The most welcome of the changes made to the BJP’s organisational structure on Monday (August 17) is the removal of the venomous Amit Malviya as national convener of the party’s Information Technology Cell. He has been replaced by Deepak Mhaskey, a little-known backroom figure from Chhattisgarh.
For 11 years, Malviya led the BJP’s campaign to poison the political discourse of the country. The former banker was recruited from the Friends of BJP to raise and organise on an industrial scale an army of trolls and bots to unleash lies, misinformation and hatred upon political opponents, critics and anyone with a contrary opinion. He drafted artistes and athletes into his hate fest and emboldened small people from little towns to intimidate women with threats of rape and violence. He recruited the busybodies of residential welfare societies and old boy networks and organised them into a home guard of obscurantist uncles. Leading from the front himself, he made slurs the lingua franca of political speech, giving currency to a new vocabulary targeting ‘tukde tukde gangs’, ‘urban naxals’, Muslims, Christians, liberals, and women.
It is such a delicious irony that Malviya had to go just when Gen Z turned foul speech into their own weapon against Narendra Modi and his dark army started sounding blasé in comparison. However, this departure does not amount to a cleaning of the Augean stables in the BJP’s social media department. It’s only the churlish abandonment of a game when the other guy has scored a goal. Deepak Mhaskey is described as a mild-mannered former chemistry lecturer who is tasked with winning over the Instagram generation. But education is no guarantee of good manners. Under Narendra Modi’s leadership, the party has invested too much in the polarising tools of hate and abuse for it to go back to being nice.
Where Malviya was the sole head of the IT Cell, Mhaskey has four social media co-conveners to assist him: Priti Gandhi, Shivanand Dwivedi, Alok Bhatt and Arun Yadav. Each of them graduated from the Malviya school of abuse with quite a record of infamy. Priti Gandhi once claimed to be a proud fan of Nathuram Godse; Alok Bhatt tweeted disgraceful epithets at Sonia Gandhi, Arundhati Roy and Yogendra Yadav; Arun Yadav’s tweets on Muslims were too distasteful even for the BJP in Haryana. Now that they are appointed to formal positions in the party, each of these worthies has effaced their Twitter profiles, surely not out of embarrassment but to avoid starting out on the defensive.
In the context of the Gen Z challenge to Narendra Modi, there are expectations among analysts that the BJP will soften up in both speech and deed to appeal to the younger generation and that this reshuffle is an exercise in that direction. But that is only hope or conjecture. The BJP is an old people party whose natural response to any challenge is to reach for the club. Coercion is its way, not persuasion. In his Independence Day speech, the Prime Minister gave his followers a clear cue when he fixed the crosshairs on ‘diimaagi Naxals’, a wide enough term that could include anyone with a divergent thought, who should be “identified and isolated”. That, in short, is the mandate for Amit Malviya’s successors — as it was for him.