Poetry as a Weapon

How extremists use music and poetry for indoctrination and mobilisation. An extract

Kunal Purohit

Kamal urgently wants to rewrite history in a way that benefits Hindu nationalists. He does this by reinventing the past and recasting inglorious events that painted Hindu nationalists in a poor light, by pitting historical figures against each other and urging his audience to discard icons who were critical of Hindu nationalism.

Travelling to smaller cities, mofussil towns and villages, Kamal carries the message of Hindutva through his craft. He helps to spread the ideology in areas where most mainstream forms of popular culture might not have the reach and, as a result, the same impact as his poetry could. Addressing dozens of such events each year since he started in 2017, Kamal has traversed across the northern, western and eastern parts of the country many times over, incidentally, the regions where the BJP gets the bulk of its electoral backing.

Through his work, Kamal makes his message simple to understand: conjuring up vivid imagery of a glorious past, painting the present to be abhorrent and stoking fears in his audience about a grim future.

He will ask seemingly straightforward questions. One of his most popular works focuses on the revolutionary Chandrashekhar Azad, titled ‘Chandra Shekhar Ko Kya Mila?, What did Chandra Shekhar Get’. In it, he juxtaposes how Azad died and has since been forgotten while Jawaharlal Nehru was rewarded with the Prime Minister’s chair. Between these selective, conveniently chosen comparisons lies his politics and its aims: such comparisons hide more than they reveal. His rhetoric, coupled with his powerful oratory in packed kavi sammelans, urges the listener to suspend reason and rationale and instead consume the emotion.

Kamal tells his listener how Azad was shot dead at the age of twenty-four by the British colonial police in the then-Alfred Park of Allahabad city. Azad had spent ten years in the country’s freedom struggle, starting with Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation movement and later joining the Hindustan Republican Association, an outfit formed by revolutionaries.

While he rightfully extolls Azad’s contributions, Kamal wilfully and carefully neglects any mention of Gandhi and Nehru’s contributions. He doesn’t mention anything that Nehru and Gandhi have done, none of their struggles, nor their time in prison during their decades-long involvement in the freedom movement.

Such poetry reduces complex historical issues, nuances and debates to binaries: pro-Hindu, good vs evil. Such binaries are easy for audiences to grasp since they don’t require any contextual knowledge of these events or personalities and, instead, appeal to their innermost emotional fears and the deeply submerged prejudices and stereotypes that they harbour.

Even the issues Kamal flags are taken out of the BJP and the Hindu right-wing’s playbook: from decrying the growth of Muslim population in India to stoking fears of threats to