Chapter 2

Minorities and Populism in Modi’s India:

The Mirror Effect

Ananya Vajpeyi

Abstract This chapter considers the nature and effectiveness of Indian right-
wing leader Narendra Modi’s populism. Paradoxically, India, the world’s largest
democracy, was ahead of the curve, electing the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) to power with an overwhelming majority in the general elec-
tions of April–May 2014, thereby installing strongman Modi as Prime Minister a
couple of years before things started to turn rightwards in Europe and the US. He
has returned to power for 5 more years with another landslide electoral victory in
May 2019. We look at the Janus-faced appeal of his economic nationalism cou-
pled with his religious nationalism, wherein the two elements speak to different
constituencies within the electorate. We also look at a sort of “mirror effect” that
Modi creates, projecting himself as but a blank reflective surface in which the
people -- whatever their aspirations, whatever their self-image, whatever their jus-
tified or unjustified political tendencies -- can see themselves, without embarrass-
ment or apology. The leader as a mirror of the people helps to usher in an age of
(Hindu) majoritarian politics in an India that has so far tried to preserve its secular
and pluralist character.

Keywords India · Indian democracy · Hindu nationalism · Hindutva · Indian

secularism · Hindu Rashtra · Modi

2.1 Introduction

The conversation on Populism and Minorities has been ongoing now at RESET:
Dialogue on Civilizations, based in Italy, since 2010. India has been an important
locus of this discussion. Inevitably, contrast, comparison and cross-cultural analysis

A. Vajpeyi (*)
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India
e-mail: vajpeyi@csds.in

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 17

V. Kaul, A. Vajpeyi (eds.), Minorities and Populism – Critical Perspectives from
South Asia and Europe, Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations 10,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34098-8_2
18 A. Vajpeyi

over the years have expanded to other parts of South Asia, as well as to countries in
Western Europe, to the United Kingdom and the United States. In a sense, RESET’s
focus on these themes was prescient. The past 10  years have seen an inexorable
proliferation of illiberal tendencies, authoritarian governments and populist leader-
ship all over the democratic world. Majoritarian nationalism everywhere has
increased the pressure on minorities; a global economic downturn precipitated by
the collapse of financial markets in 2008 has swelled the transnational flow of
migrant labor; long-running conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have created a
refugee crisis in Turkey and Europe; and more localized civil wars, often assuming
genocidal proportions, for example within Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, have
forced vulnerable minority populations like the Muslim Rohingya out of their
homelands into neighboring or sometimes even quite distant countries.
Charismatic leaders, so-called “strong men”, populists whether of the right or the
left, seem to have won every election in the past 4–5 years, unraveling the promises
of the Arab Spring, the Occupy movements, Barack Obama’s presidency in the
United States, and the economic rise of Asian giants China and India. Climate
change, global warming, catastrophic pollution and an escalating environmental cri-
sis are producing what Amitav Ghosh has called a “great derangement”, creating
unprecedented forms of inequality, impoverishment and marginality, compounding
political and economic problems with ecological ones. It is not just that capitalism –
as the dominant form of organizing humanity’s collective life, especially the eco-
nomic life of societies – has reached a tipping point. The liberal order, with
representative government as its central institution, seems to be in great danger. The
planet itself is in turmoil, and with it our survival as a species appears to be on the
brink. We are passing through a time of darkness on a scale not seen for 2 to 3 gen-
erations since World War II.
Populism and populist leadership are hard to pin down conceptually. John Judis
argues that populism can be of a left-wing or a right-wing variety, so that its ideo-
logical address is not a reliable factor in constructing a singular stable definition that
would cover all the empirical data. Similarly, the “people”, who support a populist
leader, and the “elites”, who oppose such a leader, also vary from country to country
and time to time. He writes:
“Leftwing populism is historically different from socialist or social democratic movements.
It is not a politics of class conflict, and it doesn’t necessarily seek the abolition of capital-
ism. It is also different from a progressive or liberal politics that seeks to reconcile the
interest of opposing classes and groups. It assumes a basic antagonism between the people
and an elite at the heart of its politics. Rightwing populism, on the other hand, is different
from a conservatism that primarily identifies with the business classes against their critics
and antagonists below. In its American and Western European versions, it is also different
from an authoritarian conservatism that aims to subvert democracy. It operates within a
democratic context.
Just as there is no common ideology that defines populism, there is no one constituency
that comprises “the people.” It can be blue-collar workers, shopkeepers, or students bur-
dened by debt; it can be the poor or the middle class. Equally, there is no common identifi-
cation of “the establishment.” It can vary from the “money power” that the old populists
2 Minorities and Populism in Modi’s India: The Mirror Effect 19

decried to George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals” to the “casta” that Podemos

assails. The exact referents of “the people” and “the elite” don’t define populism; what
defines it is the conflictual relationship between the two – or in the case of rightwing popu-
lism the three.”1

