This morning on Democracy Now!, Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, offered a capsule backstory of how it was that once ineffective appeals to religion-based politics have grown to the point threatening more and more of the world with senseless violence:
VIJAY PRASHAD: You know, there's a broad sociological story the starts in the 1970s. Until the 1970s, parties that identified themselves as religious parties pretty much had very, very low ability to pull people out to vote for them. In the 1970s, when the Indian government shifted its ability to provide social welfare, to provide agricultural credit to the vast bulk of the people, essentially, when it broke down the Nehruvian part of social development, at that point to gain legitimacy even the Congress Party, which was Nehru's party, started to bring in religious forms of mobilization to gain legitimacy, but they were outflanked on the right by the Hindu Party, particularly the Bharatiya Janata Party, which in the 1980s took off at an unimaginable pace. It created this family of organizations. In a way it outsourced its terror to groups such as the Bajrangdal and most recently to this group that committed, perhaps, the blast in Malegaon, a town northeast of Mumbai, in 2006. This group is called Abinhav Bharat.
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