‘Strong Leaders’, Authoritarian Populism and Indian Developmentalism: the Modi Moment

in Historical Context

Subir Sinha
SOAS, London
ss61@soas.ac.uk

*Thanks to Rashmi Varma for comments on a previous draft.

1. Introduction: Modi, Authoritarian Populism and Neoliberal Restoration

For periods of 2020, India was one Covid-19’s global hotspots, with soaring rates of infection,
transmission and death. Containment measures taken by PM Modi caused an epic exodus of
millions of migrant workers from Indian cities back to their villages, in televised conditions of
destitution, hunger and extreme heat. The pandemic deepened an already unfolding crisis,
with the economy reported to be in its worst shape in 42 years.1 The Centre for Monitoring
the Indian Economy reported a 25% unemployment rate for April and May.2 A strong social
movement contesting Modi’s changes to citizenship laws rocked India in early 2020, and was
put down with armed force, raising accusations of brutality and authoritarianism. On January
26, 2021, farmers demanding withdrawal of his three farm bills camped outside New Delhi
two months and breached police barricades to reach the historic Lal Qila, site of state rituals.
In response, the Modi government unleashed police force on them, built concrete barriers
around Delhi, and instituted yet another shutdown of internet and mobile connectivity. Rare
among contemporary ‘strong leaders’, Modi is reported to enjoy very high approval ratings
despite mishandling key aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, presiding over a deepening
economic crisis, and facing widening political contestation.3

Modi’s carefully constructed and durable image as a ‘strong leader’ is popularly credited with
the dominance of his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in contemporary Indian electoral
politics, leading it to substantial electoral victories in 2014 and in 2019, when the BJP retained
office with an enhanced majority. In 2014, Modi asked the Indian voters to elect him to solve
the widely perceived crisis of India’s famed ‘inclusive neoliberalism’, in which high growth
rates were redistributed widely via increased employment and incomes and poverty

1https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/worst-economy-in-42-years-needs-an-

honest-look/articleshow/73153184.cms

2 https://unemploymentinindia.cmie.com

3The latest #MoodOfTheNation poll conducted by IndiaToday Television reports approval rating between 70-
80%, though critics doubt the credibility of these numbers.

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reduction programmes.4 Modi had used this comprehensive crisis to criticise the Congress
Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in power since 2009, with growing
evidence of declining growth rates and incomes, rise in prices of essential commodities, and
increasing unemployment, amid swirling media stories of corruption scams. The UPA’s policy
correction measures, he said, lacked coherence, increasing both welfare-spending to pacify
the poor, and state repression to shore up accumulation. Further, Modi amplified media
questioning of the UPA’s record on national security, referencing high profile terror attacks
(notably in Mumbai on November 26, 2008), increased attacks by separatists on India’s
military in Kashmir, and border tensions with Pakistan, China and Bangladesh in his speeches.

In Modi’s 2014 electoral campaign narrative, India’s growth had faltered due to the
corruption and ineptitude of the Nehru-Gandhi family and other prominent UPA politicians,
whom he accused of having secret offshore accounts and undeclared wealth.5 For him, the
UPA’s widely hailed rural employment guarantee signalled its failure to provide proper jobs,
a drain on the exchequer aimed at creating a ‘votebank of the poor’. The high number of
farmer suicides indicated a deep agrarian crisis. As an alternative, Modi presented himself as
a man of record, vision and integrity who could take India back to high growth rates, solve
the farm crisis, deliver 2 million jobs annually, make government transparent, provide basic
amenities in record time, and pursue a muscular security policy, encapsulated in a simple
promissory slogan: ‘achhe din’ (good days).6 Modi’s claim to have a record of delivery, having
presided over the ‘Gujarat model’, was echoed widely in the media. Leading capitalists in India
and abroad, and the financial press worldwide, hailed Modi as the strong leader needed to
put India’s ‘growth story’ back on track. But success at governance of the economy was only
half of Modi’s appeal: he also pointedly called himself as a ‘Hindu nationalist’, and his
campaign team referred to him as ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ (the Emperor of Hindu hearts).

Modi’s record on delivering ‘achhe din’ after 5 years in office was poor, and in his 2019
campaign, he did not refer much to the developmental promises of 2014 except to make
ambiguous claims of success, and ask for more time to reverse the lasting legacy of the
Congress Party’s failures. Rather, he fought primarily on the security card, on the grounds
that under his orders, the Indian Air Force, in retaliation for a ‘terror attack’ in Pulwama,
Kashmir, ventured into Pakistani territory and bombed their reported hideouts. His main
slogan now was ‘ghar me ghus kar marenge’ (‘we will assault you in your own house’). He
successfully positioned himself as a ‘strongman’, seeking a mandate he argued was necessary
for a return to rapid growth and for national security.

4 See Nilsen (2021) for a fuller discussion of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’, its contradictions and its crisis.
5 He used an emotive language of the Gandhis having ‘secret bank accounts in Switzerland’.

6See Modi’s speech while launching the BJP’s 2014 election manifesto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTbU6si3wnw and also his speech on his economic policy vision:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Subix1UMs.

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Modi is part of a recent global trend for ‘strong leaders’ whose political project combines
neoliberal restoration with majoritarian appeal and is based on large electoral victories.7 His
project lies on the more authoritarian end of the political spectrum labelled ‘the populist
moment’ (Mouffe 2018; Krastev 2007) and ‘the populist zeitgeist’ (Mudde 2004).
Authoritarianism and neoliberalism are both central to these agendas, characterised by
practices of repression and control of opposition to neoliberalism, which are often labelled
‘autoritarian neoliberalism’ (e.g. Bruff and Tansel, 2018). In this paper, I suggest that in
instances in which neoliberal restoration and authoritarian populism are coupled, such
practices operate more broadly in social and cultural spaces than exclusively – or primarily -
‘economic’ ones.8 These political projects revolve around elected ‘strong leaders’ who
attempt to balance hyper-nationalism, religious or ethnic majoritarianism, a violent cleaving
of society into a ‘pure people’ and ‘enemies of the people’, anti-elitism, and the need for state
and state-sanctioned repression of dissent and opposition on the one hand, and on the other,
a neoliberal restoration with a near-obsession with growth rates, credit ratings, rankings on
World Bank and IMF indices, foreign direct investment, and miles of road built, villages
electrified, homes and latrines constructed, etc.

In this paper, I conceptualise two related phenomena -- contemporary authoritarian populism

as an electorally ratified concentration of state authority in a ‘strong leader’, and neoliberal
restoration as the return to a ‘corrected’ form of neoliberalism as a solution to the crisis of an
earlier form. Going beyond how authoritarian populism removes barriers to accumulation
(Jessop 2019), I focus on how ‘strong leaders’ provide coherence to the wider project of which
neoliberal restoration is a part, and on authoritarian appeal and practices of strong leaders
that generate support for their vision of neoliberal restoration. A focus on ‘strong leaders’
also allows an examination of how ‘security’, which is an important concern within projects
of authoritarian neoliberalism (Jenss 2019), is vocalised and established in political discourse
by such leaders. Such leaders are symptoms of ‘broad social processes’ (Saad-Filho 2021), and
also are products of certain ‘conditions of possibility’, such as flaws in the judiciary (Pahnke
and Milan 2020), but, beyond that, I argue that ‘strong leaders’ provide a contingent unity to

7To be sure, the BJP’s vote share has been well below the majority: 31%, and the NDA’s 38% in 2014, and 37%
and 45% respectively in 2019. In a multiparty first-past-the-post system, this has resulted in 282 seats for the
BJP and 336 for the NDA in 2014, climbing to 303 seats for the BJP and 353 seats for the NDA in 2019. Modi’s
own popularity, while seeing a few dips, has been reported to remain upwards of 60%. With Modi leading
highly charged and controversy-courting campaigns, the BJP won seats in states it had never won before,
expanded its share in states where it was already dominant, and increased its vote share in states where it
already had a presence. Modi also campaigned massively in many elections for state legislature, where again
the BJP and the NDA came to power via elections or post-election machinations. These electoral wins underpin
Modi’s claims to excessive power.

8 See Roberts (1995) for a prescient argument on the co-existence of authoritarian populism and neoliberalism
in Peru. Jessop (2019) and Ryan (2018), too, argue that authoritarian tendencies have been part of
neoliberalism from its pre-history.

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projects of authoritarian populism and neoliberal restoration which function together but are
not reducible to one another.

While showing the function of ‘strong leaders’ like Modi in holding together a project of
authoritarian populism and neoliberal restoration, I argue also that this role cannot be
understood with reference to populism and neoliberalism alone. The modes and processes of
constructing national versions of the ‘strong leader’ reference moments prior to
neoliberalism and its current crises. These include the end of the ‘age of developmentalism’
from the late-1960s, and, earlier, the post-war wave of decolonisation. I therefore put Modi’s
authoritarian populist leadership of a project of neoliberal restoration in a series that includes
Nehru’s postcolonial development project 1950-1962, and Indira Gandhi’s declaration of
national state of Emergency from 1975-77. I argue that while it retains traces of these
previous iterations, the construction and acceptance of ‘Modi as strong leader’ marks a new
relationship between democracy, authoritarian populism, and neoliberalism that goes
beyond those instances. The crisis to which they pose as solutions is a different one, the social
and international conditions too are different, and the apparatus through which such
‘leadership’ is constructed is more complex, involving new practices specific to media and
social media and new communication technologies. The construction of the ‘people/enemy’
cleavage at the heart of the project involves more extensive interventions everyday life, new
modes of coercion, and new ways of closing economic decision-making to democratic
deliberation.

In Section 2, I review some conceptual and methodological issues in studying ‘strong

leadership’ in relation to democracy, populism and authoritarianism. In Section 3, I briefly
explore two prior moments of ‘strong leader’ politics under Nehru and Indira Gandhi. In
Section 4, I sketch the construction of ‘Modi as a strong leader’, fusing authoritarian populism
and neoliberal restoration in the ‘Gujarat Model’. In Section 5, I analyse authoritarian
populism as a governance model in Modi’s first term. In Section 6, I suggest that this model
now shows fascist characteristics. I return to the analytical questions flagged in Section 2 in
the Conclusion.

