The Modi Decade: Has India Become a Hindu Rashtra?

The Modi Decade: Has India Become a Hindu Rashtra? Sunil K. Sahu DePauw University Prepared for presentation at ASIA Network meeting in Atlanta, GA, April 14, 2024. Please do not quote without author’s permission. 1 The Modi Decade: Has India Become a Hindu Rashtra? Sunil K. Sahu “Dev se desh aur Ram se rashtriya chetana ka vistar” (God to nation and Ram to the expansion of national consciousness)—Narendra Modi Speaking at the consecration ceremony of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya on January 22, 2024, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who performed the “Pran Pratshtha” rituals as Mukhya Yajman and was treated all but as a king, projected the Ram temple as a symbol of faith and national consciousness. He heralded “the advent of a new era” and declared Ram as a civilizational icon that unites India. He declared that “Ram is the foundation of India. Ram is the idea of India. Ram is the law of India. Ram is the prestige of India; Ram is the glory of India. Ram is the leader and Ram is the policy. Ram is eternal. When Ram is honored, the effect does not last for years or centuries, the effect is for thousands of years.” By performing a religious ceremony with full participation of the government machinery, Modi melded religion and state in a country that is constitutionally secular. He fasted for 11 days ahead of the ceremony and, following the tradition, slept on the floor. The opening of the new Ram Temple, built on the ruins of the razed Babari Mosque, which was demolished by the Hindu nationalist mob in 1992 and the ownership of the 2.77 acres of disputed land awarded to the Ram Janmabhoomi trust by the Supreme Court in 2019, was a historic moment. The temple’s inauguration was the culmination of a decades-long campaign by Hindu nationalist forces—the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—to pull India away from the secular roots upon which independent India was founded. It has been suggested that the Ram Temple is not a monument of faith and spirituality and a place to worship but an indication and sign of triumphalism and supremacy of Hinduism over minority religions, especially Islam. Modi’s “New India,” in this telling, is a de facto Hindu Rashtra, defined as a civilizational, not a Westphalian, state guided by the principle of Hindu dharma. It was a triumph for Hindus, which goes beyond Huntington’s cultural essentialism as it draws the “battlelines in a way that makes Hindu India a leading contender for civilizational supremacy.” This “new India” or the “Second Republic,” as it is being referred by some observers, imagines itself to be among a handful of regional power centers in the world, along the lines of Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory, where each power is supported by an enduring civilizational vision of order. In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, which brought the world closer economically but made it more religious, there is a surge in popular religiosity among Hindus in India. This religiosity is being cultivated by, according to Meera Nanda, the state-temple-corporate complex which has replaced, under Modi, the more secular public institutions of the Nehruvian era. In this “new India,” the idea of the Hindu right, some fear, will become indistinguishable from what the average Indian thinks—an India where the Sangh will become samaj (the goal of the RSS), where Lord Ram becomes a civilizational symbol, an idol to be accepted by all Indians, regardless of their faith. Modi has accelerated the Hindu Rashtra project through his authoritarian style of governance— by centralizing power in the center and in PMO and by harassing critics, muzzling journalists, 2 and eroding judicial independence. He has ushered in a populist authoritarian era—an undeclared emergency—not seen since Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule (1975-77). The Hindu nationalist forces have hijacked India’s liberal democracy where citizens, at least some, live in fear and no longer enjoy civil liberties and freedom of expression and association. During his two terms in office, Modi has transformed India from a liberal secular democracy into an electoral majoritarian state where democratic norms are fast disappearing, press freedom is curbed (TV and print media—popularly referred to as Godi media—sings praise of Modi twentyfour seven), journalists are threatened and even killed for doing their job, the judiciary is cowed, and the executive is not accountable. This paper is an attempt to explore whether or not India has become a Hindu Rashtra. I will argue that the effort to transform India from a secular, inclusive, and liberal democracy into an electoral democracy with a dominant Hindu nationalist ideology, a century-old goal of the RSS, was in the making for over three decades. The project began with L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya in September-October 1990 in which several hundred people died in violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims along the route. It reached a crescendo in the inauguration of the Ram temple on January 22, 2024, fulfilling a major ideological platform of the BJP. The Rath Yatra was the beginning of a nationalist state-building project, an attempt to construct a homogenous national identity. It was the upper-caste response to the rise of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) that demanded, based on the recommendation of the Mandal Commission, a quota for the 52 percent educationally and socially backward castes. The BJP’s Hindutva was the antidote to the quota politics. The weekly magazine of the RSS, Organizer, called it the “Shudra revolution.” However, the BJP under Modi has made assiduous efforts to bolster its presence among disadvantaged castes, especially in the Hindi heartland and tribal areas. The BJP is the largest political party in the world, and, for the American national interest, it is considered the most important “foreign political party in the world.” The growth of the party has been phenomenal—from 88 million registered members in 2015 to 180 million in 2024. It has come to occupy some of the political and ideological space the Congress party once held. Modi has accelerated the pace of the Hindu Rashtra project which would be realized, I argue, once the BJP’s popular vote share goes up from its current 37.3 percent to 50 percent. That would translate into a sizable parliamentary majority, allowing the party to make necessary amendments to the constitution. My hypothesis is that the BJP would make India a de jure Hindu Rashtra once it gets a two-thirds majority in Lok Sabha. Therefore, the claim of Amit Shah and other BJP leaders that their party would rule for the next fifty years is a goal well within their reach. I further argue that the project of Hindu Rashtra would not lead to a regime change and will be accomplished within the framework of an electoral democracy. Since elections lend legitimacy to those in power, elections have, until now, been free, fair, and fought vigorously at all levels of government—national, state, and local. The electoral process allows the BJP to mobilize Hindu voters by demonizing Muslims, to expand and consolidate Hindu votes. The party’s hold on power will likely grow due to its organizational strength, the commitment of its cadre, the charismatic leadership of Modi, centralization of power in the PMO, “executive aggrandizement” and “strategic harassment” of the opposition, and access to resources through 3 Electoral Bonds (2018-2024) and other undisclosed contributions. That the opposition is fractured and nepotistic further helps the BJP. During his decade in power, Modi has weakened India’s democratic institutions (the Supreme Court and the Election Commission) and the rule of law (abuse of agencies such as Enforcement Directorate [ED], Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI] and the Income Tax Department). Liberal democracy is not only about elections—as most Indians believe and some democratic theorists, notably Przeworski and his co-authors (2000) have argued—but also about what happens between elections, especially the rule of law, protection of individual rights, civil liberties, and freedom of expression and association. If we apply this definition of democracy, India is no longer a liberal democracy. The democracy-rating agencies have downgraded India’s democracy in the last decade: V-Dem downgraded India from a flawed democracy to an electoral autocracy, the Economist Democracy Index (2022) categorizes India as a “flawed democracy,” slipping from the 27th position in 2014 to 46th in 2022, and Freedom House calls India a partly free country. I would argue that India is still an electoral democracy, not an electoral autocracy, though there are indications that the country is moving in that direction. What Is a Hindu Rashtra? A Hindu Rashtra in its pure form would be a state where the State and society must adhere to Hindu textual prescriptions, where the state is led by a Kshatriya king guided by Brahmins in his court. The 1962 Nepalese constitution, abrogated in 1990, approximated this conception of a Hindu Rashtra. But this is not the kind of Hindu Rashtra the BJP wants in India. According to the BJP constitution, the party bears “true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India … and to the principles of socialism, secularism, and democracy …” It is also committed to “positive secularism (Sarva Dharma Samabhav) and value-based politics.” Since the constitution of India, unlike those of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other South Asian nations, does not privilege one religion or the rights of one community over the others and since the BJP does not (yet) want to change the constitution, its conception of Hindu Rashtra is not one of returning to some golden age. It is about “the exclusion and persecution of India’s minorities, particularly Muslims … It imagines India as a Hindu nation where the Muslim and Christian exist on sufferance” (Patel, 2020:21). Its notion of a Hindu Rashtra is based on the ideology of Hindutva which conflates its ideas of religion and culture with those of nation and state. Over the last decade, the Hindu nationalist forces have succeeded in creating a complex of cultural loss in the minds of ordinary Hindus. The ideology of Hindutva is a belief system that is aimed at making “Hindus fearful so as to compel them to act together and ultimately dominate those Indians who are not Hindus.” Ram Guha calls it “paranoid triumphalism” (Guha, 2024). The source of the misery of Hindus, in this telling, lay in the deeds of the Muslim rulers such as Babur and Aurangzeb, who came to India as invaders, and in the appeasement of the Muslim population under the Congress rule. Muslims, therefore, are to be suspected as they are here to take away Hindu’s culture, civilization, religion, land, money, women, and employment. Had it not been for the Muslim rule in India, it is argued, India would have been a prosperous country and a Vishwaguru. This sense of cultural loss and the need to reclaim everything that was once theirs is at the core of the Hindutva ideology. Therefore, Muslims are projected as enemies of India along with Christians (who ruled over India for almost two centuries), Sikhs (who were secessionists in the 1980s and have recently led the farmers movement twice), intellectuals (who 4 are influenced by Western ideologies such as liberalism and Marxism), English speaking political elites (who governed the country after independence), and the Indian National Congress (the hegemonic dynastic party that ruled India for four decades). To analyze the Hindu nationalists’ goal of creating a Hindu Rashtra, we need to first understand the concept of secularism as enshrined in the constitution and as practiced by the Congress government in the first three decades after independence. Secularism in India India was partitioned in 1947 along religious lines, creating a Muslim-dominated Pakistan and a Hindu-majority (84.1%) India with a significant Muslim minority (9.8%). Although religion has been the most powerful single factor in the development of Indian civilization, the official ideology of the early Indian state, and of the dominant Congress party, was secular nationalism. Hindu nationalist parties and organizations such as Hindu Mahasabha, the Ram Rajya Parishad, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were of marginal importance before and after India’s independence. Jawaharlal Nehru and other framers of the constitution, notably B.R. Ambedkar, committed India to the principles of secularism. Though the constitution provides protection to religious minorities, the term secular itself was not mentioned in the document; it was incorporated into the preamble of the constitution by the 42nd amendment during Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule (1975-77). India is constitutionally a secular state. The leaders of the nationalist movement recognized that the British had intentionally polarized India along religious and communal lines in the decades leading up to the second world war: Separate electorates for the Muslims were introduced in 1909 and in 1919, and in 1935 the same principle was extended to other minority religious communities. Therefore, the Congress denounced the colonial policy of divide-and-rule that had hardened vertical divisions along sectarian lines. Determined to change this situation after independence, the Congress leaders sought to create a political, legal, and constitutional system that would give security and a sense of fairness to India’s religious minorities, especially the Muslims. Since the framers of the constitution had witnessed the horrors of violence between Hindus and Muslims following India’s partition in 1947 that took nearly a million lives, their approach to secularism was informed by the lessons of partition that “religious politics kills.” This context is often lost or intentionally overlooked by the BJP and Modi supporters who point to secularism—or “sickularism,” a derogatory term they have coined—to be nothing more than the Congress party’s “Muslim appeasement” and “vote-bank politics.” The Indian state, under the constitution, observes an attitude of sarva dharma samabhava (equal respect for all religions). This meant that reserved seats and a separate electorate for religious minorities were eliminated. Neutrality and impartiality, however, did not mean complete separation of church and state. Unlike the United States, India explicitly provides for state support of religious institutions that impart religious instructions such as Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and Banaras Hindu University (BHU), though the Modi government has drastically cut the budget of AMU while it has doubled the budget of BHU. Moreover, the constitution permits taxation for the benefit of all religions but not for “any particular religion” (Article 27), and it is permissible for the state to provide a subsidy to the Muslims undertaking a 5 pilgrimage to Mecca. It is worth noting that the Hajj subsidy was ended by the Modi government in 2018, while direct subsidies to Hindu pilgrims have continued at the state level—Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Assam, and Rajasthan—and an indirect subsidy in the form of central government funding to state governments for providing facilities and security for pilgrims—for example, federal funds allocated to states for the four Kumbh Melas held in Hardwar, Allahabad, Nasik, and Ujjain. The constitution, however, contained certain provisions that were contradictory, and their implementation led to tensions which were exploited by the Hindu nationalists. For example, Article 26 guarantees every religious group or denomination “the right to establish and maintain institutions for religious and charitable purposes; to manage its own affairs in matters of religion; to own and acquire and administer movable and immovable property.” But freedom of religion was compromised by constitutional sanctions for extensive state interference in religious affairs such as requiring all public Hindu temples to be open to worship by ex-untouchables. In guaranteeing the fundamental principles of equality and nondiscrimination, the constitution provides that “The state shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, or birth of place or any of them” (Article 15 [1]). Yet this principle was compromised by the reservation of seats for the Schedule castes and Schedule tribes in federal and state legislatures (Articles 330 and 332) and by the enactment of the Hindu Code Bill (195556), which codified laws for Hindus, but not for Muslims and Christians, in the areas of marriage, succession, guardianship, adoption, and maintenance. The Nehruvian vision of a secular state was somewhat at odds with the views of Mahatma Gandhi, who emphasized the inseparability of religion and politics and the superiority of the former over the latter. For Gandhi, as Madan explains, “religion was the source of absolute value and hence constitutive of social life; politics was the arena of public interest. Without the former the latter would become debased” (Madan, 1997:344). Gandhi applied Hindu ethical values to the nationalist movement and used Hindu religious concepts such as “truth force” and “nonviolence” political tactics. In other words, Gandhi brought a religious ethic to politics rather than political militancy into religious communities. The militant Hindus and their radical organization, the RSS, opposed both the secular nationalist and the Gandhian views. They considered Gandhi’s attitude toward Muslims to be one of “appeasement” and saw the Nehru government’s effort to treat all religions equally as giving non-Hindu religions special protection (Frykenberg 1986). Inspired by the narrow and exclusivist ideology of Hindutva, Hindu nationalists were critical of the Congress government which had refrained from endorsing a uniform civil code. The logic behind Nehru’s refrain was his hope that Muslim leadership would eventually reform their own personal law, which has not happened because their leadership remained orthodox in its doctrine. The idea of a Hindu-focused India in the pre- and post-independence India had marginal influence. It was marginalized in the freedom movement and was discredited in the early post-independence years, due mainly to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a fanatic Hindu nationalist and a former RSS member, Nathuram Godse. It took seven decades for the Hindu nationalist party to have an impact “as farreaching as the political imprint left by the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru” (Mehta, The New BJP: 29). Modi has succeeded in discrediting Nehruvian secularism and supplanting it with Hindu nationalism and a new muscular, confident, and aspirational India. In 6 fact, Modi has become a legend in his own lifetime, a sage-like figure who, many believe, has risen above politics, working for the advancement of India and its people, a Vishwaguru seeking to elevate himself from prime minister to king of Bharat. Hindu Nationalism In electoral terms, the Jana Sangh, the Hindu nationalist party founded in 1951 as the political arm of the RSS, was an insignificant player until it merged with three other parties in 1977 to form the Janata Party as part of a grand Opposition Alliance to take on the Congress. It had won 3 seats in 1952 and 22 in 1971, representing 3.1% and 7.3% vote shares, respectively. It did not, however, mean that the Hindu nationalist voices were absent in the political discourse. While the ideology of the Congress party at the national and state levels was dominated by politicians who shared Nehru’s secular vision, the party leaders at the district level were not very different from the Jana Sangh and those of the RSS on Hindu nationalism. Since the Congress was a catch all party, it had accommodated under its umbrella Hindu traditionalists and nationalists such as K.M. Munshi, Rajendra Prasad, Dr. Sampurnanand, D.P. Mishra, Seth Govind Das, and Vallabhbhai Patel, along with secular and progressive leaders. It is important to note that Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the founder of the Jana Sangh, served in Nehru’s cabinet until 1950. In the one-party dominant system—Rajni Kothari called it the “Congress system“—political competition occurred “within the Congress party representing different ideological viewpoints” (Vaishnav and Hinton, 2019: 4). However, the Congress party’s decline and fragmentation, which started in 1969 with the party split by Indira Gandhi, reached its peak in the 1980s. A series of events, some unintended and others calculated, led “the anti-secular forces to gain a foothold and destabilize and challenge Congress dominance” (Hasan, 2012: 111). Those events included the Golden Temple raid (1984) ordered by Indira Gandhi which led to her assassination by two Sikh bodyguards followed by violence against Sikhs in Delhi; the Supreme Court decision in the Shah Bano case (1986), which was reversed by the Rajiv Gandhi through a parliamentary Muslim Women’s [Protection of Rights on Divorce] Act over his concern about losing Muslim support; the banning of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel Satanic Verses (1988) and; above all, the Ram Janmabhoomi temple issue (1990). It must be noted that the Congress party never recovered from its decline which started with the Rajiv Gandhi’s overturning of the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, which gave the BJP a potent weapon that was skillfully used by L.K. Advani. Indian secularism was under severe strain under Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s. It started with Indira Gandhi’s efforts to seek Hindu votes in the 1979 election and to her support of the separatist Khalistan movement and its leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale in the Punjab in the late 1970s and early 1980s, designed to destabilize the Akali Dal in Punjab. (Bhindranwale was killed along with others in the raid on Golden Temple on June 6, 1984.) Under Rajiv Gandhi, the Congress party was complicit in the violence against the Sikhs in Delhi following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The violence, which lasted for 72 hours and is well documented, has been described as the Congress-Sikh riots (Gupta, 1990). The Congress Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself a Sikh, apologized, under pressure in 2005, for the 1984 violence against the Sikhs. More importantly, it was Rajiv Gandhi who played the Hindu card by opening the gates of the Babri Mosque in February 1986 and enabling the shilanyas 7 (groundbreaking) for a temple construction at that site in November 1989; the temple was inaugurated by Modi 34 years later. Rajiv Gandhi’s “soft Hindutva” was his balancing act to placate angry Hindu extremists. However, his effort backfired. In fact, Rajiv Gandhi provided an inflection point for the rise of the BJP and Hindu nationalism, and his actions led to a sharp decline of the Congress party. The BJP, by contrast, mobilized Hindu support by endorsing the VHP demand for the liberation of Ram Janmabhoomi. And it made Ayodhya a flashpoint in Indian politics as it speaks to a fundamental question: Who is India for? In the 1991 election, the BJP campaigned on a platform that emphasized Hindu identity and nationalism and exploited the Ayodhya issue and anti-Muslim hostilities. During the election campaign, the identity of the party became virtually indistinguishable from that of the RSS and the VHP. The mobilization of Hindu voters was an effective electoral strategy. The BJP won 119 seats in parliament, up from 2 in 1984, and gained power in four states. The BJP projected itself as a true secular party and labeled the Congress as a pseudo-secular party because the latter gave minorities, especially Muslims, more rights than the Hindus, who constituted more than 80 percent of the population. Comparing themselves to Congress, the BJP leaders argued that their party supported a uniform civil code and was opposed to the special status for Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the constitution. While Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi had also exploited communal identities for political ends, they were never aimed against Muslims; it did not amount to a soft or milder version of Hindutva. The BJP’s Hindutva is a modern ideology that seeks to organize Hindus by projecting the Muslim as the Other. It uses religion in an instrumentalist manner to divide society along religious lines. The party’s embrace of the Babri Mosque-Ram Janmabhoomi agitation and mobilization of support along religious lines is an effort to reconfigure India. Rejecting the Nehruvian model of modernization for mimicking the West, the Hindu nationalists’ alternative model of modernization is based on a “civilizational consciousness.” Heightened by globalization, the civilizational consciousness, as Huntington theorized, has made “people more intensely aware of and proud of their distinctive cultures” (Nanda, 2012:122). In fact, many Hindus believe that Hinduism can provide a more satisfying spirituality to a world that has outgrown monotheism and scientific rationalism. Hindutva, Not Moditva Hindu nationalism is the dominant variety of Hindu revivalism or cultural nationalism in India, distinct from the Hindu revivalist and reform movements of the 19th century such as Brahmo Samaj (1828) and Arya Samaj (1875). Proponents of Hindu nationalism believe that Hinduism is the ultimate source of the country’s identity. It was developed in the 1920s and 1930s by V.D. Savarkar, president of the right-wing party Hindu Mahasabha, whose writings are considered foundational texts, and M.S. Golwalker, chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a social and cultural organization that is the largest nongovernmental organization in the world, as an instrument to promote the interests of Hindu society and culture in the context of the freedom movement. Savarkar was inspired by Fascism and Italian nationalism, especially the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini. He argued that virtually everyone who has ancestral roots in India—who regarded this land as his “Fatherland” as well as his “Holyland,” i.e., the land of the origin of his religion—is a Hindu, and collectively they constitute a nation (Savarkar 1969). In this definition, Indian Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Parsees were excluded from the right to claim themselves as Hindus, despite India being their “Fatherland.” 