Given the breadth and depth of this relationship, it is astonishing that India not only did not express disapproval of the bombing of Iran. For a considerable time, it refused even to acknowledge it. Nor did it make a sound when the head of a friendly sovereign state was murdered along with his family. India remained silent, too, when a children’s hospital named after Mahatma Gandhi, and located on a street bearing his name, was blown up. This puzzling muteness wasn’t just a departure from India’s long tradition of solidarity with the developing world. It was also an abdication of the de facto leadership of a large segment of the non-Western world thrust upon India by its presidency of BRICS. Every other founding member — Russia, China and Brazil — quickly denounced the war. India alone seemed to be condoning it with silence.

Then, on 4 March, an unarmed Iranian frigate sailing home after participating in a maritime exercise convened by the President of India was torpedoed by the Americans in the Indian Ocean — an area to which India claims to provide security. Yet India couldn’t muster the nerve to say a word in response. It was tiny Sri Lanka, one-50th India’s size, that activated its navy to rescue the Iranian vessel’s stricken sailors. By then, more than 80 had been killed. Colombo withstood intense American pressure to preserve and repatriate the bodies of the dead. Veterans of the Indian Navy were appalled.

When Narendra Modi — who had concluded a visit to Israel hours before the first bombs were dropped on Iran — did come around to speaking about the sanctity of sovereignty, it was in relation to the Gulf monarchies. About Iran’s trampled sovereignty, he again said nothing. The upshot was a public outcry in India at what looked like a squalid surrender to the US and Israel by a country with a long record of standing up for its interests and professed beliefs. Ordinary Indians flooded the Iranian embassy to sign the condolence book for Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Iranian mission was compelled to open a bank account to receive charitable donations from the public.

It is the sight of this outpouring of grief and comradeship that prompted Modi eventually to dispatch a senior bureaucrat to the Iranian embassy to record India’s condolences. But by then the Iranians had clearly had enough. While Tehran took great pains to display its gratitude to India and Indians, it refused to make any special concessions to Modi. When the Indian premier finally opened channels of communication with the Iranian leadership, Tehran allowed the passage of two Indian-flagged ships carrying LNG — a fraction of India’s daily needs. The message to Modi was clear: no privileges would be granted to India. New Delhi would have to negotiate the passage of every single vessel, and Iran would decide on a case-by-case basis. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, received public assurances of support from the Islamic Republic.

To liken Modi’s behavior to India’s refusal to condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine is to overlook the fact that New Delhi formally recognized the gravity of that conflict. Modi even traveled to Ukraine, and issued a public warning to Putin about the perils of making this an “era of war”. His silence on Iran is singular, and there are two reasons for it.

The first is Modi himself.

His failure to oppose the war is self-serving. Over the past decade, Modi has erected the most formidable cult of personality in the democratic world. He is the only living leader with a stadium named for him; in 2021, India’s space agency catapulted a satellite carrying his photo into space; children in state schools are forced to celebrate his birthday; villages are obliged to endure his radio broadcasts.

India’s former vice president once introduced a resolution in parliament proclaiming Modi “god’s gift to India”. Another minister hailed the “Modi Era” as the consummation of a 450-year-old prophecy.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s digital warriors, meanwhile, have toiled for years circulating fake photos of Modi surrounded by world leaders seeking his counsel or watching his speeches. They have gulled voters with absurd lies, such as the one claiming Modi was adjudged the “best prime minister” on Earth by UNESCO. The government has burned billions of rupees on public jamborees wherever Modi has gone — from Wembley Stadium to Madison Square Garden. And virtually every major news organization in India has amplified the claim that Modi is Vishwaguru: teacher to the world. The falsehoods of his sycophants have had a crazed effect on Modi himself. Last year, he told a worshipful journalist that his birth was not a “biological” event. He was supposedly sent down by some celestial force.

