The Making of Brand Modi

India is on the verge of a crucial round of state elections that will both shape the future course of national politics, as well as test the limits of the nation’s all conquering political brand, that of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The five states spanning eastern and southern India – West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry – seat a fifth of the members of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of parliament) in India. Through his deep personal involvement, Modi has staked his reputation in the elections of these states, especially in Bengal and Assam. A disastrous performance for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would not just galvanize an opposition already emboldened by the farmer protests, but it would also reinforce the notion that the larger-than-life persona of Modi can be cut down into a more resistible human form.

For now, Brand Modi seems to have escaped into the political stratosphere, untouched by the conventional laws of political competition. It remains near the peak of its appeal, undiminished by a series of recent crises, each of which might have felled lesser leaders. It has emerged largely unscathed from the pandemic that devastated an economy already teetering under a long slowdown. It has weathered a migrant crisis that left millions of Indian workers stranded on the streets because of a ham-fisted sudden lockdown. Through both the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests and the farmer protests, as well as the long border crisis with China, Modi has managed to maintain his visceral hold on the public imagination. The brand remains valuable.

In March 2021, as his government was facing prolonged farmer unrest in large parts of northern India, Modi named the world’s largest cricket stadium after himself. Similarly, last year, when India was in the midst of its worst recession in decades, Modi started the construction of a spectacular new parliament building. To those not attuned to India’s new political realities, these extraordinary acts might seem like the suicidal hubris of a leader hopelessly out of touch with his electorate. But to the political brand of Modi, these represented crowning triumphs. 

Modi’s ambition is no less than to be seen as India’s most transformative political leader post-independence, the architect of a “new India.” In his own words, the “new Parliament will prove to be a testament to a new and atma-nirbhar (self-reliant) India.” Therefore, just as most Indian public places carry the names of Nehru and Gandhi, the symbols of the old India, it is fitting that the grand monuments of new India should carry the name of its most powerful symbol. This is what Modi wished to convey, with an unabashed confidence that might have eluded him even five years back.

Even as Modi retains one of the most powerful and resilient political brands in global politics, his international image has reached its lowest point. His increasing resort to authoritarian tactics, most recently over the mass farmer protests, has meant that Modi is now more often bracketed in the international media with the strongmen leaders of Russia, Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey. The latest Freedom House Index designated India, for the first time in three decades, as only “partly free.”

What Is Brand Modi?

What lies behind the extraordinary political success of Brand Modi and what, if any, are its vulnerabilities, as we approach key state elections? Like all successful brands, Modi is a product of his time, a man who has come to embody and articulate the “national zeitgeist.” The political scientists Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma, in an influential paper, argued that Modi’s triumph at the national stage was the culmination of a long-term ideological realignment of Indian politics along the axis of “ethnic majoritarianism.” 

Hindu majoritarianism forms the core of the Modi brand. On this foundation has been constructed a formidable personality cult, where Modi has cultivated the role of not just the political leader of the nation, but also its social, moral, and spiritual leader – a latter day Mahatma Gandhi. Like Gandhi, Modi’s politics is imbued with what the political scientist Morris Jones referred to as the “saintly idiom” of Indian politics: a messianic figure, claiming to be unattached to family and material possessions, an instrument of the historical purpose of securing for India its lost glory. 

A cult of personality is invariably maintained by forging a direct emotional link between the leader and the masses through the control of communication. Modi speaks directly to the nation, either in occasional video announcements where he makes big, dazzling proclamations, or in monthly “Mann Ki Baat” radio programs in which he guides people on social issues and dispenses uplifting moral sermons. Hardly ever giving interviews, let alone press conferences, it is extremely rare for Modi to comment on policy matters – one would be hard pressed to know the prime minister’s exact thoughts on job losses due to the pandemic or on the crisis with China. During the coronavirus pandemic, when many leaders were holding routine press conferences, Modi released a series of three-dimensional animations of him teaching yoga, viewed online by tens of millions of people.