2. Strong Leaders and the Analytics of Authoritarian Populism

‘Populism’ as a subject of study is marked by confounding conceptual ambiguities (see Pappas

2016) that start from basic questions like what it is, and how it is distinct from other forms of
politics, and the resultant methodological problems over what to study and how to study it.
My engagement here with the conceptual and methodological debates is limited to the
centrality of ‘strong leaders’ in populist politics, on which, too, there is ambiguity: Weyland’s
(2001: 14) definition of populism as “a political strategy through which a leader seeks … power

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based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly
unorganized followers” is criticised by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2018). To them such a
definition presents an ‘excessive’ emphasis on leadership, which for them underplays the
‘supply side’ of populist politics, reducing it to a variant of ‘great man theory’ of politics,
ignoring pressures ‘from below’.9

Departing from this ‘great man’ and ‘pressures from below’ binary, I explore the relations
between Modi as a ‘strong leader’, and ‘the people’ who support his political project of
creating a Hindu nation and achieving his version of neoliberal development, with the use of
authoritarian force. Leaders like Modi, I show, derive their authority from large electoral
victories, and from their claims to represent ‘the people’ more broadly, as being one of the
people, and being above the people.

Strong leadership-oriented authoritarian populism presents itself as a ‘response to crisis’, and

resembles, in important ways, the precursor concept of ‘Caesarism’. This model of ‘rule by
strong leaders’, which originally implied rule by military officers, was given a different
inflection by Gramsci (in Forgacs 1999), for whom, in democracies in a ‘crisis-ridden’ state,
Caesarism could emerge. Gramsci’s concept of ‘organic crisis’, the context for the emergence
of Caesars, was multidimensional, and he noted that Caesarism could emerge in both
dictatorial and democratic variants.10

Authoritarian populist projects like Modi’s today are the nominally ‘democratic’ - or at least
electoral - variant of the response to contemporary organic crises. In providing a narrative for
the causes of the crises, and in suggesting solutions to the crises enacted through their
leadership, these projects extract “a people from within the people” (Muller, 2014). The
persona, speech and communicative practices of strong leaders in these projects function to
combine the leader’s diverse and objectively contradictory supporters – the ‘people’ - into a
‘relatively unified’ political body. (Laclau 2007: 102). These practices name the crises (e.g. as
a crisis of growth and the economy generally, security, corruption, law and order, morality,
national culture, etc), apportion blame for it, and pose solutions to it. In doing so, they
construct the ‘people/enemy’ cleavage central to authoritarian populism, with the ‘people’,
who have unique properties, posited as ‘victims’ of a ‘corrupt elite’ and other nominated
‘enemies of the people’, such as certain ethnic or religious groups, activists and dissidents,
and international actors.

9It is noteworthy that in charting out the ‘future agenda’ for populism studies, Mudde and Kaltwasser (2019)
omit the issue of leadership entirely.

10For further developments of these arguments in Weber, see Baehr 1999, and for Gramsci, see Fontana 2004.
The idea that ‘strong leaders’ are ‘called on by the masses’, who vest excessive authority in them to solve
crises through decisive action is also central to Schmitt’s notion of the ‘popular sovereign’ (see Schmitt 1922;
Brannstrom 2015).

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The ‘people’ as the subjects of populism contain different class fragments - segments of the
urban working class and peasantry, and also of the middle classes and capitalists - and
segments of other social groups (caste, regional political identity etc). It is in providing a
contingent and unstable unity to the ‘people’ constructed from diverse social fragments that
leaders give content to what Mudde (2002) calls the ‘thin ideology’ of populism, layering it
with religion, nationalism, traditionalism, socialism, developmentalism, etc., elements that
respond to different aspects of the organic crisis as discursively constructed by ‘strong leader’
aspirants.

‘Strong leaders’ attempt a ‘partial absorption’ of demands from potentially unruly social
actors - workers, students, youth, peasants, subaltern groups generally – and call for the
neutralisation by force of ‘enemies of the people’ that threaten the stability of ‘the people’
as articulated by the leaders’ political rhetoric. Because ‘crisis’ is the backdrop against which
the ‘people/enemy’ split is discursively constructed by leaders, their politics involves serial
and continuous mobilisation over recurrent iterations of the original crisis and the naming of
new events as part of that crisis (for example, a new scandal, a crime, a pandemic, etc.). In
the 21st century, fake news and other social media practices also function to consolidate ‘the
people’ and to attack and neutralise their ‘enemies’, and are used for creating and nurturing
a leadership cult. Articulations of crises are thus moments for the possible emergence of
‘strong leaders’, of specific ‘leader-people’ relations, and of the ‘people/enemy’ cleavage.

These features of populism within electoral democracies, in which strong leader wield
excessive powers, whose support among the ‘people’ is electoral but also much more than
electoral, and who construct new ‘people/enemy’ cleavages as the basis of their politics,
provide support for Krastev’s (2007) and Pappas’ (2016) definition of populism as ‘democratic
illiberalism’, and for Mudde and Kaltwasser’s (2018: 1670) suggestion that populism is against
liberal democracy, rather than democracy per se. In this paper, I also treat authoritarian
populism as ambiguous tendency within democracies, rather than something necessarily
outside of them, taking further a point suggested in Sanyal (2013) and Chatterjee (2004), for
whom the very nature of India’s postcolonial politics, in which those excluded from and
oppressed by capitalist development have the right to vote, creates tendencies towards
populism and illiberal democracy.

Contemporary authoritarian populism is ‘democratic’ in that it is closely tied to electoral and

plebiscitary processes.11 Its practitioners claim to include the ‘excluded’ into making
decisions, and it requires continuous participation by the ‘people’ in political rituals such as
rallies, voluntary actions, opinion polls, social media storms, and circulation of memes and
hashtags. But authoritarian populism is also explicitly anti-democratic, excluding those it
nominates as the ‘enemies of the people’ from the demos, bypassing democratic institutions

11These plebiscitary processes include regular opinion polls, which as Yudin (2020), referring to Putin, calls
‘daily plebiscites’.

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and processes, transferring the power of institutions to leaders on the grounds that
institutions are ‘corrupt’ and the leader is ‘pure’, and closing off entire arenas (such as the
economy, national security, foreign policy, etc.) to democratic decision-making. Further,
supporters of authoritarian populist leaders often attack the media, experts, and civil society,
and support the idea of the inherent illegitimacy of political opponents and critics. In that
sense, ‘strong leader’ based authoritarian populism resembles Banaji’s (2017) idea of
‘electoral fascism’, in which a minimal form for democracy is maintained and fetishized to
gain popular support for authoritarianism.

While comparative studies of populism often search for ‘concept validity generalisable across
cases (e.g. Meijers and Zaslove 2021), with my interests in ‘leaders’ and the ‘people/enemy’
cleavage, I approach populism as context specific, as ‘the people’ can only be defined as ‘pure’
and ‘authentic’ in relation to closed notions of religion, culture, language, national history etc.
and sedimented prejudices, which also provide the raw material for constructing the ‘enemies
of the people’, giving form to the image of ‘strong leadership’, and to the ‘populist style’
(Moffitt and Tormey 2013) of ‘strong leaders’.

Another deviation I make in this paper from studies of contemporary populism is to think
differently about its spatial dimensions., which is addressed in the literature as a response to
dissatisfaction with globalisation (for example, dure to fear of immigration; see Lizotte 2019),
or a withdrawal into nationalism or localism (Wills 2015; Featherstone 2015; Cortes-Vasquez
2020). These concerns are important in Modi’s project too, but my approach to spatiality has
other concerns as well: how is ’strong leadership’ projected across political space? How is
national community and nation-space imagined? How are the ‘people’ constructed across the
heterogeneity of Indian? How do strong leaders ‘embody’ nation-space? How do perceptions
of ‘control over international space’ play into constructions of strong leadership?

From this brief review of the conceptual debates, I have identified the core issues I deal with
in the rest of the paper: the crises in response to which strong leaders emerge, the
construction of ‘leader-people’ relations around authoritarian modes of addressing the crises,
and ‘people/enemy’ cleavages, the trajectories to authoritarianism from within democracy,
and the context-specificity of forms of strong leadership and the projects they lead. Let me
turn briefly now to some notes of methodology.

As the paper spans the period from 1947 to now, it uses a mixture of methods. The mix of
methods was also partly shaped by the Pandemic, during which substantive revisions to
earlier drafts of the paper took place without access to the ‘field’ or to the archives and
libraries. For the Section on Nehru, therefore, I have relied on standard secondary work on
the Nehruvian period, including contemporaneous academic writing I have relied on images
from the archives of The Hindu and the Times of India (both newspapers of record) that I
found via the Google search terms “Nehru Times of India” and “Nehru The Hindu”.

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Additionally, I searched the online archives of Chitravali Arts, Madras (now Chennai), who
were one of the main makers and distributors of calendars; and of Getty Images. Also, I have
read relevant volumes of speeches and Nehru’s writings released by the Publications Division
of the Government of India, and of the his Selected Works from
https://nehruselectedworks.com maintained by the Jawaharlal Nehru Fund.
For the section on Indira Gandhi, in addition to the sources mentioned above, I have also
looked at the small selection of her writings archived at https://indiragandhi.in, and for event-
specific coverage, I have conducted simple google searches with appropriate keywords. I
have also occasionally asked “Twitter hivemind” for links to contemporaneous newspaper
and magazine coverage of events, and for historical photographs, some of which I have
analysed in this section.

Researching the recent history of the Modi period under pandemic conditions has posed
different methodological challenges. Critical academics are now under survelliance across
India. Groups connected to the Hindu far right, Modi’s primary ‘people’, have attacked
academics over the past decade, and have practiced gatekeeping to keep deny access to
academics to their inner workings: a manifestation of authoritarian populism which poses
barriers to research on authoritarian populism. This has forced a reliance on publicly available
material, and to rethink what ‘archive’ and ‘field’ might mean in a world where mobility and
access to them is limited both by the pandemic and by politics.

While I have used newspaper and magazine archives and published academic works to
reconstruct the background and context of Modi’s emergence, for the period from 2010
onwards, I have relied heavily on the ‘cyber-field’ and ‘cyber-archive’. Elsewhere (Sinha 2021),
in relation to research on migrant workers during the Covid-19 lockdown, I have argued that
accessing ‘the field’ for fieldwork is not always possible. In ‘normal’, that is, pre-COVID times,
like other questions, those pertaining the building of authoritarian leadership, the
‘people/enemy’ cleavage and on serial and continuous mobilisation of the ‘people’ etc. would
have been investigated via ethnography and ‘fieldwork’, though violent gatekeeping by the
Hindutva far right groups would have remained a possibility. However, “‘locked down’
indefinitely, the ‘field’ is not accessible to us for fieldwork or ethnography.” (Sinha 2021: 220)
The events of 2020, on which parts of Sections 6 and 7 are based, fall in this time. For this
period, then, I research the ‘cyber-field’, “a composite of the internet, media and social media
with a global reach, and an interrupted, discontinuous set of images, videos, voices and
reports that make up a wholly new kind of archive” (Sinha 2021: 220).

