| | The increasing popularity of the Vinayaka festival in Tamil Nadu under the
auspices of the Hindu Munnani is another example of the Sangh parivar’s successful
appropriation of localised, traditional Hindu rituals to create a wider ‘Hindu unity’.
Though internal divisions of caste and class remain, as does factionalism among different
Hindu organisations in the state, the primary goal for the parivar in the utilisation
of such rituals is to persuade all Hindus to become conscious of belonging
to a single, majority ‘community’, rather than to initiate a campaign of social
engineering to overcome caste divisions.
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