The resilience of Brand Modi is derived to a large extent from this personality cult, which has engineered a remarkable level of intuitive trust. Most people believe his claims on the big issues of the day. A recent India Today poll showed that the vast majority of people approved of Modi’s handling of the China crisis as well as the pandemic. This is likely due to the wide credibility of Modi’s empirically dubious claims, such as “no one entered the country” (in reference to Chinese troops) or that the “lockdown… has saved millions of lives.” Additionally, the elevation of Modi’s appeal beyond the immediate party-political realm has allowed him a degree of immunity on the government’s performance on material issues such as economic growth and unemployment. 

To reinforce this image of a philosopher king, Modi has grown his hair and beard to such an extent as to appear more like an itinerant Hindu sage rather than a modern politician. The proclivity of his party leaders to compare Modi with Hindu gods has grown in the same proportion. Following in the footsteps of his Madhya Pradesh counterpart, the newly appointed BJP chief minister of Uttarakhand compared Modi to Lord Rama, predicting that Modi would be worshipped by future generations for his “good work for society.”

The pandemic provided Modi with the grandest of canvases on which to paint his role as the ultimate protector of the nation. Having implemented the toughest of lockdowns, Modi led the nation in the manner of a spiritually endowed commander, consecrating a series of mass rituals to fight the pandemic. His face has even been plastered over the certificates handed to citizens who have received the coronavirus vaccine. The success of India’s vaccine diplomacy, exporting three times as many vaccines as have been administered at home, is also being furiously appropriated by Modi in order to counter regular doses of international embarrassment over domestic repression. The latest global outcry was over charges of sedition levelled against the 21-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi, the most recent of more than 7,000 such sedition cases filed since Modi came to power. 

Having come to power promising glory on the international stage, playing the role of the “global statesman” is as important to the politics of Modi as strutting about in the model of a hard nationalistic leader lambasting delusional “international conspiracies” to defame India, including the sinister campaign against Indian tea and yoga. 

Why Are We Seeing Mass Protests?

Modi’s brand has come to its full bloom only during his second term in office. This has unsurprisingly coincided with India’s plunging score in the Freedom House index, which only started to nosedive from fairly constant levels around 2018. It has also been accompanied by mass protests. The shackles of Modi’s first term have been carefully dismantled, and the overwhelming purpose of his second term is the reconstruction of the republic. 

Unlike in his first term, Modi now commands a de facto legislative majority in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, to railroad through a transformative agenda in the spheres of both economy and politics. The judiciary, through a series of judgments over the last few years, has made it clear that they are unwilling to resist the core agenda of the BJP. The bulk of the mainstream media, through both threats and inducements, has gradually been bent to the will of the political leadership, too.

Modi has always been a classic populist embodying the hopes and desires of a pure “national community” in battle against a range of internal enemies that need to be vanquished. The difference between the two terms is that whereas the first term was spent in the political description and clarification of the nature of the enemies, the second term is the moment of truth to finally execute the agenda of defeating them. 

A little over a year into his second term, Modi had overseen the implementation of a sprawling agenda to both reconstitute nationhood as well as reconfigure the political economy. 

In the first respect, the government scrapped Article 370 and essentially extinguished the state of Jammu and Kashmir, landing an unprecedented body blow to India’s federal structure. Then the Modi government proceeded to pass the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), redefining citizenship in a way that excludes the Muslim minority. Further, in an act that demonstrated that the primacy of Hinduism has now become embedded in every institution, the Supreme Court delivered a judgment allowing the construction of the Ram Mandir, a temple devoted to the god Rama at the site of a destroyed medieval mosque in Ayodhya, a long-held demand of Hindu nationalists. In between, the government also passed the Triple Talaq Bill, to criminalize a practice of divorce among Muslims, a significant stride in the adoption of a Uniform Civil Code. Since its inception, the BJP had articulated three foundational issues: revoking Article 370, building the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and instituting the Uniform Civil Code. Barely six months into his new term, Modi had delivered on all three, establishing his place as the tallest leader in the Hindu nationalist pantheon.