Following Airoldi’s (2018) suggestions on how to learn from ‘conventional ethnography’ to

study ‘meta-fields’ and ‘contextual fields’, taking advantage of its ‘technological affordances’,
I searched for relevant hashtags (e.g. #Modi #Gujarat2002 #RamMandir, #ShaheenBagh,
#KisanAndolan, #FarmersMovement, apart from a number of Modi related hashtags, relating
to topics as they gained salience in relation to my main questions) on Twitter, whose

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algorithmic logic based on data of my past usage of the platform displayed serially repeated
use of hashtags and video footage loaded by individual users of the platforms and influencers,
and news coverage of these events. I paid particular attention to relevant hashtags and stories
‘trending’ on Twitter. Additionally, I was invited to Facebook and WhatsApp groups
exchanging information on Modi, Hindutva and on-going social movements for activists and
relief purposes, and have used published material circulated there in the paper, as
appropriate. I should note that I also managed to enter Hindutva and Modi-cult related
WhatsApp and FaceBook groups, but I was ejected from them once members gained
information about my previous publications and political orientation and activities. I take
these platforms as constituting ‘cyber-fields’, and sources digitized for internet and mobile
phone app access, and posts on social media, as constituting ‘cyber-archives’, on which I
explore the ‘leader-people’ and ‘people/enemy’ constructs central to Modi’s rule (Sinha
2021).

The rest of the paper explores issues identified in this brief review of debates on methods and
concepts appropriate for a study of authoritarian populism. I identify the ‘crises’ in response
to which strong leader politics emerged in India over time, and trace how democratic ‘strong
leaders’ attending to previous crises set the basic template of leadership in future iterations
of authoritarian populism. I outline the construction and consolidation of the relation
between the ‘leader’ and the ‘people’, and the ‘people/enemy cleavage’, with attention to
the media and communicative practices that were at play. I also explore ‘strong leader’
populism as a spatial phenomenon along the lines specified above.

3. The Indian Experience of ‘Strong Leaders’ from the 1950s to the end of
Developmentalism

Two prior moments of ‘strong leader’ politics - the tenure of first Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru from 1947-1962, and of Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency from 1975-1977 – form
the pre-history of India’s current iteration of authoritarian populism.

3.1. Nehru’s Authority and Authoritarianism-at-the-margins

As other prominent leaders died just before and after 1947, the legitimacy and authority of
the anti-colonial struggle became personified in Nehru. Given the scale and scope of the tasks
at hand, the Constitution of 1950, too, gave the Prime Minister sweeping powers, symbolising
a foundational embedding of the authoritarian possibility in Indian democracy.12 The first

12The prospects of a strong leader using their popularity and the law to turn authoritarian haunted Nehru. In a
1937 essay titled The Rashtrapati (President) in the Calcutta journal Modern Review under the pseudonym
‘Chanakya’, Nehru considered the possibility that he would become a ‘Caesar-like’, even god-like, authoritarian
leader surrounded by a cult of personality who “calls himself a socialist and a democrat, and does so in all

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task was to reverse the catastrophic effects of colonial rule via visionary developmentalism.
India scored poorly on life expectancy, education, incomes, food, and on infrastructure and
industrialisation, so development was key to the legitimacy of leadership of the postcolonial
state (Sinha 2008). Nehru’s model of postcolonial development, common to post-war
developmentalism generally, involved centralised planning and heavy state intervention in
the economy. During his 15-year tenure as Prime Minister, Nehru laid its institutional grid that
included the Planning Commission, public sector-led development of heavy industries,
planned cities, research and educational institutions, and large dam and infrastructure
projects. The ‘Nehruvian model’ subordinated national capital to the state, a task made
arguably easier as capitalists lacked sufficient class power at the time.13

The second task was to maintain parity and amity between religious communities. Leaders of
the Indian Muslim League, which had originated within the Congress Party, had demanded
Pakistan, arguing that Muslims would be persecuted in a Hindu majoritarian state. The Hindu
Mahasabha, too, initially operated within the Congress party, but separated during the course
of the anticolonial struggle, demanding that postcolonial India should be ‘Hindu Rashtra’.14
Both the Mahasabha, and the other majoritarian organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS) were increasingly influenced by European and Asian fascism (Casolari, 2000). In
the lead-up to 1947, organised violence by cadres of the Muslim and Hindu nationalists, and
the Congress, erupted with increasing frequency and scale, and the Partition itself led to an
extended bloodbath (Pandey, 1997).

A key aspect of Nehru’s leadership was his commitment to ‘secularism’, and to creating
conditions for equal citizenship between Hindus and Muslims in the aftermath of Partition.
Sporadic but small-scale and localised communal violence, with Muslims bearing the brunt,
occurred throughout the 1950s, but as Desai (1984: 22) notes, they were not systematically
organised, and the loss of life was low compared to periods both before and after this decade.
This relative lull ended with the Jabalpur riots of 1961, from when inter-communal violence
became more deadly and organised once again, with Muslims the large majority of those
killed (Engineer 1984: 35). Management of relations between a Hindu majority and Muslims
(and other) minorities became a second criteria for strong leadership in India.

earnestness” but a little twist and he “might turn a dictator sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-
moving democracy.” That was because, ‘Chanakya’ wrote, “Jawaharlal has all the makings of a dictator in him:
a vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose, energy, pride, organisational capacity…love
of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak.”

13Chibber’s (2011) thesis that ISI was an expression of capital’s power over the state, rather than of the
Nehruvian state’s power over capital, is weakened by his exaggerated account of capital’s class power at the
time. See Tyabji (2015) for a fuller account of the power of the capitalist class in relation to the Indian state.

14 See Anderson and Damle (1987) and Jaffrelot (1998) for a fuller account.

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Nehru’s international exposure as leader of the anti-colonial movement translated, post-
1947, to prominence in world affairs: he played a key role in the formation of the Non-Aligned
Movement, while maintaining strong ties both with the US and the USSR under global
conditions of Cold War bipolarity. Cultivating friendly relations with Mao, Nehru lobbied for
China’s entry into the United Nations. He offered support to the on-going anti-colonial
struggles in Asia and Africa in international fora (see Power, 1964). His pictures with world
leaders appeared in the Indian media and were read as a sign of national prestige, suggesting
that India, despite being a poor country, was punching above its weight in world politics.
Influencing world affairs and forging close relations with other world leaders became another
element of the ‘strong leader’ template in Nehru’s India.

Despite the centralisation of power and authority, Nehru did not take on a dictatorial role
then common in the developing world. As Chatterjee (1998) notes, Nehruvian planned
development was a Gramscian passive revolution: modernizers led by Nehru, unable to push
through their modernizing agenda, had to compromise with traditionalists. Vanaik (2018)
argues that Nehruvian socialism did not have a deep hegemony: without land redistribution,
it remained a “mish-mash of developmentalist goals, vague ideals and nationalist themes
such as modernization, ‘scientific temper’, industrialisation, socialism, democracy and non-
alignment, combined with … ‘soft Hindu’ secularism”. This was given coherence via reliance
on love, respect and trust for Nehru, whose status as a ‘strong leader beyond politics’ was
established by electoral victories, upbeat developmental rhetoric, and the support of the
postcolonial intelligentsia and the media.

The Indian and international press, radio and cinema newsreels showed Nehru’s ageing but
energetic frame in dam sites, factories and mines, and interacting with foreign leaders,
embedding his image as a likeable, trustworthy, capable and grand leader.15 But with the
prevalence of high rates of illiteracy, low radio penetration and virtually no television, the
technological possibilities for expanded communication practices to connect Nehru to the
people did not exist. Elements of personal style also contributed to the strong-leader image:
wearing hand-spun khadi (see Tarlo 1999) and the ‘Gandhi cap’ connected him to the anti-
colonial movement, the trademark rose in his lapel suggested dignity and high stature and
contributed to the construction of his image as ‘Chacha (uncle) Nehru’. Images of him
swimming, doing yoga and playing with tiger cubs, distributed via print media and calendar
art, all confirmed his fitness and virility.16

15 See this Pathe’ clip from 1957: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuKpclO5ZjE

16See some of these images at https://chitravali.com/index.php?route=product/search&search=nehru. For

Nehru doing Yoga, see https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/politics/yoga-includes-non-violence-
truthfulness-continence-wrote-nehru-international-yoga-day-twitter.

11
However, there was authoritarianism at the margins in consolidating state power over
national territory: in the military annexation of the Muslim Nizami of Hyderabad; the armed
subjugation of communists in Telangana; bringing down the elected government of Sheikh
Abdullah in response to the so called ‘Kashmir Conspiracy case’ in 1953 and arresting him (see
Noorani 1997); bringing down the elected Communist government in Kerala in 1959 (Jeffrey
1991); the armed ‘pacification’ of the Indian Northeast where national borders were still
ambiguous (see Guyot-Rechard 2013); and the internment of Chinese-Indians during the 1962
war with China. Towards the end of his tenure, defeat in the Chinese war, revelations of
corruption scams and declining electoral margins of victory, together with persistent food
shortages and poverty, undermined Nehru’s ‘strong leader’ status, but the template for
‘strong leadership’ in Indian politics, both in his success and his failure, was set by Nehru.

3.2. Authoritarian Populism without Democracy: Indira Gandhi’s Emergency

Nehru espoused a commitment to liberal democracy, civility in public life and the values of a
‘loyal’ opposition.17 Though Nehru cautioned against cults of personality, authoritarianism
and dynasticism, Lohia, his socialist critic in Parliament, pointed to his diminished
commitment to democracy, both at home where he guided his daughter Indira Gandhi’s
ascent to Prime Ministership in 1966, and in foreign policy towards Tibet and Africa, where
he supported anti-democratic politics (see Sinha 2019).

Nehru died in 1964, and his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966,18 leaving the Congress torn
by leadership struggles and declining electoral fortunes. In 1967, many states elected non-
Congress governments for the first time since 1947. India faced rising commodity prices,
joblessness and hunger, and US demands for currency devaluation all pointed to intimations
of a comprehensive crisis of developmentalism. A radical Maoist (Naxalite) movement
announced itself in 1967 in a series of attacks on police forces and landlords. The Congress’s
victory in the 1967 elections was narrow, prompting challengers within the party to ask for
Indira Gandhi’s resignation (Kothari, 1967). She split the party and called for fresh elections
in 1971, which she won, making emotional speeches about being Nehru’s daughter betrayed
by ‘selfish plotters’ who were obstacles to development. This was her first move to identify
‘the enemies of the people’.19 She recognised the emerging tensions between the landed and

17 Chakrabarty (2005) notes that Nehru held ‘popular sovereignty’ by demonstrations and ‘hooliganism’ as
‘improper’, and as against the liberal principle of political representation through party politics.

