In his 2025 Ramnath Goenka Memorial Lecture, Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked a stirring vision: India must complete its “decolonisation of the mind.” He spoke of shedding the psychological shackles of colonial rule, of restoring civilisational confidence, of reclaiming an ancient heritage suppressed by two centuries of foreign domination.

The speech was vintage Modi – aspirational, civilisational, positioning him as the leader who would finally complete the unfinished project of 1947. It resonated powerfully with audiences primed by decades of cultural nationalism to see colonialism as the source of all contemporary dysfunction.

But beneath the soaring rhetoric lies a profound irony: what Modi calls “decolonisation” is actually a political project that reproduces – indeed perfects – the core logics of colonial governance. His regime has not dismantled the structures colonialism left behind; it has weaponised them. It has not liberated Indian minds from colonial mentalities; it has imposed new forms of mental subjugation under the banner of cultural nationalism. The British ruled through centralised executive power, bureaucratic authoritarianism, suppression of dissent, and civilisational homogenisation. So does Modi.

Genuine decolonisation, in the sense articulated by Fanon, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ambedkar, and postcolonial theorists, is about dismantling all structures of domination – external and internal. It means redistributing power, widening cultural space, ending hierarchies that crush human dignity, and enabling the oppressed to become agents of their own liberation. Fanon saw it as the transformation of the “wretched” into subjects, Ngũgĩ as freeing consciousness from linguistic and cultural hegemony, and Ambedkar as the annihilation of caste – the oldest form of internal colonialism that long predates and outlasts British rule.

Modi’s project does none of this. It borrows the vocabulary of decolonisation while entrenching authoritarian centralisation, cultural uniformity, and the very hierarchies that true decolonisation seeks to abolish. This essay examines how the regime reproduces colonial logic even as it claims to overcome it– and why that betrayal matters for India’s democratic future.

Actual imprints of colonialism

To understand what decolonisation truly demands, we must first identify what colonialism actually left behind. Its legacy was not chiefly cultural – not English, not Western education, not the “Macaulayite” mindset that Modi targets. The real residue is structural and institutional, embedded in how India continues to govern itself.

Colonialism left behind an overcentralised, coercive executive. The British ruled through an authoritarian Viceroy-state that governed by command rather than democratic deliberation. It also left a bureaucratic apparatus – today’s IAS – designed to control subjects, not serve citizens, producing a culture of hierarchy and unaccountability.

It entrenched distrust of popular sovereignty and federal autonomy. The British routinely overrode or nullified provincial and representative decisions whenever these threatened imperial control. It normalised the criminalisation of dissent: sedition laws, preventive detention, and a surveillance-heavy police structure built to pre-empt and crush opposition.

And it imposed civilisational homogenisation behind the rhetoric of diversity – uniform legal codes, standardised education, centralised administration, and a curated narrative of history that marginalised regional languages and subaltern knowledge.

Decolonising the mind begins by confronting this architecture, not by railing against “Western influence” or invoking ancient glories. It means dismantling the authoritarian state structures colonialism installed and postcolonial elites preserved. It requires democratising power, expanding cultural pluralism, and building institutions accountable downward to citizens, not upward to rulers. Any claim to decolonisation must be measured against this.

Misappropriation of the ‘decolonisation’ narrative

The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP’s) deployment of “decolonisation” is a shrewd ideological move. It borrows the moral halo of the anti-colonial struggle while stripping it of its anti-authoritarian core. It recasts Hindutva as national reclamation rather than sectarian politics and frames sweeping institutional changes – rewritten curricula, recast histories, renamed cities – as restoration rather than ideological overhaul.

The pitch succeeds because it taps into real grievances. Indians do live under institutions shaped for colonial control. The IAS often behaves like unaccountable elite. English does confer structural advantage. Western epistemologies have sidelined indigenous knowledge. These frustrations are genuine.

But Modi’s project leaves the colonial architecture untouched. It swaps symbols, not structures. Rename cities, but preserve the centralisation. Invoke ancient science, but smother scientific temper. Rail against “Western influence,” yet expand surveillance and coercive powers modelled on Western security states. Celebrate civilisational pride while pushing cultural uniformity that mimics colonial “civilising missions.”

The sleight of hand is simple: branding Hindutva consolidation as decolonisation masks authoritarian centralisation as cultural revival. Critics of democratic erosion are dismissed as “colonial-minded”, their dissent treated as evidence of mental subjugation. The language of liberation becomes a tool to delegitimise demands for liberty.