Nothing would threaten Modi’s meticulously crafted self-image — the globally admired messiah dispatched by god to save India from its “anti-national” Anglophone elites — more than a glib putdown from Trump. A direct insult would make Modi, a strongman, the object of derision at home. Fearing this, he has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid his American counterpart over the past year. Last October, he even stayed away from the ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur, an otherwise important event, so as not to run into Trump there. Trump, not to put too fine a point on it, terrifies Modi.

This turn of events was unexpected. In Trump’s first term, Modi expended tremendous energy cultivating the American President. Modi called him “Doland, my friend”; hugged him ebulliently; and even held a rally with him, before adoring Indian-Americans, in which he effectively endorsed Trump’s re-election. There was nothing he would not do for his dear Doland. During Covid-19, Modi agreed to give away precious stocks of essential Indian medicine to the US after a phone call from Trump. He mounted an extravagant spectacle for Trump in his home state of Gujarat, and, ignoring deadly religious riots in Delhi, hosted a lavish banquet for his American guest in the Indian capital.

When Trump was re-elected in 2024, pro-Modi Indian televangelists erupted with triumphalism and schadenfreude. They declared that with Modi’s friend back in the White House, India’s adversaries were on notice and rhapsodized about the “electric” chemistry between the two men. Modi’s supporters were encouraged to believe that Trump would squeeze New Delhi’s enemies and accelerate India’s rise.

He did the opposite. Last year, when India went to war with Pakistan, Trump inserted himself into the conflict on the side of Pakistan — heralding himself as the peacemaker and demanding a Nobel Peace Prize for his accomplishment. The ceasefire, according to New Delhi, happened because Pakistan, whose military runways were cratered by India’s bombing campaign, implored its rival to stop. India’s military establishment therefore found the suggestion that Trump brokered the truce offensive, but the country’s political leadership was too timid to push back.

Trump has since repeated dozens of times the claim that he forced India and Pakistan to halt the war by threatening them with tariffs. Impatient to secure a trade deal that would grant Washington access to the most protected areas of India’s economy, he then proceeded to pronounce India’s economy “dead” and slap a 50% tariff on its exports to the United States. The levy devastated parts of the Indian economy, but Modi still didn’t react. Since India is governed by a cult, the government’s priority is to protect the cult’s master. India’s interests are secondary. Now, Trump wants demonstrations of obedience, and Modi is willing to perform national seppuku to propitiate him.

The second, supposedly respectable, reason for Modi’s unwillingness to dissent from Washington, according to his apologists in the Indian establishment anyway, is that India needs the United States to counter China. Modi’s acolytes have convinced themselves that India, aided by Washington, is destined to replace China as America’s preferred manufacturing base. Trump’s emissaries have made it plain that they have no intention of helping India realize this goal. Still, New Delhi persists with the belief that the United States is its indispensable partner. In its equation, there is no future in which India can find a modus vivendi for peaceful coexistence with Beijing. Rather than engage in intense dialogue with its neighbor next door, India’s only option apparently is to become a frontline state in Washington’s effort to contain China’s rise.

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The problem with this argument is that the one party undeterred by this grand partnership is its intended target: China. Six years ago, the People’s Liberation Army seized Indian territory in Ladakh. Modi’s initial response was to go on television and claim that there were no Chinese incursions into Indian territory — even as dozens of Indian soldiers lay dead. Then, in a belated act of retaliation, Delhi introduced curbs on Chinese investments into India. But now, as a direct result of the economic difficulties into which Trump’s tariffs have plunged the country, those barriers have been removed and India is again courting Chinese investment.

In other words, then, India’s subservience to the US is as undignified as it is strategically incoherent. Its most concrete achievement is the decimation of India’s credibility in the non-Western world. Once regarded as a model of autonomy by Africa and Asia, it is now viewed as a poodle of Washington.

That, of course, still leaves unexplained India’s strange deference to Israel.