18Shastri died of a heart attack in Tashkent, but right wing conspiracy theorists have long accused Indira
Gandhi of having got him murdered in order to clear her path to power. Recently, a far-right wing film maker,
Vivek Agnihotri, affiliated to Modi’s Hindutva movement, has made a film (Tashkent Files) giving further wind
to this conspracy theory.

19In Nehru’s (and indeed Gandhi’s) political discourses, the identification of such ‘enemies’ was imited to
‘blackmarketeers’ and ‘hoarders’ of essential commodities.

12
the landless – a result of Nehru’s inability to push through radical land reforms - and
campaigned on the slogan of ‘garibi hatao’ (eradicate poverty). She implemented major
populist policies, including limited land reforms, nationalisation of banks and of many core
industries, and assumed heavy-handed postures towards both capitalists and labour (See
Prakash 2019).20

Mrs. Gandhi became recognized as a ‘strong leader’ domestically and internationally due to
a decisive victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan leading to the formation of Bangladesh,
achieved against US opposition.21 Under her leadership, India also carried out its first nuclear
test in Pokharan in 1974, against international opinion, but which she sold as a remarkable
technological feat for a poor country.22 She continued engagement with the Non-Aligned
Movement, cultivating especially close relations with Arab leaders. However, with the
economy facing ‘structural retrogression’ (Shetty 1978), the ‘educated unemployed’ youth
began to join the Naxalite movement, and movements against water crisis, price rise and food
shortages. New political combinations emerged: while, from the late-1960s, Gandhians and
some Communists had collaborated in new movements, now, in Gujarat, Gandhian socialists
and Hindu far-right organisations combined in the 1970/72 Nav Nirman movement, in which
current PM Modi is said to have cut his political teeth. A railways workers’ strike affected the
movement of goods, including food grains.

Mrs. Gandhi labelled these movements as ‘enemies of the nation’ (‘desh ke dushman’) aiming
to create a crisis of governability, and declared a State of Emergency in 1975, suspending civil
and political rights. More than a 100,000 people were arrested, including 40 Members of
Parliament. State legislatures were suspended, and states were ruled via Governors
appointed by Mrs Gandhi. The torture and surveillance of political opponents was
accompanied by forced vasectomies for population control, violent slum demolitions,
censorship of independent media and the use of state media for propaganda. A cult of
personality around Mrs. Gandhi, and vigilante violence by the Youth Congress led by Mrs.
Gandhi’s son and heir-apparent Sanjay Gandhi, were widespread during the Emergency,
during which Jaffrelot and Anil (2020) estimate, 40-50000 were killed. They note that this
‘constitutional authoritarianism’ had support from across the political spectrum, from the
Communists and trade unionists to the Hindu right (whose leaders compared her to the
Goddess Durga), as well as wide sections of the middle class and capitalists. This authorised

20
In the context of the global crisis of postwar developmentalism, she was far from the only national leader to
move towards authoritarian populism. See Skaaning and Jimenez (2017), Figure 1.1.

21 See her interview with British television from 1971: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MATAqeiL-4

22 See this clip from the Indian Films Division: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7MagRTpdZY

13
Mrs Gandhi to subsume state institutions to her project, making personal loyalty to her the
paramount imperative.23

Strong elements of style played a semiotic role in building Mrs Gandhi’s image. This included
her characteristic ‘modern’ hairstyle with a thick streak of white, her hand-spun sarees that
represented the weaving traditions from across the country, covering her head in the
traditional manner, sporting regional clothing, including of indigenous people, presented her
as embodying India’s diversity. Through the Emergency, the slogans of the so-called ‘20 Point
Program’ were placed on hoardings, inscribed in public spaces, broadcast by media nation-
wide, and showcased in state rituals such as Independence and Republic Day parades.24
Celebrations of the Dussehra festival, which traditionally culminated with the burning of
Ravana’s effigy, now also had effigies for black-marketers, smugglers and hoarders: the
‘enemies of the people’. Her impeccable English and French, in which she addressed foreign
media, and her ease in the company of prominent world leaders, also indicated confidence in
India’s place in the world.

The Emergency ended when Mrs. Gandhi, found guilty of electoral malpractice, was forced to
rescind it and resign in 1977. But the suspension of Parliament, civil liberties and rights,
massive media censorship, repression of activists and social movements, personalisation of
institutions and subsuming them under the power of the strong leader, and creation of a cult
of personality under Indira Gandhi pushed ‘strong leader’ politics towards an authoritarian
horizon.

3.3. Indian Neoliberalism and the Interregnum between Strong-Leader Authoritarianisms

An ‘interregnum’ is the time between the collapse of an old hegemonic order and the
emergence of a new one, when “several ideologically conflicting projects struggle for
potential hegemony, each with its own solution to the crisis of the previous system” (Moller-
Stahl, 2019: 4). The instability inherent in these periods is often used by aspirant strong
leaders to construct crisis discourses and new political coalitions, combining elements of
dying and emergent projects in new ways, and adding novel elements of their own.

Contemporary authoritarian populism is said to be a response to the ‘crisis of neoliberalism,

but, equally, neoliberalism itself first emerged as a response to a previous crisis of
developmentalism. Neoliberalism varies in its national form as the balance of social forces,
the existing architecture of ‘national economies’ and the location of nations in global political
economy is variable. Not simply an ‘imposition’ from ‘the West’, it also has willing and

23 As one of her eager sycophants D.K. Baruah put it, “India is Indira, Indira is India.” See Bobb (2005).

24For a symptomatic depiction, see https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/posters-on-a-road-

bridge-in-new-delhi-advertising-indira-news-photo/3333640

14
enthusiastic champions within developing nations, and its arc of political ascent goes though
contestation and negotiation in national and local political settings.

Although neoliberal ‘reforms’ started in India in the 1990s, their pre-history lies in an
extended interregnum. The Janata coalition that replaced Mrs Gandhi between 1977-79
abandoned planning. Mrs Gandhi, returning to power in 1981, turned away from dirigisme.
Recalibrating her relations with Indian capitalists, she initiated limited sell offs of public sector
firms. Reforms from the early 1990s included currency devaluation, entry and increased
presence of private capital in the economy, loosening of restrictions on transnational capital,
and a shift from ISI to export-orientation. Expanded participation in stock markets and private
sector employment produced a broad social buy-in into these reforms. The 1990s also saw
the expansion and deepening of privately owned mass media and communication
technologies and the entry of private banks, both connected to transnational capital.

The fundamental shift from dirigiste to neoliberal developmentalism was carried out,
paradoxically, not by strong leaders but by weak and unstable coalition governments in the
1990s. New media outlets reported how privatisation was accompanied by corruption,
highlighting high profile scams involving prominent politicians. This established corruption as
a key question in national politics.

4. “The Gujarat Model” and Modi’s Authoritarian Developmentalist Populism

The Emergency failed to restore the dirigiste developmental model; rather it hastened its
crisis, and irreversibly eroded the Congress party’s support base and domination of Indian
politics. New movements, regional political parties, and parties representing new caste
groupings emerged in the 1980s. The most significant of these was the supremacist ‘Hindutva’
movement, which campaigned for the destruction of mosques allegedly built on medieval
temple sites and reconstruction of temples, all with the goal of converting India from a
constitutionally secular nation to a ‘Hindu’ state. Drawing its lineage to the RSS and the Hindu
Mahasabha of the pre-colonial period, its political wing, the BJP, joined ruling coalitions in
some states, formed governments on its own in other states, and has now ruled Gujarat on
its own for over two decades.

Although Modi claimed that his leadership of the ‘Gujarat Model’ since 2009 qualified him as
a ‘vikas purush’ (development man) who could lead national government, this ‘model’ has
deviated from national dirigisme since the 1960s, when Gujarat was created as a state within
the union. Benefitting from capital flight from Bombay after trade union militancy there in
the 1960s and 1970s, Gujarat pursued private sector-led growth and state interventions in
favour of capital, promoting public-private partnerships and exports, lobbying Delhi for
permissions, setting up industrial parks and developing infrastructure. Heading the Gujarat

15
model was the ‘Sarvochh’ (or supreme) leader, the Chief Minister, who took final decisions
on projects and resolved its contradictions (Sud 2012: 42).

The Gujarat model’s pro-capitalist leanings reflected specific class relations: transfer of
Gujarati-owned capital from Bombay, the transformation of rich and politically influential
Patidar farmers into industrial capitalists as they moved from food crops to non-cereals to
capitalist agriculture and then on to industry (Sinha 2004), indicating a partial resolution, at a
sub-national level, of the ‘agrarian question of capital’. Migrants constituted a large
proportion of workers in Gujarat industries, so trade unionism and working-class strength and
unity was low, leading to a compliant workforce.

Gujarat had seen episodes of majoritarian communal violence from the late-1960s, but this
had not fed into the rise of Hindutva politics until the Ahmedabad ‘riots’ of 1985, which
started as a protest against caste-based reservation in education and employment and then
turned communal with the entry of Hindutva groups into the movement (See Shani 2005).
Regional identity politics too had little hold in Gujarat until the 1980s, as the Congress party
ruled both the state and the centre, but the slogan of ‘Gujarati Asmita’ (pride) fed into a
subnational populism that emerged in the 1990s in the context of competition between states
for development performance and for attracting FDI flows (Sud 2012: 62). The large Gujarati
diaspora became a source of foreign direct investment (FDI) and an increasingly important
player in public-private partnerships.

In the 1990s economic liberalisation converged with expansion of the media sphere, Hindutva
and caste identity politics (Rajagopal 2001). The Hindutva project of creating a ‘Hindu nation’,
designed in the 1930s, was re-drawn by party leaders to save the BJP from electoral oblivion
after it won only 4 seats in the 1988 Parliamentary elections. Adopting an aggressive strategy
of rallying Hindus by vilifying and attacking Muslims, BJP’s top leader Advani spoke of
‘historical wounds’ left by medieval Muslim rulers who destroyed Hindu temples, and the BJP
government in Gujarat incorporated militant Hindu groups, giving them roles in police bodies,
local government, and cooperatives. These groups also provided avenues for Hindutva’s
mobilisation of youth, indigenous people and subordinate castes.

