But this is to take nothing away from the siege within; the danger lurking in the thesis which is being propagated by the Sangh Parivar as the magic formula for India's survival. Only a week back, the VHP chief, Ashoke Singhal, addressing a meeting at Jaipur in Rajasthan said that the Nobel Prize for Prof Amartya Sen was part of a wider plan to spread Chrisitianity in the country. If the comment can be simply treated as the remark of a silly mind, unread in the factors that govern the educated world, then nothing more should be read into it other than a mere and cursory stifled smirk at its audacity.The unfortunate part of the matter is that it is not so;Singhal happens to be the chief of a major force of this country and one which shares much of its philosophy with the ruling party at the Centre. Prof Sen is a national asset, a source of much of our recent glory and pride; to talk of him in such terms publicly requires censure from all right-thinking people and quarters.

The BJP naturally has been embarrassed but there has been no public apology from the men in power to that man who has been thus insulted. Instead, Singhal has been pressurised to tone down with his remark with a qualification that the nation indeed remains proud of the Nobel Laureate and the finance minister, Yashwant Sinha, has been rushed to consult Prof Sen on matters economic. The good professor may be still inclined to listen to these jokers and give them a word of two of advice on policy and the finance minister may be given his share of place in the shadows for having been the unfortunate one handpicked by his bosses to go and listen to sound economic sermons, but the fact remains that Singhal seems to be unrepentant. He has not said sorry in so many words and the various other developments in the country, the Gujarat riots , for example, and the continued attacks on Christians in that state by the Sangh Parivar seem to be orchestrated towards a definite end. Bengal's chief minister, Jyoti Basu, has rightly said that the ``siege has begun'' and that the people who could sully the name of someone like Prof Sen could not only be condemned for such utterances but that they would remain ``barabarians'' all the same. Nothing could have been more correctly put. If the hallmark of civilization has always been the right to live and the duty to protect, then members of the Sangh Parivar at least do not qualify as denizens of any civilised society. If they could travel well back in time, they would have been happy and definitely felt the comforts of being at home with the likes of Attila the Hun or Alaric the Goth.

There is indeed a method in this madness. Singhal is nobody's fool. Neither is the RSS strongman, Kushabhau Thakre, who is now the national president of the BJP. The Bajrang Dal is their tool as the name itself suggests; we are told that most Dal activists, with the song of the monkey god on their lips, are highly qualified musclemen up to monkey tricks for the better part of the day. They have indulged in hooliganism in the past: artist M.F. Husain would vouch for that. In Gujarat, they have let loose a series of attacks on the Christian community, part of which will surely be confined to the garbage of the history bin later by sane people.

Questions, however, cannot be avoided; why Christians and why now? Why Prof Sen and why the Nobel Prize? The answer may not be hard to find. The Sangh Parivar is realising slowly that all its grand talk of ``good governance'' is fast becoming a myth. Atal Behari Vajpayee himself is cornered and the slogan of ``able PM, stable India'' is now a phrase which will soon not be uttered in any BJP manifesto in the future. L.K.Advani, with his Hindutva plank, is waiting in the wings. The country, as everybody is slowly comprehending, cannot be run by this government and elections could be a distinct possibility soon. The Sangh Parivar is thus a concerned pack now; it does not have a poll plank with which it can ride Advani to power. The Muslim-Ayodhya card and the questions of appeasement and Kashmir and infiltration seem to have been answered by the people themselves. The mother of all mosques lies in the dust at Ayodhya. The Christians are, by nature, a soft target. They are not easily roused but can bring international focus; not coincidentally again, Singhal, while making that blasphemous remark against Prof Sen, had also dragged in the name of another venerable Nobel Laureate of this country known as Mother Teresa. The idea thus is now to bring to the fore rabid Hinduism and the Hindutva plank once again; if out of sheer poll necessity, a few thousand Christians are butchered and hundreds of churches are razed to the ground, that does not send any tremor down the spines of those who believe that it is only their brand of Hinduism which can save this nation. Religion, sadly, is opium; it is sadder still it has been turned into a major election exercise.