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" During the run-up to the 2014 election for prime minister that he won in a landslide, Narendra Modi in India managed to be at many rallies at the same time by using full-scale, three-dimensional holograms that many voters took to be real. He also managed to be at more than one place in ideological terms. To the generation of globally connected ambitious young urban Indians, he was the embodiment of political modernization (emphasizing innovation, venture capital, and a slick pro-business attitude, and so on); the new entrants into the expanding middle class saw him as the one most likely to uphold their vision of nationalism rooted in Hindu tradition; for the economically threatened upper castes, he was the rampart against the (largely imagined) growing influence of Muslims and lower castes. If members of these groups had met together and each had been asked to describe “their” Modi, their answers would probably have been largely unrecognizable to the others. But the networks in which these three groups operated were sufficiently separate that there was no need for internal consistency. "

Abhijit V. Banerjee , Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems


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Abhijit V. Banerjee quote : During the run-up to the 2014 election for prime minister that he won in a landslide, Narendra Modi in India managed to be at many rallies at the same time by using full-scale, three-dimensional holograms that many voters took to be real. He also managed to be at more than one place in ideological terms. To the generation of globally connected ambitious young urban Indians, he was the embodiment of political modernization (emphasizing innovation, venture capital, and a slick pro-business attitude, and so on); the new entrants into the expanding middle class saw him as the one most likely to uphold their vision of nationalism rooted in Hindu tradition; for the economically threatened upper castes, he was the rampart against the (largely imagined) growing influence of Muslims and lower castes. If members of these groups had met together and each had been asked to describe “their” Modi, their answers would probably have been largely unrecognizable to the others. But the networks in which these three groups operated were sufficiently separate that there was no need for internal consistency.