Modi had no development credentials when he became Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001. A
lifelong ‘pracharak’ (preacher) of the RSS, Modi was an important election organiser in
Gujarat, later elected Member of Parliament. He participated in the ‘yatras’ undertaken by
Advani to destroy the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya town in Uttar Pradesh state, and ‘reclaim’ the
site to build a Ram Temple. Communal violence in the wake of these ‘yatras’ resulted in the
killing of more than a 1000 Muslims, and a total nearing 2000 (Spodek 2010). With RSS
affiliates destroying the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, BJP politicians, including Modi, used
constructing a Ram Temple in that site as a main electoral plank. Modi also gained credentials
on another core Hindutva cause: at the height of the Kashmiri separatist movement, he

16
accompanied party bigwigs in 1992 to fly the Indian flag in Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital on
national Independence Day. He also expanded Hindutva’s influence beyond the nation space-
-as General Secretary of his party, he visited the US to drum up support among the Indian
diaspora there.

On 27 February 2002, a train carrying Hindutva volunteers returning from Ayodhya was set
aflame in Godhra town in Gujarat, as part of a ‘planned conspiracy’ by Muslims as per the
disputed findings of the official commission of inquiry, leading to 52 deaths.25 Modi allowed
the parading of charred bodies across Gujarat by RSS-affiliated organisations. Largescale
violence followed, and more than 3000 Muslims, and close to 800 Hindus, were killed. Bobbio
(2015: 4) notes the cross-class participation in the violence, and Desai and Roy (2016) note its
cross-caste nature, mobilising subordinate castes and indigenous people. Across India, this
televised large-scale killing of Muslims enhanced Modi’s standing as one who would allow
militant Hindus to ‘avenge’ the perceived historical injustices of Muslim rule.

Modi’s mocking, incendiary speeches following the violence had a ‘finger-in-the-wound’ tone
directed against Muslim victims and survivors, helping create a cult following among Hindutva
hardliners, and youth radicalised by the Ram temple movement.26 He referred to ‘1200 years
of colonialism’, referred to Indian Muslims as ‘descendants of historical invaders’, and thus
alien to the body politic. Those supporting the breaking the laws to ‘punish’ Muslims for
perceived ‘historical injustices’, or for ‘transgressing’ the roles assigned to them in Hindutva
ideology, became Modi’s core supporters.

Disgraced in the national media after abruptly leaving a TV interview in which he was
questioned on the Gujarat violence, Modi began to shun them while courting the regional
and vernacular Gujarati and Hindi press and giving interviews to carefully vetted Hindutva-
supporting journalists. He developed close relations with state officials who were
instrumental in letting the violence run its course, and who supported a narrative of Modi’s
non-culpability, with rewards and punishments meted out on the basis of loyalty. This carried
into the policy of highly controversial extra-judicial killings of suspected (Muslim) terrorists.

25 A one-man Commission was set up under Justice Shah, who was considered close to Modi. It was expanded
to include Justice Nanavati and Justice Mehta, the latter already having achieved notoreity for granting bail to
some of the main accused in massacres of 2002. The evidence collection was deeply controversial, and many
witnesses changed their statements. Shoddy investigation and compromised personnel and processes have
created lasting ambiguity regarding the Commissions findings. A second Commission under Justice Bannerjee
was set up by the UPA government, and its findings were that the fire was ‘not set from the outside’ and that
it was ‘accidental’, but it stopped short of stating that the fire was set from inside. The Special Court set up for
trial of 91 accused Muslims found 30 guilty, and acquitted 61, inclding the chief accused Maulvi Umarji.

26He referred to Muslims as ‘Abdul puncture wala’ (since owners of small bike repair shops were
predominantly Muslim in Gujarat), called refugee camps for Muslim victims “bachha factories” (child
producing factories) and used terms like ‘hum paanch hamare pachees’ (‘Us five and our twentyfive children’,
impying that Muslim men marry four wives and have many children with each of them).

17
Modi constructed himself as a ‘development man’ in his second tenure as Chief Minister of
Gujarat. After many countries had refused him a visa for his alleged role in the 2002 pogrom,
he cultivated personal relationships with politicians in the US, the UK, and East Asia, and
spoke of making India into another ‘Asian tiger’. From 2003, he had begun holding annual
‘Vibrant Gujarat’ events, to which he invited participation from transnational capitalists,
including diaspora Gujaratis, and signed well-publicized pre-contracts for FDI, offering fast
clearance and state assistance for projects. He paid close attention to indices fashionable with
international development agencies, like the ‘ease of doing business’ index, on which he
based his claims of ‘good governance’. He introduced electronic processes in citizens’
interface with the state, and public-private partnerships in the social sector via Corporate
Social Responsibility tie-ups, in keeping with the international development agenda. Later, he
announced a metro rail system in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s capital, and popularised the idea of
‘smart cities’. For all aspects of the development model, Modi used executive orders rather
than the legislative route. This gave credence to his arrogation of the ‘Gujarat model’, and to
his claims of ‘strong leadership’ qualities.

Another aspect of Modi’s authoritarian developmentalism was the hostility towards human
rights NGOs that had tried to hold him to account over the mass killings of 2002 and the
subsequent extrajudicial killings, and environmental NGOs that had supported protests
against the Narmada Dam. He made hostility towards human rights, NGOs and social
movements key elements of his populist persona, arguing that they slowed down growth, and
that he had more authority than them due to his large electoral mandates in Gujarat. His
strident line on Pakistan and Kashmir served both to establish his security credentials, and,
insofar as these places stand as proxies for ‘Muslims’ in popular political discourse,
consolidated his Hindutva base, as did close association with popular Hindu God-men.

Modi’s rise as a hard-line Hindutva radical who advocated authoritarian measures to

implement neoliberalism coincided with the BJP’s search for a new ‘national face’ after 2010.
In the 2004 national elections, the BJP-led NDA coalition, having presided over 5 years of high
growth, suffered a shock-defeat to the Congress-led UPA coalition, voted in by poorer voters
left out of the benefits of reforms. The UPA government, lauded for its ‘inclusive
neoliberalism’ paradigm, matching high growth with increasing social welfare, won a second
term in office in 2009. Though the UPA government did better than governments of most
other developing countries in negotiating the turbulence following the global economic crash
of 2009 and maintained growth rates of near 5%, employment generation, incomes and other
indicators fell below those of the boom years, and news of corruption, unearthed through
Right to Information petitions, initiated by the UPA itself as a key governance reform,
circulated in the public sphere.

18
 5. Modi’s Neoliberal Developmentalism and the Governance Logics of Authoritarian
Populism

In 2014, Modi’s development narrative had three constitutive components: to argue that the
Congress governments failed to sustain growth and development because of dynasticism and
corruption; that Modi’s leadership of the Gujarat model would allow him to scale it up across
India; and that his strong leadership would undertake deep market reforms for a quick
turnaround of the economy. He promised to construct ‘the world’s largest statue’, to bring in
the ‘fastest train’, ‘make India like Singapore’, build ‘200 smart cities’, and repulse perceived
Pakistani and Chinese threats to Indian security with strong military response. He made
targeted promises: jobs to youth, increased incomes to middle classes and farmers, women’s
empowerment and girls’ education, protection and extension of rights over nature to tribal
populations.

Modi affiliated his 2014 candidacy with appeals to youth, showing familiarity with mobile
phones, video games, internet culture, new apps and communications platforms. He spoke
knowingly of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and other futuristic capitalists. At the same time,
he invoked Indian nationalist, cultural and religious icons in his speeches, mimicking their
headgear and poses. Core Hindutva demands remained in the party manifesto, but they were
downplayed in the campaign, with the BJP’s spokespersons and social media team repeatedly
referred to him as ‘development man‘ (vikas purush) and ‘youth icon’, giving these labels wide
currency and acceptability. Modi and the BJP affiliated with the nation-wide popular
movement against corruption that emerged in 2011. Since the experience of corruption cuts
across social groups, Modi’s slogan ‘na khaunga, na khane doonga’ (I won’t eat public funds
and won’t let other do it) found wide resonance among the public.

Modi’s economic policy agenda was – and remains – a hybrid of neoliberal restoration, and,
given the electoral risk posed by a hard neoliberalism, it is leavened with gestures towards
‘garib kalyan’ (welfare for the poor). As Prime Minister, Modi disbanded the Planning
Commission, centralising its functions in his office, and created a smaller body, the Niti Aayog
(Policy Commission). RSS ideologues were introduced into policy making. He announced plans
to make India a manufacturing powerhouse, introduced skills training to boost employment,
and offered favourable loans for start-ups and small scale businesses. In addition, programs
to provide cooking gas cylinders to poor families, rural electrification, and road building were
announced as welfare measures. For infrastructure, he vowed to make environmental and
social clearances easier, and attacked environmental and human rights activists and NGOs as
‘breaking India forces’ and ‘Urban Naxals’.27

27He borrowed these terms from two far right wing ideologues: “breaking India forces” or ‘tukde-tukde gang’
came from the writings of US based tech billionaire Rajiv Malhotra and ‘Urban Naxals’, referring to precisely
such activists and NGOs from the far right wing film maker Vivek Agnihotri.

19
Television media and the BJP’s social media ‘IT Cell’ actively built a cult of personality around
Modi, hailing him as a ‘great man’ and a ‘strong leader’, comparable to Hindu gods, and
superior to past leaders of India and contemporary leaders of the world. 28 Fake news aimed
at destroying Nehru’s reputation as a ‘great leader’, and morphed images of world leaders in
supplication to Modi, circulated heavily on social media (Sinha 2017). These images
consolidated, in the minds of his core supporters, the fantasy that India, personified by Modi,
was now a ‘vishwa-guru’ or ‘teacher to the world’, which in Hindutva ideology is the rightful
place for India in international affairs.