If populism is conceptually intractable because of what Judis identifies as the

conflicted relationship between the three terms in its equation – leader, people and
ideology – it also seems difficult for us to analyze because of its relative novelty,
indeed, its still-evolving contemporaneity. But it has been argued that this is not the
first time populism has made its presence felt in modern history. In fact, it would
seem that the twentieth century is bookended by crises of populism. If one such
crisis is ongoing, there was one about a hundred years ago, according to David
Runciman:
“Populism itself is nothing new. It rises in democratic societies under particular conditions:
economic distress, technological change, growing inequality and the absence of war. This
is not the first time those conditions have held. It was true at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, too, when democratic politics was roiled by another great wave of populist anger. Then
as now, the anger was a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories on both sides of the
political divide. (…). Yet the great populist wave of the late nineteenth century eventually
broke. Democracy survived in both France and the United States. [William Jennings] Bryan
ran three times for the presidency without ever achieving it. The next Democrat to reach the
White House in 1913 was Woodrow Wilson, a leading political scientist, former president
of Princeton University and unequivocal representative of the expert classes. [In France]
Dreyfus was exonerated in 1906, after years of disputed inquiries and fake dawns… There
was finally agreement that enough was enough: French politics had to move on.”2

At the moment, however, “moving on” seems a very dim and distant prospect.
With Donald Trump in the White House in the US, Brexit hanging fire in the UK,
multiple European nations including Italy, France, Austria, Hungary and Poland
having conceded significant political power to rightwing parties, Putin’s Russia
rampant and Erdogan’s Turkey hostile to Trump’s America, the West seems at a
particularly low point in the history of liberal democracy. Brazil elected the far-right
politician and former military officer Jair Bolsonaro as its new president in 2019.
The British Prime Minister and Tory leader Theresa May resigned her position in
May 2019 after failing repeatedly to achieve consensus within her party, the
Parliament or the country on Britain’s exit from or continuation within the European
Union. Also in May 2019, President Erdogan annulled the results of Turkey’s
municipal elections held in March  – where his ruling AK Party had to concede
defeat to the opposition CHP in major cities including Ankara and Istanbul – stating
there would be a re-election at a future date. He seemed to indicate that his party’s
defeat was either unbelievable or unacceptable: that the AKP couldn’t or, more
menacingly, wouldn’t lose.
Paradoxically, India, the world’s largest democracy, was ahead of the curve,
electing the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power with an over-

1
John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion, Columbia Global Reports (2016), p. 15
2
David Runciman, How Democracy Ends, Profile Books (2018): p. 67–69.
20 A. Vajpeyi

whelming majority in the general elections of April–May 2014, thereby installing

strongman Narendra Modi as Prime Minister a couple of years before things started
to turn rightwards in Europe and the US. In France, Italy and Germany, far-right
parties and alt-right media have long looked to Modi and the BJP, along with a
whole “family” of political and cultural organizations of the Hindu Right, together
known as the “Sangh Parivar”, to show the way in capturing the popular imagination
and wresting power from an entrenched liberal elite, turning democracy, somehow,
against itself. Modi and the BJP replicated their landslide victory yet again in the
Indian Lok Sabha elections of April–May 2019, and are set to form the government
for a second term of 5 years as this chapter goes to press in late May 2019. The
entire national election  – with the world’s largest electorate  – was successfully
transformed into a referendum on just one man, Narendra Modi.
Participants in RESET’s annual and alternating Venice/Delhi seminars over
5 years between 2012 and 2016 would recall that an awareness of certain shared
trends in the Indian and Western European democracies had begun to manifest
and gather momentum before the dramatic changes of the past 3 years took place
and hidden currents of majoritarian aggression and populist leadership rose up to
the surface. Still, it would be difficult to state with confidence that Indian public
opinion and media discourse foresaw the coming of the BJP before late 2013,
possibly not even until early 2014, a few short months before the rightwing
Hindu nationalist party was elected with a thumping majority. By contrast the
2019 return was expected – only the extent of the BJP’s majority was not antici-
pated beforehand.
It was candidate Narendra Modi’s presidential style of campaigning, the populist
rhetoric of his speeches, and his personal charisma as a strongman that played a
decisive role in his party’s electoral victory. Modi had fine-tuned his political meth-
ods in India’s western state of Gujarat, variously referred to as a “model” and a
“laboratory”, where he had been chief minister for three terms or roughly 15 years
before ascending to the post of prime minister in Delhi. In Gujarat, his popularity
had relied equally on economic development and communal polarization (between
Hindus and Muslims). The same twin strategies were brought to the national stage,
and mobilized with equal success to propel the BJP to power in the center. It’s worth
noting that Modi’s rhetoric embodies a key characteristic of populism, which is to
claim the moral monopoly of representing the majority, while declaring the opposi-
tion as illegitimate, morally bankrupt and fiscally corrupt.