India’s embrace of Tel Aviv, which began before Modi appeared on the scene, has now become damaging. The wielders of power in New Delhi have concluded that Israel is a reliable exporter of technology and a viable destination for blue-collar workers for whom Modi has been unable to create jobs at home. Beyond this basic calculus, though, the relationship is wholly ideological. It is animated by the Hindu-nationalist reverence for a state that has battled and survived against Muslim nemeses. Israel was quick to intuit Modi’s great weakness — susceptibility to flattery — and exploit it skillfully. The Knesset recently awarded the Indian prime minister a wholly made-up prize.

Israel’s most enthusiastic supporters in India are united more than anything else by a profound hatred of Muslims, and they see in Israel a beau ideal. As the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz once put it, “Relations between Israel and India tend to grow stronger… when India experiences a rightward shift in anti-Muslim public opinion or in leadership”. As Israeli atrocities mounted in Gaza, the IDF’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders outside Israel were to be found in India. Last week, India imposed a roundabout ban on the screening of The Voice of Hind Rajab, an Oscar-nominated docudrama about a Palestinian girl murdered by the IDF that can lawfully be screened in Israel, on the grounds that it would “break up” India-Israel relations.

No decent Israeli can see this as a compliment. And no decent Indian can regard a friendship fueled by bigotry as a worthy cause. Beyond Hindu nationalists, Israel has no real champions in India. Two decades ago, virtually every side in India was willing more or less to work with Israel — some openly, others clandestinely. Today, however, Israel is so completely identified with the BJP that, when Modi is gone, the next government is bound to push it away.

Yet even before a political decoupling can occur, a more visceral detachment is being forced by the burdens imposed by the economic reality. The consequences of the Israeli-American war against Iran have reached India. As a poor, developing country, India is heavily dependent on imports for its most essential energy needs. More than 60% of the liquefied petroleum gas that powers Indian kitchens, as well as nearly 90% of its crude imports, come from the Persian Gulf. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is thus a body blow to India. Airlines have introduced a fuel surcharge, farmers face the prospect of fertilizer shortages just as demand rises ahead of the planting season, while restaurants everywhere are trimming their menus or closing altogether. All the while, the lengthy lines outside gas distribution terminals evoke Ceaușescu’s Romania; at least two men have died so far in the interminable wait to refill their canisters. An exodus from town to village, redolent of the horrifying mass flight in the bleakest days of the pandemic, has begun.

On Monday, more than two weeks after the war commenced, Modi made a statement in parliament in which he told Indians to brace for a Covid-like challenge. It’s a spine-chilling thought. The pandemic was the worst humanitarian catastrophe in republican India’s history: hospitals ran without oxygen, crematoriums ran out of wood to burn the dead, bodies floated in the Ganges. Modi used the horror to solicit tax-deductible donations for an opaque trust established, he said, for the purpose of aiding “the poorest of the poor”. With a brazenness that would have made Papa Doc Duvalier blush, he christened the fund “PM CARES”.

Nearly a billion dollars flowed into it in the first week. But where has all that money gone? That question is impossible to answer because PM CARES, structured as a private trust, cannot be reviewed by the state auditor. The flagrancy of the enterprise catches the breath: while his counterparts abroad panicked and pleaded with their people, Modi cashed out. That the Indian prime minister has again invoked that horror should therefore terrify us all. Certainly, he did not equip India for this crisis: the country has oil reserves for just 10 days. And the lesson of Covid is that the prime minister — who has a habit of disappearing from view in difficult times — will not help.

Given its sheer size and human scale, India may be on its way to becoming the largest single non-hostile casualty of the war in West Asia. For all its preening proclamations of its own rise and importance on the world stage, Modi’s “New India” proved too inconsequential to influence the warmakers — and too weak, craven, and self-woundingly stupid to be spared the war’s effects.

