“He is incorruptible”; the middle-aged founder of a well-known chartered accountancy firm in Mumbai looked palpably thrilled.

It was another of Mumbai’s social get togethers following a business conference where India’s supposedly best minds exchanged political gossip and fulminated on the state of the nation, including its celebrated potholes.

“He is ushering in changes. He looks like a man on a mission.”, the exuberant gentleman continued, like a rollercoaster on steroids. I saw a Narendra Modi “bhakt” long before that dodgy sobriquet became a national meme. The year was 2004. The Gujarat chief minister had already assiduously created a political narrative about himself, even as an ageing PM Atal Behari Vajpayee was selling the chimera of India Shining.

But I am not easy pickings; we are not an argumentative nation for nothing.

'These things don’t matter. They happen all the time'

“Do you endorse what happened in Gujarat in 2002? Is that okay? Does that not alone disqualify Modi from holding such an august office?”.

The gentleman was unperturbed. If at all, he seemed stunned at my apparent naivete. He looked at me with a bemused expression of a laboratory scientist who was about to do a surgery on a trapped cockroach: "These things don’t matter. They happen all the time”.

Whataboutery would go on to become India’s favorite sport on prime-time TV to rationalise the worst of shenanigans, corruption, violence, sectarianism and riots.

Fast forward to 2014: Modi was the presumptive prime ministerial candidate of the BJP. He had graduated from being a regional satrap ( as TV anchors brand ambitious provincial leaders) into a national alternative. By that time, I had morphed from being a part-time, quasi-back-office analyst for the Congress to becoming its ubiquitous face on television networks. Modi willy-nilly would become the surname I encountered at every nook and corner. And on every show.

“Mr Jha, Modi stands for development”, the popular bespectacled face who had mesmerised the nation with his trademark theatrics, was implacable.

“India needs his Gujarat model”. He sounded like the saffron party’s campaigner-in-chief himself.

“ Seriously? ”, I pushed back. “Are we saying that we have become a $ 2 trillion economy without development? Are you aware that India has grown at nearly 7.8% average GDP during 2004-14 and lifted over 140 million people out of poverty ? Yes, there are problems, but we are the global sweet spot after China. So what new “development” are we talking about?”.

It was my early discovery that facts, data, statistics and evidence mattered little in the noisy public discourse. Modi’s Acche Din ( Happy days) was a precursor to what would be Donald Trump’s astonishingly successful Make America Great Again ( MAGA) shibboleth that would transmogrify into a movement, a neo-Republican vote bloc. On every parameter, America was the dominant superpower in 2016, but Trump had altered the political conversation. Both Modi and Trump would go on to annihilate their beleaguered and stunned opponents.

On July 11, 2025 , a bridge in Vadodara district of Gujarat collapsed. It killed 20 innocent people for no fault of theirs. Barring a tiny fleeting mention, the news cycle cursorily buried it. They cannot be blamed. When the Morbi bridge fell in October 2022, its death toll of 135 people did not affect the electorate whatsoever.

The BJP returned to power in the assembly elections that were held just a few months later with a massive mandate. In Uttar Pradesh's Lakhimpur-Kheri, the son of the local Member of Parliament was arrested for driving his jeep mercilessly into protesting farmers in October 2021. In the assembly elections just five months later, the BJP won all 8 assembly seats in the Lok Sabha constituency with handsome margins.

I was reminded of my unforgettable confabulation with the suited-booted corporate schmoozer in 2004: “These things don’t matter. They happen all the time”. But do they? And just because they happened in the past, true or exaggerated, must we silently condone the brazen dismantling of what was once a democratic and secular role model to the world?

We were once a newly independent country that had boldly resurrected itself from a pulverised economy and a harrowing bloody partition, to embrace religious diversity and inclusive growth, and become a lighthouse to new societies battling seemingly irreconcilable contradictions.

Societies pay a huge price for not just bad choices but even for temporary blind-sidedness. The Congress’s underwhelming defense of itself led to an unprecedented wave of support for Modi, enough for its people to shockingly ignore the deadly pogrom of 2002, fake encounter killings, rise of crony capitalism, the ruthless decimation of dissenting voices, the unrelenting intimidation of brutalised minorities.

A manufactured cult

A cult was born, or more appropriately, manufactured. The Gujarat model is now trumpeted as Modi’s India by his acolytes. In his model, all you do is build highways, expressways, metro lines, trains, ports and highways. And even have an eponymous cricket stadium.

In her Pulitzer Prize winning book Autocracy Inc, author Anne Applebaum talks of disinformation, surveillance and propaganda as the trifecta of modern-day autocracies, democratically elected leaders who surreptitiously through regulatory and media capture change the destinies of nations.

As I write, the Supreme Court calling out India’s police state (Why are you fighting political battles, ED?) , and the alleged attempt by the Election Commission to disenfranchise voters in Bihar are a warning; Politicians may love power, but despots will never give it up.

Even as Modi continues to boast about his infrastructure push, he has not yet understood the core principle of political leadership; societies need a bridge between communities before they pay their toll-tax for a shimmering patch of concrete. And tragically for Modi, even they are crumbling. And broken.

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