A Question of Order. Basharat Peer
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He was referring to the 1984 massacre of 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Three decades later, the perpetrators from the officially secular Congress Party have yet to be convicted. Modi’s supporters often spoke of the 2002 Gujarat riots and the 1984 carnage as if the two pogroms canceled each other out. “But time heals,” Mehra continued. “What we need right now is an economic agenda.”
Few places symbolize the economic promise of India as much as Hyderabad, the information technology capital of India. Hyderabad was traditionally a slow-paced city proud of its traditions of courtesy and grace. Its skyline was dominated by the palaces, tombs, and mosques built by the Nizams, Hyderabad’s pre-independence Muslim rulers. The information technology district is built on the periphery, on farmland that was appropriated after India opened up its state-controlled economy in the early 1990s. Cyber Towers, a circular glass and steel office complex built in 1998, marks the beginning of what is known as HITEC City or Cyberabad.
Before Microsoft, Infosys, Oracle, and Toshiba, among others, built their own corporate parks, they worked out of Cyber Towers. Google arrived in 2004 and Facebook followed in 2010. Chandra Babu Naidu, then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, earned the moniker “Laptop Chief Minister”; Naidu was credited for putting his weight behind the transformation of Hyderabad into an information technology powerhouse between 1999 and 2004. In the past decade and half, several thousand cyber towers have sprung up. (In 2013, Telangana split from Andhra Pradesh and became its own state, with Hyderabad as the new capital.) IT exports from Hyderabad during 2013–14 were about $10 billion; the city provided employment to as many as 450,000 people.
I’d stopped in Hyderbad to meet V. Rohit Kashyap, an engineer who ran the social media campaign for Modi and his party in undivided Andhra Pradesh, which sent 42 lawmakers to Parliament. The Modi campaign was fought in village processions, but also on social media. Some of the most strident voices of the Hindu right working in support of Modi came from the world of engineering and information technology.
Kashyap works at Back Office Associates, a data firm which attracted investments from Goldman Sachs. We met at the Heart Cup, a café and bar in Cyberabad popular with IT professionals. A small, somber man who wore the caste mark of a Brahmin on his forehead, 27-year-old Kashyap comes from a family affiliated with the RSS for three generations. Members of the RSS attend early morning assemblies at shakhas, or local chapters, where they receive ideological indoctrination and paramilitary training. But Kashyap was a frail boy; his engineer father suspected he was too weak to bear the physical rigors and the mental pressures of a political life in the RSS. “They kept me away from it,” Kashyap said. His voice was taut with anger at that old slight, the haunting parental assumption of his puniness.
In 2005, Kashyap moved to Guntur, a town 160 miles south of Hyderabad, to study mechanical engineering at a university there. He was 18. He was struck by the intensity of the caste tensions in his college. “Even in the classroom, students sat according to their caste,” he recalled. One day he made a snide remark about Balakrishna, a popular actor and the son of legendary lower-caste actor-politician N. T. Rama Rao, who broke the hegemony of Brahmins and other upper-castes in Andhra Pradesh in the early eighties by forming his own political party and ruling the state for almost two decades. His lower-caste classmates interpreted the remark as stemming from his upper-caste, Brahmin prejudice. “I was beaten up,” Kashyap recalled. A Marxist professor consoled and supported him. Under that professor’s influence, Kashyap began to reevaluate his feelings about caste prescriptions and Hinduism’s role in creating them. It marked the beginning of a shift in his politics, he says, toward the extreme left.
On a visit home, his father sensed his son was slipping out of the fold. He gave Kashyap a CD of the lectures of Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu revivalist from the nineteenth century, whose speeches about universal truths being behind all faiths were admired by Leo Tolstoy and Aldous Huxley. Vivekananda expressed qualified critiques of the caste system, and his work was appropriated by post-colonial Hindu nationalists for propagating a modernist, muscular Hinduism. I remembered the BJP’s student wing would paste posters of Vivekananda on the walls of Delhi University in the late nineties: a robust, young man with large eyes in a turban, his muscular arms folded across his chest. His words: Strength is life; weakness is death. Kashyap’s readings of Vivekananda increased his zeal. “I realized that caste discrimination is not a problem specific to India because America and Europe also have this problem,” Kashyap said. “They call it racism. The argument that it is only Hinduism that oppresses lower castes simply does not hold.”
After graduating in 2008, Kashyap traveled with his father to their ancestral home in Kurnool village. Certain of his ideological moorings, of the Hindu nationalist path, Kashyap asked his father to initiate him into the RSS by taking him to a shakha. One day in 2009, Kashyap heard a speech by Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS. “He said that for a civilization and nation, three things are needed: Identity, Credibility, Character,” Kashyap recalled. “It really touched my heart.”
But as he said so, his face hardened, and he began to explain why Hindus needed to take pride in their heritage. “We feel inferior to gora chamda (white skin). We think all the Nobel laureates come from the West and we are good for nothing. Very few people know that if Nobel prizes were awarded on the past achievements, be it medicine, be it physics, be it chemistry, Indians would have won hands down.” He spoke about how the Vedas, the ancient Hindu texts, had calculated the speed of light with utmost precision, how Indians knew the antiseptic value of turmeric for centuries (women who did household work barefoot used turmeric to protect their feet), how Susrutha, a Brahmin, performed the first surgery in history. “You know, ants bite!” Kashyap said. “He used ants to cut a patient’s skin and stitch. Google him.”
A few months after our meeting, Modi echoed Kashyap’s sentiments about the scientific feats of ancient Indians while speaking at the inaugural ceremony of a hospital in Mumbai. “We worship Lord Ganesha,” Modi told his audience, referring to the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha. “There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”
Kashyap had the manner of a much older man. His sense of mission and the intensity of his large brown eyes made him an outlier among the bantering, flirtatious men and women patronizing the café. He was aghast at what India remembered of its past. “A student of history today will tell you he read about Robert Clive, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb,” he said, referring to a British adventurer and two Mughal emperors. “Stop glorifying people who invaded and conquered our country. Why do we still espouse Mughal culture? Why do we have a street in New Delhi still named after Aurangzeb?” (Aurangzeb Road was renamed in 2015 to A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Road, after the Muslim scientist who was tactically appointed by the BJP government in 2002 as President of India, and his acceptance of the ceremonial presidential position helped Hindu nationalists ease the taint of the Gujarat carnage.) These were the “historical wrongs” he sought to correct by going into politics. His Twitter bio prominently mentioned the goal of India as Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu nation. “It requires a transformation, the way we teach history, the way we inculcate a sense of pride in our past and history,” he told me. In Narendra Modi, he saw someone who thought like he did. “I could connect every time he spoke. He always makes his pride in India, in our history and our civilization, very clear. I was able to connect.”
Kashyap formally joined the information technology cell of the BJP in Andhra Pradesh in 2010, and four years later he was leading the party’s social media campaign in the region. His focus was on getting the urban youth to vote for Modi. “They might not read the morning papers, but the urban youth do start their day with Facebook and Twitter,” he explained. “So we went where they were.” He trawled the comments pages of popular television network websites and various Facebook groups. He identified users whose comments echoed his own ideology. “If he was from our area, I would send him a friend request and request a private phone conversation,” Kashyap explained. He would invite the potential convert for dinner at a restaurant or at his house. Kashyap’s team built a network of 2,000 social media warriors for Modi and his party. “I personally met around five hundred people.” Most of the people Kashyap enlisted were engineers and information technology