Emergency, which lately appeared in Indian cinemas, portrays the 21 months from June 1975 that Gandhi suspended the constitution and ruled the country by decree. Citing rising political violence, and long-standing tensions with Pakistan, the Premier’s actions have been deeply controversial ever since. But if you know anything about Kangana Ranaut, you shouldn’t expect subtlety alongside your popcorn. For beyond producing, directing and starring in Emergency, the 38 year old is also a member of parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

As a Hindu nationalist outfit, the BJP has always loathed Gandhi’s secular brand of politics. That’s clear enough from those billboards: Ranaut’s Indira practically snarls, a narcissistic demagogue as flames smolder ominously behind. Not that she’s alone. For decades, after all, politicians here have understood the immense power of the big screen, especially when so many Indians remain illiterate. Yet if Indira Gandhi’s own Indian National Congress exploited movies in the past, the BJP is doing something new, borrowing its links to the stars to dehumanize its foes — not just long-dead Gandhis, but many millions of Muslim citizens too, a strategy that could yet turn deadly.

Since independence, Indian politicians have reveled in the silver screen. The cinema of the Fifties and Sixties, the heyday of Congress rule, reflected Jawaharlal Nehru’s founding vision of socialist nation building. One classic example here is Ab Dilli Dur Nahi (“Now Delhi is Not Far Away”). Released in 1957, it follows a young boy who visits the capital to secure justice for his falsely imprisoned father, pleading his case to none other than Nehru himself. Other movies from this period invoke similar progressive pieties, lionizing ethnic minorities and assailing greedy landlords.

At the same time, Congress was happy to ban any movies it didn’t like. In 1975, for instance, it temporarily repressed Aandhi because it apparently drew on Gandhi’s relationship with her estranged husband. It’s a strategy that continued for as long as Congress was in power. In 2014, to give one example, it banned Kaum De Heere (“Gems of the Community”) because it allegedly glorified Gandhi’s killers. Gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards, in 1984, they claimed revenge for an attack by Indian troops on the Golden Temple, the most sacred shrine in Sikhism. Politically, if not ethically, such sensitivity makes sense. Indian politicians have for long understood that cinema can sway voters in their favor. Boasting a vibrant film industry even before independence from Britain, in 2023 the sector pulled in $1.3 billion, with the industry pumping out some 1,500 films a year.

Yet if Congress pulled the plug on films for political gain, and on releases they felt could spark communal strife, its BJP successors have embraced film far more aggressively. Over their decade dominating the country’s politics, indeed, what can only be described as Hindu nationalist propaganda has flooded Indian cinemas. It’s worth returning to Emergency here, with Ranaut using her film to effectively paraphrase Modi that Gandhi’s rule by decree “was a dark chapter” in the country’s history. Considering Gandhi used the Emergency to suppress a range of Hindu nationalist organizations, that antipathy makes sense.

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In truth, though, BJP-aligned films usually have a far bigger target in mind than the Gandhis: Muslims. It’s a history that runs deep. The BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), exists largely to undermine the Muslim presence in India, ever since its formation as a quasi-fascist organization back in 1925. Vinayak Savarkar, the group’s founder, carefully curated the idea of Indian freedom from the British Empire, even as he hoped to be free of Muslims too, envisaging a state where Hindus reigned supreme. Even today, leaders from both the BJP and RSS label Muslims as “terrorists” and “termites” — and just a few weeks ago, a BJP official in the southern state of Kerala told Muslims to “go to Pakistan” if they weren’t happy in India.

Certainly, these ideas are reflected in BJP-backed movies. A case in point is The Sabarmati Report. Released in November 2024, and produced tax-free after support by BJP officials, it covers an infamous 2002 pogrom in the northwestern state of Gujarat. The violence apparently started after an argument between Hindu pilgrims, returning from a shrine on the Sabarmati Express, and Muslim vendors at Godhra station. Even 22 years on, the details of what happened next remain murky. But what’s certain is that a fire started in one of the train’s carriages, killing 59, before vengeful Hindu mobs massacred over 1,000 random Muslims, raping and torturing as they went.

Watch the film, though, and you’ll get a rather different impression of what happened, with The Sabarmati Report bluntly blaming Muslims for the death of the pilgrims while ignoring the butchery that followed. Tellingly, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat during the slaughter — and was quick to praise the film, which earned almost 300 million Indian rupees. “It is good that this truth is coming out in a way that is accessible to everyone,” he wrote on X. “A fake narrative can only last so long — facts eventually prevail.” Statements like these unsurprisingly make India’s 170 million Muslims queasy, especially when Modi had the film screened at an auditorium in Parliament House, an event also featuring both the information and broadcasting minister and the defense minister.

