Can India’s Liberal Democracy Recover After a Third Modi Term?
The Hindu nationalist prime minister has attacked minorities and institutions yet is poised for victory in the national elections
The cult of personality built around Narendra Modi now aims to make him seem immortal. That he is too strong to beat in a national election, is mundane; instead, Modi now seems permanently appointed, a figure fixed in the longue durée of India’s governance.
In his own recent speeches, Modi has placed the country and himself at only the start of a new era. The next quarter century, which he has dubbed the Amrit Kaal (the “Elixir Age”) will “decide our direction for the next one thousand years,” he said. This January, after Modi led inaugural rituals at a new temple in Ayodhya, one built over the rubble of a mosque razed by a mob in 1992, his ministers—calling themselves “the Cabinet of the Millennium”—praised him in terms once reserved for kings. He was “not just a leader of the people, but … a pioneer of the new age.” “Not from a political but a spiritual point of view,” the cabinet resolution said, “destiny has chosen you.”
This fails to give credit where it’s due; it was definitely Modi who chose himself. But Narendra Modi’s popularity is real. In 2019, his party won close to 38% of votes across India, bringing him within five percentage points of Indira Gandhi’s 1971 landslide. This year’s election, between April and June, could boost his mandate further.
These levels of approval are invested in the man himself, not his party or the “Cabinet of the Millennium.” For many Indians, especially wealthy elites and the diaspora, it is Modi’s apparent personal merits—the fakir-like austerity, the burning of midnight oil— that need to be rewarded. They trust him with wide executive power and prerogative. Democratic checks and balances only hinder Modi’s decisive nature, as far as they are concerned.
He even looks the part. Now scowling, now sweet, he is a casting director’s dream of a sturdy Indian patriarch. This personal image, built up at humongous expense, is the bedrock of his government’s legitimacy.
Mortal Beloved
A flaw in this Modi-centric model of the universe, though, is that our sense of his permanence is just wrong. Modi won’t be prime minister indefinitely, or even—in the long view—that much longer. The most serious question India faces may not be what happens under the man, but what happens after.
Modi won his first national election in 2014. Immediately after, his party instituted a new rule: No members would hold office past the age of 75. In one stroke, the party’s founding figures—Lal Krishna Advani, Murali Manohar Joshi—were put out to pasture. (Technically, they were put in a “margdarshak mandal,” or guidance committee, which was never heard of again.) The first political counterbalance that Modi eliminated, as prime minister, was within his own party.
This year, Modi turns 74. He is the oldest person in his cabinet. By his own rules, he should be preparing to retire, or to serve his last term. Neither seems to be the case. Going by reports, he is already planning for 2029; by his own account, “You are stuck on 2029, but I am planning for 2047.” So much for rules.
Still, in two more terms, Modi will be 84 years old and India will be looking at a successor.
Who that will be is a question that’s almost never asked. For corporate-owned media, the subject is taboo, and amounts to something like lèse-majeste. Modi’s aura—of capability, resolve, and yes, permanence—is one of their leading products; or viewed another way, one of their leading products is the ads for the Modi cult bought and paid for by his party, by government ministries, by public-sector firms, and by crony corporations.
Modi’s critics are too consumed by the continuous sense of crisis to see beyond him. His supporters could care less: Après Modi, le déluge.
Worse Yet to Come
For both critics and supporters, though, thinking about Modi’s successor focuses the mind—because Modi is not Hindu nationalism’s end-game scenario. He is a ruthlessly ideological leader but is still, in many respects, a mainstream politician. Although Modi can present as a political fakir out of the provinces, he spent much of the '90s working out of New Delhi—an old fashioned party apparatchik who dealt with press and recruited new allies for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
He has a transparent craving for international kudos and respectability (having tasted disgrace, after the 2002 pogrom in the state of Gujarat, where he was the chief minister). His break with constitutional norms and legitimacy is not complete.
It is almost certain that Modi’s successor will make him look like a moderate democrat, as he did to his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s previous prime minister from Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, the BJP.
Granted, we have probably not seen the worst of Modi yet. There’s a clear track of rising authoritarian creep and ideological zeal even within the first two Modi administrations. One way to see that is in the changing garb and roles he has worn through two national elections and terms in power.
