Not infrequently, Indians have participated in cults of personality. Since he came to power in 2014, the country has been obsessed with an extraordinary personality cult centred around Narendra Modi. The cult is promoted through the party's propaganda machine, but it is also expressed in state propaganda, through the press, and by leading industrialists, celebrities and sportsmen singing the praises of Modi's steely will and great achievements.

Indira Gandhi enjoyed a similar heroic status, which culminated during the Emergency, when she imprisoned virtually the entire opposition. To Ramachandra Guha, who has biographed several Indian leaders, the 1975-77 state of emergency is the closest Indian counterpart to Modi's current regime. Just as Indira was synonymous with India, today Modi epitomizes the nation.

Modi is an ultra-nationalist, and this implies not least a showdown with India's Muslim past. However, as far as the worship of great men is concerned, Modi continues Muslim traditions. It is assumed that Modi is a celibate and that he does not keep a harem. But the poise with which he moves, the flattery he is accorded, the ambitious projects he launches, and the graces he dispenses as a ruler in his own right and as God’s man on Earth rival that of a Great Mughal.

Modi is moulded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) movement, whose cadres profess a spartan lifestyle in the service of Hindu nationalism. As the leader of Bharat, instead, Modi is a hero surrounded by gold and glitter, rather than an ascetic RSS apparatchik.

Modi is 73 years old and his party has a loose rule of not fielding people over 75 years of age. Should Modi not stand in the 2029 elections, he could in time, I think, become the leader of the wide-ranging RSS network.

The RSS was formed in September 1925, and it will be able to celebrate its centenary almost at the same time as Modi turns 75. If the fortunes of Modi and the RSS are aligned, it might pave the way for his close aide, Home Minister Amit Shah, or another BJP politician such as Yogi Adityanath, to become the next leader of the party.

Priest king

BJP runs politics based on religion. Within Hinduism, the priests (most often Brahmins) take care of the ritual affairs, while the warrior caste fight for power. Ritual specialists and rulers are thus fundamentally separate, but Modi often mixes the two archetypal roles in a way that has brought him out of favour with Brahmins and politicians alike. This came to light, for example, at the inauguration of the imposing temple in Ayodhya dedicated to the child god Ram.

A smaller mosque from the time of the Great Mughals used to stand here, but it was demolished in 1992 by agitated Hindus, who claimed that Ram was “born” in this very place. There was no convincing evidence that an important Ram temple had stood on this site. Moreover, the cult around Ram as a child was almost non-existent before the Hindu nationalists took it up.

Those responsible for the destruction of the mosque have never been punished. Instead, the Supreme Court worked out a sort of compromise which allowed the Hindus to build a Ram temple on the site, while the aggrieved party, the Muslims, were directed to build a mosque nearby.

At the inauguration earlier this year, Modi acted almost like a priest. It was he who sat by the sacrificial fire in the sanctum sanctorum of the temple together with the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, and various sacrificial priests. Some of the invited Brahmins objected to this dual role. Sacrificial priests, who should officiate at rituals, were reduced to spectators while Modi was elevated to a kind of priest-king. Politicians from several parties also refused to attend the inauguration.

The imposing temple was built in the Nagara, a predominant North Indian architectural style, seemingly without the Indo-Saracenic stylistic elements, and the consecrated idol made by a South Indian sculptor.

It should perhaps be mentioned here that Larsen and Toubro (L&T) have been an important builder. Although L&T has its roots in the FL Smidth group, which, in Denmark, is closely associated with cement production, L&T constructed the temple without cement.

Earlier this year, Ramachandra Guha updated his analysis of Indian politics in the Foreign Affairs, and he has not softened his tone. On the contrary. He describes Modi's administration as “like Indira Gandhi on steroids.” Both have gone harshly after the opposition. Indira imprisoned them during the Emergency. Under Modi, dozens of parliamentarians were excluded from parliament after loudly protesting the government’s unwillingness to open a debate on acute crises.