And if victims and their families have little to cheer from The Sabarmati Report, films that cover the massacre more evenly have also been repressed. In January 2023, for instance, the BJP invoked emergency laws to block a BBC documentary examining Modi’s role during the riots. A month later, India’s Income Tax Department raided the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai, ultimately forcing the corporation to restructure its activities in the country. Feature films covering the pogrom have also faced legal challenges. That includes Kai Po Che, a 2013 movie that petitioners claimed unfairly blamed Hindus for the violence.

Nor, of course, is this simply a matter of a single film, or a single act of communal slaughter from many years ago. Rather, Modi and the BJP have developed close links with Bollywood to promote their jingoistic brand of Hinduism. As Kangana Ranaut hints, that begins with the stars themselves, with several backing the party in their public statements. And if it’s hard to know where ideology ends and professional expediency starts — Vicky Kaushal is just one of the actors to get big after playing a Hindu hero, with the rugged 36-year-old netting a National Film Award for his troubles — there are other links here too. That’s clear enough financially: several pro-BJP movies have received the same tax-free treatment as The Sabarmati Report. It helps, too, that Maharashtra, the home of Bollywood, is now under Hindu nationalist rule, with several stars recently attending the swearing-in ceremony of the state’s BJP president.

And if all this again speaks to the enduring power of cinema as a political tool in India, hardly surprising when 25% of people still can’t read and write, you equally get the sense that many films are best understood as telling one single story: Muslims are a danger to Indian life. One good example The Kashmir Files, which implausibly depicts the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Hindus as a genocide systematically arranged Kashmiri Muslims, even though many actually fought to protect their Hindu neighbors. Article 370 covers similar themes, while The Kerala Story feels even more crass. Depicting Muslims as brutes intent on smuggling vulnerable Hindu girls into ISIS slavery, the film’s marketing initially suggested 32,000 women had suffered such a fate — until complaints forced the filmmakers to clarify that the blockbuster only compiled the “true stories of three young girls”.

Like with The Sabarmati Report, meanwhile, these movies have explicitly received the Modi mark of approval. And if that’s another reason for ambitious directors to stay on side — a good word from him can see box office takes soar — filmmakers have delved deeper into history to make their politics clear. One good example is the 2020 film Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior. Released during Modi’s second term, and set in the 17th century, it paints the subcontinent’s Muslim Mughal rulers as barbaric, bloodthirsty monsters, whose ultimate goal is the economic and political subjugation of Hindus.

Nor, of course, is cinema the only place that the BJP is flexing its anti-Muslim muscles. From its muzzling of journalists, to its lavish funding of friendly broadcasters, it’s little wonder Reporters Without Borders ranks India 159th for press freedom worldwide. The media, for its part, is happy to oblige its paymasters: in 2020 several Indian news channels blamed Muslims for Covid. Though they never questioned how the BJP’s faulty vaccine provision resulted in mounting deaths, they did promote conspiracy theories claiming Muslims were intentionally spreading the disease.

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Not, of course, that this matters simply for India’s spiraling international reputation. On the contrary, Modi’s usurpation of his country’s media is having a real-world impact on the safety of Muslims. In 2023 alone, India Hate Lab, a Washington DC-based group that documents hate speech against India’s religious minorities, recorded 668 hate speech examples targeting Muslims. Even more striking, there’s suggestive evidence that calumny against Muslims in the cinema can have a practical impact on the streets. Admittedly, the line between media and violence is hard to trace explicitly, but it’s surely telling that 59 cases of communal violence were reported in India last year, a significant rise on the 32 from 2023. Other links are even more explicit. After the release of The Kashmir Files, anti-Muslim videos soon went viral on WhatsApp, with one exhorting Hindus to shoot the “traitors” in their midst. Muslims themselves are clearly worried too, with one opposition politician comparing The Kashmir Files to Nazi propaganda.