2.2 Populist Tactics

Modi is not the first example of charismatic leadership in modern India – scores of
leaders both in the anti-colonial era (up to 1950) and subsequently in the postcolo-
nial period have enjoyed a strong rapport with the people and garnered a massive
following, regionally as well as nationally. Nor is he unique in his rhetorical and
2 Minorities and Populism in Modi’s India: The Mirror Effect 21

oratorical capabilities – of late, he has been repeatedly compared with Indira Gandhi
in his singular persona, dominating presence and immense popularity. However,
three factors mark a decisive breakthrough in his style of self-presentation relative
to earlier mass leaders and popular politicians. One, a Janus-faced message, which
projects economic nationalism through one mouth and articulates religious nation-
alism through the other. Two, the expert deployment of print, electronic and social
media as well as the use of public relations and event management on an unprece-
dented scale, not just to campaign during elections, but also to communicate with
voters and citizens on a continuous basis. There has also been an unprecedented and
open use of the incumbent government’s power to attack all kinds of opposition, not
just political. Modi’s government has tactically used its position to mold institutions
in its favor or in favor of its ideology of Hindutva.
Three, the crafting of a public persona for Modi himself, as The Leader, an indi-
vidual who is above his party, above his ideological camp of the Hindu Right, above
his role as Chief Minister of Gujarat (earlier) and of Prime Minister of India (now),
and instead connects in a direct and unmediated fashion (despite the heavy and care-
ful use of every possible type of media) with his supporters and constituencies.
Modi has succeeded in sidelining the entire apparatus of party politics, vote banks,
electoral processes, parliamentary democracy and representative government to
offer himself, the singular protagonist Narendra Modi, as the voice, the will and the
image of the Indian people.
Further, Modi has crafted at least four platforms for relentless self-projection as
a singular icon rising above the political fray, which in India is naturally diverse,
chaotic and cacophonic. The first of these is the domestic election campaign,
because he is nothing if not a successful campaigner, for himself as well as for his
party. The second is the visit to a foreign country – Modi has made 41 such trips at
the time of writing this article, visiting almost 60 countries and 6 continents since
he became Prime Minister. The third is his Twitter handle @narendramodi, which
has close to 48 million followers at present. Finally, he has instituted a monthly
radio broadcast titled “Mann ki Baat”, which means something like “What’s in my
heart” or “Sharing the message of my heart”, but literally “The heart’s discourse” or
“My heart’s testimony”.
Across these four kinds of stages or spaces, all heavily reliant on electronic and
social media, he is able to create a persona for himself that he then projects directly
to Indians at home and abroad, wherein the connection of the citizen / consumer /
convert is always with Narendra Modi the man and the leader, and bypasses or sur-
passes the entire set of institutional relationships that together constitute the struc-
ture of Indian democracy and the architecture of the government of India. His
leadership tactics follow those of successful “brands”, and this phenomenon of per-
sonal and highly mediatized “branding” is something new in the context of Indian
politics.
In his campaign speeches, Modi is usually strident, even shrill, and doesn’t hesi-
tate to attack political opponents quite viciously. He is entirely a partisan – cam-
paigning for his party the BJP and unabashedly speaking the language of Hindu
22 A. Vajpeyi