8 In his Essentials of Hinduism (1922) and other writings, Savarkar advanced the concept of Hindutva (Hindu-ness), a specifically political category that equated Hindu religion with ancestral Indian roots and nationhood. He promoted the idea of Hinduism being a political and cultural identity, invested in all those who lived in India regardless of the faith they followed. His writings sought to create an authentic Hindu volk, a Hindu identity and militancy, and to that end he objectified Muslims and the British as the Other (McGuire and Reeves 1994:10). Savarkar, who supported Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy, identified such policy to be “a solution to the Muslim problem in India.” His admiration for Nazi Germany, as Mishra writes, was “widely shared among Hindu nationalists at the end of 1930s.” (Mishra: 263). His vision was of an inclusive Hindu community that included Jains and Sikhs and Buddhists and to bring back men and women who had converted to Islam or Christianity. But they could come back only if they returned to the “culture” of Hinduism, which was in fact religious culture. The purpose of the ideologue of Hindutva was nation building. Savarkar believed that “only religion could be an efficacious building block for nation- and state-building in South Asia” (Walzer: 79). He, therefore, rejected the “composite” or “syncretic” view of nationalism espoused by Nehru, Gandhi, and the INC. Golwalker, who led the RSS from 1940 to 1974, went further and asserted in his 1939 manifesto, “We, or Our Nationhood Defined,” that India was Hindustan, a land of Hindus where “Jews and Parsis were ‘guests’ and Muslims and Christians ‘invaders.’” Hinduism, in his view, was “like a race—not in the biological sense but in the sense that its cultural and religious essence grew from Indian soil.” In recent years, the image of Muslims as invaders has been used extensively by Hindu nationalists in their anti-Muslim narrative. “Golwalker made explicit the role of non-Hindu in a Hindu nationalist state: The nonHindu people in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect, and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e. they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness toward this land and its age-old traditions but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead—in a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privilege, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizen’s rights.” (Quoted in Malik and Singh 1994: 159) The RSS, a social and cultural organization founded by K.B. Hedgewar in 1925, and the ideology of Hindutva, is at the core of Hindu nationalism. As an umbrella organization, the RSS dominates other affiliated Hindu nationalist organizations—popularly known as the Sangh Parivar (Sangh family)—including India’s largest trade union, as well as unions for farmers, students, teachers, doctors, lawyers, women, and small businesses. However, the influence of these organizations was limited in the first three decades of independence because the Congress party, committed to secular nationalism—constitutional commitment to India’s territorial integrity with a cultural notion of political pluralism—was the dominant force in Indian politics. Prior to India’s independence, the RSS, under the leadership of Golwalker, who had links with the “hard-right in Italy and Germany,” was focused on defending 9 and strengthening religion and culture instead of actively participating in the anti-British freedom movement dominated by the Congress party. The RSS encountered other setbacks after India’s independence: The organization was banned in 1948 following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, a member of the RSS, and it was subsequently banned twice— during the emergency rule (1975–1977) and after the destruction of the Babri Mosque (1992) for fomenting extremist sentiments and violating constitutional principles. However, the RSS and BJP challenged the notion of secular nationalism once the Congress party ceased to dominate national and state politics after the emergency rule (1975–1977). The Hindu nationalists advanced, as noted above, the alternative conception of India’s identity. The ideology of Hindutva, the cornerstone of political and religious agendas of the BJP, presents Hinduism as a “unified cultural and religious system,” and downplays or ignores the diversity within Hinduism (Shekhon: 36-37). Hindutva is the ideological glue that binds the RSS with other Hindu nationalist organizations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajarang Dal. Operating through 60,000 shakhas (branches) and three dozen organizations run by its volunteers carrying out a wide range of socio-cultural activities, the RSS has profoundly shaped Indian society and politics, especially in the last three decades. Most BJP leaders, including Modi, Advani and Vajpayee, started their public life as pracharaks in the organization. While the RSS has supported non-BJP/BJS leaders in the past, notably Indira Gandhi, who had better relations with the RSS in the early 1980s than Vajpayee, the organization is now fully aligned with and supportive of the BJP, especially prime minister Modi. In its view, Modi has done more than any other BJP leader to move India closer to achieving the organization’s overarching goal of establishing a Hindu Rashtra—a rare alignment of political will and ideological conviction. Having absolute majority in parliament and being fully in control of the party, Modi is free from the constraints Vajpayee faced as the leader of a multi-party coalition government. The RSS belief in a single, unified Hindu identity, not divided along caste lines, and its primary goal of upholding and promoting Hindu culture, values, and traditions, as formally expressed in the 1951 Pune Resolution, is being fulfilled by the Modi government. The organization’s revivalist and chauvinistic goals are being carried out by the Modi government through policy pronouncements, legislative and executive actions, which would likely continue in the post-Modi BJP government. The evidence suggests that directionally the party is moving further to the right as suggested by the hateful names for Indian Muslims and dog-whistle politics of likely Modi successors Amit Shah and Aditya Nath, who have called Muslims “termites” and “Babar ki aulad” (Babar’s progeny) respectively; Aditya Nath has also taunted Muslims with the slur “abba jaan” and repeatedly tells them to go to Pakistan. It is instructive that Modi was joined by the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat—and two others: Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath and Uttar Pradesh governor Anandiben Patel—at the Ram Temple’s sanctum sanctorum on January 22, 2024. In his speech following the temple consecration, Bhagwat referred to Modi as “an ascetic” who kept his “stringent vow” of building the temple. An analysis of Bhagwat’s annual Dussehra addresses during the Modi decade suggests that there is a high degree of understanding and cooperation between the RSS and the Modi government that did not exist when Vajpayee was in power. Modi has given the RSS a free hand in determining the social, cultural, and educational agenda of the BJP government and the RSS, in turn, has supported major government policies, including policies that may not enjoy the support of its affiliate organizations such as the Goods and Services Tax Law (GST) and Farm 10 Laws. The influence of the Hindutva agenda on education policy is pronounced in the government’s New Education Policy (2020) and the National Council of Educational Research and Training’s (NCERT) decision to delete (2023) from class XI and XII political science, history, and sociology textbooks references to Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse, the Emergency Rule, and the 2002 Gujarat Riots. The “saffronization” of school education can be further observed in the deletion of the periodic table and democracy from textbooks for class 10 and 12 students and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from class X textbooks due to the upper-caste Hindutva pride and belief that “we are children of rishis, not monkeys.” It is, therefore, not surprising that Bhagwat’s support for Modi is total and unqualified (Hansen and Jaffrelot: 149). In fact, the RSS today is dominated by Modi. The BJP government is also pushing a controversial move of making Hindi India’s dominant language. The pressure tactic of the union government can be observed in the experience of southern states. Kerala’s LDF government, for example, was required to change their health center’s name from Malayalam to Hindi before it could utilize the Ayushman Bharat Yojana funds. Since the Kerala government refused to change its label, arguing that it would be incongruent with the language and culture of the rural population, in early 2024, the Modi government withheld funds until the state clinics are renamed as “Ayushman Arogya Mandirs“ from its current “Janarogya Kendram” label. According to a recent survey, the use of Hindi language across India has grown in the last decade; today 70% of government business is conducted in Hindi. It can be observed that nonHindi speaking politicians now make efforts to give speeches in Hindi. A Pew survey on Religion in India (2021) found that nearly 80 percent of the two-thirds of Hindus (64%) who said that it was very important to be Hindu to be “truly” Indian also said that it was “very important to speak Hindi to be truly Indian.” The Modi regime is making a concerted effort to relegate English to the margins of Indian life as a “colonial relic” and promote Hindi, the native language of 40 percent of the population, as the dominant language in India. The decision of three Hindi speaking state governments—Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand—to start offering medical degrees in Hindi is a move toward freeing Indians of what Modi calls the “colonial mindset.” If accomplished, it would be the realization of Savarkar’s maxim of “Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan.” Modi presented himself as a Hindu king at the inauguration of the parliament and at the consecration of the Ram temple. In symbol, if not in substance, Modi is a Hindu emperor. The charismatic leadership of Modi is central to the creation of a Hindu Rashtra. The Modi Factor “Today, 18 May 2014, may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India. Narendra Modi’s victory in the elections marks the end of a long era in which the structures of power did not differ greatly from those through which Britain ruled the subcontinent.” These observations made in the Guardian editorial a decade ago were perceptive. When Modi assumed power in 2014, it was generally believed that his government would be Vajpayee government 2.0. After all, Modi came to power on the platform of good governance, anti- 11 corruption, and the Gujarat model of development. But the Modi decade has been transformational: He has redefined India’s nationhood, and there has been a Hindu-fication of political discourse. Modi has reinvented and Hinduized Indian politics. He is popular and has an iron grip over his party, like Mrs. Indira Gandhi had over the Congress party in the 1970s. Moreover, Modi enjoys, unlike Vajpayee and Advani, full confidence of the RSS and affiliate organizations in the Sangh family. In fact, the Hindu nationalist forces are fully aligned with the BJP; they are working in tandem to create a Hindu Rashtra. After establishing the party’s dominance in the Hindi heartland—north, central, and western India—the BJP is making a concerted effort to become electorally competitive in states where it is weak—the four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh—and in Bihar, West Bengal, Punjab, Delhi, and Odisha. Since control over state governments is critical to the Hindu Rashtra project, the Modi juggernaut is expanding its reach in states where non-BJP parties are in power. They have deployed various means—from toppling the elected non-BJP governments