Modi had pushed for neoliberal restoration (in both its accumulative and redistributive
aspects) under his leadership as his main election plank in 2014, but it was strident Hindutva
that made the most advance in his first tenure. Modi’s core supporters demanded laws for
cow protection, a ban on beef eating, and death penalty for cow slaughter, targeting Dalits
and Muslims involved in beef retail, the leather industry and in the removal of bovine carcass.
Starting in August 2014, Dalits and Muslims across northern and western India were attacked
as ‘smugglers’ for carrying cattle to market, and for suspicion of slaughtering cattle for beef,
by groups explicitly linked to Modi’s party and ministers.29 The attackers were garlanded by
Modi’s ministers, and the families of victims faced coordinated harassment from police and
BJP-affiliated far right wing vigilante groups, including on social media.30 This hit raw hide
supplies to the Indian leather industry, one of the world’s largest, virtually shutting down hubs
of production in Kolhapur and Kanpur.31 Small and informal abattoirs were affected32,
consolidating beef trade in the hands of politically influential large export firms.33 Local cattle
trade was badly hit, affecting dairy farmers for whom sale of non-milch cattle is a crucial
source of income. Abandoned cattle wreaked havoc on standing crops. 34

28Modi was seen clutching several world leaders in a hard embrace, communicating to his followers his
intimate and informal friendship with them.

29
See https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/02/18/violent-cow-protection-india/vigilante-groups-attack-
minorities. Accessed March 1, 2019.

30See https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/in-the-name-of-the-mother for a detailed report. Accessed

January 2, 2019

31See https://www.thequint.com/news/infographics/when-cow-protectionism-puts-livelihoods-at-stake-
leather-industry-kolhapuri-chappals Accessed 12/08.2016.

32See https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/slaughterhouse-crackdown-in-up-butchers-and-farmers-
hit-big-businesses-gain/story-SE3ha4M3FArgc3n28wtqqM.html. Accessed January 30 2019.

33 India is the world’s second largest beef exporter.

34See https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/what-made-rural-india-abandon-its-
cattle-in-droves/articleshow/67604493.cms. Accessed March 16 2019.

20
The radical exclusion of Muslims from the public space in Modi’s first term was enforced by
Hindutva vigilantes banning the use of public spaces for Friday prayers and on displays of
kebabs and tandoori chicken outside of roadside eateries. Vendors selling ‘biryani’, a food
item increasingly associated by Hindutva adherents with ‘Muslims’, were also attacked by
police and vigilantes.35 Such measures were accompanied by a normalisation of hate speech
by Hindutva figures, frequently escalating into death threats on ‘mainstream’ television and
especially on social media. A carefully nurtured fascist hyper-politics, in which sharp political
disagreements on not merely policy but diet, clothing, speech, cinema, cartoons, memes,
advertisements, and so on, was played out on the streets and on social media. Hashtags
circulated by news channels and social media ‘influencers’ created deep polarisations on
grand themes as much as everyday practices.

Modi had affiliated with the movement for women’s safety, sparked by the gang-rape and
murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012, for which he blamed the UPA’s laxity on law and
order. He popularized the slogan (and hashtag) ‘beti bachao beti padhao’ (protect your
daughters and educate them). In actual fact, funds for women’s safety and security were
diverted and decreased.36 India remains ‘the country most dangerous for women’, with rates
of crimes against women soaring in BJP ruled states whose party leaders routinely blame
victims, and some have been named directly in sexual crimes. 37 Further, the BJP has stalled
legislation in Parliament on quotas for women, which it had promised in its manifesto.
Meanwhile, participation rates for women in the workforce have declined steadily.38 Modi’s
‘Ujjwala’ Yojana aimed to provide household cooking gas connections to reduce women’s use
of health-damaging coal or wood stoves was also beset by problems. After initial success it
emerges that poor women cannot buy cooking gas after the subsidy period is over.39

Challenging Modi’s claim of providing 2 million jobs annually, the premier governmental
statistical agency, the National Sample Survey Office, reported in 2019 that India’s
unemployment in 2017-18, at 6.1%, was the highest since 1972-73.40 The Centre for

35https://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/en/NewsDetail/index/1/8683/Eid-In-Mewat-Terrified-Muslims-Shut-
Shop-As--Police-Turn-Cow-Vigilantes

36See https://thewire.in/women/nirbhaya-fund-money-isnt-being-spent-womens-security-schemes-not-
implemented. Accessed March 20, 2019.

37 https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-india-rape-2018-story.html. Accessed March 20, 2019.

38See https://www.thehindu.com/business/female-labour-force-participation-in-india-fell-to-26-in-2018-
report/article26467857.ece. Accessed March 25, 2019.

39For a fact-check on the Modi’s government’s claim to success on Ujjwala, see

https://thelogicalindian.com/fact-check/lpg-connections-real-ujjwala/. Accessed March 25, 2019.

40See https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-s-unemployment-rate-hit-45-year-high-in-2017-18-
report/story-1MYf1tFZ0thkz1UGfKp1BP.html Accessed February 2 2019. Accessed May 8, 2019.

21
Monitoring the Indian Economy reported 11 million jobs lost in 2018 alone.41 The
unemployment figure is currently nearly 9%. Modi’s ‘Skills India’ programs had little success.
And although he claimed that his ‘Mudra’ scheme for small entrepreneurs that had created
livelihoods was not recorded in the jobs data, by all accounts it had limited success and had
put pressure on public banks. 42

In 2016, with elections approaching in the politically important state of Uttar Pradesh against
the backdrop of unproductive corruption investigations on opposition figures, and reports of
scams involving his own party, Modi demonetised 86% of all currency notes in circulation with
immediate effect. This was done ostensibly to short-circuit black money.43 But it resulted in a
massive cash crunch, as the government had not printed new currency as replacement. The
informal sector – the engine of growth in India that employed 81% of the workforce - was
badly affected, and wage payments to workers was delayed, reduced, or even denied.
Demonetisation is estimated to have cost 5 million jobs in India. 44 In the end, more money
was returned to the banks than the estimated value of the currency in circulation, indicating
large-scale money laundering. However, demonetisation provided Modi with a classic
populist narrative: that he had made the rich stand in the same ATM queue as the poor, that
the ‘sacrifices’ of the poor would not go in vain, and that only those with black money were
negatively affected. Modi refused to address questions on demonetization, did not divulge
on what advice he had undertaken this draconian measure, and insisted it was a success (see
Chodorow-Reich, Gopinath, Mishra and Narayanan, 2019; Kalyan Shankar and Shahni, 2018;
and Reddy, 2017 for comprehensive overviews of demonetization’s effects.) Since monetary
policy is the domain of the Reserve Bank of India, this destroyed the credibility of this key
institution, as it was unable to provide either the logic behind this action, or data to back
claims of its success.45

41
See https://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/india-lost-11-million-jobs-in-2018-rural-areas-
worst-hit-cmie/story/306804.html. Accessed December 22, 2018.

42See https://wap.business-standard.com/article-amp/economy-policy/npas-under-modi-s-mudra-scheme-
doubled-to-rs-9-204-cr-in-just-1-year-rti-119062400108_1.html . Accessed May 14, 2019. He gave brazen
responses, saying that there are more youth selling samosas, and this counts as employment generation.

43See Gago (2017: 6) on demonetisation as a hard neoliberal policy in Argentina, and Todhunter (2016) as a
particular aspect of Modi’s version of neoliberal restoration.

44https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/5-million-men-lost-their-jobs-after-
demonetisation-says-swi-2019-report-119041700386_1.html

45The RBI Governor fled the media on occasion. See https://www.deccanherald.com/content/591038/rbi-

governor-runs-away-media.html. He also did not answer the Parliamentary Committee.
https://guce.huffingtonpost.in/copyConsent?sessionId=3_cc-session_eadbf827-a174-4eac-baf3-
c9059b787020&inline=false&lang=en-in. He later resigned and then blamed Modi for taking this disastrous
decision. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/after-truce-urjit-stuns-government-is-
1st-governor-post-reforms-to-quit-rbi/articleshow/67033346.cms . All accessed Jun 14, 2019.

22
Suppression of data caused a crisis of institutional credibility. Modi’s ex-Chief Economist
disputed the official growth rate of 8%, saying it is likely to be near 4.5%.46 All core sectors
show slowdown, but Modi claimed that the growth rate was increasing.47 The Indian
government’s apex data agency, the NSSO, showed highest unemployment in 45 years, but
Modi’s ministers released vague data contradicting it.48 On farmer suicides, a key barometer
for India’s extended agrarian crisis, Modi’s government stopped keeping data from 2016. 49
The lack of hard data was covered up by flooding the public sphere with fake data, a key
populist governance strategy. Belief in Modi’s vague, erroneous and fraudulent data becomes
a surrogate for belief in Modi himself. The issue of governmental performance thus remains
in a permanent state of ambiguity and unverifiability, which Modi has used in his favour in
two ways. He campaigned in each election as if his development claims are true, and he spoke
as a ‘victim’ of opposition and elite conspiracies that want to stop him from working for ‘the
people’, using local and state election as a plebiscite on his national government. The second
tactic involves attacking critics, including Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, who
question his claims.

Six years into Modi’s rule, no Congress politician he accused of corruption has been jailed.
Nor has Modi succeed in bringing back ‘black money’ that he claimed was stashed abroad. No
allegation of corruption against his government has been investigated, nor against capitalists
closely associated with him, several of whom decamped for safe havens abroad after having
defaulted on massive loans from public sector banks, leaving them on the verge of collapse.50
But since 2014, Modi has repeatedly claimed that he has “stopped corruption”. 51 Despite
these failures, Modi took on the title of ‘Chowkidaar’ (watchman), the vigilant custodian of
the economy, in his 2019 campaign.

46See https://www.livemint.com/news/india/india-s-gdp-growth-overestimated-by-2-5-during-2011-2017-
arvind-subramanian-1560239804132.html. Accessed June 20, 2019.

47See https://www.businesstoday.in/current/slowdown-blues/slowdown-blues-8-core-sectors-report-flat-
growth-of-43-pc-since-17-18-second-slowest-rate-in-5-years/story/342240.html Accessed Jun 18, 2019.

48See https://thewire.in/labour/nsso-data-puts-unemployment-at-45-year-high-in-2017-18-report. On
government disowning its own data, see
https://economictimes.inxs`diatimes.com/news/economy/policy/jobs-data-not-finalised-government-after-
nsso-report/articleshow/67782769.cms. Accessed June 10, 2019

49See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/opinion/india-farmers-crisis.html for a brief overview on the

crisis facing farmers. On lack of farmer suicide data, see https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/centre-has-no-
farmer-suicide-data-since-2016-minister-told-parliament-1965532 Both accessed Jun 10, 2019.

50See https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/year-ender-2018-npas-of-indian-banks-
surged-past-rs-10-trillion-118122500654_1.html .Accessed March 20, 2019

51Media critics lost jobs if they persisted with the stories. See http://thewirehindi.com/53257/punya-prasun-
bajpai-abp-news-masterstroke-modi-govt-media/. Accessed April 20, 2019.