Nationalism. On his foreign trips, Modi has been prone to evoking laughter more
than respect, with a colorful and sometimes gauche wardrobe, a propensity to hug
other (male) world leaders over-enthusiastically, and an obvious delight in taking
‘selfies’ that he promptly posts on social media. He often maintains pregnant or
painful silences on Twitter, failing to tweet or refraining from tweeting on occasions
when the public expects an intervention from him – typically, when there is an inci-
dent of violence against minors, minorities or other marginal individuals or groups.
These silences are meant to convey a meaning: it is invariably an implicit endorse-
ment of majoritarian aggression against vulnerable sections of Indian society.
And finally, on his radio program, he is prone to assuming an avuncular tone, like
an elder in the family, speaking mostly in banal generalities and formulaic plati-
tudes, perhaps the closest he comes to being prime ministerial rather than partisan,
sociable rather than strategic. The particular ‘mixed message’ that he has concocted
from these different modes of communication seems to work well in keeping him
consistently popular with his voters and supporters.
Modi’s personal approval ratings have been consistently high, despite controver-
sial or even sometimes unpopular policy changes, like the demonetization of the
Indian economy in November 2016, the imposition of a General Sales Tax (GST)
from July 2017, continually rising petrol and diesel prices, and the removal of a sit-
ting elected coalition government in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in June 2018
because of the BJP pulling out of its partnership with the Kashmiri People’s
Democratic Party (PDP). While the BJP-led government had slipped several points
in its approval ratings last year because of an anti-incumbency sentiment, Modi
himself remained personally popular. His main opponent, Rahul Gandhi, President
of the Congress Party, gained slightly in the months leading up to the election, but
Modi still remained far ahead of him.3
After a terrorist strike in the form of a deadly suicide bombing in Pulwama,
Kashmir on Feb 14, 2019 and a retaliatory attack on Balakote, Pakistan by the
Indian air-force on Feb 26, 2019, approval ratings for Modi and his government
surged again, leaving the Congress Party far behind in the April–May general elec-
tion, and causing Rahul Gandhi to lose his own seat in Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, to his
BJP challenger Smriti Irani, a TV star turned politician.4 The Congress tried to draw
public attention to credible information in the press about possible corruption in the
Rafale defence deal between the Indian and the French governments, and expected
thereby to make a huge dent in Modi’s reputation for personal probity and fiscal
integrity.5 But Modi was unaffected, while the effort to undermine his clean image
rebounded negatively on the Congress and Rahul Gandhi himself.

3
Lokniti CSDS-ABP News “Mood of the Nation Survey  – Round 3”, May 2018: http://www.
lokniti.org/pdf/Lokniti-ABP-News-Mood-of-the-Nation-Survey-Round-3-May-2018.pdf
4
Lokniti CSDS “Pre-Poll Survey”, March 2019: https://www.lokniti.org/NES2019PREPOLL
5
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/opinion/india-arms-deal-corruption-modi.html
2 Minorities and Populism in Modi’s India: The Mirror Effect 23

2.3 The Populist as a Mirror of the People

As with the US President Donald Trump, Modi’s own popularity  – based on a

kind of negative charisma – appears to be a part of the Zeitgeist. Trolling, hate
speech, defamation and slander seem to have become acceptable parts of political
discourse all over the democratic world, part of the rising crescendo of illiberal-
ism and populism everywhere.6 In sharp contrast with lofty, learned, elegant,
well-spoken and also immensely popular figures like the great democrats
Jawaharlal Nehru and Barack Obama, men like Trump and Modi do not hesitate
to stoop to conquer. They make no effort to elevate their discourse to conform to
standards of decorum and non-partisanship expected of the leaders of the two
largest and most voluble democracies in the world. Rather, they play to their
strengths, which lie in knowing exactly how to appeal to the lowest common
denominator in their respective audiences.7
A populist leader like Trump or Modi may be autocratic, illiberal and megaloma-
niacal, but he gives the impression to the populace that he is really there to do their
work and give shape to their desires. He is continually involved in a transaction of
mutual legitimation between himself and the public. Legitimation flows both ways –
from him to his people, and from the people back to their leader. There is no objec-
tive or Archimedean point in this relationship. Both such a leader and his voters and
supporters might very well have demands and expectations of politics that are, from
an external perspective (which is not available), illegitimate. The charisma of a
Trump or Modi seems to elicit blind faith from followers.
Thus Modi has over time rhetorically put out and reiterated certain myths about
himself – that he rose to the highest office in the country through the sheer dint of
hard work while starting life as the son of humble chai-wallah (“tea-seller”); that
he has been an unmarried celibate with no relationship to his  – as yet not-
divorced – wife, as well as a devoted son to his widowed mother all his life; that
he has a degree from the University of Delhi; that he sleeps only 3–4 hours a night
and works round the clock; and so on. The veracity or mendacity of these sup-
posed pieces of biographical information about his origins and background seem
not to make any difference whatsoever to his loyalists – his word itself is proof
enough for them.
What’s important is that the two parties in this exchange of legitimacy need one
another to sustain their respective beliefs and aspirations, howsoever false, immoral
or irrational these may be. And indeed, they are there for each other, short-circuiting
both the normative scaffolding (as in India) and the institutional safeguards (as in
America) that we imagine or expect to be true of democracy. It becomes difficult to
dislodge or impeach such a leader from his office on the basis of any normally
assumed democratic mechanism whether moral or procedural, such as on grounds
of shame, lack of accountability or even outright impropriety, bordering, as in