by “poaching” state legislators and breaking their party (Maharashtra); using state governors as tools to destabilize, defame, and disrupt state governments ruled by non-BJP parties (Kerala, Tamil Nadu); “bribing” important opposition leaders facing criminal charges to defect and join BJP (Bhavana Gawali, Pratap Sarnaik, Hasan Mushrif, Ajit Pawar, Yamini Jadhav, Chhagan Bhujbal, and Ashok Chavan) to leaders facing charges of corruption such as Himanta Biswas Sarma (Assam chief minister popularly known as Amit Shah of the Northeast), Narayan Rane, and Mukul Roy; and recently arresting the sitting chief ministers of Jharkhand and Delhi. The Congress party seems to be in free fall: Since 2014, fifteen former Congress Chief Ministers have crossed over to the BJP and other parties. Through the force of personality, Modi is hard at work toward achieving his professed goal of wiping out the Congress party—Congress Mukt Bharat, which won 19.5 percent popular vote, the highest among opposition parties, in 2019. Power of Branding: The Modi Brand Modi was denied a diplomatic visa by the US government in 2005 for his alleged complacency in the Godhra pogrom (2002) when he was the chief minister of Gujarat. But as prime minister, he has been invited to the US three times and is one of two foreign leaders given the honor of addressing the US Congress twice (in 2016 and 2023); Netanyahu of Israel is the other leader. A key factor in transforming Modi’s image from a regional to a national leader to a Vishwaguru is the branding of Modi, a brand that was carefully crafted, managed, and promoted. The value of his brand was worth $45 million in 2020. The Modi brand, a creation of political consultants and ad agencies and amplified in social media, is as strong as the Nehru brand. Modi supporters often lampoon Nehru as soft, wimpish, and placatory as opposed to Modi, who, in their view, embodies strength, manliness, and resoluteness. The difference, however, is that the Nehru—or Gandhi—brand was not associated with the consumer-oriented process of branding created by the 21st century technology and brand consultants. Without Modi being the face of the party, the BJP would not have won the parliamentary election twice and several state elections; the party is now poised to win a third term in 2024. In fact, Modi has emerged as the most credible and popular leader since Indira Gandhi. Millions of Modi bhakts (faithful or devotees) blindly follow him, consider him a better leader than Nehru and are unwilling to accept even the mildest criticism, based on facts, of their Supreme Leader. They reject the argument that Modi has undermined the world’s largest democratic experiment. 12 Modi had the first mover’s advantage as he was the first to use advertising firms for creating a political brand like consumer products such as Coca Cola or Nike shoes. In the business and corporate world, branding is an essential tool for making a lasting impact on consumers. It is a process of manufacturing meaning by purposefully packaging and repeating a company’s name, logo, and its product until it gets stuck in the minds of the public. It is an effort to connect ordinary things—such as a soft drink, theme park, automobile, or shoes—with a larger idea: Coca Cola with happiness in a can, Disney with family fun, and Volvo with safety and highminded practicality of its owners. The goal of a brand is to have a customer base that is loyal to that brand and is a long-term stakeholder in the journey of the brand. A successful branding can change the fortune of a company. Nike’s “just do it” campaign, for example, increased the company’s share of the North American sports shoe business by twenty-five percent in a decade; it went from 18 percent in 1988 to 43 percent in 1998. Nike’s tagline, invented 35 years ago, became the brand identity: Competitive, forceful, direct, and as powerful as the athletes that appear alongside it in Nike’s ads (Weiden). The tagline is approachable but vague enough that anybody could apply it to whatever it was they were trying to aspire to do. In the political world, branding helps a candidate—or a party—bring about change or maintain reputation and support, create a feeling of identity with the candidate, and create a trusting relationship between the candidate and the voter. It helps target the voter to understand quickly what a candidate is about and distinguish a candidate from the competition. Recognizing the power of branding in the business world, Modi applied the same principles and created a strong brand for himself. He understood that success in politics is achieved through marketing— projecting and selling an image, stoking aspirations, and moving people to identify and consume. In particular, he was inspired by Barack Obama, who rose from obscurity to make history as the first black person to win the presidency in 2008 and reelection in 2012. The success of the Obama brand was the “mirror in which millions of people saw their cherished ideals reflected: tolerance, cooperation, equality, justice” (Time, 2016). His “Hope” logo symbolized those ideals. Obama and his team were so adept at building a brand and an image that “Obama was named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the year for 2008” (Zavattaro, 2010). That Obama was elected purely for himself—his message, his persona, and what he symbolized—was not lost on Modi. Since Obama’s success in 2008, there has been an “Obamafication” of the Indian political campaign, but no political leader has been more successful than Modi in creating a brand that, like those of Obama and Trump, was new, different, and attractive. The efforts of other imitators, notably Arvind Kejriwal of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), pale in comparison. The Modi brand, a larger-than-life image, created by consultants and ad agencies, captured the imagination of voters in 2014, which has since endured. Modi was the crucial factor in BJP’s victory in recent parliamentary elections; the party’s popular vote share went up from 19 percent in 2009 to 31 percent in 2014 to 37.4 percent in 2019. By contrast, the decline of the Congress party, due largely to the negative campaigning of the Modi machine targeting the Congress party, especially the Gandhi family, has been dramatic: Its seats in the Lok Sabha decreased from 206 in 2009 to 44 in 2014 and remained low (54) in 2019. According to most polls, the BJP is likely to retain its current strength in parliament though Modi has an ambitious goal—“Abki Baar, 400 Paar”—that this time the NDA will cross the 400 mark. Brand Attributes 13 Brand attributes are made from the culture of a brand, its potential customers, the emotions those customers have, and its brand voice. For example, Tesla conjures up the image of a brand that is innovative, sophisticate, experimental, and daring; Mercedes’ expensive, high value, prestigious, well built, durable, and quick; and Nike’s iconic, unstoppable, empowering, provocative, inclusive, and authentic. Following the sound business principles of branding, the Modi brand has gained unparalleled credibility in Indian politics. The brand creators—leading advertising, marketing, and public relations agencies, such as Soho Square, Ogilvy and Mather, Madison World, McCann Worldgroup, and APCO Worldwide (Pai, 2023)—presented Modi as a messianic and transformational figure invested with millennial expectations (Basu 2023:166). The use of advertising firms in election campaigns, referred to as professionalization of campaign practices, has become common since 2014. Brand Modi exemplifies how a brand is built and managed; it has, in fact, evolved into a cult brand like Apple. The Modi brand was built around the following attributes: a strong, decisive, and charismatic leader; “vikas purush” or development man; “na khaoonga, na khane doonga” or someone who doesn’t indulge or brook corrupt practices; “Hindu Hridaya Samrat” or someone who rules Hindu hearts; “garib maa ka chaiwalla beta” or the tea-seller son of a poor mother; a backward caste leader (OBC) whose politics transcends caste affiliations; and his work ethic and oratory. Modi has established a unique connection with voters through the effective use of “disruptive technology” and digital and social media. The Modi brand is multi-dimensional. They include: A. Charismatic Leader A cult brand must have a leader people want to follow, such as Steve Jobs and Apple, Tesla and Elon Musk, and Modi and the BJP. Indian voters appreciate strong and decisive leaders who can deliver as opposed to leaders who are consensus builders typically in coalition governments. (i) Making of the Modi Charisma Modi possessed traits that make a person charismatic—confidence, exuberance, optimism, expressive body language, and a passionate voice. In addition, he has a deep understanding of the society and the people he developed during the three decades he was in public life before becoming the Gujarat chief minister in 2001, first working for the RSS as a pracharak, vibhag pracharak, and sambagh pracharak for 15 years and then serving the party in various positions for another 15 years, including as Organizational Secretary of the BJP. Moreover, Modi’s personal passion for the computer, the Internet, and social media came in handy when the liberal mainstream media covered the Godhra riots critically. Understanding the potential power of the internet and social media, which allowed unmediated communication with the voters, Modi set up a personal website in 2005 and joined Twitter in 2009. (It may be noted that the BJP was the first political party in India to set up a website in 1995 and the RSS volunteers provided training to BJP workers in the early 2000s.) Using social media, Modi communicated directly with the people, and it made the journalists who hounded him after the 2002 riots redundant. His communication skills and masterly use of the “disruptive technology,” including hologram in the 2012 Gujarat and 2014 national elections, have been central to the making of the Modi cult. 14 Modi is a powerful orator in his native Gujarati and Hindi. His charisma is largely the creation of his public relations machinery. Modi recognized the importance of image building soon after he became the chief minister of Gujarat and built his political career exploiting the Godhra incident. As one of his biographers puts it, “Modi was the ultimate manifestation of extreme communalization of India … If there was no Godhra, there would be no Modi. If there was no Ayodhya, there would be no Godhra.” The BJP would not have won the 2003 Assembly election had Modi not communalized Gujarat politics in the aftermath of the carnage. Modi saw himself as a product to be merchandised, and he used multiple tactics to put his USP (unique selling point) upfront. Since his USP was Hindu Hriday Samrat, he communalized politics to the extent that Muslims accepted Hindu hegemony in Gujarat—a process that would play on a larger canvas after 2014—as reflected in the 2003 CSDS survey in which Hindus said that riots were necessary to teach a lesson to Muslims. True to his USP and being consistent with the masculine, violent, and aggressive aspects of Hindutva, Modi has never expressed remorse about postGodhra violence against Muslims under his watch. As the Chief Minister of Gujarat, in 2009, Modi hired the public relations giant APCO worldwide, at the cost of $25,000 a month, to promote his investment and development showpiece “Vibrant Gujarat,” billed as “Indian Davos,” a biennial summit he had started in 2003. APCO also worked on changing Modi’s image, which needed a makeover as it was tainted by his alleged complicity in the Godhra pogrom against Muslims, especially after the muchpublicized aborted interview with the TV journalist Karan Thapar in 2007 and the criticism of his human rights record by Amnesty International and other human rights groups. APCO, the strategic communication firm which had handled crises of companies and politicians as diverse as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Merck, Ford Motor, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and Nigerian president Sani Abacha, took on the task of building Modi’s reputation and enhancing his image. The company projected Modi as a “strong leader” and Vikas Purush (development man); it showed that his “Gujarat model” had brought unparalleled investment, growth, and prosperity to the state. That Modi was a dedicated public servant who worked long hours, sleeping only four hours a night, was highlighted. The PR agencies worked on journalists, fed them stories, and, in some cases, doled out advertisements to their employers. And they cleaned up after Modi if he goofed up in an interview, as he did when he gave the analogy of the pain one feels when a puppy comes under a car’s wheel to the 2002 Gujarat riots or when he commented that malnutrition among children under five in his state was due to “middle-class girls in Gujarat being more figure conscious than health conscious.” When Modi was asked by the NY Times reporter in 2002 whether he had any remorse about the Godhra massacre, he answered, “he wished he had managed the media better.” Indeed, he has since managed the media extremely well; he has not given a single press conference as prime minister because he wants full control over his message. The Modi advertising machine promoted him as the alternative to the Congress-led UAP government right after he won the Gujarat election with a big margin in 2012. His supporters started projecting him as the party’s candidate for Prime Minister, and at the victory celebration they held up posters reading, “This is the trailer, watch the film in 2014” and “CM in 2012, PM in 2014.” His advertisers flooded the media with stories about the honesty and efficiency of his 15 state government and compared that with the UPA government at the center that was mired in corruption scandals at the time. These messages resonated with the public as corruption in the UPA government was a topic of national debate, especially the Anna Hazare movement (2011), which had forced the UPA government to take a series of steps to tackle corruption. The positive news about the Gujarat model of development, Modi’s effective and decisive governance, and his leadership style was widely publicized in the mainstream and social media. Celebrities such as Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan promoted Modi’s image. In 2012, Modi was the top newsmaker of the year, and he appeared on the cover page of Time magazine (South Asian edition)—a distinction few Indian politicians had achieved—with the caption “Modi means business.” A photo line in the article read, “Designs on Delhi: Modi is tipped as a contender to be India’s next Prime Minister.” It is worth noting that the article downplayed Modi’s alleged involvement in the 2002 pogrom against Muslims or his commitment to the Hindutva ideology. Instead, it emphasized “Modi’s ability to get things done in stark contrast to the Congress-led central government in New Delhi” and concluded that Modi was the only contender that had the track record and name recognition to challenge Rahul Gandhi in 2014. The Modi brand was front and center in the 2014 election campaign. Modi marketers filled print, television, radio, and social media platforms with pro-Modi messages. Since Modi had built his own information network independent of the party, he sidelined the party system. The catchy campaign slogans developed by his team—Modi hai to mumkin hai (Modi makes it possible) and Ab ki baar, Modi Sarkar (this time Modi’s government)—focused on the leader, not the party or party platform. The presidential style campaign projected a positive image of Modi while diminishing the image of his main opponent, Rahul Gandhi, as Pappu and a dynasty (more about it follows). Modi made extensive use of social media and imageries, symbolism, and catchy public relations techniques to engage with the netizens and sent across his message in a much better way compared to the opposition, especially in “high impact” constituencies (160 out of 543) where social media influenced “voter turnout and sway[ed] poll results by 3-4 percent.” The Modi team also trolled and silenced those with liberal views. Analyzing the Facebook data, Siva Vaishyanathan found that “Modi leveraged teams of trolls who would flood Facebook with messages that would harass critics, with messages that would rile up crowds, and indignation mostly toward Muslims, but in some cases toward others.” If Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign made him the “first social media president,” Modi’s use of Facebook (108.9 million users in 2014), Google Hangout, Hologram, and other social/digital media platforms made him the Barack Obama of India. It is important to underline that despite limited penetration of the Internet in 2013-14, conversations seeded online found “their way into mainstream media, and [got] read, seen and discussed in towns and villages;” its impact, however, is hard to quantify. Modi’s sartorial style became a part of his brand. He made a transition from RSS pracharak to fashionista. His wardrobe was made over by famous designers. A fashion icon in his sixties, Modi’s choice of a common man’s outfit—his trademark half-sleeved kurta and Nehru jacket (now known as the Modi jacket)—was touted as was his plebian background. At the same time, his crisp, ironed, and color-coordinated designer (Troy Costa and Jade Blue) kurta and jacket and tight-fitting churidar, his neatly trimmed beard, and his impeccably combed hair was presented 16 as an image of a man at work. And his expensive western accessories—Bvlgari glasses, Mont Blanc pen, and Movado watch, gave him a pro-business and “an agent of change” image which resonated with aspirational Indians, who “valued opportunity and personal growth and progress” (Vittorini, 2022: 286-89). The idea was to create a hype and buzz about Modi that TV anchors and pundits would keep discussing on TV shows. There was an endless effort to present Modi as a larger-than-life figure. Three examples would suffice. First, a comic book, “Bal Narendra—Childhood Stories of Narendra Modi” and a video based on it was released ahead of the 2014 election. One of the stories depicted Modi as a courageous child who brought home a baby crocodile from the crocodile infested lake in which he had jumped to fetch a friend’s ball. This and other stories created a perception of Modi as a courageous man, which is reflected in his decisions as a prime minister. On the eve of the 2019 elections, a 30-minute biopic of Modi’s childhood, Chalo Jeete Hain, was released. It depicted him as an enlightened child, a modern avatar of Siddhartha. And in 2020, an Apple+ TV series “Modi: the Journey of a Common Man,” showed “an inspiring journey of Narendra Modi, from his childhood to his entry into politics.” Second, Prime Minister Modi’s face is seen everywhere—in railway stations and airports, on bags of food rations distributed to the very poor, on COVID vaccine certificates, and in the press to the point of overkill. During India’s hosting of the G-20 in 2023, Modi’s face was seen every 100 meters in Delhi, reminiscent of Mao’s China (though Mao did not have the advantage of the 21st century technology). The Modi government has spent ₹6,491 crore on advertisements between 2014-2022 (₹3,260.77 crore on electronic and ₹3,230.77 crore on print media); it spends $230,000 a day on buying advertising space in the media. Third, Modi bhakts have been propagating his Godly attributes: the General Secretary of the Ram Janmabhoomi Trust Champat Rai described him as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, a State Minister called him an avatar of God who was born to end despair and can remain prime minister until he is alive, and a temple dedicated to Modi was erected in his home state of Gujarat. This is how the Modi cult and Modi myth has been created. (ii) Making of the Supreme Leader After assuming office, Modi promoted his image in a manner no prime minister has ever done before. He has become a cult-like figure with the help of the disruptive technology and his authoritarian style of governance. In the history of electoral politics, Modi is unique: He is always in a campaign mode. After winning big in 2014, he turned his attention to the next election. He first delegitimized and coopted the mainstream media and then targeted the social media which was expanding fast due to the explosion in internet connectivity after 2016. The growth in the internet users was unprecedented; by 2018, it had reached 500 million users, driven by the Reliance Jio 4G telecom promotion. Recognizing the potential and power of social media as a tool in election campaigns, Modi pronounced that the 2019 national elections will be fought on mobile phones. Modi took full control of his image, unmediated by TV anchors and journalists, that was projected, and he shielded his government from being covered by independent journalists by changing the rules of media engagement. As noted above, Modi has not given a single press conference in ten years. He has only granted interviews to friendly journalists, and he does not allow his cabinet members to interact with journalists. Instead, Modi 17 announced major decisions on Twitter (with 57.9 million followers in 2020, he was the second most followed leader, next only to President Trump) and allowed only official media to accompany him on foreign trips. The mainstream media, the Fourth Estate of democracy, has become pliant. It has become the public relations arm of Modi and the BJP, earning the pejorative name “Godi Media” that justifies instead of questioning government actions and policies. The media has failed to scrutinize government’s controversial decisions such as demonetization, GST, lockdown during COVID-19, and farm laws. Instead, it has fostered the adulation of Modi as “more than a great political leader—as a savior and a visionary” (Amrita Basu:255). In his second term, Modi tightened narrative control in print and TV media and sought to control digital and social media. He also moved to silence a few remaining critical voices on television, especially NDTV, which was acquired by Gautam Adani, the wealthiest Indian who had close ties with Modi since he was the Gujarat chief minister. After the takeover of NDTV, Adani fired journalists critical of Modi, including the celebrated Hindi anchor Ravish Kumar. Journalists on other TV channels, too, were let go for covering the Modi government critically, notably Dayashankar Mishra, editor at News18, who was asked to resign in November 2023 because he wrote a book on Rahul Gandhi in which he had analyzed the BJP propaganda against the Congress leader. In the Modi ecosystem, which equates patriotism with support for Modi and the ruling party, there is little space for dialogue and critical evaluation of the prime minister and his policies. The Hindutva project has therefore been advanced by media capture, a major cause of democratic backsliding. If continued in Modi’s third term, it would reach the levels of Victor Orban’s Hungary. The trend points in that direction. Modi has a performative approach to politics, which relies on the visual appearance—from policy launches to inaugurations and commemorations to celebration of official national holidays. Since every event of Modi is bhavya (spectacular)—from his grand swearing-in ceremony attended by 4,000 guests (2014) to his Madison Square Garden speech (2014) to the “Howdy, Modi!” Rally with Trump in Houston, TX (2019) to the Ahlan Modi event in Abu Dhabi (February 2024) to the inauguration of the Ram temple (2024) to the hosting of the G-20 annual meeting (2023) to the Wembley Stadium Event (2015)—the media coverage of Modi on all platforms is extensive and makes him appear larger-than-life. In media savviness, Modi has surpassed Donald Trump though, unlike Trump, he was never a TV star. Modi’s image is ubiquitous in India: There is hardly anyone in India, as Snigdha Poonam writes, “who is not intimately familiar with every wrinkle and whisker on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s face.” In the Modi-BJP created ecosystem, Indians mostly hear positive news and praise of Modi and his government. The mainstream media has propped up Modi as the Supreme Leader, and he is rarely, if ever, criticized. The mainstream media has shied away from covering the regime’s antidemocratic and unconstitutional crackdown on dissent or covering critical points raised by opposition parties or human rights and civil society groups. The Modi brand and his charisma has been propped up by the media. If popularity is measured by a leader’s social media presence, Modi ranks high among political and business leaders. Elon Musk’s personal account on X (formerly Twitter), for example, is followed by 170 million people, which is eight times higher than followers of the official Tesla 18 account (21 million). Modi’s followers are five-and-a-half times higher than his party’s official account (95 million and 17 million, respectively) and almost twice that of PMO India’s account (55 million). Also, Modi’s X followers are almost five times higher than those of his rival Rahul Gandhi (20 million). In opinion polls, too, Modi enjoys high approval ratings, which have been consistently in the range of 70 percent or higher except during the two pandemic years when his numbers dipped by 20 percent. According to the 2023 PEW Research Center poll, the vast majority of Indians found Modi to be unwavering, strong, and competent: About 80% had a favorable view of Modi that included 55% having a very favorable view. Rahul Gandhi’s ratings, by comparison, stood at 62 and 26 percent, respectively. Similarly, India Today’s the Mood of the Nation survey, conducted in February 2024, ranked Modi as the most popular