panel discussion this week: “The Congress is playing politics. What does Rahul Gandhi know about Dalits?”

The overused diversionary tactic fails to cut any ice. Dalit youth all over the country—significantly in BJP ruled states in particular—are up in arms because of the alarming rise in incidents of brutal oppression and murderous atrocities against Dalits by outfits owing allegiance to the RSS. The Congress has very little to do with it and the president did nothing more than read out a passage from Modi’s Karmayog book.

That apart, what the Sangh Parivar should be more concerned about is the possibility of Bahujan Samaj Party supremo Mayawati carrying out a threat she made a year ago—that she was seriously thinking of converting to Buddhism herself, along with her followers.

Warning of cataclysmic consequences unless the RSS and BJP stopped what she called was a deliberate strategy to commit atrocities on backward castes, Mayawati invoked the teachings of Bhimrao Ambedkar and his growing appeal among Dalit youth.

Ambedkar, she said, had made an announcement in 1935 that he was born a Hindu but he would not die a Hindu. He gave Hindu religious and political leaders 21 years to to reform. But when he saw there was no change in their attitude, he converted to Buddhism in 1956 in Nagpur.

The BSP leader said: “We had hoped the contractors and custodians of the Hindu religion would change after Babasaheb’s conversion and finally give respect to the Dalit and backward caste communities. But even today they continue to exploit the backward communities and the Dalits.

“I want to warn the BJP and the RSS that if they don’t change their disrespectful, casteist and communal behaviour towards the Dalits and backward caste people and their leaders, I too will convert to Buddhism with my crores of my followers,” said Mayawati.

In what must have sounded ominous to the ears of the RSS-BJP bosses, she referred to the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 and said: “I will take a decision on conversion to Buddhism at an appropriate time, just like Ambedkar.”

Whether that threat is genuine or purely political rhetoric, time alone will tell. What is real is the event in Una where 300 Dalits, maybe more, clad in white saris and kurtas, will change their religion instantly and forevermore.