Ground Reports On How India Will Vote

Nationalism reigns over much of Modi’s home state, giving BJP a post-Pulwama glow. But there are sullen sections of society that stand aloof.

- Bhavna Vij-Aurora

There are two ends to this journey of images. One is the frontline, where the troops are deployed—a tough, bleak place in reality, and a place of high, almost mythic aura in the public consciousness. As PM, Narendra Modi has often found himself there, donning military fatigues, seeking to blend himself with that air suffused with taut, vigilant power. The other end is Indian society, where those images circulate. In Modi’s case, there is no better venue to judge this than his original home, his place of birth and the one that catapulted him to national consciousness. Those NaMo pictures, with him wearing aviator glasses and personalised fatigues, standing amidst soldiers, often with a rifle photoshopped onto them, fill the lanes and bylanes of Gujarat. his words are emblazoned across these banners, proclaiming him the vanquisher of the enemy and saviour of the country.

There is a ready audience for these motifs in what was once, and still is to good measure, Modi’s Gujarat. Hiten Doshi, 21, will soon become one of India’s 130 million first-time voters (of whom 15 million are just 18-19). Doshi, a student at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, says desperate times call for desperate measures. “The world is endangered by jehadi terrorism and so is India. We need a strong leader who can pay back in the same coin. India cannot be a doormat to terrorism. If someone slaps you, it’s foolish to turn the other cheek,” he says, walking down the Sabarmati riverfront, now a popular walkway and garden in the heart of the city.

And then, barely a stone’s throw away from Sabarmati Ashram, where Mahatma Gandhi had spent a major part of his life fashioning his philosophy of peace into a mass politics, he reprises a maxim Gandhi had once extended and deployed against violence.