He may not be a candidate for election, but his influence is growing by the week. As India's parliamentary election campaign enters its final phase of voting (which is due to end on June 1st), Dhruv Rathee, a 29-year-old with youthful good looks, has gotten it into his head to "save Indian democracy." Based in Germany, he uses YouTube to expose the reality of Modi's India through educational videos, which combine animation, graphics and press clippings. In 2023, Time magazine ranked him as one of the leaders of the new generation. At 20 million subscribers, his channel has become one of the most watched in the country.
One of his latest productions, "Is India becoming a dictatorship?," has been viewed more than 25 million times. In it, he examines the methods used by the government to destroy its political opponents and instrumentalize government agencies, the central government's interference in the activities of federal states, and the politicization of regulatory institutions – all while urging viewers to turn out to vote and do their duty to protect democracy.
The YouTuber, who works with a team of around 10 people, has chosen to express himself in Hindi, the language spoken throughout northern India, the most populous region, and the most receptive to the ideas of Modi's BJP party. Raising his index finger just as Modi does, he tackles every controversial topic – the country's unemployment crisis, the political parties' funding scandal, the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi's chief minister – to deconstruct the image carefully built up by the Hindu nationalist and candidate for a third term in office. In his videos, India's strongman is likened to a dictator who uses Hitler's oratory style, taking him from seeming like a champion of development to a friend to billionaires.
However, he has said that what he does isn't politics: "I like to call myself a YouTube Educator," claimed Rathee. He claimed to be neither a journalist nor an influencer, adding: "I believe that we are at a point where even those with very different political views than me are starting to see that something is going very wrong in India at the moment."
When the BJP's campaign for the parliamentary elections took an openly Islamophobic turn, he drew on the work of leading historians Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib to debunk the theory, put forward by Modi himself, that Hindus had been slaves to Muslim invaders for a thousand years.
Rathee has become so popular with young people that his videos have been shown on massive screens. Political parties whose names he doesn't want to mention have approached him to ask him to work for them. He has refused. "I don’t have any allegiance or loyalty to any political party; my loyalty lies with my values of rationality, liberty, inclusivity, progress for the nation, and integrity," he asserted.
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