23
Modi has focused state power in attacking social movements, NGOs and activists who act on
behalf of Muslims, Dalits, women, farmers and poor peasants, and tribal populations, groups
he claims to represent himself.52 Alleging corruption, he has closed hundreds of human rights
and environmental NGOs, arresting activists, dissidents and critics, who have been held
without trial or bail (see Nilsen 2018). These are replaced by ‘ersatz’ civil society’ forms,
associated with the Hindu far right, that mimic civil society’s associational forms while
assisting Hindutva’s project of violent exclusion, and which now have prominent positions in
development planning and delivery.

Modi’s control over media and social media is central to his rise as a strong leader. An
overwhelming majority of television channels endorse him and vilify the opposition.53 He has
cultivated good relations with global social media players to act on his requests for shutting
down accounts of critics, while tolerating pro-Modi Islamophobic posts, malicious fake news
and morphed audio and video material maligning Modi’s critics and opponents.54 The BJP
maintains troll factories that attack his critics relentlessly (Chaturvedi 2017). After dominating
Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, the BJP’s IT cell mastered TikTok to make short and punchy
propaganda clips.55 Prominent television channels are owned by business houses or by BJP-
affiliated politicians that have backed Modi for decades. These media and social media
practices of serial circulation of fake news about political opponents and ‘enemies of the
people’ constitute a ‘postcolonial hyper-reality’, in which a multi-dimensional simulation of
‘reality’ substitutes effectively for reality itself. This has proved a key mode for maintaining
the image of ‘Modi as strong leader’, even as his economic record has been dismal.

As the 2019 elections approached, bad economic news kept piling up, and the BJP lost many
state elections in 2018. Modi put his project of neoliberal restoration on hold and announced
a raft of ‘garib kalyan’ populist sops he once lampooned: cash transfers to the poor, including

52 The Washington Post reports that the case against the so-called ‘Bhima Koregaon activists’ was made by
planting fake evidence on their phones and laptops using malware and spyware.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-bhima-koregaon-activists-
jailed/2021/02/10/8087f172-61e0-11eb-a177-7765f29a9524_story.html

53 A sample of titles of news shows includes: “Modi is India’s Papa.” “Modi will bring Cricket World Cup Home.”
“The moon rings with the cries of Modi Modi.” “The age of Modi was predicted 450 years ago.” Modi’s critics
rightly write of the media as an extended ‘arm of the Modi government’.
https://caravanmagazine.in/media/media-becomes-government-modi-indian-express-republic

54See Mahapatra and Plagemann (2019) for an account of the BJP’s IT cell’s domination of social media. On
Facebook’s compliance with Modi’s instructions, see https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-
india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346. Accessed August 16 2020.

55The ex-head and current head of Facebook India are members of organisations of the Hindu right, as is the
ex-head of WhatsApp’s India operations. Twitter has controversially blocked accounts of Modi’s critics. All
social media houses have refused to factcheck incendiary communal propaganda and pro-Modi fake news.

24
increasing outlay for UPA-era rural employment programs, and construction of latrines and
homes. But his campaign speeches lacked a central narrative hook, and the party’s internal
polls predicted substantial losses. However, in the weeks before the elections, in what Modi
and the Indian media labelled a ‘terrorist attack’, 40 Indian security personnel were killed in
Pulwama, Kashmir. In retaliation, Modi ordered air strikes inside Pakistani territory, and
claimed to have killed 350 terrorists. These figures were disputed in the international media,
and when opposition parties asked for evidence, he accused them of insulting the armed
forces and colluding with Pakistan. 56 Hindutva social media troll armies lampooned and
threatened those who questioned Modi’s claims and accused them of undermining
democratic accountability by converting it into an issue of ‘trust in Modi’.

After Modi’s unexpectedly massive victory in May 2019, the media reported that voters felt
a high degree of ‘personal connect’ with him, and that while the welfare provisions were well
short of what was promised, Modi’s claims had ignited a ‘rumour of development’ and a
desire for it.57 Poor voters knew of someone who had received benefits and hoped that they
too would get them.

6. From Authoritarian Neoliberalism with Hindutva features to Hindutva Fascism with

Neoliberal Characteristics

Shortly after winning his second term in May 2019, Modi began implementing the ‘core’
Hindutva agenda of moving India from a constitutionally secular and democratic republic to
a Hindu, authoritarian one, with Hindus as the ‘primary’ citizens and Muslims as secondary
ones with fewer rights.

In June 2018, Modi’s BJP withdrew from the coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir, the
only Muslim-majority state in India, leading to its collapse. Since then, Kashmir is ruled from
Modi’s office via an unelected Governor, accompanied by an expanded role to the armed
forces. On August 5, 2019, Modi, with no consultations in Parliament, annulled Article 370 of
the Constitution that gave Kashmir ‘special status’, breaking the province into three parts,
ostensibly to tackle separatist terrorism. Major opposition members, including the BJP’s own
ex-allies, were put under house arrest, and journalists, lawyers, academics, and activists were
arrested. Non-Kashmiris could now buy property there, which Article 370 had prohibited,
paving the way the change the demography of the state.

56 The government has not investigated the Pulwama attack, and questions remain about how such an attack
could have taken place given extreme security measures in Kashmir. Asked for evidence by the opposition,
Modi took on highly emotive language, accusing those who asked for evidence of disrespecting soldiers killed.
57 Kunal Purohit refer to this as ‘competitive welfarism’, in which Modi’s claims to welfare provision are seen

by voters as more credible than that of his critics. https://www.devex.com/news/in-india-welfare-politics-

trumps-poll-rhetoric-94927

25
The BJP had won state elections of Assam in 2016 on a stridently anti-immigrant platform,
promising to check the citizenship documents of residents, and to intern those whose claims
to citizenship were unverifiable.58 The ‘National Register of Citizens’ (NRC) potentially could
make nearly 2 million people stateless.59 It primarily targeted rural Muslims, who, then-BJP
chief Amit Shah claimed, were Bangladeshi.60 In 2019, Shah, now Modi’s Home Minister,
announced in Parliament that he intended to expand this nationwide. He then introduced
the Citizenship Amendment Act, granting fast-track citizenship to all non-Muslims persecuted
in other South Asian countries. Shah next announced the National Population Register,
requiring details of everyone living in Indian territory. The ‘CAA-NRC-NPR’ were seen rightly
by Muslims as a means to question their citizenship, and voting and residency rights. Police
responded to peaceful protests by Muslims against these majoritarian moves with excessive
force, firing grenades into university campuses, conducting mass arrests, slapping terror and
sedition charges on activists, academics and civil society actors, denying them bail, and
attaching their property without judicial process. The protests ended with largescale killings
of Muslims in Delhi, with BJP leaders making provocative speeches prior to the violence. Mobs
specifically targeted mosques and the identity papers of Muslims.61

Cultivated closeness with other authoritarian populists worldwide, the ‘far-right

international’, provided Modi a key enabling condition implementing such violent
majoritarianism.62 This included links with Trump, Bannon and the US far right; with Boris
Johnson and his Home Secretary Preeti Patel; Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Muhammed bin
Salman of Saudi Arabia.63 Trump understood Modi’s NRC-CAA-NPR as a justified reaction to
‘Muslim overpopulation’, the Hindutva version of the ‘population replacement theory’
popular among the global far right.64

58This involved producing identity documents going back generations, including voter ID cards, land records,
birth certificates, etc.

59See https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2019/nov/20/race-to-stop-2-million-becoming-
stateless-as-the-clock-starts-ticking-in-assam. Accessed May 13 2020.

60He referred to them as ‘infiltrators’, ‘termites’ and ‘cockroaches’. https://www.reuters.com/article/india-

election-speech/amit-shah-vows-to-throw-illegal-immigrants-into-bay-of-bengal-idUSKCN1RO1YD

‘Ham Kaagaz Nahin Dikhayenge’ (we won’t show our papers) was the main slogan of the so-called ‘anti-CAA’
61

movement.

62 https://newint.org/features/2019/02/11/far-right-international

63Bannon has referred to Modi as “Trump before Trump”.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/steve-bannon-as-a-nationalist-modi-was-a-trump-before-
trump/articleshow/70210775.cms. Johnson and Patel have frequently expressed support for “PM Modi’s
project of building New India.” Bolsonaro has used religious idioms to describe Modi as a ‘Hanuman’ in
providing Brazil with hydroxychloroquine.

64 See https://thewire.in/diplomacy/donald-trump-visit-modi-muslims.

26
Modi’s ‘strong leader’ politics were evident is his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Defying
expert advice, Modi delayed the official Covid response as he held a welcome rally for Donald
Trump, toppled the Congress government in the state of Madhya Pradesh, and cracked down
on the anti-CAA movement. In late March 2020, he announced an immediate and complete
nation-wide lockdown, enforced by the police, vigilante groups and neighbourhood
associations. He instructed major media figures to provide “positive coverage” on his efforts
to tame the pandemic: they mostly complied. Taking on the persona of a ‘family elder’, Modi
led the country in clapping, banging pots and pans, lighting lamps, and striking poses that
referenced Hindu religious rituals. To ‘calm’ the population, the state broadcaster
Doordarshan began reruns of Hindu religious epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Modi did little to help the millions of workers walking back to their homes from the big cities,
except to say that he understood their pain but had to take a tough decision to save the
nation. Even though his lockdown caused mass unemployment, he was reported to face no
public anger, and managed to embody an image of a messiah who stands ‘beyond politics’.65
He appeared periodically on television wearing hand-woven face coverings from around
India. He has grown his beard to resemble a ‘sage’, no mere politician but a divinely ordained
leader: pictures circulate of him with Hindu gods on his shoulder, guiding him. 66

When a meeting place of a Muslim sect was found to be a Corona hotspot, violence against
Muslims spiralled across India. Modi’s media affiliates provided stridently Islamophobic and
provocative coverage of the role of the sect’s members in transmitting the virus, with social
media campaigns demanding ‘strict punishment’ to them. Modi made references to the
event, suggesting that Muslims, the perennial ‘enemy of the people’ in Hindutva discourse,
were spoiling his fight against Corona. Meanwhile largescale Hindu festivals were allowed to
go on, an indication that laws were different for Hindus and Muslims. In August 2020, three
separate courts ruled that the campaign against the Muslim sect had been ‘unfair and
unjust’.67

The pandemic did not deter Modi from implementing another core element of the Hindutva
agenda: laying the foundation to the Ram temple to be built on the site where the Babri
Masjid was destroyed in 1992. In an event carried live on all Indian television channels, Modi
participated in a religious Hindu ceremony to launch the temple. This is a key milestone to

65https://theprint.in/opinion/narendra-modi-no-political-costs-suffering-he-causes-iran-ali-khamenei/423355/
This was achieved, the journalist Kunal Purohit found, via massive use of WhatsApp.
https://sabrangindia.in/interview/whatsapp-sculpted-modis-cult-kunal-purohit

66 55% of Indians polled in a survey would like ‘an extended period of dictatorship’. (Daniyal 2017).