This appropriation hollows the concept out. In postcolonial theory, decolonisation means the oppressed becoming subjects of their own history, dismantling imposed hierarchies, and expanding democratic, plural spaces. In Modi’s usage, it means majoritarian dominance, state-enforced cultural homogeneity, and the policing of dissent as anti-national. The term is flipped – from liberation to control, from pluralism to uniformity, from democratisation to centralisation.

How Modi deepened colonial logic

A. Centralised executive power: The return of the viceroy

The most glaring colonial continuity is the concentration of authority in the prime minister’s office. Modi governs through a tight circle of bureaucrats, sidelining cabinet responsibility and parliamentary scrutiny. Decisions like demonetisation, the COVID lockdown, the reorganisation of Kashmir and rather every other decision were announced, not debated – executed through fiat rather than deliberation.

This mirrors the Viceroy’s Secretariat, which exercised power unilaterally while the legislature played along as democratic décor. Parliament today serves a similar function: laws are rushed through with minimal debate, Standing Committees are bypassed, and the Cabinet has been reduced to a notification desk. Electoral cycles become referendums on the leader’s persona, not democratic governance. This is colonial-style centralisation dressed up as democracy.

B. The governor as modern viceroy

No office displays colonial residue more starkly than the governor. After the Supreme Court’s recent judgment affirming that governors (and the President) face no time limits in granting assent to bills, governors have effectively regained the colonial-era power to stonewall elected governments.

Under British rule, provincial governors existed to keep provinces subordinate to imperial authority. Today, governors serve as the Union government's political instruments. Tamil Nadu’s governor sat on over twenty bills; Kerala’s governor blocked legislation and appointments; Punjab, Telangana, and West Bengal saw similar obstruction. Modi has turned gubernatorial discretion into a political veto. States are reduced to administrative units. Federalism becomes ceremonial. The viceroy has returned – now operating from Delhi, armed with nationalist legitimacy rather than imperial arrogance.

C. Bureaucratic authoritarianism: The IAS as instrument of fear

The IAS inherited the ICS’s ethos – elite, hierarchical, unaccountable. Modi has sharpened it into a tool of political enforcement. Officers who resist are transferred or punished; compliant ones are rewarded. The message is unmistakable: loyalty is to the regime, not the Constitution.

Even more troubling is the weaponisation of investigative agencies. The ED, CBI, and NIA function as political police, mirroring the colonial CID. Opposition politicians face raids, journalists face cases, civil society faces harassment. Administrative power is deployed to intimidate and discipline. Colonial authoritarianism lives on, adapted for partisan control.

D. Suppression of dissent: From sedition to UAPA

India retained colonial laws like sedition, but Modi has turned their spirit into routine governance. The UAPA now serves as the regime’s main tool of repression – permitting long detention without bail and requiring minimal evidence. Activists, students, scholars, and journalists have been imprisoned for years on tenuous or fabricated charges.

The logic is pure colonialism: dissent equals conspiracy, criticism equals subversion, and citizens are threats to be neutralised. The British called it maintaining order. Modi calls it fighting “urban Naxals.” The effect is identical – criminalising dissent and throttling democracy.

E. Homogenisation of culture: The Hindutva civilising mission

Colonialism imposed a homogenising “civilising mission”, erasing local cultures, marginalising indigenous knowledge, and standardising subjects for ease of control. Modi’s cultural project follows the same logic, only with nationalist content. A Hindu-centric, Brahminical narrative is cast as India’s “authentic” culture; diversity becomes a problem to be domesticated.

Hindi is privileged over regional languages, local practices are subsumed under an invented civilisational unity, and alternative epistemologies are dismissed unless they can be folded into a Sanskritised framework. This is cultural flattening disguised as revival – another civilising mission, but with saffron varnish.

F. Control of knowledge and education: Ideological rewriting

Colonial education systems produced loyal subjects through controlled curricula. Modi’s reforms replicate this model while flipping the ideological script. Textbooks erase or distort Mughal history, science is subordinated to myth, and universities are purged of “Western” or critical theory – whether Marxist, feminist, Ambedkarite, or postcolonial.

Academic freedom shrinks. Faculty are targeted for dissent. Universities become ideological extensions of the state rather than spaces for inquiry. This is not decolonisation; it is recolonisation. The colonial logic remains: control knowledge, control the nation.

Caste as the deepest colonial mindset

The deepest contradiction in Modi’s decolonisation rhetoric is that genuine decolonisation in India must confront caste – the oldest system of domination on the subcontinent, predating British rule and surviving long after it. Caste is India’s original hierarchy: a structure that assigns purity and superiority to some and pollution and subhumanity to others.

