Many countries have been reluctant to distance themselves from Russia amid its war in Ukraine. One of them is India. India is proudly nonaligned and counts itself both as a member of the BRICS grouping with Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa as well as of the U.S.-led “Quad,” which also includes Japan and Australia.
New Delhi is keen to level its malleable geopolitical position to grow India’s global profile—and no leader has devoted more to that effort than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In September 2022, while on a visit to Washington, Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar quipped that “our [India’s] opinions count, our views matter and have actually today the ability to shape the big issues of our time” thanks to Modi.
Elections to Watch in 2024: This story is part of a package on 15 key elections this year (besides the United States). Read the full analysis here.
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. The INC spearheaded the Indian independence movement and ruled India for most of its history. It has also “effectively functioned as a hereditary dictatorship led by the Gandhi family for more than five decades,” author Kapil Komireddi wrote in Foreign Policy in October 2022.
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.
While many leaders can claim to be figureheads of political personality cults, Modi’s is perhaps the biggest—and most detrimental to global democracy. The historian Ramachandra Guha argued as much in a landmark November 2022 essay in Foreign Policy entitled “The Cult of Modi.” Modi is popular, Guha contended, for six reasons: because he is genuinely “self-made” and hardworking, is a skilled orator, has weak political rivals, has effectively capitalized on Hindu nationalist sentiment, leads a shrewd propaganda and social media campaign, and is emotionally intelligent.
More practically, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has identified Modi’s brand as one of “competitive welfarism”: In addition to identity politics, the prime minister has been able to court favor by upping public spending and cash transfers to Indians.
In turn, Guha wrote, Modi has managed to weaken five of India’s key democratic institutions: political parties, the cabinet, the press, bureaucracy, and the judiciary. Agricultural reforms that set off nationwide farmers protests starting in late 2020 were unpopular in part because Modi rushed them through parliament—just one of many “bold decisions with little care for democratic decision-making” by the prime minister, FP’s Ravi Agrawal wrote at the time.
Modi has also gone after political opponents: Former INC head Rahul Gandhi was convicted last year on charges of defamation and sentenced to two years in prison after insulting Modi at a rally. In late December 2023, the prime minister suspended 141 opposition members of Parliament who were protesting a recent security breach.
Independent journalism has taken a beating, too. Reporters Without Borders has warned that “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis” in India. The country’s press freedom ranking fell 21 spots from 2014 to 2023, thanks in part to the BJP’s efforts to muzzle journalism and big tech, FP’s Rishi Iyengar reported last year. Rules enacted in 2021 allow the government to demand media companies remove content that violates an impossibly broad set of standards. Experts say they “have given Modi carte blanche to go after critics and opponents, shrinking the space for free speech—online and otherwise,” Iyengar wrote.
The most notorious case of these rules’ application so far was Modi’s banning of a documentary produced by the BBC in January 2023—and subsequent raids of BBC offices in Mumbai and New Delhi. The film examined Modi’s role in deadly anti-Muslim riots in the state of Gujarat during his time as chief minister there.
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.
The United States and other Western powers have sought to court India as a partner against China while mostly ignoring Modi’s democratic regression and marginalization of minority populations. When Modi visited the United States in June 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden greeted him with a state dinner, and just a few progressive lawmakers boycotted Modi’s address to Congress. But last fall, revelations about the Indian government’s alleged involvement in the assassination of a Sikh leader in Canada—and the attempted assassination of a Sikh leader in the United States—rattled this delicate tight rope.
So far, “Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has paid little price for many of its actions” on the world stage, Yale lecturer Sushant Singh wrote in Foreign Policy in December 2023. Domestically, going after Sikh separatists could even be a boon for Modi because it might “help bolster the prime minister’s strongman image ahead of next year’s national election,” Singh added.
That’s a vote that Modi and the BJP look like they will win handily. India’s Financial Express predicts a “hat-trick” for the prime minister, who easily earned majorities in 2014 and 2019. The BJP is leading a coalition called the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to rival an INC-led group of 28 parties known as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), led by Mallikarjun Kharge (whom Komireddi called a Gandhi “surrogate”). Some smaller parties are running on their own, too.
To obtain a majority in India’s 543-member Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, parties need at least 272 seats. A December 2023 Times Now-ETG survey predicted that the NDA would win 323 seats to INDIA’s 163. Candidates are elected in single-member constituencies in a first-past-the-post system to serve five-year terms.
Indian authorities have not yet announced when elections will occur, but it’s certain they will be a multiweek affair. India’s last national election, in 2019, was held over the course of more than one month to accommodate all voters. Because the Lok Sabha’s term ends in June, most observers expect that India’s “election month” this year could range from April to May.
In December 2023, the BJP won big in three state elections, setting the party up well for the national contest this spring. Observers like Komireddi are likely concerned. This year’s vote, he wrote, is “the final chance to stop Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s conversion of the world’s largest democracy into an illiberal Hindu-supremacist state.”