IT DIDN’T HAPPEN overnight. Democracies do not die in the dark. They erode in plain sight—applauded, televised, algorithmically boosted. The India we once recognised—messy, pluralistic, chaotic but fundamentally inclusive—is no longer visible beneath the saffron tide. Narendra Modi has not merely led a government. He has orchestrated a metamorphosis. What remains now is not India, not the secular republic that rose from the ashes of Partition with a constitution that promised liberty to all faiths and none. What remains is Bharat—a Hindu-first state, ideologically rigid, factually indifferent, and unapologetically revisionist.
Modi did not cast a spell on India. He gave voice to a fantasy long nurtured in the minds of men who marched under the banner of the RSS, who dreamt of a nation purged of dilution, of diversity, of dissent. It is a fantasy rooted not in Gandhi’s vision, but in Golwalkar’s—a caste-ordered, myth-soaked civilisational fortress where Muslims are second-class citizens and Christians are foreign implants. Modi was their vessel. His genius lies not in governance but in performance. He made hate aspirational. He made majoritarianism democratic. He made the RSS mainstream.
One must not understate the violence of this transformation, not in blood but in spirit. It is not simply lynchings over beef or the bulldozing of Muslim homes in the name of law and order. It is the soft, suffocating erasure of alternative Indias—the India of Tagore’s humanism, of Nehru’s secular socialism, of Ambedkar’s constitutional morality. In their place is a Bharat that prays to Rama while punishing those who spell their gods differently. In Modi’s India, patriotism is not love of country. It is love of a certain kind of country. All others must apologise or perish.
The press, once the watchdog, is now the lapdog. Editors who dare question the government find themselves unemployed, exiled, or imprisoned. Entire television networks have been repurposed as tools of state propaganda, blaring war cries against Pakistan while ignoring the war being waged within. Fact and fiction are no longer distinguishable. A nation that once prided itself on the argumentative Indian now rewards the obedient one. And those who object—from students at JNU to farmers in Punjab—are labelled terrorists and seditionists, enemies of the nation whose only crime is remembering what that nation used to be.
And now, as military hostilities with Pakistan threaten to spiral, we see the final act of this tragic farce. The nation rallies behind its leader, as they are meant to. But they are not told what to rally for. They are fed doctored videos, false flag narratives, and tales of surgical strikes that may or may not have happened. To pretend that the Indian media war machine is anything but complicit in manufacturing consent is to lie to oneself. Every drone strike, every headline, every chest-thumping anchor serves the same purpose—to drown out domestic decay with patriotic noise.
Modi’s India is not merely misinformed. It is disinformed. This is not ignorance. It is a strategy. Misinformation, weaponised through social media, WhatsApp forwards, and pliant newsrooms, has become the lifeblood of this regime. The most dangerous lies are not the ones we believe, but the ones we want to believe. That Muslims are taking over. That Pakistan is always plotting. That dissent equals treason. These lies have been repeated so often, so loudly, and so confidently that they no longer need verification. They simply are.
This would be tragic enough if it were accidental. But this is by design. The RSS has waited nearly a century for this moment. In Modi, they found not just a leader but a messiah—one with the political cunning of an autocrat and the populist charisma of a televangelist. Under his watch, textbooks have been rewritten, history sanitised, minorities demonised, and a billion people convinced that all of this is progress. When he speaks of Vishwaguru—India as the teacher of the world—what he means is Bharat as an echo chamber, where ancient myths count for more than modern rights and where foreign applause matters more than domestic anguish.
The judiciary, once the last hope of the oppressed, has too often looked away. Cases linger. Hate speech goes unpunished. Activists rot in jail without trial while those who incite violence walk free. Bail is now a privilege, not a right. Law is no longer blind. It sees religion. It sees politics. And it flinches. The great constitutional machinery that Ambedkar built is being hollowed from within, not with a bang but with a shrug.
International observers have taken note. India’s democratic backsliding has been documented in rankings, reports, and resolutions. But Modi does not care. His government thrives on the siege mentality—the idea that the West is envious, that criticism is colonial, that the only truth lies in the voice of the nation, which just so happens to be his own. And the world, hungry for trade deals and wary of China, has largely played along. Principles have been replaced by pragmatism. Modi smiles, the world shakes his hand, and the lynched are buried without justice.
What then remains of India? Not the dream, surely. Not the promise of unity in diversity, the anthem sung in every language, the secularism stitched into every flag. What remains is a shell, a slogan, a performance. “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas” sounds noble, but ask the Kashmiri whose phone hasn’t rung in weeks. Ask the Dalit beaten for entering a temple. Ask the Muslim student forced to chant Jai Shri Ram to sit for an exam.
Bharat is not India. It is its carefully constructed mirror, made to reflect only the preferred angle, the preferred caste, the preferred faith.