WASHINGTON - Modi, who has been in power since 2014, presides over the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has effectively dislodged the progressive secular Indian National Congress (INC) as the country’s traditional power broker, according to Allison Meakem, an associate editor at Foreign Policy.
To his critics, Modi is a walking controversy and wannabe despot; to his admirers—who are, in India, a much larger group—he is a compassionate leader unwavering in his commitment to governance.
According to Morning Consult, Modi has the highest approval rating of any democratically elected leader in the world, at 78 percent, as of late November 2023. Analyzing the debacle in Foreign Policy, writer Salil Tripathi pointed out that, for Modi, “the documentary brings back ghosts of the past.” That’s because Modi has inflamed religious tensions in India like no other leader to date. Now the world’s most populous country—with over 1.4 billion people—India is majority Hindu but still home to many religious minorities, including the world’s third-largest Muslim population and a sizable Sikh community.
Modi, keen to rekindle what he sees as a glorious pre-colonial Hindu legacy, has weaponized anti-Muslim sentiment among Hindu nationalists to produce big victories at the polls. He has also enacted policies that advocates say are motivated by Islamophobia.
As just one example, in 2019, the BJP passed a law that limits Muslim immigrants’ access to Indian citizenship. In pre-pandemic March 2020, as demonstrations against the measure were ongoing, FP’s Anchal Vohra reported from Meerut, India, that police appeared to be “setting Muslims and Hindus against each other” and then “stood by during violence—or actively sided with Hindus.”
Guha’s assessment of the situation is grim. “[I]f it lasts much longer, the Modi regime may come to be remembered as much for its evisceration of Indian pluralism as for its dismantling of Indian democracy,” he wrote in his essay.
Modi’s Hindu nationalism, known as Hindutva, has also extended to his foreign policy. In 2019, Modi amended the Indian Constitution to revoke Muslim-majority Kashmir’s semiautonomous status, cutting off communications and deploying troops to the region.
He’s also boosted ties with Israel, seeing in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government a similar animosity toward Islam.