Together with other ominous signs — an amendment to India’s citizenship act, coupled with a national register of citizens, may leave millions of Indian Muslims liable to detention and deportation — and the future looks bleak. That’s especially when you examine upcoming releases in Indian cinemas. One example is Chhava. Scheduled for release next month, it features a Hindu hero (once again) decimating evil Muslim kings. If only by comparison, Emergency almost feels balanced.

Modi had been angling for a moment like this since September of the year before, when he lobbied the United Nations to make 21st June “International Yoga Day”. In an address to the General Assembly, he claimed that “Yoga is an invaluable gift from our ancient tradition. Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action … a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and our well-being. Yoga is not just about exercise; it is a way to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature.”

Modi’s successful pitch for yoga at the UN contained eerie echoes of a pitch for Hinduism made by one of his heroes, the religious teacher Swami Vivekānanda, to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago back in 1893. It was a masterclass in using the language of inclusivity to make the case for a particular idea. Hinduism, declared Vivekānanda, is the “mother of all religions” and has “taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance”. To an audience consisting primarily of American Christians, familiar with Jesus’s claim that “No one comes to the Father except through me”, Vivekānanda offered a contrasting line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

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Vivekānanda’s expansive case for Hinduism was helped by the fact that the concept itself was only around a century old by the late 1800s and remained somewhat flexible. Europeans in colonial-era India had used the term “Hindu” (derived from a Sanskrit word for the Indus River) to describe people on the subcontinent who did not belong to better-understood and apparently more clearly-defined traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Indian reformers later used the term “Hinduism” to refer to a broad system of ideas and practices that went beyond “religion” in the narrow confessional sense familiar to modern Westerners and encompassed culture, identity and, in time, a sense of national political purpose.

In the decades running up to Indian independence in 1947, there was nervousness among religious minorities — particularly Muslims — about what this might mean for the role played by Hinduism in a future independent India. The country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was among those who advocated for secularism and religious pluralism. Other forces in Indian politics, including the predecessor to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), encouraged the idea that India is fundamentally a Hindu country and that its politics and institutions ought to reflect that fact.

The vexed politics of “Hinduism” in India — religious tradition versus a more encompassing cultural or national identity — has been mirrored in the West by arguments about yoga, one of whose earliest teachers was Swami Vivekānanda during visits to the United States. Is yoga essentially religious in character? If so, is it wrong to use it purely for its health benefits or to teach it in schools that are subject to rules about the separation of church and state? And given its origins in India, is there something morally wrong or at least a little unseemly about white Westerners making money from promoting it — or even practising it at all?

Just as these anxieties appear to be ebbing in the West — though concerns remain about shallow and overly-commercialised forms of yoga — Modi has been leading the charge to reclaim yoga for Indians, and for himself in particular. It is part of a broader push to promote traditional Indian culture at home and to leverage India’s spiritual wealth abroad as a soft power asset. Modi has already made much of his country as the home of Buddhism, finding it useful when dealing with Buddhist-influenced cultures around Asia, from Vietnam to Korea.

Modi’s critics worry about what this might mean for the secular and pluralist character of their democracy. When, in his 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly, Modi described yoga as a gift from “our ancient tradition”, who exactly was the implied “we”? Indians as a whole — or the country’s large Hindu majority? Modi and the BJP are suspected of using yoga as a means of encouraging people, both at home in India and abroad, to think of those two categories as more or less one and the same. That risks reinforcing the idea that India’s Muslims, Christians and Dalits — formerly referred to as “untouchables” and historically mistreated by upper-caste Hindus — are outsiders, potentially exposing them to yet more discrimination and violence. Modi is also accused of engaging in what one commentator memorably called “om-washing”: linking yoga to everything from world peace to a healthier climate while pursuing destructive policies on these and other issues.

