India’s YouTube streams are filled with influencers like Sandeep, who are aligned with the Hindu right-wing and provide everything, from polemical, communally charged rhetoric to ‘analysis’ and perspective. The style is uniformly common too—live videos from makeshift studios set up in their homes and offices, mostly alone, sometimes with other ‘expert’ guests—offering their takes on current affairs events.
Such influencers perform useful roles for the BJP—on any given issue, they become valuable voices for the party to shape public thought and discourse covertly in ways that it wants, without directly getting involved in it. These influencers, often, lay the ground for the Modi government’s actions by creating consensus on critical issues. As a result, when the government finally takes decisions on those issues, a substantial section of the party’s base is already likely to have been convinced of its need, thereby allowing the party to drown out any criticism of its actions. This played out to perfection when the Modi government decided to abrogate Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy. While most others were stunned at the hurried manner in which the decision was taken without consulting many of the stakeholders, the BJP’s supporters backed it firmly—having been constantly fed the rhetoric that scrapping the region’s special powers would help local Kashmiri Hindus ‘fight back’.
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