Colonialism did not create caste, but it entrenched it. The British census froze fluid social categories into rigid identities; colonial law validated caste-based personal codes; and the colonial state relied on upper-caste intermediaries, reinforcing their dominance. Far from weakening caste, colonial rule preserved and bureaucratised it.

Real decolonisation would mean dismantling this internal colonisation: overturning the mental world that normalises hierarchy, breaking practices that enforce subordination, and building conditions of equal dignity. This is the substance of Ambedkar’s call for the annihilation of caste – a radical reordering of social consciousness, not cosmetic reform.

Modi’s project does the opposite. It rehabilitates Brahminical authority under the language of Hindu unity, treats Dalit-Bahujan assertion as divisive, romanticises caste as culture, and reduces Ambedkar to a decorative constitutionalist stripped of radical critique. The regime preserves the deepest colonial residue – caste hierarchy – while claiming to purge the colonial mind. This is decolonisation turned into deception.

Decolonisation means democratic deepening

Genuine decolonisation would not look like Modi’s cultural nationalism; it would look like democratic deepening. It would mean empowering states and local governments, ending the Union government's habitual dominance, and trusting citizens with real self-rule. It would require autonomous institutions – universities, media, judiciary, and the Election Commission – free from executive capture.

It would embrace pluralism: India’s many languages, faiths, and cultures flourishing without being subordinated to a single civilisational narrative. And at its core, it would demand social justice – the dismantling of caste structures, redistribution of opportunity, and creation of conditions where dignity is universal, not inherited.

True decolonisation would expand dissent, not criminalise it. It would treat disagreement as a democratic resource, protect protest as a constitutional right, and shift accountability downward to ordinary citizens rather than upward to centralised authority. It would democratise power instead of hoarding it.

Modi’s vision inverts all of this. Centralisation is recast as national unity, homogenisation as cultural revival, and authoritarianism as civilisational pride. Where genuine decolonisation disperses power, Modi’s project consolidates it. Where decolonisation multiplies voices, his project silences them. Where decolonisation frees the mind, his project disciplines it.

A ploy for political diversion

The decolonisation slogan performs several political tasks at once. It justifies authoritarian consolidation by framing every institutional capture as the cleansing of colonial remnants. When the government subordinates the judiciary, erodes Parliament, or bends the Election Commission to its will, dissenters are accused of defending colonial structures.

It also diverts attention from economic distress and democratic decay. While the public debates renamed cities and doctored textbooks, unemployment climbs, inequality widens, and institutions rot. Cultural nostalgia becomes a substitute for material improvement; mythic civilisational pride fills the vacuum created by contemporary failure.

It mobilises cultural sentiment while hollowing out constitutional morality. The regime proclaims ancient greatness even as it violates constitutional principles – treating minorities as outsiders, criminalising dissent, and centralising power. Nationalism displaces constitutionalism as the governing ethic.

Most cynically, the rhetoric weaponises postcolonial critique against critics themselves. Anyone questioning authoritarian drift is accused of harbouring a colonial mind. Defending democratic norms becomes defending colonial legacy. Resisting Hindi imposition becomes anti-national. Critiquing Hindutva becomes attacking Indian civilisation. The regime has effectively colonised the language of decolonisation, turning it into a tool to silence the very democratic impulses true decolonisation demands.

Conclusion

The supreme irony is this: India cannot decolonise while strengthening the very structures colonialism left behind. Yet this is precisely what Modi's regime does. It has perfected colonial governance – centralised executive power, bureaucratic authoritarianism, gubernatorial control, dissent suppression, cultural homogenisation, knowledge control – while claiming to transcend colonialism.

True decolonisation demands decentralisation of power, accountability of institutions, genuine pluralism that celebrates rather than suppresses difference, and anti-caste transformation that challenges the deepest hierarchies. Modi’s project does the opposite on every dimension.

What India witnesses is not decolonisation but recolonisation – the colonial state rebuilt and strengthened, its authoritarian logic preserved and perfected, now wielded by indigenous elites in the name of civilisational nationalism. The colonisers have changed; the colonisation continues.

India does not need a new civilisational mythology to mask old authoritarian structures. It needs liberation from the colonial state the present regime has perfected – the state that rules through fear rather than consent, that imposes uniformity rather than embracing diversity, that concentrates power rather than dispersing it, and that treats citizens as subjects to be controlled rather than as equals to be empowered.

Until India confronts and dismantles these structures, all talk of decolonisation remains what it is under Modi: rhetoric masking the opposite reality, liberation language deployed for authoritarian purposes, and the cruelest irony – a colonial state preaching decolonisation while perfecting the arts of colonial control.

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