6
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/between-sophistry-and-silence/article19535457.ece
7
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/Of-statesmen-and-strongmen/article16716519.ece
24 A. Vajpeyi

Trump’s case, on criminality, sedition or an anti-democratic coup. In both the US

and India, there are fears (though not openly expressed) that future elections may
not even take place, or that if they do, they would not be free and fair, leaving
Americans and Indians no recourse to remove or replace the regnant strongmen
democratically.8
What is it about populism that captures the popular will in a way that regular
democracy does not seem to? I would like to propose that what sets it apart is the
mirror-like persona of the leader. A senate, a parliament or any other type of legis-
lature, an elected body of legislators cannot act as a mirror in the same way as an
individual can. A populist leader acts as a singular or unitary mirror for the multi-
plicity of wills and aspirations that are expressed in a democracy. Unlike a dictator,
autocrat, despot or tyrant, the populist does not (appear to) bring his own agenda to
the table and impose his will on the people – rather, the opposite.
A successful populist presents himself as a mirror held up to the people’s aspira-
tions, no matter how intellectually unreasonable, morally questionable or economi-
cally unviable those aspirations may be. They see such a leader as a faithful reflection
of whatever it is they really want, not of what they have been told (by ruling elites)
they ought to want. The compact of the populist is with the people and not with the
truth, with the past or with the future. The normative overtones of representative
democracy and electoral participation, of liberalism and choice, all of these fade
away before the illusion of the direct projection of the will of the collective onto the
reflective surface that is the populist leader, and his ability to show the people what
they want to see, which is not him but themselves-in-him.
The popularity of Narendra Modi’s radio show “Mann ki Baat”, the huge follow-
ing of his Twitter handle @narendramodi, and the stupendous turnout at his election
rallies (which are also televised), now begin to make more sense. In fact these are
empty signifiers, or pure reflective surfaces – traditional, electronic and social media
all acting as mirrors of the popular will, allowing vast numbers of Hindu voters to
see, hear, feel and think what they want to, all of which appears to emanate from the
authoritative figure of the country’s prime minister. Modi is the unitary human
embodiment of popular desires, in the way that a text like the Constitution of India
or a legislature like the Lok Sabha (the Lower House of the bicameral Indian
Parliament) – both of them abstract, complex as well as polyphonic entities – could
never be.
The reciprocity of legitimation between Modi and his electorate is nothing but
the mirror effect at work. If Hindus want India to be recast as a Hindu Rashtra (a
Hindu Reich or Hindu Nation), they need no longer be ashamed, apologetic or
answerable to a diverse public of fellow-citizens, which includes minorities, because
Modi gives them the illusion of being united and of being right. The one leader
stands before the one people. Their eyes are locked together. There is no place for
“others” in this gaze of mutual fascination. Ironically, it was Jawaharlal Nehru who

8
This fear – that elections will be stolen, annulled or fail to take place – is most explicit in Turkey,
which has had long periods of military dictatorship throughout the twentieth century.
2 Minorities and Populism in Modi’s India: The Mirror Effect 25

first understood this political alchemy of eyes in a beautiful passage of his Discovery
of India (1946), surely one of the classic texts of global democracy.9 But Nehru,
whilst campaigning for elections in 1936–37, did not have modern media technol-
ogy beyond the microphone, the loudspeaker and the camera available to him, with
which to reach the people or project words and images towards them. His descrip-
tion is of an almost unmediated, visceral connection between the leader and the
people, Nehru himself and the vast crowds he is addressing all over India. Needless
to say, things have changed entirely in the 80 years separating Nehru from Modi.

