Source: Asia Maior | Published: 2026-05-09
Category: 아시아 정치경제 | Keywords: authoritarian, india, prime minister
Narendra Modi’s India ten years on: A second Indian Republic or a second Emergency? James Manor Post Views: 6 Short URL: https://www.asiamaior.org/?p=2572 Available also in pdf – Download Pdf
To understand what is India’s internal political situation after 10 years of rule by Narendra Modi, it is necessary to consider diverse topics. They include the main aspects of the authoritarian system that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had created during a decade in power, and the surprising setback that he faced at the national election in April-May 2024 despite huge unfair advantages over rival parties. His loss of a parliamentary majority at that election led some to expect that he would moderate his drive for autocratic rule and religious polarization, but that did not happen. Aspects of the economy that affected politics also mattered: economic growth, widening inequality and persistent poverty, the government’s surprisingly unhelpful treatment of the middle classes, and its welfare provisions. India under Modi suffered deeply embarrassing downgrades to dismal places in numerous international rankings. Its efforts to address this problem bore little fruit. A fundamental social change – the refusal of so called «lower» castes to accept caste hierarchies – had long been seen at the grassroots. But in 2024 it finally had an impact in national politics, to the disadvantage of Modi’s party. He had succeeded in gaining control of nearly all of India’s once-vibrant media, and they helped to promote his extravagant personality cult. Partly as a result of it, he relaxed into a self-satisfied complacency which led him to believe and to announce that he is of divine origin. This monumental complacency also led to three startling excesses that have damaged India’s international ties – especially with the West and most crucially with the US as Donald Trump takes power.
Keywords – election; de-institutionalisation; authoritarianism; personal rule; personality cult; divinity; complacent excesses
1. Modi’s drive for authoritarian control and religious polarization
Between 2014 when he became prime minister and early 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made great progress in promoting religious polarization – leading a hard-line Hindu nationalist assault to demonise and brutalise minorities, especially India’s 172 million Muslims. That effort continued during the national election campaign in April and May 2024 when Modi and others made much use of anti-Muslim rhetoric. He had also made great strides in radically centralising power and in hollowing out democratic institutions in order to impose one-man control of the political system.
The only institutions that escaped his effort at disempowerment and control were the prime minister’s office (PMO) and eleven investigative agencies. They were kept strong but were flagrantly misused to mount raids and probes, often on dubious charges, to intimidate or subdue actors in government institutions and in civil society, the media, etc. – to bring them to heel. The aim here was to create an authoritarian government dominated by one man exercising personal rule.
The list of institutions that were hollowed out and controlled is long. They included India’s central bank, the election commission, the central information commission, the national statistical organisation, universities, research centres, the comptroller and auditor general’s office, the offices of speaker in both houses of parliament, state governors in the federal system, the federal system itself [Kailash 2021, 5 March], etc.
No significant power centre was omitted from Modi’s drive for top-down control. And very prominently, parliament suffered. As early as 2015, deep anxiety was evident even among members of parliament from the prime minister’s own Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because no consultation was undertaken by Modi. An economist who had advised the BJP told an eminent journalist of his surprise at the amount of «hatred» privately expressed towards Modi by several party leaders. 1 During his first decade in power, numerous bills were rammed through parliament without time for scrutiny or discussion. By 2019, this disempowering had gone so far that one opposition legislator asked «Are we delivering pizzas or passing legislation?» [PTI 2019, 31 July]
Even cabinet ministers were starved of influence amid Modi’s radical centralising. They learned what their policies were from their civil servants who were told by the prime minister’s office (PMO). This led to serious delays. With ministers interminably waiting for instructions from the PMO and unwilling to stick their neck out, decisions are taking much longer. According to sources in the PMO the highest number of files pending has gone up from 1,500 in Manmohan Singh’s tenure (before 2014) to 6,000. «The prime minister, being a control freak and travel freak at the same time, compounds the problem», says a former cabinet secretary [Srivastava 2022, 5 February].
The firm control over cabinet ministers from on high may have diminished a little over the last ten years, but Modi’s soaring personality cult (discussed below) has ensured that the top-down grip remains tight.
2. A surprise result of the national election, and Modi’s uncompromising response
In April and May 2024, a national election was held for a new parliament. It was not a fair election. The ruling BJP had vastly more money to spend than all other parties put together. But that was not enough. The bank accounts for the Congress Party, the BJP’s main rival, were frozen as the campaign began. The leader of another prominent rival party was jailed on dubious charges.
Modi had gained full control of the election commission which is supposed to ensure fairness. It helped him. On 110 occasions, it took no action when his words – religiously polarising dog whistles and blatant remarks – violated its model code of conduct. Modi also controlled most print, television and online news outlets.
