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May 20, 2025

The Business of Belief: How Faith, Nationalism, and Welfare Were Rebranded for Power

 


The RSS today looks less like a cultural organisation and more like a Brahmin-Baniya club that knows how to sell ideas like goods in a market. Over the last decade, it has perfected the art of packaging ideology with the finesse of a corporate campaign. Words like “Bharatiya”, “Hindutva”, and even the sacred name of Lord Ram have been turned into political commodities—marketed with emotional appeal, devoid of spiritual depth, and served with electoral intent. Faith has become a business model, and government schemes are sold with a religious sticker on them.

Many of these schemes, ironically, were conceived during Congress regimes but have been rebranded under glossy saffron labels. Initiatives for financial inclusion, rural housing, and public health have been remarketed with catchy slogans like #ModiHaiTohMumkinHai and Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas—often with minor tweaks and maximum media mileage. The difference? Congress lacked marketing; the BJP mastered it. Wrapped in a saffron version of Bharatiyata, these repackaged schemes are designed to touch the emotional nerves of a largely unsuspecting population, turning governance into spectacle.

The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion—not its franchising. But that distinction is being deliberately erased. In today’s India, beliefs are marketed like brands, governance is sold like faith, and nationalism is peddled like a loyalty subscription. The BJP IT cell, meanwhile, has done a phenomenal job manufacturing and spreading narratives laced with nationalism, creating a digital universe where they are the only patriots and everyone else is conveniently labelled anti-national.

But marketing alone doesn’t move mountains. What makes this political rebranding so effective is the carefully constructed echo chamber that sustains it. A large section of the mainstream media has shed its role as the fourth estate and become the extended PR arm of the ruling dispensation. Prime-time news is no longer about facts or holding power accountable. It has become a circus of manufactured outrage, where anchors shout down dissenters and amplify distraction. While joblessness, inflation, and agrarian distress silently deepen, our television screens remain lit with debates on temples, films, and communal flashpoints.

This sustained diversion would not be possible without the passive complicity—or active abdication—of institutions meant to uphold constitutional order. The judiciary, once revered as the last refuge of the common citizen, now walks a delicate line between caution and calculated delay. Petitions concerning civil liberties, electoral malpractices, and democratic rights linger in cold storage, while cases that suit political interests are heard with lightning speed. The once-mighty Supreme Court now risks appearing selective, if not submissive.

The Election Commission, constitutionally mandated to ensure free and fair elections, too appears increasingly uneven in its scrutiny. While opposition leaders are often reprimanded for minor code violations, blatant breaches by ruling party figures are either ignored or brushed aside. The neutrality that once lent credibility to our democratic process now appears compromised by convenience.

This slow institutional drift has had a chilling effect on civil society. Voices of dissent are not just discredited—they are criminalised. Journalists, students, activists, and even comedians are hounded for questioning the state. The line between criticism and sedition has blurred. In such a climate, even silence becomes an act of resistance.

And then there are the voters—the ordinary citizens whose emotions are constantly manipulated by appeals to religion, caste, and nationalism. It’s not that the public is unaware; it’s that the noise is too loud, the propaganda too persistent, and the choices too narrow. When every election is framed as a battle for civilisation, it becomes harder to speak of roads, schools, or jobs. The voter is offered mythology, not manifesto.

India is not just being governed—it is being marketed. Faith, governance, and identity have all been brought under a single brand strategy. The real danger isn’t just the misuse of religion for politics, but the normalisation of it. When belief becomes business, and business becomes ballot, democracy loses both its meaning and its soul.

In times like these, the citizen must remain alert, not just to what is being said—but to how it's being sold.


About the Author:

Siddhartha Mishra is an Advocate at the Supreme Court of India. He writes on law, politics, and society with a focus on constitutional values, civil liberties, and the misuse of power. He believes that satire is not a style—but a form of resistance.

Email : - ssmishra33@gmail.com

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