Adityanath as UP CM, for Indian millennials like me, is the Modi moment we never saw
When I was in college, a lecturer who was attempting to explain the Hindutva ideology in detail found himself staring at blank-looking faces of students at the mention of the words "Kar Seva".
He had realised that, perhaps, for the first time, he was interacting with a whole age group for whom these words did not hold the relevance or meaning that they had for people who knew of an India before it.
My generation were either toddlers or not even born when the Sangh Parivar and its outfits demolished the Babri Masjid.
We were barely aware middle school students when the current prime minister was accused of presiding over a pogrom and inciting it with his fiery speeches.
By the time the first inklings of political thought began to emerge in our young minds, the PR machinery was already in full swing.
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| Young voters had already started thinking of Modi as a visionary looking 'beyond' identity politics. Photo: PTI |
Our first engagement with Narendra Modi was not as a rabble-rousing ideologue, but as a suave development guru; a hard-working and tech-savvy administrator.
Modi had understood very well that young or first-time voters constituted a massive share of the voting population in 2014.
He was also aware of the fact that this generation would not be one that associated him immediately with being the face of Hindu nationalism.
On the back of the resounding electoral successes following massive communal polarisation in Gujarat, Modi was all set for Delhi.
The only thing left was a "normalisation " — a process by which he could posit himself as the face of a new, "developed" India.
By the time he set off on his election campaign, young voters had already started thinking of him as a visionary looking "beyond" identity politics.
"The youth" as a category showed up massively for Narendra Modi because of his promise of development — however hollow that claim may have been considering Gujarat’s social development figures — not because they thought of him as being a religious fanatic.
In the aftermath of Yogi Adityanath’s rise to being Uttar Pradesh chief minister, however, there appears to be the sign of slight schisms in the fabric that Modi has stitched together with resounding success.
For many young people, the Yogi and his partners in crime represented the fringe of BJP’s politics — the same group that had never known from experience that Modi was, for years, the poster boy of that very "fringe".
For the first time, noticeably, a string of ardent Modi supporters has begun to feel cheated by the elevation of an evident demagogue who served as a perfect example to show what Modi supposedly didn’t stand for.
A group of young voices are beginning to feel disenchanted with the false promise of keeping communal elements at bay.
Of course, the Yogi has already set in motion a normalisation process of his own.
Papers and channels have begun the shift from "give him a chance" to the very same tropes that they have used for Modi before — "hard working", "sleeps very little", "is soft natured but stern", "vegetarian and lover of nature", "transformed his town" et al.
Fortunately, Yogi Adityanath has spewed enough venom in the digital age so his chances of erasing his past are far less likely.
The historical moment, however, is what is of interest.
For an older generation, it is nothing but another iteration of the BJP’s classic bait-and-switch — making Advani the hardliner to Vajpayee’s moderate, Modi the hardliner to Advani’s moderate and now merely using Adityanath to firmly secure
Modi as a moderate with no agenda but development. But for a generation of millennials that saw very little of Advani or Modi’s transformations, the normalisation of Yogi Adityanath is a watershed in understanding the Orwellian world of the mainstream media and its power.
The need of the hour, more than ever, is an organised force of progressive politics to reject the "new and improved" Adityanath.
The citizens of the USA have shown such resolve in the "post truth" age of dealing with a man with a past like Donald Trump’s.
If we are to sincerely believe that most Indians are not communal or interested in a divisive politics of hate, then now more than ever is a time to act; to historicise the trajectories of Hindutva, and to insist that the development and prosperity of the nation lie far removed from the interests of the firebrands and charlatans.