Earlier this year, the leader of the Aam Admi Party (AAP) created to fight political corruption was jailed on suspicion of being corrupt himself. The charges against Arvind Kejriwal were that his party had manipulated licences for the sale of alcohol. The charges were nebulous, and in May, the Supreme Court temporarily released Kejriwal so that he could participate in the last phase of the election campaign.

Although Modi often mocks the parliamentary process, his government has built a new parliament building. At the inauguration, Modi had again appeared in a priest-king role. Surrounded by South Indian Brahmins and religious leaders, Modi presided over the ceremony which was unequivocally Hindu.

The BJP has Muslim party members but hardly find a position of consequence in Modi’s scheme of things.

Under Modi's rule, the central vista of the capital city, New Delhi – from Rashtrapati Bhavan (the presidential bungalow) down to India Gate (a memorial for freedom fighters and soldiers) has been rebuilt. The India Gate triumphal arch, where George V once stood, is now dedicated to a statue of Subhash Chandra Bose, whose alliance with the Axis powers during the Second World War is thus given the blue stamp.

Bizarre and baroque claims

The ongoing Lok Sabha election initially looked to be a rather dull affair as Hindu nationalism has challenged and weakened India’s liberal institutions to such an extent that the election had become effete, if not dramatic. Apparently, well into the election, Modi and the BJP have decided to teach both the opposition and the electorate a lesson: Election or no election, it is Modi who decides.

In any case, Modi and the party have ramped up a hateful campaign against the country’s Muslims, who are described as infiltrators with far too many children. In the same vein, he also targeted the Congress party, accusing it of promising in its election manifesto to deprive Hindus of their quotas in public service and to confiscate their property including the jewellery worn by married women to redistribute it all to the Muslims. As if that was not enough, the Congress party, if it comes to power, will field the national cricket team based on religious criteria, Modi claimed.

Critical media in the US have long kept accounts of Donald Trump's untruths. Now Indian media, criticised for pro-Modi bias for last many years, has started doing the same with Modi's falsehoods.

Of late, Modi stunned everyone with an allegation that Rahul Gandhi and the Congress Party have received large sums of money from Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, the two industrial magnates who otherwise seem closely linked to the BJP, and the mercurial rise of one of them being attributed to Modi’s patronage. Modi alleged that black money had been delivered in “tempos of cash,” i.e. in small cheap vehicles for passenger and goods transport.

It is not inconceivable that black money could be transported in large suitcases, and transports of large sums of money or alcohol are also revealed during elections, but that ultrarich Indians like Ambani and Adani should use small, cheap “tempos” is a strange claim. Perhaps Modi was thinking of the larger vans now sold under the same name, but in any case, the lack of substance of the allegations is worthy of the social media.

Since Modi is making them in full public view, they should, according to both the Congress Party and Ramachandra Guha, be investigated by the Election Commission of India. It should ask Modi where he got this information from, as well as investigate the complaints made by the Congress Party and others against Modi's election campaign.

The election is conducted under a set of rules, the Model Code of Conduct, which sets narrow limits on what may be done and said during an election campaign. However, the current electoral commission has been sitting on its hands, argues Guha in an interview to The Wire.

A few years ago, Israeli historian Ornit Shani published a book titled How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of Universal Franchise, in which she describes the admirable care with which Indian democracy with universal franchise was launched after independence. Since then, things have gone up and down, but according to Guha, there has never been a weaker Election Commission than now. Its three commissioners simply do not dare to assert their influence, even though they are empowered to do so. They are “nakedly partisan.” According to Guha, the website through which voters can contact the commission does not work either.

This is an indication that the current Election Commission is also incompetent. The Indian election is a mammoth exercise that simply requires more resources and skills than the commission has at its disposal, argues PT Rajan, IT specialist and politician, in an article in Frontline magazine.

Modi’s bizarre allegations not only cast aspersions on the Congress Party, Rahul Gandhi and other politicians. He also accuses two of the world’s richest men, with whom he has had close relations, of petty bribery. Whether these outcomes are a cunning way to exploit people's distrust of capitalists and politicians, while obscuring the fact that it was BJP which received the most money from private companies, or whether they are a panic reaction to the lower than desired voter turnout, is hard to decide.

