The journalist Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, was recently in Chennai, and a line from his talk has stayed with me. About the costumes and muscular imagery associated with H-Pop, he said its task was to make “religion cool”. What he left unsaid is something we have seen unspooling over the past decade: It is not just Hindu religion but hatred and violence against other religions that have also been made “cool”. The videos from the Kanwar Yatra showing young men breaking up cars, beating up people, or vandalising property have been alarming enough to move even the otherwise phlegmatic Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh to ask the kanwariyas to “practise self-discipline”. If these young men are so ready to resort to violence, it is because they fully recognise that being on pilgrimage grants them impunity and also that being a “cool pilgrim” is no longer about piety alone but about punitive aggression.
A telling line in a new book by Rahul Bhatia titled The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy says of a former RSS functionary named Partha Banerjee: “By the time he was nine or 10, Partha had located within himself the desire to beat up a couple of Muslim children at school.” Partha joined an RSS shakha when he was six.
The angry young man has been a staple of Indian cinema but an entire nation of angry young men and women? Can we deal with that? Young people not angry with the state for its inadequacies and failures, who express anger in democratic ways, but citizens angry with fellow citizens. People so starved of jobs, status, and aspirations that they can be effortlessly whipped up into fury against the first effigy you place in front of them. After years of shrugging off the warnings and even denying the existence of a problem, the government gave its first passing nod to the unemployment crisis in this Budget, unveiling some weak measures that largely expect the corporate sector to pick up the baton. It is unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, the number of angry young men roaming the streets will grow.
The strategy of finding an enemy to ensure citizens take their eyes off their own spiralling problems can only work up to a point. When millions of Indians who struggle to put vegetables on the table are asked to bask in the vulgar pyrotechnics of an Ambani wedding, it is unlikely that religion or hatred alone will offer succour. Nor are they likely to remain apathetic to the news that 2024 alone has seen seven railway accidents so far, a number so outrageous any self-respecting Railway Minister would have bought himself a one-way train ticket. Similar alarming data abound across sectors and States, but it is invariably met with a curious mix of indifference and whataboutery from the government. However, with Assembly elections due in three States later this year, rhetoric will fly high again.
In anticipation, we have chosen this issue to focus on Maharashtra, India’s third largest State and its wealthiest, whose election could well spell the end of some of its political players. Once a leader in agriculture, industry, commerce, cinema, theatre, transport, and social reform movements, Maharashtra is in some serious trouble today. Its infrastructure is a mess, its record of farmer suicides is frightening, chunks of its businesses are showing signs of migrating to other regions, and, most worryingly, its sociopolitical fabric is being rent apart.
None of this can be solved by simply making religion “cool” again or winking at violence, but that will certainly not deter political parties from trying.
