SIR, victimhood, and the imaginary woes of a WhatsApp group
Updated: 6 hours ago
Any rational person should know that upper castes enjoy total control of all white-collar jobs in government and private sectors. They should realise that government policies, not marginalised sections of society, are responsible for their current job woes and tough economic conditions.
By Manan Kumar in Delhi
A couple of days ago I had an argument with one of my elderly relatives on the family WhatsApp group. The catalyst was a video of a beautiful fair young woman clad in a traditional Rajasthani ghaghra, odhani and kurti addressing a gathering in a hall. The woman, the gathering, the script and the voice were all AI generated.
She was speaking in chaste Hindi on "Kaun Hain Samanya Varg ke Log?" (Who are the people belonging to the general caste?).
Adorned with an expensive nose hoop and other jewels, the AI woman passionately appealed to the prime minister, explaining that the general caste people —Brahmin, Rajput, Baniya, Bhumihar, Kayastha and Jain—are the backbone of this country. Then she escalated and played the victimhood card, emphasising how the upper caste people are facing the brunt of lop-sided decisions, including reservations, and are the real victims.
After the explosion of solid ground reporting from Gen Z and Gen Alpha on social media, I had high hopes that reason would gain the upper hand. Any rational follower of fact-based social media and newspapers should know by now that upper castes enjoy total control of all white-collar jobs in both government and private sectors. Their enrollment in private schools, colleges, medical colleges and universities far outweighs their percentage in the population. Government policies, not marginalised sections of society, are responsible for their current job woes and tough economic conditions. I presented data, anecdotes and cases. In addition to my past reporting, I had fresh data and cases to support my points.
A few days before this verbal duel, I had covered the story of a manual scavenger dying on duty cleaning a filthy drain in north-east Delhi. Later, I attended the Safai Karamchari Andolan programme at the Press Club of India in Delhi where women from the Valmiki samaj explained how the scourge of cleaning human waste is still prevalent in some mofussil towns and villages. But, as always, the argument ended on a terse note even before I could recount the evidence.
The WhatsApp University and Godi media had done the trick. The brainwashing was complete. According to them, people from the lower castes and Muslims were the real culprits. No one came to support my position in the all-upper-caste WhatsApp family group.
The example above raises several disturbing trends and questions that must be addressed and confronted if India is to remain a democratic and secular country based on equal, fundamental rights.
Right-Wing Penetration on WhatsApp
While some level playing field has emerged on advanced social media platforms like X and Instagram, thanks to the overwhelming and intelligent use by the youth, right-wing groups continue to dominate the traditional platforms of WhatsApp and Facebook. These two platforms are crucial elements of the right-wing digital strategy, allowing rapid message transmission to any remote location across the country with internet access. WhatsApp in particular is a closed and opaque platform that allows propaganda penetration on a bigger scale. Its reach remains highest among all social media platforms and its personalised nature gives a targeted reach to organised, cadre-based right-wing groups that the RSS-BJP combine discerned quite early.
While maintaining a pro-Dalit and pro-tribal facade in slogans and celebrations, they are also feeding these groups to ratchet up the propaganda of victimhood. These WhatsApp groups have been devised to deliver different kinds of messaging that suit the region, culture and social stratum of the people there. For example, groups of upper castes in one region would receive a different kind of message than the lower castes residing in those areas. Similarly, those residing in metropolitan cities would see different messages; for example, the video discussed above is meant for upper-caste groups residing in cities.
Is SIR a tool to help Hindu upper castes?
If one looks closely, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted by a regime-friendly Election Commission of India (ECI) is already helping the Hindu upper-castes by threatening to weed out those who question and do not fit into the Hindutva scheme of things—marginalized sections of Hindus and Muslims.
None other than the former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), S.Y. Quraishi, has warned that it could end the voting rights of close to 15 crore bona fide citizens. Currently, the SIR puts more than 13 crore voters at risk of losing their franchise. The SIR exercise seems like a cruel joke because after every past enumeration exercise, the numbers of electorates have increased instead of decreasing and in every such exercise the possibility of error has not been more than 2 to 3 per cent. The ECI offers no explanation for these egregious anomalies.
It's a no-brainer: without voting rights, there is no citizenship.
In Bihar and West Bengal, the recently undertaken SIR resulted in the removal of approximately 1.3 crore names from the voting registries. While the ECI doesn't provide caste and religion-wise data, independent studies by civil rights groups, research organisations, newspapers, and citizen journalists reveal that a large proportion of those removed are suspected to be Muslims and from marginalised communities of SCs/STs, OBCs and EBCs, including women.
The West Bengal case
According to the ECI, in West Bengal, of the 91 lakh voters removed, about 60 lakhs were deceased. However, ground-based analysis by the Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public-interest data and research firm, showed that only 24 lakh names belonged to deceased people.