No doubt there will be those who regard worries over Modi’s appropriation of yoga as of no more consequence than hand-wringing in the West about wellness enthusiasts who like to greet each other with namaste gestures. Depending on your point of view, Indian soldiers performing yoga in freezing temperatures at the Siachen Glacier is either a step towards entrenching Hindu nationalism at the heart of Indian politics while provoking Pakistan — with whom India remains in dispute over sovereignty in the region — or simply a nice touch for International Yoga Day. Likewise, government bureaucrats and foreign diplomats in India taking up yoga, on Modi’s advice, may be regarded either as working on their general health or participating in a slow but steady narrowing of acceptable discourse in India.

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Time will tell just how much or little this matters for India. As Modi enters his third term as prime minister, the argument over yoga seems set to extend to schools across the country. Some BJP-led regional administrations have already sought to make it mandatory among the nation’s children, prompting objections from defenders of India’s minorities and the country’s secular constitution. A Sun Salutation — or Surya Namaskar — may strike most as an innocent sequence of yoga moves. But “Surya” is both the sun and the Hindu solar deity, rendering the sequence controversial in the eyes of some Muslim groups in India.

Those wanting to see yoga’s influence diminished in Indian politics may hope that Modi’s Olympic dream comes true. Modi wants the Games to come to India in 2036, and for yoga to be included on the list of events alongside chess, kabaddi, kho kho, squash and T20 cricket. It may well prove divisive: plenty of yoga practitioners will no doubt object to what they see on display, just as large numbers of karate fans regarded its Olympic incarnation — when Tokyo hosted a delayed Games in 2021 — as “not proper karate”. A more potent message still would be sent if things take an Australian turn. The sight of an unfortunate competitor butchering their contribution — offering an unintentionally comic twist on the downward dog to rival Raygun’s kangaroo hop — might end up harming yoga’s global reputation.

In the shorter term, there seems little prospect that Modi will retire yoga as a pawn in India’s over-heated politics. Promoting ancient glories is a cheaper and more reliable way of winning hearts and minds than promising the earth politically, whether at home or abroad. And as long as the wellness boom is with us, so too will be that sweet spot where fitness, fulfilment and wisdom coincide — seasoned, dare it be said, with a dash of the exotic, courtesy of images of the far-away or the long-ago. For all the anxieties that it seems to be causing of late, in the West and in India, nothing promises to hit that spot quite like a good sweaty hour on a yoga mat.

I can, moreover, enter and leave Britain at will. Modi was banned from Blighty for a decade for having blood on his hands. When raucous Hindu pilgrims aboard the Sabarmati Express were torched alive by a Muslim mob in 2002, it came as manna from heaven for Modi, the newly descended carpetbagging chief minister of Gujarat. Dipping into his sixth-form science textbook, he declared that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. The police were pressured to stand down as Gujarat descended into violence. Muslims had to be “taught a lesson”, Modi told senior policemen.

In the pogrom that ensued, Hindu nationalists unleashed fire and fury, using electoral rolls to smoke out Muslims. Some 2,000 were killed, and more than 125,000 displaced to refugee camps. One of Modi’s close associates later boasted to the press how he had “slit open” a pregnant Muslim woman during the riots. Meanwhile, his ministers and marionettes were spotted marauding about Ahmedabad, orchestrating the violence.

In London and Washington, the revulsion prompted visa bans on Modi. At home, however, this only stirred sympathy. So you had the liberal journalist Vir Sanghvi only half-ironically working up much patriotic indignation: “He may be a mass murderer, but he’s our mass murderer.” Modi made hay while the sun shone, bullying the election commissioner into — in that splendid Indian-English word — “preponing” the election in Gujarat, insinuating that if he didn’t, it was only because he was a Christian in the pay of foreign masters.