These moves have also been largely popular with the electorate. In the India Today poll mentioned above, which gave Modi a 74 percent approval rating, the two biggest achievements of the Modi government that respondents cited were the removal of Article 370 and the construction of the Ram Mandir. 

The anti-CAA protests were not quite harmful to the domestic politics of the BJP, as is sometimes imagined. Since those protests were led by the Muslim minority, they played into the BJP’s politics of mobilizing the Hindu community in opposition to Muslims. The behavior of the ideologically free-wheeling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which rules Delhi, is instructive in this regard. On the eve of the 2020 Delhi elections, as the anti-CAA protests continued to rage, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal boasted that had he controlled the police, he would have cleared the protests in a matter of few hours. It was a sharp commentary on the heightened “Hindu consciousness” of the electorate. 

On the political economy front, Modi moved toward restructuring the institutional architecture governing labor and agriculture, giving primacy to the markets. The recent budget, which constituted the biggest push toward privatization of the economy in over two decades, confirmed this shift toward a more liberal economic direction. 

Much like a harder swerve toward Hindu majoritarianism provoked the CAA protests, the reshaping of the economy has set off the farmer protests in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab. The genesis of both protests is not just the transformative nature of the BJP agenda, but also the increasingly imperious style of governance, which holds the democratic arts of compromise and consensus-building in barely concealed contempt.

Unlike the anti-CAA protests, however, the farmer protests have managed to make a dent in the carefully maintained image of Modi and his party. They do not, however, constitute a serious electoral threat to the BJP. The biggest gains made by the BJP in the 2019 elections came in rural areas, with the middle peasant castes enthralled by the Hindu majoritarian agenda of the BJP, and the rural poor coaxed with targeted welfare schemes, such as an annual subsidy for farmers. The protests remain largely confined to the Sikhs in Punjab (not a natural BJP constituency) and the dominant peasant Jat castes of Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. It is unlikely, or at the very least unclear, that the protests will precipitate a significant withdrawal of support from the BJP in rural areas.

The more serious threat to the BJP comes from the resurrection of the economy as an axis of contestation in national politics. The farmer protests have provided a shot in the arm of a disarrayed and moribund opposition. The state of Uttar Pradesh, for example, which goes to the polls next year, has emerged from a period of unusual political quiescence, and is witnessing renewed political mobilization in the forms of rallies and public meetings. The BJP’s usual populist tactic of smearing its political opponents as illegitimate or “anti-national” has come unstuck when facing the “son of the soil” farmers of the heartland, largely from the Hindu and Sikh communities.

The economy remains the most potent threat to the BJP leading up to the next general election in 2024. So why then did Modi give the opposition this opening on the economic front? To understand this, one much develop a fuller appreciation the evolution of Brand Modi. 

The Evolution of Brand Modi

To understand Brand Modi, we must first remember that it is far from a static phenomenon. Modi renews his brand appeal every few years. The core of Modi’s brand has always remained Hindu majoritarianism, but he has periodically bolstered it with other elements, rejiggering components to fit emerging political contexts. The Hindu majoritarian element leaps alternatively between front-stage and side-stage to suit the needs of the time, but it never quite leaves the play.

In his first term in Gujarat, Modi projected a hardline Hindutva persona who protected the interests of Hindus during the Gujarat riots and their aftermath. Toward the end of his first term, and especially in his second term as chief minister, he cultivated the credentials of a pro-business economic reformer, thereby earning the favor of the business elite. In the campaign for the 2014 elections, he fashioned himself as an outsider to the political system – harping on his origins as a chaiwala (“tea seller”) who was uniquely positioned to clean up the corrupt establishment in Delhi. This helped him in the 2014 elections to garner the votes of an aspirational category of voters, what the political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot termed the “neo-middle class.” In fact, as Chhibber and Verma demonstrated in their work, the Modi effect in 2014 consisted mainly of bringing aspirational “economic-right” voters to the BJP.

After coming to power in Delhi in 2014, many political observers expected Modi to rule along the lines of Atal Behari Vajpayee, the last prime minister from the BJP. This meant co-opting the old elites, and accommodating the country’s long secular legacy: in other words, occupying the traditional center ground of Indian politics. 

