The thuggish tactics of Narendra Modi

Thereafter, the BJP moved from strength to strength in state elections. Modi made his bones as the campaign manager of Haren Pandya, a rising star who beat the sitting chief minister in a stunning by-election upset in 1993. By all accounts, it was an ugly campaign, with undue emphasis on the Muslim bootleggers undermining prohibition. Two years later, the BJP permanently displaced the Congress in Gujarat. A seismic stroke of luck came Modi’s way in 2001, when Keshubhai Patel’s botched handling of the Bhuj earthquake prompted his ouster. Never having fought an election before, Modi was airdropped as chief minister. It would, again, be thanks to backroom manoeuvring that he would become the BJP’s national candidate in 2014 — making history as the man who became PM without having ever been an MP.

As chief minister of Gujarat, Modi ruled with an iron fist. Jaffrelot shows how he turned the police into a vigilante force with a penchant for extrajudicial killings. The victims were invariably Muslims, one of them a 19-year-old college girl. Law and order was given over to Babu Bajrangi’s shock troops, who were tasked with “rescuing” — kidnapping — Hindu women from their marriages to Muslim men on pain of abortion and torture.

Modi’s government, Jaffrelot argues, was as corrupt as it was violent. Unpossessed by a cupidity of his own — the rare celibate among dynasts — Modi has nevertheless facilitated the fortunes of the grasping oligarchs around him. His favourite one, Gautam Adani, was given state-owned land for a pittance, which he then immediately sublet to state-owned companies at market rates. Schemes such as these briefly made him the second richest man in the world. An Adani Green Energy Gallery was inaugurated at London’s Science Museum in March.

“Modi ran one of the most thuggish and corrupt governments in Indian history.”

Modi’s rise has been good for Adani — and Adani’s for Modi. But while Adani claims his motto is “nation building”, this is hardly clear from the situation in Gujarat. The state’s wealth, much vaunted by the press, only trickles upwards. Surveys dubbed Modi’s Gujarat the malnourishment capital of India, with three in five children underweight. Wages stagnated, consumer spending plateaued, household debt burgeoned, investment rates fell off, even as a few billionaires did a roaring trade.

Modi ran one of the most thuggish and corrupt governments in Indian history, Jaffrelot concludes. Yet electorally he remains invincible, thanks in no small part to a piss-poor opposition. The Congress high command routinely depicts the chaiwallah’s son as a chav — when he met Obama, Modi showed up in a monogrammed pinstripe suit spelling out his name a million times in gold — which is hardly a sensible charge in a country where nearly everyone is working-class.

Modi’s charge, by contrast, sticks. He paints his rivals as a bunch of cosmopolitan elites cut off from hoi polloi. There’s no doubt an element of schoolboy crassness to his epithets, a touch of Berlusconi perhaps, but it goes down well. The leader of the opposition party, the Veneto-born Sonia Gandhi, was sent up for her Italian ethnicity as “Pasta-ben”, Sister Pasta. Rahul, her pallid son and lately successor, has been nicknamed “Jersey Cow”.

Compounding the gift of the gab is Modi’s facility with technology. Enlisting the services of the PR firm APCO, whose choice clientele included the Nigerian and Kazakh dictators Sani Abacha and Nursultan Nazarbayev, Modi was an early adopter of 3D holograms in election campaigns. The advantage of addressing multiple audiences simultaneously was magnified in a highly illiterate setting where mesmerised audiences were left wondering whether Modi was an avatar of Vishnu’s.

Then there is his braggadocio, so extravagant as to put Putin to shame: his 56-inch chest; his penchant for wild swimming surrounded by crocodiles, one of which he nonchalantly brought home only to be reproached by his mother. His fans lap it up, as they do his antisemitism. The BJP’s latest campaign depicted a befuddled Rahul Gandhi dangling on puppet strings manipulated by a vulpine George Soros, omnisciently above him in black-and-white. Modi has form here. As early as 2005, he had the Holocaust removed from history textbooks. In its place came a paean to the Third Reich: “Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government… He brought prosperity to Germany… He instilled the spirit of adventure in the common people.”

For most of the last quarter-century, Modi was unassailable. His party rivals learnt this the hard way, as when a fake sex tape surfaced at just the opportune moment to see off the party secretary Sanjay Joshi, who had it in for Modi. By the time Joshi cleared his name, it was too late to rehabilitate him. At the same time, Modi can cannily switch his weapon of choice from the stick to the carrot. These days, it isn’t unusual for Congressmen to cross the aisle for the BJP; the going rate for legislators is about £3 million. One of these turncoats, a Canarese septuagenarian, was spotted sporting a Rolls-Royce post-defection.

Ideologically, too, everyone now plays by Modi’s rules. Before Modi, the BJP trick was to tar the Congress with the brush of “pseudo-secularism” while vehemently declaiming the real thing. “Hindu nationalism” used to be a term of opprobrium. No more. Modi has repurposed it into a term of approbation.

Until very recently, Modi’s rise left Congressmen dumbstruck. As early as 2002, they saw no better option than to mimic his policies. Over the following decade, the best the opposition could come up with were attacks on Modi’s deficient Hinduism. The chief minister stood accused of destroying 200 temples while gentrifying Gujarat, and, horror of horrors, not lifting a finger to stop the butchering of 100,000 cows.

Batting on Modi’s home turf proved disastrous for the Congress. A few years ago, Gandhi was to be found criticising Youth Congress party workers in Kerala for their “thoughtless, barbaric, and completely unacceptable behaviour”. And what would that be? Cooking a calf to protest Delhi’s absurd cow slaughter laws. Gandhi has spent the better part of the last few years trying to out-Hindu Modi, inter alia prancing around temples and perusing the Upanishads, to no avail.

Now, at long last, some efforts are being made at course correction. In the 2024 election, widely seen as a victory for the opposition and Indian democracy, a gaggle of two dozen parties contested together to deprive Modi of a decisive majority in parliament. For one thing, the first-past-the-post system worked in their favour, eliminating triangular and quadrangular contests that would have split the anti-Modi vote. For another, Modi’s popularity in recent months took a dive, what with slower growth rates and higher unemployment. The clientelism and corruption of his regime, too, went a long way in discrediting Modi in the eyes of voters. Still, even as the opposition coalition rejoices at its better-than-expected showing, it would be remiss not to point out that this is still a defeat for Modi’s foes. Modi is still in power. If the Congress and its allies don’t get their act together, they’ll be on the opposition benches until the cows come home.