The snap election produced the desired result. Hindus closed ranks and Modi won his first election. Twelve years later, he gave us a repeat performance, only this time it was on the national stage. Hard on the heels of the anti-Muslim Muzaffarnagar riots — again choreographed by Hindu nationalist parliamentarians, whom Modi hailed as “heroes” on the hustings — his Bharatiya Janata Party coasted to victory in 2014, permanently displacing the Congress Party that had ruled the country more or less uninterruptedly since independence. The chief minister of Gujarat was now prime minister of India. By this point, his mates had exonerated him for the 2002 riots.

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The French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot recently wrote a superlative study of the early life and dark times of India’s current ruler. (Full disclosure: my book on the Emergency, aforementioned, was co-authored with him.) Gujarat Under Modi languished in “legal read” hell for a decade. Timorous lawyers felt it betrayed “an unyielding view of Narendra Modi” — thanks, captain obvious — and, accordingly, recommended cuts so extensive as to make a Vatican censor squirm. Jaffrelot exercised good judgment in waiting for a plucky publisher (Hurst) to come by rather than suffer the surreal indignity of seeing his book stripped to the bone.

The early chapters tell us how the young Modi, a low-caste tea-seller’s boy, was drawn to the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the BJP. On the face of it, the RSS was an upper-caste affair, whose very existence owed to the déclassé resentment of the high-born in a world where the lower orders had begun to get ideas above their station. The aim was to sublimate their frustrations, heightened on account of their vow of celibacy (yes, Modi’s likely still a virgin), through punitive calisthenics, sweaty wrestling and textual exegesis. These days, with less time on his hands, Modi squeezes world leaders in ever-tighter embraces — the “hugging diplomacy” for which he has become infamous.

Modi, however, would have felt no reason to dwell too deeply on the caste contradictions inherent in his embrace of the RSS. True, its high-born apparatchiks would have taken a dim view of his caste origins. The modh ghanchis — oil pressers — were officially recognised as a “backward caste” in 1999. But Modi himself, like other lower-caste Indians, would have truckled to his caste superiors rather than resented them. Even a figure such as Mahatma Gandhi, a Gujarati like Modi, thought it perfectly comme il faut to rail against intercaste “interdrinking, interdining, intermarrying”, even as he set about uniting the country in the Twenties and Thirties.

The RSS gave Modi a social purpose. One suspects he was also thankful to the Sangh friends who helped him flee Vadnagar, saving him from the clutches of an arranged marriage aged 17. Still, in the Fifties and Sixties, there was something unfashionable about being an RSS man; the outfit had been forever tainted by Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 by one of its members.

All of this changed with the Emergency, the dictatorship of 1975-77. The Congress’s enemies, Left and Right, were banged up in prison together, where they, perforce, warmed to one another. After the Emergency, they rode to power as one big coalition. For the first time, though only briefly, out-and-out Hindu nationalists sat in the cabinet.

Modi turned the bleak biennium to good account, liaising with bigwigs underground and distributing samizdat. We have, from this period, some improbably convincing snaps of him disguised as a Sikh to elude the police.

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Modi has created a new theocracy

By Pratinav Anil

By the Eighties, the Congress in Gujarat was in an increasingly tenuous position. Already discredited by the Emergency, they had managed to scrape by thanks to the support of the backward castes, the lower-middling sort clamouring for affirmative action. The BJP, on the other hand, monopolised the upper-caste vote, stirring violence every now and then to expand its base. It was a gory business, of course, but there was an arithmetic logic to it. For interfaith conflagrations had the perverse effect of producing intercaste unity. Put differently, uniting Hindus against Muslims was a way of papering over their unwholesome caste divisions: Muslims accounted for a mere 8% of Gujarat’s population, Hindus the remaining 92%.

The 1985 Gujarat riots, one of the bloodiest the country has witnessed to date, brutally underscored this dynamic. Led by chanting Hindu priests, a mob of 100,000 entered Muslim neighbourhoods, torching everything in sight. More than 2,500 homes were flattened, and some 12,000 Muslims made homeless. Much of the dirty work was done by Dalits, hitherto antagonised by caste Hindus but now on the same side, even if hierarchically split.

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’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.”

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Liberalism didn't protect Salman Rushdie

By Pratinav Anil

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.