The rise to power of the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014 was a reaction to the growing assertiveness of middle and lower castes that Narendra Modi’s predecessors had permitted in the wake of government reforms taken to elevate these groups. For the core group of BJP supporters, made up of the urban upper-caste middle class, Modi was the instrument of a counterrevolution as he combined a plebeian face (himself being from a lower caste) and a socially conservative ideology (as a pure product of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a Hindu nationalist militant organization). By mobilizing Hindus in the name of religion and polarizing society along communal lines, the BJP ostensibly sought to neutralize caste divisions. The rise to power of the BJP in 2014 not only enabled upper castes to stage a comeback at the helm of the central government but it also allowed this government to dilute policies of positive discrimination, which, in India, are also known as “reservations” consisting in quotas for lower castes and tribal groups in the bureaucracy and the public sector. Apart from politics and policies, Modi, the BJP, and the RSS have sought to recraft society: the new dispensation has made it possible to propagate an extreme version of Brahminical Hinduism and to impose these norms, via vigilante groups first, and secondly through state vigilantism. [First paragraphs]