Indian prime minister. Most Indians believed that Modi’s leadership has strengthened India’s global influence and that India is a swing nation due to its close ties with the US and refusal to join the US-led sanctions against Russia. It predicted a hattrick victory for the Modi-led NDA, forecasting 335 seats in the Lok Sabha but only 166 seats for the opposition INDIA bloc. Modi remained India’s first choice for Prime Minister and his biggest achievement, according to the survey, was his handling of COVID-19, which is surprising given the government lockdown during the first wave that caused unprecedented devastation—with an estimated death toll between 3-5 million. While Modi’s image was temporarily dented, it rebounded after Modi’s photograph with the message “Together, India will defeat COVID-19” appeared on COVID-19 certificates in January 2021, giving the impression that Modi was the savior of the masses. It is suggestive that the survey also showed that Modi’s popularity was low in the five poll-bound states where the Election Commission had removed his photo from the vaccine certificates. Modi would not be the Supreme Leader without his skillful manipulation and management of the mainstream and social media. B. On Message Modi is always on message, but when he shifts message, “it isn’t something he acknowledges, it is just a new message.” The Modi brand has evolved over the last two decades, displaying traits of a fox, not of a hedgehog: From an RSS pracharak (2001) to a “Hindu Hriday Samrat” (postGodhra) to an able and uncorrupt administrator (2007) to an avatar of economic development, the CEO of Gujarat Inc., who would bring achhe din (good times) and development to the entire nation (2013-14) to a warrior with a 56-inch chest who would keep India safe from external aggression (demonstrating his strength and resolve by ordering the Balakot airstrike against Pakistan in response to the Pulwama attack in 2019 by Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Pakistan-based terrorist group) to a Modi Ki Guarantee that he is dedicated to the task of building a Viksit Bharat by 2047 and to a leader who delivers—abrogation of Article 370 and the builder of the Ram temple. Modi has moved from message to message, but he has not been held accountable by the media or voters for his past promises that remained unfulfilled. The lack of accountability is partly due to the way he communicated—he delivers a one-way monologue through tweets, radio programs, and staged interviews with pliant journalists. He has perfected the art of headline management and creative narratives. For example, the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (BBBP) scheme, launched to promote “Save Girl Child” and “to Educate Girl Child” in 2015 and the hashtag #SelfieWithDaughter created media buzz and headlines for the Modi government without any measurable outcome in health and education for girls. In fact, the Parliamentary Committee on the Empowerment of Women found that between 2016 and 2019, the government had spent 80% of the funds under the scheme on media campaigns. 19 (i) Modi the Dream Merchant Like the dream merchants of Bollywood, Modi is unparalleled in selling dreams. He symbolizes and identifies with an aspirational India—the dream of a Viksit Bharat. In 2024, Modi is presenting himself to the voters as a leader who brought Lord Ram back to Ayodhya after 500 years “in exile” and the one who is working tirelessly toward making India a developed nation by 2047. He is giving a “Modi Ki Guarantee”—the pledge encompassing the development of youth, empowerment of women, welfare of farmers, and upliftment of marginalized communities. While his guarantees are similar to the freebies promised by opposition parties, which Modi had criticized as revadi (freebees), and while he did not fulfill promises he had made in 2014—bringing back money stashed overseas during Congress rule, remitting Rs 15 lakh in the account of every Indian, and creating 100 million jobs in the manufacturing sector by 2022 under the Make in India initiate—voters have vishwas or trust in his guarantees over those offered by opposition parties. They believe in Modi because voters have developed a strong emotional connection with him. He is perceived as a strong leader with a clear vision who, unlike his predecessors Manmohan Singh and Vajpayee, who were constrained in their decision by the politics of coalition governments, can make good decisions for polity on his own. The level of trust in Modi transcends deliverables. The voters’ faith in Modi is the creation of the Modi IT Cell that propagates every conceivable news that can boost the image of Modi as a national and international leader and damage the image of opposition leaders, especially Rahul Gandhi. Those images are then amplified by the Godi media in TV and newspaper reporting and by the Modi bhakts on social media, especially in the Hindi heartland. It should be noted that Modi’s IT cell has a large budget that allows it to hire “hundreds of well-paid employees heading over thousands of party workers spread across various levels and social media channels” (Sharma and Jain: 80). The opposition has failed to provide a counter narrative; they have not capitalized on Modi’s vulnerabilities, especially his policy failures. The media capture by Modi is complete except for online platforms, social media, and a few independent English newspapers such as the Hindu and Indian Express. This will end in Modi’s third term, when the new criminal laws—Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and Bharatiya Sakshya Act, replacing penal code—go into effect on July 1, 2024. (ii) Targeting the Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty Looking back at the 2014 election, Modi accomplished poll-defying success partly through “environment management”—his team’s relentless attack on his rival Rahul Gandhi, who was endlessly criticized for being a fifth-generation dynast, a shehzada—the Urdu word for scion of an imperial estate—who did not deserve to be the vice-president of the Congress party. Modi’s constant reminder of parivarvad (dynasticism) and Rahul Gandhi’s entitlement mentality—his father, grandmother, and great grandfather had been prime ministers, and his mother was the longest serving president (over twenty years) of India’s grand old party—resonated with the upwardly mobile, aspirational Indians, especially the youth, in both urban and rural areas. The Gandhi family, in his narrative, presented an unacceptable feudal past in the “New India.” The Modi campaign team created a pappu or buffoon image of Rahul Gandhi—one who does clumsy 20 and idiotic things when important works are at hand—in the run up to the 2014 elections. Their Pappupedia division created a website, www.pappupedia.com in a Wikipedia format, that featured social media jokes and cartoons that depicted Rahul Gandhi as stupid and dumb (Price, 140). The Modi IT cell has also projected Rahul Gandhi as a non-serious politician who takes frequent vacations and often visits foreign countries when he is needed in the headquarters. By contrast, Modi is presented as the most hardworking prime minister in the history of India who has not taken a day off since he became prime minister. It is worth noting that the Congress prime minister Manmohan Singh also worked seven days a week and never took a vacation, but most Indians did not know about it because it was never advertised. The Modi machine has mastered the art of glorifying Modi and presenting Rahul Gandhi and the Nehru dynasty in the most negative light. The Pappu image stuck to Rahul Gandhi, which he could not shake for a long time. It was only after his big “makeover act,” Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2023, during which he demonstrated resilience and stamina, that he is perceived as a serious politician. While Rahul may have overcome his Pappu image—Amit Shah continues to call him Rahul Baba (baby)—he is still not considered a viable alternative to Modi because the stature and popularity of Modi has grown in the last decade. While Modi continues to attack Rahul Gandhi on every conceivable way— depicting him as a new-age Ravan in a poster war on social media in October 2023 and targeting him for his “Shakti” remark in March 2024—he has recently focused on demonizing Nehru and holding India’s first prime minister responsible for every ill in contemporary India. For example, in a recent speech in Lok Sabha (February 4, 2024), Modi made an all-out attack on Nehru by quoting out of context his 1959 speech in which he alleged that Nehru described Indians as “lazy and of low intelligence.” Modi and the Sangh Parivar have blamed Nehru for the partition of India, the appeasement of Muslims, adopting the Western model of development that kept India mentally enslaved, the dominance of the English-speaking elites, and India’s military weakness and its defeat in the 1962 India-China war. By contrast, Modi presents himself as a better modernizer of India exemplified by his achievements—the building of physical and digital infrastructure, including new highways and expressways, airports, major bridges, high-speed freight corridors, a new parliament house, and the world’s tallest (Patel) statue. He boasts of paying attention to, unlike Nehru, the cultural and religious spheres, such as renovation and reconstruction of temples (Kedarnath and Ayodhya), the Char Dham project, and the building of the Kashi Vishwanath corridors (Varanasi). While a meaningful comparison of Nehru and Modi as modernizers is hard to make due, among others, to the difference in initial conditions—economic, social, and educational—in 1947 and 2014, when the two leaders, respectively, started their tenure as prime minister, Nehru’s focus on building what he called the “temples of modern India”—hydro-electric projects (Bhakra-Nangal, Hirakund and Chambal), pharmaceutical industries (HAL and IDPL), heavy industry (Rourkela and Durgapur), space (IIST), and atomic energy programs (BARC), the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and agricultural universities (Punjab Agricultural University)—laid the foundation upon which the country modernized in the subsequent decades, including the Modi decade. The IT and software revolution and achievement in areas such as space and atomic research and drug and pharmaceuticals would not have happened had Nehru not laid the foundation of modern science and technology and higher education in the 1950s and early 1960s. However, Modi’s negative publicity of Nehru and other INC leaders, including Gandhi, has 21 made India’s first prime minister much less popular, especially among those under the age of 35, who constitute 65 percent of the population. Modi and the Sangh Parivar is “saffronizing” school-age children by introducing new curriculum with a “corrected” version of Indian history which emphasizes India’s cultural heritage. We will return to this theme later in this paper. C. Storytelling Prowess Modi has used the power of narrative to change the prevailing belief that coalition government was natural in India as it reflected the country’s diversity and that the “Congress System” was an aberration, a hangover of the freedom movement. Nehru had a compelling narrative. He was the architect of the democratic and secular India, who struggled for thirty years to achieve independence during which he had spent nine years in British jails. He was a great literary statesman judged by his speeches, letters, and books he wrote— “The Discovery of India,” “Glimpses of World History,” and “Toward Freedom.” He was a sagacious leader and a respected statesman. Children lovingly called him chacha (uncle) Nehru. Modi and the Hindu nationalists, however, viewed Nehru and his vision critically. They believed that India had been a single cultural unit for a thousand years and that Christians and Muslims were basically converts from Hinduism and should be reintegrated, including reconversion or Ghar Waapsi, into the mainstream of the Hindu culture. Therefore, they were dedicated to the overthrow of the secular programs. Due to this contrasting conception of India, Modi has continually demonized Nehru and holds him responsible, 60 years after his death, for everything that went wrong in India—from Kashmir to China, from public sector and unemployment to the decline of Hindu religion and culture. Modi’s effort has been to undermine the Nehruvian ecosystem and the dominant thought for seven decades. Modi is an effective storyteller. He acquired the skill of storytelling, the “language of mobilization,” as an RSS pracharak which emphasizes symbolism echoing thousands of years of history. After Modi became the prime ministerial candidate in 2013, he promoted a robust discourse on anti-elitism and anti-dynastic rule and has succeeded in redefining the nation and its institutions. Using his communication skills effectively, he has established deep connections