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.