He and his party entered the campaign in high spirits, hoping that his consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya on 22 January would provide an electoral boost. He asked voters to give him 400 seats in a house of 543 – even more than had been won in his thumping victories of 2014 and 2019. Other BJP leaders explained that 400 would enable the new government to change India’s constitution.
But when the votes were counted, the result came as a shock. Despite all of its unfair advantages, Modi’s party won only 240 seats – embarrassingly short of a majority of 272. It was only able to form a government by relying on two regional parties which were its allies. Modi’s personal vote share in his Varanasi constituency fell from 63.62% in 2019 to 54.2%.
This confirmed what has long been known: Indian voters are not mindless sheep who are easily led. They have thrown out ruling parties at roughly 70% of national and state elections since 1977 – internationally, a very high rejection rate. In this election, despite the huge unfair advantages enjoyed by his party, it suffered a reversal.
The causes of this outcome are complex. Most opposition parties coalesced in an imperfect but reasonably successful alliance to prevent the fragmentation of anti-BJP votes. Reliable opinion surveys revealed widespread discontent over inflation and the lack of employment opportunities about which Modi had long made what Indians call «tall promises». The use of anti-Muslim rhetoric failed to generate the expected levels of support.
Many activists in the ruling party’s hard-line Hindu nationalist sister organisation, the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), sat out the campaign. They were unhappy with Modi for two reasons. His drive for one-man government and his personality cult offended them because they had always believed that their organisation and their cause should take precedence over individual leaders. They also objected to Modi’s tendency to seize power by any means. After he had lost state elections, he had repeatedly used threats and inducements to persuade legislators from other parties to defect to the BJP, so that he welcomed turncoats with no commitment to the Hindu nationalism that was so dear to the RSS.
The BJP also suffered from a decline in support from disadvantaged groups – most crucially, the Scheduled Castes (ex-untouchables) and the Scheduled Tribes ( adivasis’s ) – see Table 1 below. Many of them were alarmed by the prospect of a large enough majority for the BJP to alter the constitution in ways that could lead to the weakening or removal of reservations for them in educational institutions and government jobs. By loudly appealing for 400 seats, Modi had blundered.
Some expected that the disappointing election result would make Modi less aggressive in pursuing autocratic rule by consulting the two regional parties on which he depends for his majority, and by toning down Hindu extremism because those two parties have cultivated support from minority voters. He offered financial concessions to those parties, but little else changed.
Soon after the election, he intentionally outraged opposition parties by re-nominating as speaker of the lower house a man who had suspended 110 of their legislators in a single day in the previous parliament. New harsh criminal laws were proposed which broadened the definition of terrorism and, after claiming to abolish sedition, retained it under a different name – and increased punishments to life sentences.
A tough new broadcasting bill was introduced to strengthen the government’s grip on digital media. Modi unilaterally lifted the ban on government employees joining the BJP’s sister organisation, the RSS. Loud protests from the opposition claimed that this would let RSS members assume powerful roles, and that it was a threat to reservations for disadvantaged castes. But the change survived. Without consulting allies, Modi announced changes in a Waqf bill to take a tough line on provisions for Muslims, to end what he called the «appeasement» of the minorities.
He also vowed to continue with forceful «anti-corruption» efforts, which meant the persistence of widespread raids and arrests by investigative agencies on questionable pretexts. There are eleven such agencies, including the Income Tax Department, the Intelligence Bureau, the Central Bureau of Investigation, and the Finance Ministry’s Enforcement Directorate. They have been brazenly misused against opposition politicians, media outlets, India’s once hugely constructive civil society organisations (including two Nobel Peace Prize winners), universities and research centres (starting with vengeful attacks on the best), and independent voices. After the election, his right-hand man, Amit Shah, drove the message home: Modi would have total power to act without consulting allied parties [Raman 2024, 30 September].
The only significant change was an effort to repair the damage done among Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe voters by his call for a huge majority. New initiatives to benefit these groups were developed. Analyses of the election result indicated that their anxiety over reservations (see section VI) – along with rising inequality and the severe shortage of jobs – outweighed religious polarization which Modi had stressed during the campaign. But after the election, Modi, Shah and other BJP leaders continued to promote religious intolerance and the brutalization of the vast Muslim minority [Singh 2024, 5 December].
The incendiary BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, warned repeatedly – and preposterously – that if Hindus were not united, they would be slaughtered. He promised that more Hindu temples would be built on the sites of mosques. He and some other BJP state-level leaders continued, without due process, using bulldozers to destroy the homes and businesses of Muslims whom he called the «mafia». Thi