with the masses, especially in the Hindi heartland. For example, his Mann Ki Baat (MKB), a popular public radio program in Hindi, has been telecasted in multiple regional languages since 2017; it is Modi’s version of FDR’s Fireside Chat. Through this “visually enriched” monthly radio program in which he paints a rosy and ideal picture of India, Modi has addressed a wide range of topics, including social issues, education, healthcare, and the environment (see Table 1). In these programs Modi has amplified his initiatives such as the Jan Dhan Yojana, Ujjwala Yojana, Ayushman Bharat, Atmanirbhar Bharat, and Awas Yojana. He has also used MKB to clarify some of his government’s more controversial policy decisions, such as demonetization and goods and services tax (GST). Modi has reached an estimated 1 billion people through the 110 monthly episodes since 2014. Modi is a gifted communicator, much like Ronald Reagan, who connects with voters at an emotional level, whether he is addressing a rally, sending a tweet on X, or having a chat on the radio. For example, in the 108th episode of MKB which aired in December 2023, he started the show by telling the listeners that this episode was special because of “the importance of number 108” and that its “sanctity is a subject of a deep study—108 beads in a rosary, chanting 108 22 times, 108 divine sites, 108 stairs in temples, 108 bells.” He went on to say that “this number 108 is associated with immense faith.” Through this medium, Modi has reached multiple social groups at the grassroot level—women, youth, and farmers—and encouraged them to participate in social change. A content analysis of 99 episodes of MKB revealed that Modi invoked Gandhi, Patel, and Ambedkar as nation builders—they were mentioned 255, 103, and 60 times, respectively—but not Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, and other Congress leaders. Modi mentioned Hindu Mahasabha leader Veer Savarkar 21 times, but Nehru was referred to in passing (on anniversaries) 4 times; Indira Gandhi was mentioned 6 times, and Rajiv Gandhi was not mentioned at all. (It may be noted that Nehru’s contribution to India’s independence has been intentionally minimized by the Modi government—his name was omitted from the “Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav“ celebrations at Salar Jung Museum and his photo was conspicuously missing in the ICHR poster.) The analysis further suggests that MKB has not resulted in concrete action on the issues discussed in the program. It is more of a public relations exercise which has helped burnish Modi’s image. Modi’s outreach and engagement with the public, especially rural Indians, has contributed to his popularity. His appeal among rural women, who are emerging as a vote bank, grew in recent years due to the Ram temple and government programs such as Awas Yojana, a credit-linked subsidy scheme for affordable housing and Ujjwala Yojana benefits, a subsidy for cooking gas cylinder; these were extended to 100 million poor households in 2024 on Women’s Day. The Modi brand has grown stronger despite many policy failures, including demonetization (2016), the farm laws (2020, repealed in 2021), youth unemployment (over 40% among college graduates), and growing inequality. People perceive Modi as a beacon of hope and don’t question him even when he has failed to deliver on his promises. Modi voters are emotionally attached to him, much like the Trump support base, and they believe in him. Their belief is so strong that they don’t question government policy or the leader’s claim that India is amid amrit kaal, a golden age, while the economic reality suggests otherwise. Modi’s audience engagement skills are unmatched; his positive message is amplified by the Hindu nationalist echo chamber which, at the same time, is hypercritical of the opposition, especially the Congress party and the Gandhi family. Table 1 23 Source: ThePrint https://theprint.in/india/yoga-swacchata-bapu-but-very-little-nehru-decoding99-episodes-of-modis-mann-ki-baat/1528415/ Trained in the pedagogy of oratory and storytelling from his early days as an RSS pracharak, Modi has the skill to communicate with voters, if needed, using abusive language, and he never paid a price for it. For example, he called Sonia Gandhi a Jersey Cow and Rahul a “hybrid bachda” (calf) to highlight that neither of them is an authentic Hindu. (Sonia is an Italian Catholic by birth.) Similarly, he took a potshot at the Congress Minister Shashi Tharoor’s personal life by commenting on his wife that she was once his “50-crore-rupee girlfriend.” However, when others hurl personal attacks on Modi, he has the skill to turn them into political advantage for himself. Congress leaders’ personal attacks on Modi have backfired—the “chaiwala” comment of Mani Shankar Aiyar in 2014, the “chowkidar chor hai” jibe by Rahul Gandhi in 2019, and the “maut ka saudagar” (merchant of death) comment by Sonia Gandhi in 2007. Modi’s skill to turn an opponent’s jibe into a counter-offensive campaign—as he did in March 2024 by launching the “Modi Ka Parivar” campaign in response to the RJD leader Lalu Prasad’s “no family” jibe at Modi—is unmatched. Modi has even tolerated politicians of his own party using abusive language against opposition politicians if that served his political objective. For example, BJP MP Ramesh Bhiduri hurled abusive communal remarks at opposition Muslim M.P. Kunwar Danish Ali on the Lok Sabha floor in September 2023. The abuser, however, was not reprimanded or disciplined by the Speaker or by the BJP while 141 opposition MPs were suspended in the same session (December 2023) for disturbing proceedings of the parliament. D. Consistent and Credible 24 In a fast-changing world, the brands that offer a consistent experience, i.e., without changing essential elements of a brand identity, can develop a cult-like following. For example, HarleyDavidson’s consistent design, appeal to craftmanship, and symbolic power of the brand has created a loyal following for over 150 years. Similarly, Apple phones, though expensive, are popular because of their credibility and innovation, design excellence, and technological prowess. So successful is Apple Inc.—a $3 trillion company by market capitalization—that the company’s logo, which cost $15 to create, is estimated to be worth $107 billion. Modi has the power to sell anything with words. Today he is the most credible leader in India because he is perceived to have a clear vision of Hindu Rashtra and that he wants to create a Viksit Bharat—a developed India that is proud of its heritage and is respected in the world. One may debate about Modi’s vision and his policy preferences, but there is no denying that he has a clarity about his vision. Unlike the muddled vision of the Congress party, the only other truly national party, which lacks ideological coherence and strong leadership (the Gandhi triumvirate—Sonia Gandhi and her children, Rahul and Priyanka—control the party without any accountability), Modi has a vision of India’s future, and his leadership has mass appeal. Consistency is the hallmark of Modi’s politics. He has been consistent in the messages he has put out in the last two decades. E. Media: Modi is the Message Modi has a massive propaganda machinery, financial resources, and the 21st century technology that helped build his image. Modi and the RSS were the early adopters of the internet and social media which allowed them to take their message directly to the people. Through the effective use of the new media, they have succeeded in placing their ideas at the center of public discussion and have been winning the debate. No leader in India is better at communication on social media and digital platforms than Modi. The Modi brand was built on his unmediated communication with the voters in the populist political style. The management of legacy and social media has been central to the making of the Modi phenomenon, his rise from a regional leader to the most popular prime minister to Vishwaguru to a Supreme Leader. He used the disruptive technology creatively and reshaped Indian politics by simultaneously eroding the existing political narrative and offering competing narratives. Modi has been the agenda setter in Indian politics since he has been in power. The opposition has failed to capitalize on his mistakes because the Modi team has succeeded in changing the narrative whenever it has faced a crisis. (i) Control of Mainstream Media The Modi decade coincided with the rise in the use of social media in India. After assuming power, Modi virtually cut off all communication with traditional media. Instead, he—and his cabinet members—started communicating, as discussed above, through tweets and radio programs like MKB. Modi succeeded in controlling the mainstream mass media through various tactics. First, he arm-twisted and pressurized the media owners and succeeded in removing high profile editors who did not toe the government line. The Modi government deployed a large staff (about 200) that monitors the media and sent “directions to editors on how they must report on the prime minister’s activities.” Since the government and the BJP has a large advertising 25 budget, it was not difficult to control media companies and impose on them self-censorship. The effort has been so successful that the mainstream media has become the godi (lapdog) media. Second, Modi’s wealthy corporate friends came to his aid—Mukesh Ambani, the most prominent media baron who owns large swaths of news space across TV, print, and online media, removed editors and reporters critical of Modi. Since Ambani has various business interests from oil and gas to telecom, he has a lot to gain by being on the right side of the Modi government. Similarly, Gautam Adani, the wealthiest tycoon and a close friend of Modi whose business interests range from airport operations, shipping, rail and metro infrastructure, petrochemicals, solar PV manufacturing, and online services, bought NDTV (2022), a major TV channel that was critical of the government. Upon acquiring the ownership, Adani fired, as discussed above, journalists who were critical of Modi. India’s top media houses are doing government’s bidding, and it is hard to find independent journalism in the mainstream media, especially in the Hindi heartland. Finally, the control of mainstream media has shielded Modi, to a large extent, from getting negative news reaching the voters about his policy failures and charges of corruption. They include the mishandling of COVID-19, demonetization, promise of “achche din,” failure to clean the Ganga river despite spending billions, and to bring back black money stashed abroad, failure to overhaul the land acquisition law, the allegation of fraud against the Adani group in the Hindenburg Report, ethnic violence and human rights violations in Manipur since May 2023, the BBC documentary “India: the Modi Question,” and the record of corruption and irregularities in the functioning of several union government ministries and departments exposed in the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Report (2023). Above all, there is the Electoral Bond controversy that erupted on the eve of the 2024 parliamentary elections. In each case, Modi managed the crisis and his government’s vulnerability extremely well with the help of pliant media and adopting diversionary tactics such as expelling Rahul Gandhi (March 2023) and Mahua Moitra (December 2023) from parliament, suspending 141 opposition MPs from parliament (December 2023), and arresting Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal (March 2024) and Bihar Chief Minister Hemant Soren (February 2024) on charges of corruption and bribery. Indeed, these expulsions, suspensions, and arrests were Modi’s effort to change the narrative by diverting public attention away from real issues such as ethnic violence in Manipur, the Adani controversy, youth unemployment, price rise, and the failure of the BJP government to address them. However, the opposition is also to blame for its inability to capitalize on these vulnerabilities; it has failed to mobilize public opinion against Modi and his government. (ii) Dominance of Social Media Part of the problem the opposition has faced is the mastery of the ruling dispensation to overcome any criticism of the regime by presenting a counter narrative in social media at a lightning speed. Modi and the BJP have invested heavily in social media and digital platforms; they have created a formidable infrastructure that dominates the digital space. In the 2019 election, the internet was instrumental in mobilizing and setting the narrative and spreading misinformation. Five years later, the BJP IT Cell is managing over 5 million WhatsApp groups and has acquired the capability to disseminate information from Delhi to any remote area in the country within 12 minutes, down from 40 minutes a few years ago. 26 Modi’s love for