RESEARCH

I f you have seen the crowd during the August 2011 movement led by Anna Hazare and then if your jaws dropped when you saw lakhs turn up to hear BJP’s then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi even in the south Indian state of Kerala where the party was near absent, you have seen nothing. You must know PV Rajagopal, president of Ekta Parishad, who commands a following of lakhs of landless and homeless people across the country, concentrated mostly in the central provinces though. Rajagopal addressing one of his mammoth rallies in 2012 If you have not seen the size of a crowd Rajagopal can lead, it is because New Delhi, then a Congress bastion, did not allow his procession to ever reach the country’s capital. Which government of a democracy would not turn jittery at the sight of a disciplined queue at least 1,00,000 strong comprising emaciated bodies and impoverished faces of tribal folk and other poor people entering the capital of the country after