In 2014, as challenger to what was seen as a venal and paralyzed coalition led by the Congress Party, Modi played a hard-nosed, business friendly, GDP go-getter. His defining program, enacted in his first months in office, was “Make in India,” and his most publicized cabinet ally was the urbane and wonkish Arun Jaitley, a man who looked like he read the pink papers, or like he belonged in them.
By 2019, with at least one economic debacle behind him—the overnight demonetization of nearly all of India’s cash, to no productive end—Modi was transformed into National Security Man. The most publicized figure in his administration was the National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval.
The 2019 election was bookended by Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority province and its byword for threats to India’s sovereignty and soldiers’ lives. Just ahead of the election, a deadly terror attack took place there, leaving Modi to conjure a high-stakes spectacle of national vengeance, with fighter jets and missiles dispatched to Pakistan, which was supposed to be behind it. After the election, using a barely-there constitutional conceit—and plain repression on the ground—Modi stripped Kashmir of its rights, its special status, and of statehood altogether. Now a union territory, Kashmir would be ruled from Delhi, as it remains to date.
This year, the culmination of his second term, the curtain-raiser for his re-election campaign took place on January 22. At the new temple in Ayodhya, the prime minister personally performed rituals to consecrate the idol. A millenarian frenzy swept through the media and the public. The actual religious pontiffs of Hinduism refused to attend. In Modi’s version of the ritual, of course, the idol consecrates him.
From the sanctum he stepped out in his latest costume, the Righteous King of Hindus, returned to rule Bharat—no longer just “India"—after a thousand years. This avatar highlights some of the grand ambitions of a third Modi term that include a:
Unified Civil Code, written on Hindu nationalist terms. Some aspects of family law in India differ by religious community, despite a directive in the Constitution calling for an eventual “unified civil code.” Past governments (Modi’s included) have side-stepped this sensitive terrain. But the UCC headlines the BJP 2024 manifesto: milking the optics of ending regressive Muslim personal laws, even as it enshrines law to suit conservative Hindus. (A recent state-level UCC criminalized live-in relationships unless they were registered with the state.)
National Register of Citizens (NRC). This is a nation-wide audit aimed at identifying “infiltrators” (a dog-whistle for Muslims) who cannot corroborate their citizenship. As early as 2020, camps for detainees were already being built across the country.
Together, the UCC and the NRC signal a promise to scrub the country—legally and demographically—of undesirable Muslim lives and lifestyles.
Modi’s Cracking Armor
For three weeks after Jan. 22, Modi had seemed unassailable. Then there was a startling turn of events.
The Supreme Court threw open the contents of the electoral bonds scheme, a system for secret political donations introduced by Jaitley in 2018. Since then, ultra-rich individuals and corporations had made anonymous contributions to parties by buying “bonds” for unlimited amounts from the State Bank of India.
After the Supreme Court declared the scheme illegal, it forced the SBI to reveal the identities of both donors and recipients. Predictably, electoral bonds turned out to be instruments of bribery and an extensive political extortion racket.
The Modi government’s reaction was immediate, lawless flailing … at the opposition. Although the BJP had received the overwhelming majority of these secret proceeds, it froze the entire funds of its major rival, the Congress Party. For other reasons, it arrested Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of a maverick party governing both Delhi and Punjab. Kejriwal is the first sitting chief minister ever to be arrested in India. Incredibly, both these actions took place right at the outset of the election, when governments are held to a “model code of conduct.”
January 22 had mesmerized the country with its epic devotional theater, and its forced mass-adoration of the PM. The new events helped to throw the house-lights back on, and make a fresh case for institutional checks in the “Amrit Kaal.”
The electoral bonds exposé validated India’s Supreme Court. But it also was a startling victory for civil society groups, which had dogged the Supreme Court for years to hear the case. It showed the abject state of state-controlled corporations (like the State Bank of India, which misled the court again and again about its ability to provide information).
The sudden round of attacks on the opposition demonstrated afresh how badly the ruling party has misused law enforcement agencies, including the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation. Their work has been endlessly diverted to cheap political ends, even as Modi portrays an aura of Mr. Clean.