Modi, however, had learned an abiding political lesson from his mentor L.K. Advani, one of the most important leaders of the BJP. After the party’s loss in the 2004 elections, Advani, the pre-eminent mascot of Hindutva for the past three decades, went to Pakistan and praised its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It was meant as an attempt at projecting a “softer” image in order to win over the illusory center of Indian politics. It was an unmitigated disaster that Advani never recovered from, eventually being replaced at the top of the party by Modi.

The bedrock of a political brand is authenticity, as Modi intuitively understands. Authenticity of the political brand is what lends it credibility. Modi knows that if he ever turned his back on Hindu majoritarianism (the core of his political brand) for political expediency, every other claim he makes would consequently become less believable. 

Even though Modi shied away from any conciliatory moves toward his political opponents, he understood that he did not have the institutional control to unleash his agenda of transforming the nation in his first term. Therefore, he spent much of his first term assiduously converting his personal appeal into institutional authority. All of India’s institutions – the media, judiciary, parliament – had to be systematically aligned to the purposes of the BJP, and power had to be centralized in the prime minister’s office.

Having put his transformative agenda on hold, Modi proceeded to expand his popular base in a more traditional Indian manner by fashioning himself as a “leader of the poor.” Breaking away from his pro-business image, Modi began constructing a refurbished welfare regime, which the prominent economist Arvind Subramaniam, among others, dubbed “New Welfarism.” This New Welfarism basically meant the subsidized public provision of essential goods and services, normally provided by the private sector, such as bank accounts, cooking gas, toilets, electricity, and housing. These tangible goods were relatively straightforward to deliver, measure, and monitor, as opposed to intangible welfare goods such as health, education, and nutrition, which were largely ignored. Even when these schemes were merely the new versions of previous Congress Party schemes, the centralization of their implementation, along with the personalized style of marketing (the name and face of the prime minister was invariably attached to the benefits) meant that New Welfare carried rich electoral rewards for Modi and the BJP. As the political scientist Louise Tillin has written, there is a marked increase in Indians crediting welfare schemes to the center (as opposed to the states) since 2014. 

At the same time, Modi continued to nurture a degree of ambiguity toward the BJP’s Hindutva agenda. That agenda was deputed to those below him. The most telling moment in this regard was when Modi handed over the politically key state of Uttar Pradesh to a blustering Hindu monk, Yogi Adityanath, whose only claim to fame was his unabashed baiting of Muslims. The Hindutva agenda was also outsourced to the numerous affiliates of the sprawling Sangh Parivar, who kept communal tensions boiling at the grassroots. Notwithstanding all of this, at the formal level, except for meddling in educational institutions, the central government largely kept clear of its own Hindutva agenda during Modi’s first term. 

If the Brand Modi was composed of softer Hindutva and social welfare in the first term, it now represents hard Hindutva and economic aspirations.

The turn toward the economic right by Modi was driven both by conviction and compulsion. To make up for his poor economic record, Modi is holding out economic promise. Even before the pandemic pushed India into its first economic contraction since the 1970s, the country was suffering from a long slowdown, with GDP growth falling almost continuously for eight quarters, grinding to a measly 3.1 percent in March 2020. India had also registered its highest unemployment rate in 45 years prior to the tens of millions of jobs that were lost during the pandemic-induced recession. The shambolic state of the economy meant that Modi was pushed toward proactively owning a positive economic agenda, pre-empting opposition maneuvers to corner him. Modi is also perhaps keenly aware that the hold of his personality cult cannot indefinitely suspend the weight of the economic aspirations that he helped unleash in 2014.

