Why Modi Is So Popular

It’s easy to see Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a strongman, says FP’s editor in chief, Ravi Agrawal. A magnetic figure and a brilliant orator, Modi looks likely to win a near-unprecedented third term in the country’s upcoming elections. But it would be a mistake to see the Hindu nationalist changes he’s brought to the country purely as an example of top-down management, Agrawal cautions in this FP Live discussion—and as he argues in the magazine’s most recent issue, in an article called “The New Idea of India.” People are increasingly aware of Modi’s policies and measures, Agrawal says, “and so when people vote for him, there must be at least some broader desire to go along with” his vision of what India is, and should be.

What, then, is this vision? In our interview, Agrawal makes the case for a conceptual shift in the country’s idea of itself, from the secular republic envisioned by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, to an India that “prioritizes culture and religion” in the state’s affairs under Modi. Agrawal also talks about the growing divide between the country’s north and south; and, in asserting a newly robust foreign policy, how India has made the most of both Russia’s Ukraine invasion and the Israel-Hamas war. Don’t miss his essay in FP’s India issue, which is out now.

Amelia Lester: Talk to us about just how big Indian elections tend to be.

Ravi Agrawal: While the U.S. presidential elections might be the most consequential for the world in 2024, India’s is clearly the biggest. It has a population of 1.4 billion, in which there are more than 960 million eligible voters. That’s why this election is spread out over 44 days. It’s a spectacular exercise that spans the length and breadth of India. There will be polling booths in the Himalayas. In 2019, there was a polling booth near a forest in Gujarat, outside a lion sanctuary, which was basically catering to one eligible voter. Every time India votes, it’s the biggest election in history. So it really is an enormous exercise.

AL: You called your essay “The New Idea of India.” What’s the significance of that title? What was the old idea of India?

RA: The title was a play on a 1997 book called The Idea of India. 1997 was the 50th year of India’s independence. The old idea of India, as it were, was the vision of its founding fathers. In 1950, when the Indian Constitution came into being, India’s leaders and its people agreed on a secular republic: a country that had liberal values, whose constitution drew on Western ones—but in a very Indian way. India was then, and still is today, a patchwork of different cultures, languages, and histories, and the constitution tried to knit these into one unified idea of what India could be. It was a secular coalition different from, for example, Pakistan, which was founded on the basis of religion.

That old idea of India was best embodied by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. This is a person who went to Harrow School, was educated at Cambridge, and went by the first name “Joe” until his 20s. He was fairly anglicized. It was very important to him that India remained secular. One of his greatest fears was that India would become a purely Hindu nation. He wanted to avoid that, despite the fact that 80 percent of India is Hindu. About 14 percent of the country is also Muslim—a sizable minority that has now grown to include 200 million people. It was important to him that the country would stitch all of these groups together and be secular.

AL: So what then is the new idea of India?

RA: I should hasten to add, it’s not actually new. In a sense, this is a new-old idea of India. But I framed it around India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who has now been in power for 10 years and likely will get another five years. His vision of India is a vision that prioritizes culture and religion over notions of secularism and liberalism. His vision of India is that of a Hindu-first country. He feels that India has always been a Hindu civilization, and its time has come.

I say it’s a new-old idea because the idea is more than 100 years old. There were thinkers in the 1920s—the activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, for example—who first came up with the idea of a Hindu nation. But that idea didn’t win out in 1947 when India became independent. The BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] traces its roots to those leaders 100 years ago. As it becomes stronger, and as it wins a greater vote share and has more power in parliament, it’s more likely to prioritize this Hindu-first idea; it will be more public about it and more proud of it.

AL: It struck me that the provocation you were trying to advance in your essay was that Modi isn’t imposing his will from the top down, as I think is sometimes represented in the West. You say there is, in fact, demand for the BJP’s vision of what India should be.

RA: Yes. This is the somewhat controversial part of my essay. It’s very easy to see Modi as this strongman—a dictatorial leader with an authoritarian bent. And he is, of course, a magnetic figure and a brilliant orator, especially in Hindi. There’s something about his cult of personality that clearly leads to a larger vote share for his party, the BJP. It’s also easy to interpret the Hindu nationalist changes he’s bringing to the country as an example of purely top-down management.

But what I wanted to put forward is that this is also popular. It would be wrong to ignore the popularity not only of Modi, but also of his policies and measures, which the people are increasingly aware of. They are openly telegraphed in his speeches; they are clearly in the BJP’s manifesto. And so when people vote for him, there must be at least some broader desire to go along with what the BJP’s vision of India is and should be.

