‘The fringe moves further into the mainstream’ is a comment about the present political situation in India, but could equally be applied to a variety of countries – so must be something in the zeitgeist.
Narendra Modi, the Indian PM, has appointed firebrand Yogi Adityanath as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a fifth of whose 200 million people are Muslim. He is a strident Hindu supremacist/nationalist and rabble-rouser. Critics fear a crackdown on Muslim businesses and mixed-religion couples in the region, as well as a return to the violence against Muslims which sent Adityanath to prison ten years ago.
A think-tanker remarked: ‘“It answers one of the questions that we had about Modi all along,” he says. “Is this guy’s project about development or Hindu nationalism? What this pick reaffirms is that it’s not an either/or question. He has two faces: one is Modi the great economic moderniser, and the other is one of muscular nationalism – and Adit is its starkest manifestation.” [See: Post 19 March 2017]
Yogi Adityanath, 5 June 1972, is a Sun Saturn Mercury in Gemini trine Uranus in Libra; with a volatile Mars in Cancer square Uranus; and a Pisces Moon. Air sign charts can be surprisingly nationalistic, with a trenchant ideology. He doesn’t look overly successful with tr Neptune squaring his Sun Mercury till late 2018.
His term chart, 19 March 2017 2.18pm Lucknow, India has an aggressive and unyielding Mars in Taurus conjunct the MC which is square the Sun/Moon midpoint, so certainly argumentative and fiery. The Sun squares Saturn, so progress will be slow, strewn with difficulties. There is the signature of the moment Jupiter opposition Uranus square Pluto which has undertones of religious and philosophical conflict. Pluto is in a fanatical square to Sun/Mars. And the Node is opposition Mars/Saturn and square Jupiter/Pluto which brings together the two sides of Modi’s government – suppression and expansion.
History seems to be going backwards at the moment into movements and mindsets we thought we’d left behind.
Another comment that is worth pondering for its wider global application: “This vision of Indian history is one of victimhood. That Hindus were first persecuted by the Muslims, then the British, and they can only recover when they repudiate all that is Muslim and British in their past.”
That could equally apply to Scottish nationalism, France’s Le Pen, even to Brexiters; and to Trump’s insistent harping on broken America which he is going to fix. It was what brought Hitler to power – a crushed Germany after World War 1 and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles engendered a fierce nationalism that rose out of the ashes of shame. The example of Germany apart, for all the rest the downtrodden-martyr tale is largely a political fig leaf.
It must be partly Pluto in Capricorn, though with overtones of Saturn Pluto, which latter is suppressive of diversity, religious and other – and we haven’t even got there yet. Plus perhaps a dash of the mad zealotry of Neptune in Pisces added to the mix.