THERE WAS HARDLY any anticipation in any quarter in the country that a month and half before the 80th anniversary of independence the generation that came of age under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party led by Narendra Modi would blow the wits out of Modi and the BJP. This is the generation that has travelled from school to college over the past thirteen years marked by Modi vilifying Jawaharlal Nehru, a towering figure of our struggle for independence, brilliant writer and architect of modern India.
Building of Modi Cult
Grown up entirely in the Modi era it has heard, day after day, the praise of one man, and the incessant chanting of one name. On its school bag, on the ration sack, at the petrol pump, in school, college and bus stand, everywhere it has encountered the same face. That face is Narendra Modi.
Television, newspapers, schoolteachers, college and university teachers, vice-chancellors, all authorities, kept telling this generation that Narendra Modi is a gift from God to India. More often than not, their parents and the elders around them have believed the same thing and asked them to believe it too.
Then how did it happen that the moment this generation got an opportunity, it did the dhadantakhtaa of Modi, to use Manto’s words—a phrase that means chopping a seemingly formidable image into pieces, and doing so with almost gleeful abandon a few weeks of the anniversary of India’s independence?
As a teacher, I have the good fortune of meeting new generations of students all the time. I keep watching how most teachers and administrators are constantly devising one strategy or another to shape and condition their minds. All kinds of programmes are continuously organised in educational institutions in which Modi-style nationalism is preached. Young people are repeatedly told that Modi has brought this country out of an age of darkness. Teachers who are critical of Hindutva nationalism are maligned and defamed. Gradually, history is distorted and textbooks are being altered in such a way that they are becoming nothing but propaganda material for Hindutva nationalism.
Television, newspapers, schoolteachers, college and university teachers, vice-chancellors, all authorities, kept telling this generation that Narendra Modi is a gift from God to India.
Otherising Muslims
This was also the period when the entire communications apparatus across the country left no stone unturned in portraying Muslims as anti-national, outsiders and infiltrators. They were called backward, dirty, conspiratorial—who knows what else. It was only natural that the majority of the country’s young people, who are Hindu, would begin to look at Muslims with suspicion.
In the figure of Umar Khalid, a frightening spectre was created. For ten years, the government, the Bharatiya Janata Party and every platform available to the media carried out a vicious campaign of vilification against a young Muslim man. Umar became, in the minds of many Hindus, a symbol of the educated, thinking Muslim who is presumed, almost by definition, to be an enemy of the country. Sharjeel Imam was added to this Umar figure 4 years later. That was an attempt to alienate Hindu youth from their Muslim counterparts.
To Hindutva-ise Hindu youth, swords were put into their hands. They were given songs that abused Muslims and humiliated them. Over the past ten years, we have watched with astonishment and fear how millions of Hindu young people have been initiated into hatred and violence.
Given the length and intensity of this campaign over thirteen years, it would have been entirely natural for a young person who grew up in this period to have acquired precisely this nationalist, statist and hateful mind. His tongue should have been steeped in hatred.
Demolishing Modi Cult by Youth
Then how, and by what means, did a collective free mind emerge in defiance of all these efforts a few weeks before the 80th anniversary of India’s independence? Why, instead of being dazzled by Modi, did this generation begin to feel disgust towards him? How did the man who once appeared to be the most powerful and fearsome person in India get reduced to an object of ridicule for these young people?
Did Modi’s very omnipresence begin to make this young generation suspicious of his power? Did the excess of attempts at Modi-conditioning itself produce resistance to the very project of conditioning?
Psychologists have told us that the adolescent mind has a natural resistance to conditioning. It is irritated by sermons and moral lessons because it also sees, every day, the hypocrisy of the generation that came before it.
Psychologists will study how, despite all the efforts of an all-pervasive authoritarian propaganda apparatus, a young public opinion emerged that could call reality by its true name.
When teachers like me speak to young students in our classrooms, we can see how hard they struggle to think, to arrive at an understanding through their own minds. They often receive no support from their institutions, their families or their elders. Their textbooks lie, the media lies, teachers lie, and those who cannot lie mostly censor themselves for obvious reasons. They are forced to live in this thick fog of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. And yet their struggle continues. I have often been astonished by the way they manage to tear apart the entire web of illusion constructed around them by their educational institutions, the media, cinema and social media, and somehow reach the real world beyond it.
One reason for this, psychologists have told us, is that the adolescent mind has a natural resistance to conditioning. It is irritated by sermons and moral lessons because it also sees, every day, the hypocrisy of the generation that came before it. It observes and examines the world around it, including the everyday conduct it encounters in school. It does not always express its opinion because it also knows that everywhere the balance of power is against it. Adults are immensely powerful, and however truthful a young person may be, he cannot defeat them. To mistake his silence for consent is nothing short of foolishness.
Students see how they get admission to PhD programmes, how their best teachers are displaced by mediocres who do not know their subjects and cannot teach. They observe how good teachers are denied promotion for years while the third-rate ones reach the top. They see the sloppy syllabus, the impoverished academic programmes, the steady lowering of standards. And then they see the constant glorification of the NEP. They know the reality of it. They are living through it. They are suffering.
A friend once told me about a conversation he had with his son. The boy said that he wanted to become rich very quickly. “You have to work hard for that,” my friend told him. The boy replied that he did not see the richest people in this country doing any hard work. So why, he asked, could he not become rich without working hard? There can hardly be a simpler, sharper or more honest commentary on capitalism than this.
Students see how they get admission to PhD programmes, how their best teachers are displaced by mediocres who do not know their subjects and cannot teach. They know the reality of it. They are living through it. They are suffering.
Youth Upheld Fraternity
What we witnessed at Jantar Mantar in July 2026 was an honest expression of precisely this innocent, uncorrupted young mind of India. It has exposed the hollowness of this communal, majoritarian authoritarianism so completely that every attempt it now makes to appear serious and formidable looks increasingly pathetic.
A few weeks preceding 80th anniversary of independence peaceful resistance of Indian youth, regardless of their religious and linguistic identities, against Modi regime for its role in causing the drastic fall in educational standards and damaging the credibility of examination system by repeated paper leaks has amply demonstrated their fraternisation imperilling its very foundation. It augurs well for upholding the idea of Swaraj and the idea of India for which our freedom fighters sacrificed everything.