67https://scroll.in/article/971195/unjust-and-unfair-what-three-high-courts-said-about-the-arrests-of-tablighi-
jamaat-members

27
formalise what had taken shape as a prefigurative community from his first tenure into a legal
fact in his second, with the construction of the temple commencing on January 26, India’s
Republic Day. His followers on social media have campaigned to change the Constitutional
status of India from a ‘secular socialist democratic republic’ to a ‘Hindu Rashtra’.

Modi’s national security credentials, a core component of ‘strong leadership’, were dented
when evidence in 2019 of takeover of what India regards as its land by China, which built
villages, resorts and roads. Indian soldiers were reported to have suffered losses in two
skirmishes, but unlike the response to Pulwama, Modi did not announce any military action,
refusing to even utter the word ‘China’. However, unconfirmed stories appeared in the Indian
media and on social media of the valour of Indian soldiers, to which Modi alluded to in his
speeches. His media surrogates made extravagant claims of losses inflicted on the Chinese,
seeking to again polarise those asking for evidence as ‘disrespecting our soldiers’.

Meanwhile, as reports came in of sustained social and economic chaos, the Indian tech
billionaire Narayan Murthy echoed other capitalists in warning that Indian GDP growth was
likely to fall to 1947 levels.68 In response, Modi initiated privatisation of core components of
the public sector - airports, railways, ports, heavy industry, defence, telecommunication firms
and banks - and attempted to remove key rights of labour – to unionise, for minimum wages,
and workplace safety. The Ministry of Environmental Affairs has given a record number of
project clearances while violating the requirement of ecological and social assessments.
Mineral blocks in Kashmir and in tribal areas are up for auction.

In September 2020, Modi rushed through three farm laws in Parliament. His minister had
already announced the government’s intent in May 2020, with the Covid-containment
lockdown in full force. Taken together, these are the most far-reaching neoliberal reforms
ever undertaken in Indian agriculture, clearing the ground for bypassing regulated markets
(mandis) for selling agricultural produce and creating a more ‘open’ market, deepening
contract farming, and lifting restrictions on private stocking of grain, in other words making
Indian agriculture WTO-compliant. While Modi argues this will open more choice for farmers
and fulfil his promise of doubling farmer incomes, farmers argue that this will structurally
weaken their position in relation to large buyers, remove government support prices that
they rely on to deal with high price volatility, distort prices, affect food security for the poor,
and overall dispossess farmers and pass control over agriculture to a handful of corporate
houses. They also argue that immiserated farmers would be forced into exploitative informal
labour markets, providing cheap labour for Modi’s growth project. These bills also sharply

68See https://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/gdp-growth-might-hit-the-lowest-since-
1947-warns-n-r-narayan-murthy-120081101093_1.html

28
curtail the legal remedies to farmers in disputes with corporations. 69 A strong farmers’
movement has been going on since September 2020 opposing these bills.

Modi’s six years in power are the fullest expression of ‘strong leader’ politics in India and
represent the most enduring political use of a ‘people/enemy’ cleavage. His modes of
embodying the people, and the control he exercises over his image as a strong leader, rely
heavily on new digital and communication technologies. Modi’s radio monologues, ‘Mann Ki
Baat’ (‘Speaking my mind’) are non-political and folksy and refer to local heroes and histories.
The NaMo app, which he owns, provides subscribers with a range of Modi content and
merchandise. His portraits adorn bus stops, petrol stations, airports and railway stations, and
other urban spaces. The semiotics of Modi’s persona – the beard, the variations on Nehru’s
clothing, and now the exquisite hand-spun face-covers are new iterations of previous
explorations in style: caps from around the country, clothing identified with all social groups
except, pointedly, with Muslims, religious attire for well publicised rituals, are all forms of
embodying his ‘people’.

7. Conclusion: The Routes of Neoliberal Restoration from Democracy to Authoritarian

Populism and Beyond

In this paper, I have argued that the analytical category of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’
reduces a broader politics of authoritarian populism to its function of neoliberal restoration,
and to show that this function is combined by ‘strong leaders’ like Modi with other elements
such as majoritarianism. Distinct from studies of populism that are concerned with
generalisability across cases, I suggest that in-depth studies of national variants such as India
provide historical and cultural contexts in which ruling authoritarian agendas and coalitions
emerge. I showed that authoritarian populism is a tendency within democracies, and that
moments of crisis of development models provide contexts for its emergence. ‘Strong
leaders’ create contradictory coalitions in support of authoritarianism, building large electoral
majorities. They provide an unstable and contingent unity to these coalitions by constructing
lasting ‘people/enemy’ cleavages, by deploying violent hyper-nationalism and
majoritarianism, and dominating media and social media in nurturing the ‘people/enemy’
antagonism, and the image of the ‘strong leader’ as the one to solve multiple crises. While
outside the scope of this paper, I indicated that conditions in international politics, mastering
which is a key component of ‘strong leaders’, support the consolidation of authoritarian
populist projects nationally.

In concluding, I suggest that authoritarian projects such as Modi’s are limited when the
‘people/enemy’ antagonism does not work, when ‘strong leaders’ fail to contain their
contradictions, and when international enabling conditions no longer hold. At such moments,

69See https://thewire.in/agriculture/indias-farmers-protests-guide-issues-at-stake-reforms-laws-msp for a

brief discussion.

29
these projects potentially take a turn towards fascism, while retaining an electoral element
of democracy, as democracy in this narrow sense is crucial for the subversion of democracy
in the broader sense. This involves a “weakening” of formal representative institutions to
construct active popular consent for the violent use of state and non-state power on the
‘enemies of the people’, “but not their suspension.” (Hall 1979: 14)

There are indications that Modi’s authoritarian populism has now moved to something like
fascism: going beyond naming the ‘enemy of the people’ to denying them justice, political
equality and political representation; claiming that Hindus as ‘the pure people’ are under
threat from ‘enemies’ defined in terms of religious affiliation and political preference; hyper-
nationalism, religious majoritarianism and militarism; state and non-state violence to control
‘the enemies’; crushing dissent; and circulation of conspiracy theories and fake news. The
step ‘beyond’ also makes hate speech normal in public discourse by Hindutva leaders in which
taking the lives of enemies becomes a virtuous act.70 This cultivated sense of a society and
economy in perpetual crisis seeds the ground for a turn from authoritarian populism to
fascism. All of these features have come to the fore in Modi’s project over his tenure.

Not all contestations of Modi’s power can comfortably fit Hindutva’s ‘people/enemy’
definition. When the farmers’ movement gathered strength from late 2020, as with previous
challenges to his rule, Modi and the Hindutva media and social media apparatus claimed it
was led by radical Sikhs committed to the Khalistan separatist movement, and by the far-left,
duly redeploying ‘tukde-tukde gang’ and ‘urban Naxal’ labels and hashtags. But with no
‘Muslim angle’ – the idea that it was ‘funded by Pakistan’ was aired but did not gain traction
– and the spread of the movement beyond Punjab and beyond Sikhs to other parts of the
country, the stock modes of re-inventing the ‘people-enemy’ framing have failed. Attempts
to ‘take charge of the political narrative’ in ways more amenable to that framing, such as
holding a young Muslim comedian without bail for jokes he did not crack on his show,
campaigning to ban a television show for ‘hurting Hindu religious sentiments’, and asking for
more mosques to be demolished to make way for temples, have failed to deflect focus from
the movement. Seizing on messages of support for the farmers’ movement from international
figures like the climate change activist Greta Thunberg, the porn star Mia Khalifa, and Kamala
Harris’s niece Meena Harris as signs of an ‘international conspiracy’, have further discredited
Modi’s project. Now, Indian environmentalists who coordinate with Greta Thunberg in a
transnational social media campaign to support peaceful protest have been arrested under
draconian laws. Nation-wide actions by workers are planned in opposition to Modi’s extreme
neoliberal labour reforms that would remove key protections and rights, and they too will be
hard to fit in the ‘people/enemy’ template.

70Snyder (2018) quotes the Russian fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin saying that “fascism is a redemptive excess of
patriotic arbitrariness” and involves “identifying and neutralising the enemy”.

30
Other conditions key to enabling Modi’s ‘strong leader’ led authoritarian populism have also
weakened. Modi had cultivated close relations with Trump and the US far right during the
campaigning for his re-election. But with Biden confirmed in office, and revelations of
Hindutva activists joining the US far right in the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021,
relations between Modi and the White House are currently frosty. Modi was well down the
list of national leaders Biden has spoken with after taking office, and many senior US
administration officials have pointedly asked Modi to respect democratic freedoms. News of
Modi’s excessive use of sedition laws against activists, and of internet and mobile signal
shutdowns to quash dissenting voices, have also been published in the international press,
forcing Modi to restore 4g communications in Kashmir after 18 months.

Social media giants, too, have taken steps indicating that the one-sided domination of Modi’s
team is at a low ebb, perhaps as their role in facilitating the US far right is under scrutiny.
After Twitter India blocked several accounts supporting the farmers’ movement to comply
with the requests of the Modi government, it quickly re-instated them, and senior officials in
Twitter India resigned.71 Twitter chief Jack Dorsey has ‘liked’ some of the messages by
international celebrities supporting the farmers’ movement, and messages of key Modi
influencers abusing those celebrities and spreading fake news have been taken off the
platform. Modi’s government is now demanding the suspension of another 1178 Twitter
accounts.72 Still, some of the recent arrests of activists have involved social media giants
making available information to the Modi government.

Whether these are indications of the beginning of the end of Modi’s authoritarian project, or
new challenges that he will be able to negotiate, remains to be seen. Indeed, the future of
Modi’s strong leader politics depends on his ability to incorporate or neutralise opposition
and dissent that current evade his current framing of ‘the people’ and their ‘enemies’ within
a nominally democratic politics. It depends also on whether these challengers will accept a
resolution of their issues within Modi’s political project, or will be able to form coalitions
across caste, class, region and religion and give rise to an alternative articulation of the
political beyond its current framing of the ‘people’ and their ‘enemies’, or indeed beyond
populism itself.

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