2.4 Populism and Minorities: The Indian Case

Modi’s Janus-faced populist message has already been alluded to above. He articu-
lates two kinds of nationalism, one economic and the other religious. Economic
nationalism proceeds under the sign of “growth” and “development”. Modi’s main
slogan in this regard has been, “sabka saath, sabka vikaas”, literally “Solidarity
with All, Development for All”. This type of populism is broad-based, religion-
blind, and positive (inclusive). Religious nationalism, by contrast, is addressed
solely to the Hindu majority, and is hostile to religious minorities, especially
Muslims and Christians. It is therefore majoritarian, community-specific, and nega-
tive (exclusionary).
There could also be an overlap in the catchment areas of the two types of populist
messaging  – i.e., poor, aspiring, Hindus who for various reasons did not benefit
substantially from the economic boom of the two previous consecutive Congress-
led regimes (2004–2009 and 2009–2014). Disenfranchised and resentful majori-
ties – working class whites in the US, non-elite Hindus in India – have helped both
Trump and Modi suture together a coalition of supporters who hear and respond to
both aspects of the leader’s bifurcated political messaging. In some respects though,
in the Indian situation, economic nationalism may be regarded as left wing (or at
least compatible with the type of Nehruvian socialism that prevailed in India for the
first 40–50 years after Independence), while religious nationalism is clearly right
wing, proceeding openly as Hindutva. But this obvious contradiction has been for
the most part subsumed under the overarching and (as Judis’ formulation explains)
by-definition ideologically incoherent umbrella of populism.
However, Dalits as a constituency have vacillated between voting for Modi and
the BJP when drawn by the promise of opportunity and growth (economic national-
ism), and turning against the Hindu Right when faced with caste discrimination and
majoritarian violence (religious nationalism). The violent politics around cows,
cattle and beef, including brutal lynching, rapes, arson and mob attacks, which have
escalated alarmingly in Modi’s India, have resulted in Dalits largely deserting the

9
Discussed at length in my book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India,
Harvard University Press 2012; pp. 180–181. See the chapter on Nehru, pp. 168–207.
26 A. Vajpeyi

BJP and its allies in many state elections since 2014.10 The two-facedness of Modi’s
populism is so confusing – and not just for Dalits – that many analysts and com-
mentators in India have attributed the two types of messages to different sections of
the Hindu Right – economic nationalism to the political party, the BJP and religious
nationalism to the so-called ‘cultural organization’, the RSS.11 What such an analy-
sis ignores is the fact that Modi rose up through the ranks of the BJP while being a
member of the RSS from a very young age. He has already always enfolded the
contradiction into himself, and this precisely is what accounts for his success as a
populist leader.
In her article of 2011, the linguistic anthropologist Jean Comaroff calls “popu-
lism” a “shifter”, borrowing the term from linguistics to indicate that what it means
at any particular use depends on who speaks and who is addressed, and the relation-
ship of speaker and addressee in a cultural-political matrix. A shifter typically marks
the difference between two persons, groups or ideas, and is less concerned with
content than with contrast. Its meaning is “largely relative to the standpoint from
which it is deployed.” Thus, she points out, while many “profess to be “of the peo-
ple” or “for the people”, most of us would think twice before dubbing ourselves
“populist” as such, for even at its most benign, the word carries associations of
crowd-pleasing and cheap emotionalism and, in its stronger senses, of fascist dema-
goguery. Yet it is precisely its intrinsic slipperiness that makes the term so produc-
tive in political rhetoric.”12
The question arises  – can minority communities throw up their own populist
leaders as well? The answer of course is yes, they can, and they do. In India at the
moment, Jignesh Mevani, Asaduddin Owaisi, Akhilesh Yadav and Lalu Prasad
Yadav are such figures for Dalits, Muslims and Yadavs (Other Backward Castes)
respectively, located in the state of Gujarat, in the city of Hyderabad in Telangana
State, in the state of Uttar Pradesh and in the state of Bihar. But just like with those
we might call ‘majority populists’ or ‘mainstream populists’, with these figures too,
ideological affiliations, party orientations, connections with long running left / right
political traditions, and established political logics are not clear and need not be.
Mirroring and speaking to and for specific publics is all that is needed, and so long
as that condition is fulfilled, such leaders can successfully enter the political fray.
This said, however, the student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, a JNU graduate, who con-
tested elections in 2019 from his hometown Begusarai in Bihar on a Communist
Party of India (Marxist) ticket, lost very badly to his BJP opponent. Perhaps this was