The study explained by BehanBox, an all-women interventionist journalist venture, further proves that over 61.93 lakh eligible women voters were rendered unable to vote ahead of the 2026 West Bengal state assembly elections.
Women made up more than half of the deleted voters in over 88% (219 out of 294) of all assembly constituencies in West Bengal.
The study further proved that the mass exclusions were heavily clustered in rural booths with high population of Muslims, Scheduled Tribes (ST), and the Matua (Scheduled Caste/SC) community.
The Bihar case
In Bihar, 65.22 lakh names were initially struck off the rolls during the initial phases of the SIR but consistent intervention by civil rights groups and, then rulings by the Supreme Court, brought the tally down to nearly 47 lakh, a net decline of 6%. Civil society groups estimate that 25 lakh to 30 lakh of the deleted voters belong to the Economically Backward Class (EBC) and Scheduled Caste (SC) communities, including Muslims and women.
EBCs and Mahadalits constitute the core of Bihar's landless, seasonal migrant workforce and millions of them leave the state for months at a time to work in construction or agriculture. A large number of them were marked as "Absentee/Shifted," causing immediate deletion.
According to an investigation by The Hindu, permanently shifted and those who migrated accounted for the highest share of deletions, roughly 58% of cases, largely impacting young women changing villages post-marriage and seasonal migrant labourers.
All these denotified voters, angry with the current state of affairs and living on the margins, bear the maximum brunt of poverty, unemployment, static wages and inflation.
Dalits: A weapon to push the Hindutva agenda
In what can be called a divide and rule masterstroke, the political masters are sustaining the upper-caste agenda by portraying them as victims and helping them gain an upper hand by weeding out ‘hostile voters’ through SIR. Simultaneously, they are trying to render SCs or Dalits politically useless by pushing them into the whirlpool of aggressive religiosity. Coinciding with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s, the Kanwar Yatra is increasingly becoming a procession of youth drawn mainly from the backward and marginalised castes, particularly Dalits.
Ground reports, surveys, and sociological analyses show that a vast majority of the young Kanwariyas come from backward and marginalized caste groups. A survey published by The Hindu noted heavy participation from these communities, matching their broader demographic share in the North Indian states from which the yatra draws its crowds (such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, and Rajasthan).
A report by the Indian Express explains how the Kanwar Yatra, once a quiet, ascetic journey governed by strict codes of purity and walking barefoot, has ballooned into a massive, State-supported public event. The modern demographic largely consists of lower-income, marginalized, or unemployed youth. This mass mobilization has transformed the ritual's cultural dynamics.
The so-called mainstream media doesn't cover the pitfalls of Hindu processions or the attacks by Hindutva militant groups on minorities unless the issue becomes too big to cause a mass public reaction. Brave, independent journalists on social media are doing the bulk of this reporting, despite grave threats. Even some of these reports are banished from the social media on the pretext of sensitive content.
Now participated by thousands, the Kanwar Yatra frequently causes heavy traffic disruptions and indulges in high decibel music from modified vehicles, open displays of vulgarity, hooliganism, and public friction sometimes resulting in street violence, brawls, mob violence and even lynching.
These youth, including young kids from the lower castes, can be seen smoking and drinking banned substances in the name of religion. Yet, the administration boosts their egos by showering petals on their procession from helicopters, etc and pressing policemen into service to give them royal treatment.
The RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and Vishwa Hindu Parishad are the prime drivers of the Kanwar Yatra and other Hindutva religious functions like Ram Navami and Ganesh Chaturthi. They organise, patronise and reportedly finance the participation of lower caste youth as a ‘benevolent gesture’ and, to that end, have a well-oiled machinery in place in ghettos across cities.
A section of these lower caste youth serve as obedient foot soldiers in militant Hindutva outfits like Bajrang Dal, Gau Rakshak Dal and several others, and, allegedly, can be seen attacking mosques and churches or minorities under the pretext of cow protection or any other excuse. Usually, these vigilante groups are headed by upper-caste youth and the foot soldiers are lower castes.
A compilation by Sabrang India, an upright web-magazine, speaks volumes about the spiral jump in these cases, while, literally, no or the little action is taken by the authorities. A case in point is the sordid episode of Hindu upper-caste youth Swatantra Bhardwaj who openly gloated over the murderous attack on the Dalit father of Nishu Azad, a 15-year-old protestor, and then blurted out names of BJP leaders as his saviours. He remained scot free for weeks, showing complicity of the Delhi Police and the government. After a national outrage, he was arrested – but quickly given bail.
In such a lop-sided state of affairs, does the Indian middle class, largely consisting of upper-castes, have any moral or ethical basis to talk about being victims of the system? Indeed, are their woes real?
Manan Kumar is a Delhi-based independent journalist who has worked with The Telegraph, Kolkata.