IN A YOUTUBE VIDEO TITLED “Bulldozer Baba ne diya aisa jawab toh bilbila utha vipaksh”—Bulldozer Baba’s replies rattled the opposition—the baba in question looked tired. His fatigue was understandable. The video was released on 22 February, and Ajay Singh Bisht had been campaigning to retain his position as Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister for nearly a month and a half. Bisht had earnt the sobriquet “bulldozer baba” for overseeing his government’s demolition of Muslim homes. The next day would be the fourth phase of polling in the world’s largest provincial elections, a gruelling three-month marathon from announcement to results. Bisht, the singular face of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s state campaign, had an extremely busy schedule.
The country’s biggest media houses had been hounding him for exclusive interviews but had had limited success. One of the primary Uttar Pradesh election reporters of a major English television channel told us that he had tried for over three months but had not been able to get even a ten minute chat with the chief minister. An interview instead went to the YouTube channel Khabar India, who had uploaded their first video—a sales pitch for a motorbike—a mere four years ago. It is easy to underestimate the reach of these interviews. The bulldozer baba interview garnered nearly a quarter million views on YouTube and almost nine hundred thousand on Facebook. Bisht soon gave interviews to several other YouTubers: The Rajdharma channel uploaded an interview titled “Yogi’s interview in 3 questions, which will change this election,” while Headlines India put out an interview titled “Yogi Adityanath’s most firebrand interview, that has sent tremors in criminals.” The interviews by both The Rajdharma and Headlines India had more than half a million views on You-Tube each.
These YouTube channels are able to swing their content across platforms with a speed that mainstream media channels might envy, and often enjoy a more loyal audience. An interview of the chief minister by Republic TV’s founder and hawkish star anchor Arnab Goswami had only four hundred thousand views on YouTube. “Those interviews by YouTubers with the chief minister were arranged by his own PR team,” Rishabh Awasthi, a YouTuber from a channel called O News Hindi, which publishes similar content, told us. He sounded sour that he had not gotten the opportunity.
These channels belong to a growing constellation of far-right YouTubers, many recently started by twenty-something college graduates with names that usually indicate upper-caste status. They are rapidly out-performing mainstream news channels in terms of their reach, their ability to set the news agenda and their curation of the most extreme forms of hate speech and Islamophobia. In the relatively unregulated Wild West of Hindi YouTube, these dozen-odd channels, all based around the national capital, have built small empires on the back of meticulously scheduled vox-pop videos and triumphant coverage of Hindu extremist meetings.
These channels cannot be considered small fry. Older channels in the ecosystem enjoy total video views that can confidently compete with mainstream news organisations—Khabar India has a total viewership of more than 160 million on YouTube, while Pyara Hindustan has nearly 700 million views, The News has 1.2 billion views, Headlines India has 2 billion, HDV News has 240 million and Youth Media TV has 150 million. Their subscriber numbers are impressive too, with Khabar India having over eight hundred thousand, while Shining India has 1.34 million, The Rajdharma nearly 2 million and Pyara Hindustan boasts 2.84 million. Each of their videos also live long second lives on Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram and Twitter.
In the relatively unregulated Wild West of Hindi YouTube, these dozen odd channels, have built small empires on the back of meticulously scheduled voxpop videos and triumphant coverage of Hindu extremist meetings.
Their content is tailormade for virality, frequently leading to flash campaigns on Twitter and Facebook about that week’s often imagined injustices against Hindus. A lot of this content then makes its way to television stations and their relatively moderate audiences. The arrangement of this pipeline allows for the mainstream media as well as leaders of the BJP to share calls to raze mosques, attack Muslims and engage in the wanton propagation of genocidal rhetoric, while maintaining plausible deniability.
Each channel has a moment, a video that brings it into the centre of the hungry world of far-right audiences. For Awasthi, who introduced himself to us as the managing editor of O News Hindi, that moment was on 2 August 2021. “It all started with a viral post I had seen on social media about the unjust construction of a flyover over a mazar,” Awasthi told me. He said that a small Muslim shrine had been built on the edge of the Azadpur flyover in northern Delhi. “Khabar India went there first and covered that on the ground. There was this guy who used to be in the Bajrang Dal, called Deepak Singh Hindu, whom they interviewed at the mazar. But that did not appeal to the minds and sensibilities of the audience.” A few days later, Awasthi interviewed Sikandar, the caretaker of the mazar.
“Bajrang Dal contacted me as they wanted to organise some kind of event to send a message that the ”—Hindu society—“is aware and organised there, and wants action taken against the mazar,” Awasthi said. He said that people who had joined the Bajrang Dal’s demonstration wanted to speak to him near the mazar. “When I started taking bytes of a protestor, Sikandar reached there and started arguing. The interview took a backseat and they kept arguing.” Awasthi sensed the opportunity for a great