technology goes back to the 1990s when he was doing organizational work for the party. His tech savviness is well known: His 2015 selfie with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang was dubbed as one of the most “power-packed selfie in history” and in August-October 2020, he topped the trending chart on social media with 2,171 trends (Sharma and Jain: 77). His social media handles reflect, as discussed above, his brand image: Culturally conscious, solution driven and a doer, connected with voters, well-networked globally, and humble. He uses all media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He joined the newly created WhatsApp channel immediately after it was launched in September 2023 and acquired 5 million followers in less than a week. While Facebook and WhatsApp have been crucial to Modi’s media campaign, he has relied more on the latter since the 2019 elections, dubbed as India’s WhatsApp election. In 2019, the BJP was the first to master the use of WhatsApp at a large scale. The BJP prefers WhatsApp because 99 percent of the group communication on this platform remained off-limits to outsiders. Though the inner workings of the Modi-BJP social media strategy are not known to outsiders, it can be observed, based on a few studies and the information available in the public domain, that social media provides a deep and intimate identification between Modi and his potential voters. Modi and Hindu nationalist groups have been in the global vanguard of using social media for political aims—to marginalize religious minorities and suppress criticism in addition to promoting their own narrative. Gerry Shin of the Washington Post, who was given the rare access to observe the vast messaging machinery of the BJP and the activists who ran it on the eve of the Karnataka Assembly election in 2023, wrote about how the BJP staffers conceived and crafted posts aimed at exploiting the fears of India’s Hindu majority. According to him, the party had assembled a “sprawling apparatus of 150,000 social media workers to propagate this content across a vast network of WhatsApp groups.” He concluded that Modi and the BJP have “perfected the spread of inflammatory, often false and bigoted material on an industrial scale, earning both envy and condemnation beyond India’s borders.” Since WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted and since it’s almost impossible to identify where the message originated, it is Modi’s preferred tool of political propaganda. Social media can be effective only if it is used as a tool in a broader political strategy, and the Modi-Shah team excel at that. For example, Modi was vulnerable when the Supreme Court declared Electoral Bonds unconstitutional and ordered the bond issuer, the State Bank of India, to release the data. After the Election Commission put the data on their website, the media started scrutinizing possible quid pro quo between the corporate bond buyers and the recipient parties, especially the BJP, the largest recipient (54%) of bonds. The electoral bond issue quickly gained momentum, and critics started calling it the biggest scam in Indian history. However, Modi skillfully changed the narrative by employing a diversionary tactic: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested the Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal the same evening (March 19) on charges of corruption. In doing so, he shifted the media attention from funds BJP received from corporates, a legalized form of corruption, to corruption charges against the leader of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the party that was born out of the anti-corruption Anna Hazare movement in 2011. The BJP IT Cell went in high gear and distributed misinformation and disinformation such as the Home Minister’s wrong statement about the total amount of bonds purchased by the corporates and the percentage of bonds received by the BJP (see Table 2) and justified their largest share on the ground that they are the largest number of MPs in parliament 27 and that electoral bonds was an improvement upon the system that existed prior to the introduction of electoral bonds, which consisted mainly of cash contributions. It is hard to predict as to how this will play out and whether the opposition will capitalize on the vulnerability of Modi and the BJP, but Modi has a track record of turning things around in his favor and the opposition lacks in organization, resources, and the messaging skill. The creativity of Modi can be seen in his two recent (mid-March 2024) moves. First, he sent a WhatsApp “Viksit Bharat Sampark” message along with a letter from the Prime Minister as a PDF attachment that mentioned government schemes like Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, Ayushman Bharat, Matru Vandana Yojana, etc., and sought suggestions from the citizens over government initiatives and schemes. It was a misuse of public data for electoral gains, and the Election Commission of India, following its Model Code of Conduct (MCC), asked the government to stop WhatsApp messages. Although the government complied with the order, it succeeded in putting the PDF file detailing Modi’s accomplishments on the phones of 500 million voters. Second, the ticket distribution for parliamentary seats in the 2024 election indicate that Modi is in full control over decision making as defectors from other parties, younger BJP politician and candidates from the SC and ST communities, have been given tickets while sitting members of parliament been denied tickets. Since the election is being fought in Modi’s name, the will of the leader reigns supreme. In fact, sycophancy around Modi has started resembling the level that existed in Congress under Indira Gandhi’s leadership; her cabinet ministers used to say, “India is Indira and Indira is India;“ now Modi bhakts are chanting “Modi hai to Mumkin Hai.” Table 2 28 (iii) Bollywood: Modi’s New Propaganda Tool Bollywood films promoting Modi and his policies have flooded the country on the eve of the 2024 elections. They are being used, for the first time, as a form of political mobilization. Though Bollywood stars endorsed Modi for reelection in 2019, the Election Commission (EC) at the time did not allow the release of a Modi biopic for not meeting the Model Code of Conduct on the eve of the 2019 election as the EC viewed it as a form of political propaganda. Things have changed since: A dozen films have been released since January which are nothing but political propaganda for Modi or blatantly Islamophobic and divisive. Bollywood, which celebrated a pluralist India, produced system-challenging movies in the past. For example, Nashbandi (1978), Kissa Kursi Ka (1978), Rang De Basanti (2006), Maachis (1996), Shanghai (2012), and Aandhi (1975). Such movies cannot be made today. In recent years, films and series on streaming platforms critical of the government have been removed or have faced legal challenges. But movies consistent with the ideology of the ruling dispensation have received government support and praise—”Uri: the Surgical Strike“ (2019), a fictional 29 account of the 2016 Uri attack, was praised by the then defense minister; “the Kashmir Files“ (2022), portraying the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s, which stirred nationalist fervor and Islamic hatred, received tax exemption and praise from the Prime Minister; and “The Kerala Story” (2023), depicting the state’s global terror links, was invoked by Modi in a rally ahead of the Kerala state election in 2023. In 2024, Bollywood has become Modi’s propaganda machine. For example, the biopic “Veer Savarkar,” which glorifies the Hindu nationalist and founder of the Hindutva ideology, is full of historical falsehoods. Another film, “JNU: Jahangir National University,” a reference to Jawaharlal Nehru University, is nothing but propaganda for Modi and the BJP. JNU, one of India’s top universities, has been an obsession of Modi because of its left-leaning faculty and student body and the inability of the BJP affiliated student union, ABVP, to gain a foothold in the university. Modi calls these left intellectuals “urban Naxals.” A third film, “Bastar: the Naxal Story” is about a battle between Naxalism and patriotism and is focused on cruelty of the Naxalites. The film ends up justifying extra-constitutional killings. Finally, “Fighter,” a big budget India v. Pakistan showdown movie starring three top Bollywood actors—Deepika Padukone, Hritik Roshan, and Anil Kapoor—has helped boost Modi’s image. As a reviewer has observed, “a character playing PM Modi mouthing bombastic lines, insisting that it was time to show Pakistan who the “boss” was, before deciding to launch air strikes against the neighbor in 2019” showed the PM, as he often claims, to be a decisive leader. Other propaganda films include “Razakar: the Silent Genocide of Hyderabad,” “Main Atal Hoon,” and “the Sabarmati Report.” These movies are being used in political campaigns to promote Modi and the BJP. The transformation of Bollywood during the Modi decade is noteworthy: It has gone from being an industry that promoted national integration and unification of India, to an instrument, by at least part of the industry, of the regime in spreading divisiveness and hate against Muslims, notably actors such as Akshay Kumar, Anupam Kher, and Kangana Ranaut, who is contesting for parliament on the BJP ticket. Conclusion India is a de facto Hindu Rashtra because the Prime Minister consecrates a new temple, the ruling party does not have a single Muslim MP in either house, and the BJP does not care about Articles 14 (equality), 15 (discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or birth of place) and 21 (right to life and liberty) of the constitution in their desperate bid to push the ethnoreligious nationalist ideology of Hindutva. It is a de facto Hindu Rashtra because Jai Sri Ram has become a lynching war cry instead of a warm greeting, a justice of the Kolkata High Court cannot differentiate between Mahatma Gandhi and Nathuram Godse, religion has become a fundamental definition of identity, and hate speech is not fringe any more. Modi’s circumlocution ends with a single ambition: “One God, One Country, One Nation, One Ideology, One Party, One Election, One Language, and One Leader.” And he is well on his way to achieving it. One God: Modi’s effort to unify Hindus under the Hindutva umbrella has been successful in the Hindi belt, and he is making inroads into South Indian states. In Modi’s third term, Muslims, 30 constituting 14% of the population, will continue to be marginalized and would cease to have any political significance. One Country—Modi has helped connect the country physically—from Kashmir to Kanyakumari (NH 44) and from Gujarat to Assam (East-West corridor), which has increased tourism and interaction between people from different regions of the country. Modi is credited for raising India’s stature internationally and for making citizens feel proud of being an Indian. One Nation: Modi’s effort to bring about a common Hindu identity has been successful in making the public discourse center around Hindutva, an important aspect of the Hindu Rashtra project. One ideology: The ideology of the political left has become irrelevant, and Nehru’s socialism and secularism is discredited. There is no viable alternative to Hindutva. One Party: In 2014, Modi wanted Congress Mukt Bharat, now he wants opposition Mukt Bharat. He has used various strategies to weaken opposition parties, such as poaching/buying their leaders and forming alliances with small regional parties. Recently, the AAP has alleged (March 2024) that their MLAs were offered Rs. 20 crore each to defect to BJP, and Modi is employing every means available to break the opposition where they are in power at the state level. He has put two sitting Chief Ministers—Hemant Soren and Kejriwal—and other AAP leaders in jail. One Election: The proposal to hold simultaneous elections to multiple levels of government may benefit the BJP, though it will be difficult for the Election Commission to implement. One Language: It’s the hardest goal to achieve. But Hindi has become India’s dominant language, evidenced in the effort made by non-Hindi speaking leaders, including South Indian politicians, to give speeches in Hindi. One Leader: Modi is the Supreme Leader of the party, the nation, and of Hindus. As the protector of Sanatan Dharma, Modi will be the last Hindu sage king. No other BJP leader has the charisma of Modi. He will therefore be needed to complete the Hindu Rashta project beyond his third term, and he would likely get an unprecedented fourth term in 2029. However, he cannot be both a Vishwaguru and a Hindu Hriday Samrat, and the jury is still out on his ambition to outshine Nehru and go down in history as the most important prime minister of India. Modi is well on his way to achieving his goal of making India a Hindu Rashtra. 31