It was the morning of Ram Navami. I was engaged in an exchange with a colleague, attempting to parse the dense layers of Ram ki Shakti Puja. This iconic long poem by Suryakant Tripathi ‘Nirala’ is a work that refuses to exhaust itself; no matter how frequently one returns to its verses, it yields new tremors of meaning.Our conversation centred on the poem’s final stanza: that moment of sublime resolution where Durga, moved by Rama’s gruelling tapasya, reveals herself in her pūrṇa rūpa, her complete form.We were specifically struck by a singular, enigmatic detail in Nirala’s description of this Mahashakti: what does it signify that, in this ultimate manifestation, she bears “Shankar upon her head” (mastak par Shankar)?In the universe of this poem, Durga is not merely a deity; she is Bhagwati,or, Shakti. The narrative breathes within the familiar architecture of the Ramayana – the climactic battle against Ravana. But, for Nirala, as another keen reader of Nirala, Nandkishore Nawal, insisted, this endeavour of Nirala’s Ram is to rescue Sita, his beloved wife.Yet, Ram himself is god but here he is a mortal being Ravana, who is not just a formidable adversary; he appears invincible because Ram realises, which disables him, that Shakti herself has moved to his side. He sees her cradling Ravana in her lap, a celestial endorsement of the unjust. How does one wage a war when the very source of cosmic power stands guard over the oppressor?Despondent, Rama confesses to his comrades that this is an unequal battle. How is he expected to fight Shakti? The aged, wise Jambavana consoles the despairing Ram and tries to break the impasse that Ram is in. He counsels Rama to withdraw from the heat of the fray and undertake a tapasya of a different order. This is no ordinary religious ritual. Jambavana presents a radical challenge: Rama must arrive at his own original conception of Shakti. It must not be a borrowed image, a received tradition, or a scripted dogma; it must be a power realised through the labour of his own spirit. Rama accepts. He must imagine power anew.As the rite nears its end, Rama prepares to offer the last of one hundred and eight blue lotuses. But Durga, playing a divine and testing game, steals the final flower. Faced with the prospect of an incomplete sacrifice and certain defeat, Rama sinks into a final dark night of the soul. Then, a memory flickers: his mother once called him ‘rajīva-nayana’ – the lotus-eyed one. If the flower is missing, he will offer his own eye.It is at this precise threshold – where devotion transcends ritual and becomes an uncompromising, self-sacrificing resolve – that Durga manifests. She is Adi Shakti. She assures him of victory and, in a profound closing gesture, dissolves into his very self.This conclusion has long haunted readers. If Rama was challenged to conceive Shakti anew, what are we to make of this vision? Is the Shakti who appears the fruit of his internal transformation? What, truly, is “original” about this image?While grappling with these questions with a fellow teacher, unable to find a foothold, I reached out to Tarun Kumar in Patna – a friend and a meticulous reader of Nirala. His line was busy. In that restless interim, I turned to the digital sprawl of X (formerly Twitter). A video from the Press Trust of India appeared. One grants such a source a baseline of credibility; one assumes the footage is not a fabricated artefact of a political desire, but a record of an authentic lived moment.The scene was from Gorakhpur. A five-year-old girl was being interviewed, flanked by adults who seemed to be her family. She had just encountered chief minister Adityanath during his morning stroll. In her small hands, she held a toy bulldozer.The video captures her offering the toy to the chief minister. He accepts it with a smile, a gesture of televised warmth, poses for the cameras, and returns it to her. The child later recounts his advice: to study hard, and to “play with the bulldozer.”We must pause here. What does it mean for a child to “play” with a bulldozer in the contemporary Indian imagination? How do the protagonists of the current political order “play” with it? By now, the symbol has been stripped of its innocence. A bulldozer is defined not by its mechanics, but by what it faces: a home, a livelihood, a history to be razed to dust, destroyed. In the grammar of modern India, the bulldozer has acquired a communal identity. It is the tool of a power that announces itself through the spectacle of destruction – specifically, the destruction of Muslim lives and properties.That morning in Gorakhpur felt choreographed. The child and her guardians appeared prepared, as if participating in a curated epiphany. Does a five-year-old spontaneously decide that a machine of demolition is the most appropriate gift for a head of state? Or was this symbolic gesture birthed in the minds of the adults of her family, or scripted by a publicity apparatus designed to normalise the aesthetics of force for destruction? To turn it into a symbol of innocent pleasure that a toy gives to a child?To place a bulldozer in a child’s hands is to baptise her into a specific cult of power. Is it an endorsement of “bulldozer justice”? Or perhaps a symbolic defiance against the courts that have, occasionally, questioned this extra-constitutional violence? Regardless of the intent, the image was profoundly unsettling. It represented the instrumental use of childhood to serve a narrow, aggressive political spectacle – a sight that disturbed even those Hindus who usually remain indifferent to the shifting political winds.My mind drifted back to Rama’s tapasya. We were searching for a “novel imagination of Shakti,” one which Ram would have conceived, and here, a new symbol had intruded, tearing the very fabric of the imagination.The bulldozer is indeed a form of Shakti, but of a particular kind. In the Hindutva worldview, it represents an unrestrained, visceral force that bypasses the discipline of law. For a significant section of the majority, it has become the most visible embodiment of “victory” – a power exercised over the “other.”What does it reveal about the moral health of a society when such a symbol is lovingly passed to a child? This is not merely an isolated event; it is a pedagogical process. We are witnessing the internalising of destruction as a natural, even desirable, state of being. We are raising a generation that may one day no longer see a demolished home as a tragedy, but as a fulfilment of a political promise, a source of pleasure.This imagination of power is not confined to the symbolic; it has entered the mundane. A friend in Pune, working with the organisation Lokayat, recounted traveling in an auto-rickshaw with a group of children she has been working with for months ,after a picnic. As they passed a mosque, the children, in a sudden, practiced unison, shouted: “Jai Shri Ram!”She was stunned by the spontaneity of it. In the context of our times, the chanting of the name of Rama is no longer an invocation of the divine. It has been weaponised into an assertion of dominance over Muslims and Christians. Its resonance is inseparable from the trauma of the Babri Masjid demolition and the decade of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. It is a slogan addressed as much to the self – to reassure the speaker of their power – as it is to the “other,” whom it seeks to intimidate.I recall a similar story from Dehradun. An ornithologist was speaking to students at an elite school about migratory birds – creatures that cross borders without passports. Seeking to bridge the lesson to human empathy, he took them to meet a community of Van Gujjars, traditionally a migratory tribe. He suggested the children greet them before their conversation. They did, in a loud, collective roar: “Jai Shri Ram!”The children in Pune were from modest backgrounds; those in Dehradun belonged to the new elite. Yet the slogan, and the power it claims, travelled across these class divides with effortless ease. If asked, these children might not know the history of the phrase, yet they instinctively recognise it as a linguistic instrument of control. A greeting is meant to offer reassurance; this version of the name of Rama offers a threat.The toy bulldozer in the child’s hand – does it signal that a new imagination of power has become a reality in the Hindu mind? Or does it mark the end of imagination itself? Imagination is linked to creation. The bulldozer is a symbol of destruction. What is this imagination of power that has entered the subconscious of Rama’s devotees who enjoy playing with bulldozers?On the day of Ram Navami, as we reflect on Rama’s imagination of Shakti, what does the image of a new power, the bulldozer, do to the power of imagination itself?Apoorvanand teaches Hindi at Delhi University.