The pandemic further accelerated Modi’s rightward economic turn as it squeezed the government’s fiscal space. The fiscal deficit for the current year has exploded to 9.5 percent of GDP, which the government hopes to snip back into the acceptable range of 4 percent of GDP only after a period of six years. The debt-GDP ratio is expected to soon cross the 90 percent mark. In other words, as India sits on a pile of debt, Modi does not have the fiscal room to embark on another round of ambitious new welfare schemes. This also explains why the government was forced to cut down on social spending in this budget, even as it substantially increased its spending on growth-inducing capital projects. “Privatization and the proposed monetization of government assets have emerged from a fiscal cul-de-sac,” the seasoned political commentator T.N Ninan remarked, as “both tax and non-tax revenues have fallen… with little hope for future buoyancy.”

Like all good brands, Modi knows how to create a virtue out of a necessity. Modi is particularly well suited to smoothly traverse across the economic spectrum as his political articulation of both social welfare and economic reform is rooted in the same populist style and vocabulary. Both are meant to empower the citizens by weeding out the “corrupt middlemen and vested interests” that had kept these sectors shackled. In both cases, the narrative battle is set up between the corrupt status quoists (Modi’s political opponents) and the honest disruptor (Modi). 

Hence, even if Modi is not able to deliver an economic revival by 2024, he would be able to showcase his efforts at implementing a transformative economic agenda that is in the process of remaking the country’s economy. The secret of Brand Modi is that it is always in motion, constantly evolving to meet new realities, frequently in the act of creation, but perhaps more often in the act of “creative destruction.” 

April-May State Elections

The upcoming elections in five states – West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Puducherry – will play out in their own local contexts, yet the aggregate picture will provide the backdrop for national politics leading up to the next general election, set for 2024. As mentioned earlier, this is probably the biggest test for Brand Modi since the 2019 elections. In the state of Bengal, Modi is addressing as many as 20 election rallies. There he has transformed the election into a personal battle with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC). Even in Assam, Modi is addressing six rallies, much more than the two rallies he addressed in the Delhi elections last year. If the BJP loses all of these elections, it can expect a more assertive and united opposition in the second half of its term. This section looks at the prospects of the BJP in each of these upcoming elections. 

The election in the state of West Bengal is unquestionably the most crucial of this round in terms of its ramifications for national politics. The BJP has historically been less than a marginal player in the state. But in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections it made a dramatic leap to win 18 out of the state’s 42 seats. On the back of the appeal of Brand Modi, the BJP has quickly occupied the political space vacated by the disintegrating Left parties. Despite the presence of a Congress-Left Front, this election is widely expected to be largely a straight contest for power between the ruling TMC and the BJP. Given the high anti-incumbency sentiments the ruling TMC faces over charges of corruption, violence, and high handedness at the local level, the election is placed on a razor’s edge. Even though the BJP is fighting on local issues, Hindu majoritarian forms the glue of the campaign in a state where nearly a third of the population is Muslim and victory depends on polarizing Hindu votes. 

West Bengal is especially important for the BJP for a number of reasons. First, the BJP has mostly made gains in new states at the expense of the Congress, but Bengal would be a testament to its ability to defeat a regional, linguistic-based party in state elections. A successful campaign there will provide the template for future conquests in southern India, as well as helping cast off the BJP’s Hindi/north-Indian tag for good. It will also be a referendum on Brand Modi’s not-so-subtle attempts at appropriation of the historical legacy of Bengali icons such as Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore. Second, Bengal was the ideological birthplace of Hindutva nationalism and carries deep resonance among the support base of the BJP. Third, Bengal would be a test of what political scientist Sajjan Kumar has termed “subaltern Hindutva,” or Hindutva assertion that rises from the ranks of the backward castes and classes, and not from its traditional bastion in the upper castes. In Bengal, the BJP did exceedingly well among segments of Dalit and Tribal voters in 2019, as well as garnering the votes of the bulk of the OBCs (Other Backward Castes). Thus, along with the “Hindi” tag, victory in Bengal will help the party discard its “upper caste” baggage. A triumph in Bengal will see the BJP proclaim its entry into a new era, as a more diverse and inclusive pan-India party. 

