The Wire Wrap | Rahul's Dharna, Modi's New Faces for Old Fixes
The Wire's senior political correspondent Sravasti Dasgupta is joined by Ashutosh Bhardwaj, independent journalist and Manish Anand, senior journalist to discuss the recent developments surrounding Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi staging a dharna outside Parliament Street police station on Friday (August 21) to help Sahil Lochab, one of the youth protesters hit by pellets during the July 20 Sansad March, to get an FIR registered.
After over four hours of protest, the FIR was lodged late evening, with Gandhi saying that it was the home ministry and Amit Shah who were blocking it.
"The BJP didn't understand the gravity and intensity of the Jantar Mantar protests right from the beginning. And now it is wrong to say that no separate FIRs should be filed since a Supreme Court monitored committee has been formed," Bharadwaj said.
The guests also discuss the Bharatiya Janata Party's first major organisational rejig with an eye on the youth and elections in Uttar Pradesh next year. The team is dominated by upper castes.
Crucially, the BJP has moved out its long-time IT cell chief Amit Malviya after the party lost narrative control on social media during the youth protests last month.
"It was expected that the prime minister would do something like this, that kind of response was expected. Dimagi Naxal was an expected response because of the way the CJP [Cockroach Janata Party] attacked Modi. If your biggest brand is attacked and abused and those videos are viral. Now, these videos are being erased from the Internet but people have seen these videos already, even BJP's core constituencies have seen. Brand Modi must have been diluted, so Modi had to tell his core constituencies that look people who are misguide had come here [Jantar Mantar]. He is trying to communicate to his own audience."
"It is not like he has done it for the first time, Urban Naxal was a phrase that was used in the past for any Modi critic. It has been refined as Dimagi Naxals. It is an improvisation by Modi to protect his own core constituencies," Anand said.
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