Modi is far from realizing his promises of economic and military security. Pakistan-backed militants continue to strike inside Indian territory. The anti-Indian insurgency in Kashmir has acquired a mass base; Maoist insurgents in central India attack security forces with impunity. Industrial growth, crucial to creating jobs for the nearly 13 million Indians entering the workforce each year, is down, at least partly due to Modi’s policy of demonetization.
That gambit was, as the economist Kaushik Basu writes, “a monetary policy blunder,” which “achieved next to nothing, and inflicted a large cost on the poor and the informal sector.” Yet Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party subsequently swept elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s politically most significant state. He looks almost certain to be reelected as prime minister in 2019. [...]
Ascendant in both new and old media, Twitter as well as radio, television, and the press, Modi is moving India away from debate, consensus-building and other democratic rituals. He is presiding over what Mukul Kesavan, a sharp observer of Indian politics and culture, calls an “infantilization of Indians.” “Instead of being proud, equal, adult members of a republic,” Kesavan writes, they “are reduced to being the wards of an all-seeing parent.” [...]
The devastating flaw in Modi’s project is this: He is trying to build a homogeneous national community in an irrevocably diverse country. It commits him and his party to demonizing, excluding and alienating too many members of the Indian population. Moreover, he has arrived too late in history, decades after Park Chung-hee, Chiang Kai-shek, and Lee Kuan Yew accomplished their tasks of national self-strengthening.
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