In neighboring Assam, the BJP is defending against a resurgent opposition composed of the Congress alliance and a regional party, Assam Jatiya Parishad (AJP), formed out of the anti-CAA agitation from student-youth bodies of Assam. The BJP spectacularly won the state for the first time in 2016, going from five seats to 60 amid a powerful national wave. Assam represented the success of an audacious political experiment for the BJP, in which it skilfully remolded the issue of indigeneity from ethnicity to religion, mobilizing an alliance from a diverse array of tribes and ethnic groups against the “Bangladeshi Muslim outsider.” It demonstrated the adaptability of Hindutva in a deeply diverse state where over 30 percent of the population is Muslim. However, the implementation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, the main part of the BJP’s promise to root out ‘“infiltrators,” soon ran into political hot water as it excluded only a tiny proportion of residents, as well taking up Hindu Bengalis (a base for the BJP) in its dragnet as much as it took Muslim Bengalis. The state government soon wiped its hands of the whole exercise, which had angered more people than it satisfied.

The party was further rocked by the anti-CAA movement, which was perhaps strongest in Assam, where “indigenous” ethnic groups feared it would confer citizenship on Hindu Bengali immigrants. Notwithstanding these political headwinds, the BJP has constructed a formidable political base, particularly in Upper Assam, through targeting of welfare benefits to key constituencies, and remains the favorite to retain the state. The communal divide still runs deep, and the BJP is stoking fears over the Congress’ alliance with the Bengali Muslim party, the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), to yet again fabricate a Hindu majority out of hostility toward Muslim immigrants. 

The states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala represent the country’s most inhospitable political terrain for the BJP. The party’s ambition there won’t go much beyond opening its seat account and gaining a toehold in state politics.

Tamil Nadu is dominated by Dravidian politics, roughly a combination of ethnic-linguistic pride and backward caste assertion, which is the ideological polar opposite of the Hindu nationalism of the BJP. Last time, the BJP lost every one of the 234 seats it contested there. In these elections, the party will focus on just 20 seats in alliance with the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). Last year, the BJP recast its upper-caste dominated state leadership and appointed two Dalits, L. Murugan and V. P. Duraisamy, as president and vice president of BJP’s state unit, respectively, signalling its newfound adaptability. However, all indications point to a Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)-Congress sweep in these elections, and the BJP would consider itself fortunate to wind up with just a few seats. 

Similarly, the objective of the BJP in Kerala is to grab a few seats in another bipolar contest between two big alliances: the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front (LDF), led by the state’s Communist parties. The last elections saw the BJP win a seat for the first time in the state. In a state where almost half the population is composed of minorities, the BJP has had to soften its Hindutva ideology, trying to gain influence among the Christian minority, in a reprise of its strategy in the Western state of Goa. The recent meeting of Modi with leaders of the Catholic Church, particularly from Kerala, was seen in some quarters as another attempt at wooing Christians ahead of the assembly elections. The party’s attempts here, though, as in Tamil Nadu, are only meant for the long term, and will carry little relevance to these elections. Kerala is yet another close election where the ruling Left alliance currently holds a narrow edge over the Congress alliance.

The Southern Union Territory of Puducherry, according to opinion polls, is likely to see its first BJP government, in coalition with the larger All India N.R. Congress (AINRC), a breakaway Congress party. The manner in which the BJP engineered the defection of Congress Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in Puducherry, which led to the fall of the Congress government, speaks to the importance the BJP places on these tiny enclaves, perhaps as a springboard to launch its incursion into neighboring Tamil Nadu. 

Threats to BJP’s Dominance 

Brand Modi both exacerbates and papers over two fundamental contradictions in the BJP’s pattern of dominance. There are historical resonances with the hollowing out of the “Congress system” during the long and dominant reign of Indira Gandhi, the full consequences of which only became apparent after her demise. The first contradiction is structural: Dominance at the national level coexists tensely with weakness at the state level and the party centralization-induced decline of the leadership at the local level. The second contradiction concerns the support base: There are tensions between the ideologically driven traditional members and parachuted-in outsiders, as well as a struggle between the increasing backward-caste base of the party with its traditional upper-caste leadership. 