10
https://www.deccanherald.com/content/610238/death-stalks-land.html
Things changed, however, in the 2019 election, when even Dalits in the state of Uttar Pradesh
voted for the BJP rather than for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) led by the hugely popular Dalit
woman leader Mayawati, who was the Chief Minister of UP from 2007 to 2012. Muslims too
either voted for the Congress but their vote did not count, or in some constituencies voted for the
BJP in hopes of better governance than other parties could provide.
11
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the National Association of Volunteers.
12
Comaroff, Jean, “Populism and Late Liberalism: A Special Affinity?” The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 637, September 2011, pp. 99–111; p.100.
2 Minorities and Populism in Modi’s India: The Mirror Effect 27

because he did not represent any particular caste or community, but rather simply
tried to enter mainstream national politics on the strength of his ideological convic-
tions and radical appeal, at least among the urban intelligentsia.
This volume carries several chapters that look in detail at India’s many minori-
ties  – primarily, disaffected and marginalized Muslims, Christians, Tribals and
those in conflict zones at war with the Indian state, like Kashmir and the Northeastern
states. In these places and for these communities too, economic considerations and
identity politics (whether on the basis of caste, religion, region, language or ethnic-
ity), often pull in opposite directions, or work in a paradoxical tandem, depending
on the skill of the politicians and parties who make a populist appeal upon these
constituencies. The dialectic between populism and minorities is a shifting, com-
plex and context-sensitive one, needing both granular analysis and thick descrip-
tion. As the editors, Volker Kaul and I hope that this volume makes a useful
beginning towards helping us understand better the contours of the problem in a
comparative perspective.

Select Bibliography

The Economist: How Strongmen Subvert Democracy. June 16–22, 2018.

Foreign Affairs: Is Democracy Dying? A Global Report. May/June, 2018.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay of the Geography of Anger. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Comaroff, Jean. 2011. Populism and Late Liberalism: A Special Affinity? The Annals of the
American Academy of Political Science 637 (September): 99–111. Race, Religion, and Late
Democracy.
Geiselberger, Heinrich, ed. 2017. The Great Regression. Cambridge: Polity.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. London:
Penguin.
Judis, John B.  The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and
European Politics. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016.
Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. The Age of Anger: A History of the Present. Delhi: Juggernaut Books.
Mukhopadhyay, Nilanjan. 2013. Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times. Chennai: Westland Limited.
Müller, Jan-Werner. 2017. What is Populism. London: Penguin UK.
———. 2019. False Flags: The Myth of the Nationalist Resurgence. Foreign Affairs 98 (March/
April): 35–42. The New Nationalism.
Mudde, Cas. 2016. SYRIZA: The Failure of the Populist Promise (Reform and Transition in the
Mediterranean). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2014. Youth and the Extreme Right. Amsterdam: International Debate Education
Association.
Nagle, Angela. 2017. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and
the Alt-Right. Winchester: Zero Books.
Peer, Basharat. 2017. A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen. New York:
Columbia Global Reports.
Prothero, Stephen. 2016. Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections).
New York: Harper Collins USA.
Runciman, David. 2018. How Democracy Ends. Bevin Way: Profile Books.
Sardar, Ziauddin, ed. 2017, Oct–Dec. Critical Muslim: Populism. 24. London: Muslim Institute
and Hurst Publishers.
28 A. Vajpeyi

Seminar: Minorities and Populism. 621, 2011.

Sharma, Ruchir. 2019. No Country for Strongmen: How India’s Democracy Constrains Modi.
Foreign Affairs 98., The New Nationalism (March/April): 96–107.
Vajpeyi, Ananya. 2016. Hind Swaraj versus Hindu Rashtra. In Words Matter: Writings Against
Silence, ed. K. Satchidanandan, 116–127. Haryana: Penguin India.
———. 2014. Urgency of the Alternative. Open Magazine, April 04, 2014. http://www.open-
themagazine.com/article/india/urgency-of-the-alternative
Walzer, Michael. 2015. The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious
Counterrevolutions, Yale University press. New Haven.