It seems to me that Modi deliberately wants to appear as someone who does not need to bother with facts because he has the people with him. Somewhere along the way he is right. He is the man who had a Ram temple built, where the mosque once stood. Many Hindus will vote for him for this way of putting an end to the Persianate Age.

There are also Muslims and Christians who vote for the BJP. If it turns out after the election that more Muslims and Christians have voted for the BJP in this election than in previous elections, Modi will have been proved right about voters bowing to the big man.

Indians will have gotten the leader they want and deserve.

An anonymous wall poster seen in Copenhagen, March 7, 2024. Photo by author

Warrior king

India has tried to cast itself as Vishwaguru, i.e. as a teacher for the whole world. Not everyone agrees. For some, India is neither a teacher nor an errant student. At the recent Alliance for Democracies convention in Copenhagen under the leadership of Anders Fogh Rasmusen, India played a marginal role. In the report on the state of democracy presented during the convention, India is somewhere in the middle on many parameters. It is places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Ukraine, and Europe that call for attention.

However, the course of the election and Modi’s domestic and foreign policy make India more relevant in an international context. One problem is that India and Indians in the West have achieved a status and a leeway that is being exploited in a way that undermines the relationship. Specifically, there is growing concern in the West over the murders and attempted murders that India is accused of being behind in Canada and the US.

In a lengthy report from the end of April, Washington Post reviewed the course of events, and it indeed appears that Indian intelligence agents under the then head of the Research and Analyses (RAW), Samant Goel, were behind an overseas liquidation campaign aimed particularly at separatist Sikhs. Whether India's top security adviser, Ajit Duval, has been involved in the process is more unclear. The RAW agent who was the day-to-day manager of the attempt to kill Sikh leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannum in the US has been identified as Vikram Yadav. This is the same person referred to simply as CC-1 in the United States of America v. Nikhil Gupta in the New York indictment released some time back.

The most shocking thing about the Washington Post review of the whole affair is – as the experienced scholar of Indian politics James Manor noted as early as December 27, 2023 – that the Indian intelligence service agreed that Pannum could be liquidated during Narendra Modi's state visit to Washington DC. Here, fine vegetarian dishes and decorative lotus flowers were laid out for the Indian leader to feel welcome while President Biden spoke about shared values and mutual trust.

The Indian Ministry of External Affairs has tried to dispel the accusations by promising a thorough investigation. However, India's decision-makers are well-aware of the merits of the allegations, having been repeatedly been told by US and Canadian officials.

In a way, India has actually already admitted to being behind the killing campaign. In response to The Guardian report early in April exposing a series of murders in Pakistan on Muslims and Sikhs who had committed crimes in India, Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on TV that terrorists seeking refuge in Pakistan will be hunted down and killed.

At a recent election rally, Modi himself uttered these words, worthy of a Bollywood gangster: “Today, even India's enemies know: This is Modi, this is the New India,” adding that, “This New India comes into your home to kill you.”

In the eyes of the Vishwaguru, there is obviously nothing wrong in doing something wrong when others have done the same. On the contrary, as a great power, you have the right to do the wrong thing, because others allegedly did the wrong thing once, and got away with it. “We now have the power to do to you what we claim you did to us,” seems to be the logic.

Ramachandra Guha sums up the choice facing India this way:

“Modi and the BJP seem poised to win their third general election in a row. his victory would further magnify the prime minister’s aura, enhancing his image as India’s redeemer. His supporters will boast that their man is assuredly taking his country toward becoming the Vishwa Guru, the teacher to the world. Yet such triumphalism cannot mask the deep fault lines underneath, which—unless recognized and addressed—will only widen in the years to come.”

The result of the election is expected on June 4th. If Indians choose to derail their liberal democracy, it may happen with the neck bowed, but hardly with eyes closed.

(The views expressed in the article are solely of the author. He can be reached at: stigtm49@gmail.com.)