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Except for a very small minority of dimagi bhakts, there is a new national realisation that the Narendra Modi-led Hindutva project has run out of steam. The Gen Z protest, with its epicentre at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, has now transmuted itself into a nation-wide resistance; and, the young have made their elders see through the structured bogusness of the entire Modi spectacle. More importantly, there is a natural authenticity to the young protesters’ resistance because Modi’s prime ministerial enterprise has sown the seeds of its own dismantling. The resistance we see all around us is only the organic manifestation of an inescapable denouement that has been in the works for some time.

There was a certain inevitability about the Jantar Mantar eruption. Though the spark and immediate anger had to do with a very corrupt examination system operated by very corrupt Hindutva examination warriors, the Jantar Mantar resistance found a purchase in the national imagination because Modi has, over the past 12 years, lent his name and his popular mandate to an extreme distortion of national purpose.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Twelve years is too long a time in this age of communication and internet and social media for any regime to cover up the gap between rhetoric and reality. Citizens are no longer willing to give Modi the benefit of doubt when he seeks to attribute his own inefficiency and inadequacies to presumed deficiencies and infirmities introduced in our collective affairs by previous regimes. Get cracking, man.

The slogans of Vikas and Viksit Bharat do not stir any excitement........

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