Is it just me, or do you, too, dear reader, sense rising anger all around you? Ever since Narendra Modi has come to power his supporters have grown angrier. Victory should be a reason to cheer and celebrate. Anger somehow doesn’t seem right at a time when Modi’s popularity is peaking. Yet anger is all around us. The situation is pathological: ever since he has become the Prime Minister it seems India has gone bipolar. 

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If his victory has, to a large extent, silenced, with shock, critics like me, it has also led to a weird sense of pride among his supporters, which, oddly, is manifesting itself as anger. It is difficult to talk to a Modi supporter without coming face-to-face with the anger they contain in their hearts. It is an anger I fail to understand. It is as if even after victory Modi supporters do not feel validated enough and would like each and every person to conform to their ideals.

Over the last six months or so I have seen countless young men and women go crazy with anger every time Modi comes up. Most of them are his supporters. Most of them hang out with each other. Yet when they get together they pool their anger to fight an invisible common enemy, a left-leaning liberal not present in the room.

Among people of my fraternity, the fault lines have been drawn quite clearly. There are writers who love Modi; there are editors who hate him. Modi baiters and supporters usually don’t hang out but every now and then a fence sitter betrays his love for Modi and an entire evening is destroyed in the ensuing angry diatribe against Modi baiters.

The only reason for this anger I can think of is that deep down inside a Modi supporter knows that on a number of grounds criticism is valid, that like every human being who rises to political office, Modi, too, is a shrewd player, that a large part of his personality is nothing but a blur created by marketing agencies to entice us. For his supporters, Modi is the real thing but deep down every human being knows that when it comes to politics there is no such thing as the real thing. The anger also represents the lack of clarity among Modi supporters as to what they really want.

In my own house there is an uncomfortable silence around Modi, a silence many times more violent than any imaginable heated debate. My mother is an ardent supporter; my wife is a long-time baiter. Every time I try and talk about Modi with my mother she lifts her eyebrows, raises her hand and very softly asks me to shut up. When it comes to Modi my mother needs no discussion. My wife, on the other hand, loves a Modi discussion. I have never seen my wife lose a Modi debate, which is why in my house there is an unspoken rule: if you want peace don’t bring Modi up. Though I am no Modi supporter I rarely discuss him with my mother. Though I seldom talk about it, I know for a fact that the fragile peace in my house is temporary. One day Modi will do something and the dam of silence will break and angry, pointless and downright stupid arguments will flood my home.