Behind these agencies, but still in plain sight, is a whole landscape of crippled and demoralized institutions—the Parliament, the Election Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the Income Tax Department, the university boards, curricular boards, censor boards, scientific and economic advisory bodies, statistical bodies, minority and women’s rights commissions. (Not to mention my own drooling, demon-possessed darling, the fourth estate.)
The past 10 years have been a blur of assaults on their autonomy and functioning. This is one reason why the V-Dem Institute in 2018 downgraded India from “electoral democracy” to “electoral autocracy.” Its March 2024 report shows India falling even further on multiple metrics: It is “one of the worst autocratizers” in the world today.
From Bigotry to Mass Violence
If the BJP’s hegemony grows while India’s checks and balances dwindle, the post-Modi succession could lead quickly to an autocracy well beyond the pale. The case for India’s institutional integrity, its checks and balances, is about Modi but even more about the unknown quantity that follows him.
The BJP itself is perilously over-centralized. The longer Modi is in power, the more sudden competition may occur—even within a party as disciplined as the BJP—over his succession. What we can expect to see is there, for example, in Republican primaries in the United States: a scramble toward extremism, as rivals find they can only outflank each other from further on the right. The scope for opportunism is limitless, centered around instigation against Muslim Indians.
Already, viable successors and next-gen BJP stars outshine Modi in bigotry and aggression. They are chief ministers who are applauded for using bulldozers to destroy citizens’ shops and homes, particularly Muslim ones. Cabinet ministers lead rallies in New Delhi, chanting, “Traitors to the nation will be killed.” Young MPs give speeches suggesting yearly targets to “reconvert” minorities to Hinduism.
In the rank and file, speech is plainly genocidal. At one rally (allegedly organized by a BJP MP, and not far from the India’s Parliament) a crowd was recorded chanting, “Jab Mulle Kaate Jayenge, Ram Ram Chillayenge”: “When the Muslims are cut to pieces; Then they’ll shout Ram’s name.”
In 2021-22, not one but two international genocide watchdogs published alerts about India. The Early Warning Project, an initiative of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, ranked India at #2 for risk factors for mass killing (Pakistan was at #1). Genocide Watch raised a similar warning soon after, and its founder made specific reference to an NRC exercise in the northeastern state of Assam. The rising volume of murderous discourse, along with rising vigilante killings on Modi’s watch, against Muslim Indians (and other cultural scapegoats) is impossible to ignore. One risk under Modi’s successor is that authorized mass-violence actually begins.
If You Can Keep It
This is an inherent and structural danger, however, rather than a problem of individual bad characters. Even a non-BJP leader, in a post-Modi India, will resist the return to accountability and checks and balances. If the present damage to institutions outlasts Modi, it will also outlast BJP rule.
This is an argument to be made to complacent liberals, and even to Modi’s true believers. It may be the only persuasive message we can put to them. India's authoritarian shift is sold to Indians on the coin of one man’s supposed qualities. It’s worth asking about his unknown successors, their unknown qualities, and whether we should meet them with their power unchecked.
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Hard to pick a favorite sentence, this might be it.
"In Modi’s version of the ritual, of course, the idol consecrates him"
Biggest aftermath of colonialization is this. People who have lost faith in their own understanding and problem solving ability, and only seek to imitate others they think are superior to them.
They mask their personal sense of inferiority by adopting external identity, but keep projecting natives to also lack understanding of the world and therefore disregard their wishes and desires as secondary.
So any debate about how the country should be run has to be within the groups of these people in identity crisis, and these people most often simply assume (imitate) the characteristics of what they are copying.
Westoids think the "belong" with the western civilization, communists identify with China and other converted minorities from Turkey to babar ki aulad.
But this external identity is mere imititation, and they personally have no power to create through it. Whatever agenda comes up in west/middle east, etc becomes their purpose and mission few years down the line.
You might complain about complacent liberals, but expecting them to have original thought or solve problems to fight against modi/hindutva goes against their original purpose of imitation of identity to mask their insecurity.
Put simply, the liberals in "bombay" and other circles are not "proud liberals" that would defend their rights by buying guns and fighting the government, they are merely adopting the identity to appear "modern", "educated" or like their white masters (since before 1947), within their social circles.