It’s important to grapple with the demand side of this equation because it means that India itself could be changing. Indians broadly made a social compact in 1947 to prioritize secularism, and that social compact may be changing. Half of the country’s population is under the age of 25, and if younger Indians especially are making a new bet on this vision that prioritizes a large religious majority, a leader who embraces a less collaborative, less democratic, CEO style of leadership, then it’s important to engage with the demand side of that equation. It means that were Modi to leave, he would be replaced by someone else like that. As India approaches these elections, it’s important for the rest of the world to understand what’s changing nationally in this way, and not just in New Delhi.

The paradox here is that Modi, of course, believes that all of the things he’s doing—building toilets, dramatically expanding roads and highways, improving train lines, building new airports, electricity connections, gas connections—are for the greater good. His “new welfarism” is very popular—although time will tell how much of this infrastructure works. But there is this sort of authoritarian bent to how he conducts policy.

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AL: There’s a growing divide between India’s north and south. Why has that come about, and what could it mean in the longer term?

RA: This has become a big talking point in India and elsewhere among India-watchers. India is roughly diamond-shaped, and the Vindhyas mountain range loosely divides India’s north and south. In the northern parts of India, above the Vindhyas, most people speak Hindi. And the southern parts include a variety of states—Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka—where people speak different languages. 

But beyond the linguistic and culture divide, there’s an economic divergence between the north and the south. A baby born in Uttar Pradesh has a lower chance of reaching the age of 5 than a child born in Afghanistan. Whereas in Kerala, in India’s south, that same baby would have a higher chance than a child born in the United States. There’s a difference in education rates and in GDP per capita. For example, average incomes in some of the southern states are higher by orders of magnitude than incomes in some of the northern states.

The BJP is far more popular in the north than it is in the south. This is partly why I described some of the ruling party’s agenda as Hindi-first. I think language matters because of Modi’s proficiency in Hindi.

The divergence I’m describing could end up leading to growing resentment in the south, where people pay higher taxes. This is, of course, where India’s tech sector is flourishing. And they receive less benefit from those taxes because the more populated north gets most of it. So there is a north-side divide, and that divide could be exacerbated over time.

Prefer to listen?  Follow the FP Live podcast for the entire conversation, plus other in-depth discussions, wherever you get your podcasts.

AL: You barely mentioned the opposition in your essay.

RA: No matter where you sit on the partisan divide in India, everyone should be able to agree that you need a good opposition. And India has struggled to put forward a proper national alternative to the BJP. The old alternative used to be the Congress party. There are regional parties that do well across different states. There has to be some way to knit them all together to create a stronger, more united opposition that the country sees as a viable alternative.

AL: Why do you think they found it so difficult to do that?

RA: Part of it is because, at least in the Congress party, they’ve got a leader in Rahul Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) who is reluctant to step aside. And yet, he is a reluctant leader. You often sense that he’d rather do almost anything than be in the thrust and parry of Indian politics. As I said earlier, India needs a stronger, more united opposition.

It’s also worth pointing out that the BJP has done well to marginalize its opposition. They’ve been able to use levers of the state. BJP proponents will say they have not used these levers, that this is just independent institutions acting, but this is where it gets disputed. The Congress party, for example, has not been able to access its bank accounts because of allegations of tax improprieties that go back decades. The opposition will say, why now? Doesn’t that hurt democracy? The BJP will say, but they’re corrupt, so that’s what had to happen.

I think overall, though, it does create this sense of the BJP as this juggernaut that will win anyway and seems quite intent on crushing its opposition and winning with huge margins.

AL: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in its third year. The Israel-Hamas war is continuing. Western democracies have really stumbled as many in the world see an inconsistent response to those two conflicts. How would you characterize India’s response, and what does that tell us about the new India?

RA: India’s response has been to make the most of it.

On Ukraine, as has been widely reported in FP and elsewhere, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, India was purchasing just about 1 percent of Russia’s total crude exports. Today, that is upward of 50 percent. So for all the Western sanctions on Russian crude, India mopped up a lot of it on the cheap. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the world, because if India didn’t buy it, global oil prices would go up dramatically. This would then end up hurting Americans, and it would hurt [President Joe] Biden at the polls. So there’s a real understanding that this kind of works for everyone. India gets to buy oil on the cheap. And, of course, it loves to market that internally and externally as a sort of victory of Indian foreign policy.

On the Middle East, it’s a little bit more complicated. I think India in Nehru’s time had much more sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Under Modi, the India-Israel relationship has strengthened significantly. So India is more likely now to just sit on the sidelines and, as it often does, try to play both sides.

The old Indian foreign policy was one of nonintervention and nonalignment. In a sense, that hasn’t changed too much. The bigger change is India trying to apply its self-interest, or what India calls “strategic autonomy.” It likes to try to look at any global situation and pick the thing that works to its advantage. A lot of foreign policy now is economics, as we know, and India uses the economy and the market that India represents in a very powerful way. By using India’s growing purchasing power as a calling card, India is able to play a more muscular, significant role in foreign policy than it could even 10 years ago.