The strange thing about the BJP’s pattern of dominance is its weakness at the state level. The BJP controls the smallest number of states for any party to command a majority at the center in India’s history. The intertwining of Brand Modi and Brand BJP has had mixed results for the party at the state level. It helps the party in its role as a challenger for power but can drag it down when it’s an incumbent. This is reflected in the party’s disastrous run in the last few years in many of the states where it was defending power, contrasted with its extraordinary phase of expansion in 2014-17, where it was mostly challenging for power. This happens for two reasons. 

First, Indian politics has gradually evolved into a dichotomy in which voters have come to prioritize ideological issues at the national level and livelihood issues at the state level. The BJP’s plank of Hindutva-infused nationalism has given the party very limited returns in state elections over the last three years. In the run-up to the 2019 elections, the party was thrown out of power in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. In 2019, it further lost control of Jharkhand and Maharashtra, while only managing to retain Haryana through adroit alliance making. Last year, the party received a humiliating defeat in Delhi at the hands of the incumbent AAP. The only silver lining in the party’s recent state record is a fairly good performance in the eastern state of Bihar. These were, incidentally, all the states that the BJP had swept in the 2019 general elections. Having been banished to marginality at the national level, the issues of economic slowdown, rural distress, and unemployment return with a vengeance to haunt the BJP at the state level.

Second, the centralization of the party under Modi has severely weakened its state leadership. Modi, a colossus, casts a forbiddingly long shadow underneath which state BJP leaders appear as little more than stodgy pygmies. It is worth remembering that the hollowing out of Congress’ power in the states owed itself in no small part to the ruthless centralization of the party that started under Indira Gandhi. 

The close identification of Modi with his party is not quite an anomaly in Indian politics, where most parties are tightly controlled by their top leader. But the BJP had somewhat escaped this powerful logic of centralization during the Advani-Vajpayee years, taking pride in collective leadership and a remarkable degree of inner party democracy, part of their claim of being “a party with a difference.” This loose party structure had allowed for the emergence of vigorous new leaders in states, who had the autonomy to cultivate their own independent bases of support. All of that ended the day Modi, along with his close confidante Amit Shah, took control of the party. 

The state elections where the BJP is fighting to gain power are fought under the name and face of Modi. Among the nine states where BJP has come to power over the last seven years, they had declared their chief minister candidate before elections only twice: in Assam and Himachal Pradesh. In the event of a BJP victory, the chief ministers are handpicked by Modi, not by their state units. Thus, the BJP benefits from Brand Modi when it is the challenger for power as Modi makes up for a weak state leadership (as in the case of Bengal), but in state elections where the BJP is the incumbent, Brand Modi is often a liability, as it exerts a significant downward pressure on the existing state leadership.

A further factor enervating BJP’s state leadership is the ruthless centralization of India’s welfare state, leading voters to attribute credit to Modi for welfare schemes that are implemented by the state governments. Welfare spending has traditionally been an important way of building relationships of patronage between chief ministers and their voters. In the absence of the welfare plank, the ruling chief ministers of the BJP are left with little ammunition to stave off anti-incumbency, while being simultaneously hampered by all the economic failures of the Modi government. The political scientist Neelanjan Sircar has argued that it is this centralization of credit attribution that ultimately felled both Shivraj Singh Chauhan and Raman Singh in 2018, the BJP’s powerful chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, respectively.

The second threat to the BJP’s system of dominance is the extraordinary weight on Brand Modi to stave off the emerging tensions within its support base. Modi’s appeal is frequently invoked to cover up the less exalted power-seeking ways of the Modi-Shah electoral machine. As the BJP seeks to conquer new territories, it is drawn to co-opt and integrate the local power elites of rival parties. We see this strategy in full force in Bengal, where the ranks of the BJP have been swelled by a staggering exodus of both party workers and leaders of the ruling TMC. In the Northeast of India, the BJP leadership is made up almost entirely of turncoats from other parties 

In fact, the BJP has used turncoats to overturn opposition governments in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, and Puducherry. Many of these new entrants to the party face corruption charges, from the Congress MLAs who flocked to the BJP in Puducherry, to the former top leaders of the TMC, who had been ensnared in the Shraddha corruption scandal. Indeed, the threat of the central investigative agencies is frequently employed as a recruiting mechanism, blended with the more seductive offers of power and treasure. The conflict between purists and powerseekers can often lead to intense factional conflicts, which can ultimately lead to the unravelling of a dominant party, as the political scientist Francoise Boucek has demonstrated.

