Source: TW
I wish I could answer this with numbers, but I don’t have the time to dig up such. Hence, this answer is based on feelings. I feel approximately the same. In the thread below I’ll elaborate a bit: It might arouse disagreement in some readers. In 1989 we had the disastrous ascent of VP Singh, the Mandal affair, then by 1991 the collapse of our main ally the Sov-rUs empire, the assassination of Rajiv, the unstable brief rule of Chandrashekhar. Coeval with this the mlechCha-marUnmatta attempt to grab our head – Kashmir was initiated with full violence.
All these left us with a feeling of deep instablity: would we be able to withstand mlechCha-marUnmattAbhisaMdhi without the Soviets (in freefall). Then came PVNR, who definitely made several positive admin changes. Till then if you were in the middle middle class you could really feel that India was a poor country: access to knowledge & education was hardly great; you stood in lines with ration cards; you went to a water pump to get your water supplies for the day etc. But with the reign of PVNR things started looking up. By 94 we were just beginning to see the effects of this. e.g., the Middle class could just begin purchasing a PC, allowing you to explore computation at your own leisure. PVRN also looked the other way as our folks retook sAketa from the symbol mahAmada tyranny. It was a tremendous boost to H confidence. The rise of a H political party was palpable & we did feel that H consciousness was on the rise. I personally felt this when I converted a friend of cherapada roots from a deep commitment to left-liberalism to hindutva. There was a sense that the saffron flag would fly on the lohitapura.
From there things seemed ascendant until the H masses dropped the ax on their foot by ushering the sonyarAj. From the disaster of the UPA years the resurgence under the lATanaresha has brought back some of the same feeling that we feel in the resurgence from PVRN down to the nuclear weapon tests under nAmamAtra-vAjapeyI.
However, we have been bit of an amateur historian & have always realized that humans have a poor historical sense as their lifespan is v.short compared to the “arc of history”. Thus, we have that sense within that these blips could simply be wavelets in a bigger more consequential waveform. We had read with interest how the H felt when raghunAth-rAv of the morettos put the saffron flag on the Attock fort & how Panipat happened. Again the victory against the mlechCha-marUnmatta alliance at Kharda in 1795 & the autoimmune reactions of 1803-1805 were things we read with foreboding. Thus, we feared the same deep structural flaws with respect to the ability to combat the mlechCha-marUnmattAbhisaMdhi & their manifold internal allies & now the ever-belligerent chIna-s remained.
“What next?” has always been a big question. The successor problem: who will lead after the lATanaresha passes into the sands of history – can they navigate the upcoming nirNaya? In 1994s our fears were whether the fledgling H consciousness would take off after all? Now we think it is mature, but the fear is whether it will survive navyonmAda, the accelerants of modernism, & the coming nirNaya with the mlechCha-marUnmatta. Thus, in a sense, we have the same overall sense. Perhaps as one grows old the optimism & fervid expectation of youth turn into pessimism& fatalism.