Does Dhruv Rathee’s popularity worry the BJP?

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Towards the end of the United Progressive Alliance’s second term, the Bharatiya Janata Party built a well-deserved reputation for leveraging the internet for political outreach. The Hindutva party was head and shoulders above any other outfit on this score, so much so that the very name of its social media unit, the “IT Cell”, became a well-known, even feared, term in India.

A decade into Modi’s rule, ironically, much of the visible opposition to the BJP is coming from the internet. This trend best characterised by a young Haryanvi YouTuber named Dhruv Rathee. In February, for example, Rathee released a video where he argued that India under Modi was now moving towards being a one-party dictatorship. Remarkably, the video was viewed more than 23 million times.

There is little in the genre of current affairs and politics on Indian YouTube that garners this quantum of views,...

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