A similar tension exists between the disproportional upper-caste leadership of the BJP and the vote base of the party, which is mostly made up of backward castes, as the political scientists K.C. Suri and Rahul Verma have pointed out. It was this identity-based struggle over representation and the benefits of office that progressively tore apart the Congress’ social coalition. Brand Modi has acted as a bridge between these two factions, as the most powerful backward-caste leader of the party who also commands the unquestioning loyalty of the party’s traditional upper-caste leaders. Thus, it has acted as a bandage over this tension without fully resolving it. However, it would require tremendous political skill going forward for the BJP to gradually integrate more backward castes in leadership positions, to satisfy the demands of its backward-caste base, without provoking a backlash from the upper castes.

Conclusion

The political scientist Rajni Kothari famously termed India’s political system, during the heyday of the Congress, as the “Congress system.” This was certainly not an exaggeration. It was difficult to separate the Indian state from the Congress party, as it pervaded all aspects of political life and directed state institutions, relegating all other political parties to marginality. It would be impossible to tell a post-independence history of the country without reference to the Congress. In the same manner, it can be said that the future of the country cannot be imagined without reference to the BJP, and its supreme leader, Modi, which are not just governing the country but transforming it in fundamental ways. In fact, according to the political scientist and activist Yogendra Yadav, the “First Republic” of the country is already in the rear-view mirror and we have entered what he describes as India’s “Second Republic.”

The Second Republic, according to Yadav, is a new political epoch where the constitutional values of pluralism, dialogue, and institutional autonomy are replaced by Hindu majoritarianism. “The constitutional form of parliamentary democracy may remain untinkered with, yet for all practical purposes India could become a Latin American-style presidential democracy where the supreme leader draws power from the people and is answerable only to them. The public could be continuously mobilized to undo the republic,” Yadav wrote last year. The recent verdict by the V-Dem Institute, downgrading India under Modi to the status of an “electoral autocracy,” certainly endorses that grim reading. 

Yet Modi has not so much created history as quickened the processes of history, building on ideological realignments that had been evolving over the preceding decades. To borrow Hegel’s description of Napoleon, Modi represents political instinct rather than political genius, intuitively in step with the “national zeitgeist.”

None of this makes Brand Modi unassailable, or the BJP invincible. As India’s political history shows, the dominance of a party itself creates the cracks in the foundation that then unravel it. The Congress might still feel that they are on fertile political terrain, adopting a left-wing economic plank, as inequality in India has skyrocketed during the pandemic. India added 40 new billionaires in 2020, even as a survey in January found that over a fifth of people who had lost work during the lockdown were still unemployed in December. 

However, a sobering reminder is in order. Even as inequality and joblessness were rising in Modi’s first term, the opposition failed to make it into a salient political plank. Any ideological repositioning of the opposition parties, in order to be successful, must integrate the issues of economic precarity, joblessness, and development, into a clear alternative vision. Even that might not be enough to shake off the immense trust of the electorate, which has turned Brand Modi into one of the most dominant brands ever in Indian politics.

Ultimately, Modi presents himself not merely as an economic reformer or a social welfare populist, but as a nation builder — or rebuilder — a “saffron Nehru.” This is why he rarely utters the names of contemporary political opponents, such as Rahul Gandhi or Manmohan Singh, but keeps returning to Nehru: the competitor he has set up for himself. Much like the country gave Nehru three terms to complete his project, Modi implicitly asks Indians to trust him with a similarly long tenure. While normal politicians might be held accountable in one or two terms, people instinctively understand that “remaking the nation” is a drawn-out affair. Modi is out there building the nation for them, even if they are unemployed.