The 2024 national elections braked India’s slide into authoritarianism but did not halt it. The Narendra Modi-led Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured 240 of 543 parliamentary seats even as, diminished by voter pushback, the BJP lost 63 seats. Failing to secure the requisite 272-seat majority, Modi forfeited the ability to command a solely BJP national government. Reliant on partners in the seemingly unsteady National Democratic Alliance (NDA), on June 9, Modi assumed office as prime minister of India for a third term.
On June 4, in his victory speech, Modi underscored the religionisation of state and government, rallying: “Bharat Mata ki [Jai]” (Hail to Mother India), a slogan promoted by Hindu nationalists. Bharat Mata, the nation as goddess, objectifies and feminises the state wherein control over women is critical to nationalist assertion. Bharat Mata is associated with Akhand Bharat (undivided India), the delusive once-future homeland of Hindus.
Modi spoke of Odisha and the BJP’s sweep of the 2024 elections, taking 20 of 21 seats. Commending the state’s excellent performance, Modi extolled that, for the first time, the land of the “great god Jagannath” would install a BJP chief minister. A male Odishan tribal figure, Jagannath has been deified, Hinduised, as a manifestation of the deity Krishna.
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Modi omitted to note the BJP’s downturn, focusing instead on the exceptionalism of a third consecutive win, stating, “In the third term, the country will write a new chapter of big decisions, and this is Modi’s guarantee,” continuing, “the NDA government will put a lot of emphasis on uprooting all kinds of corruption.” The reference to eradicating corruption was incongruous, given the BJP’s reported recent collusion in the electoral bonds scandal.
The NDA secured a majority in the 2024 Lok Sabha, with support from BJP partners, Telugu Desam (TD), Janata Dal (United), and the ultranationalist Shiv Sena. Modi’s allies include incoming Andhra Pradesh chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, of TD. Following initial criticism of Modi in 2002 relating to the Gujarat pogrom, Naidu had acquiesced to the BJP leadership. In Delhi, in 2024, the BJP won all seven seats, lost 14 seats in Maharashtra, lost six seats in West Bengal, gained one seat each in Chhattisgarh and Kerala, and secured nine of 14 seats in Assam. Considering the 2019 revocation of Article 370 and India’s continued siege on Kashmir, what does it mean for Kashmiris to have the BJP secure 2 of 5 seats in the 2024 elections?
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP lost 29 seats. Modi had consecrated the temple in Ayodhya in January on the wreckage of Babri Masjid, a momentous marker for the Hindu Nation. To do so, land was appropriated from local communities, while BJP policies disaffected Muslim, Dalit, and other caste-oppressed groups, impacting electoral decisions against the party.
People attending Ram Temple consecration ceremony in Ayodhya on January 22, 2023. Photo: X (Twitter)/BJP4India.
Speech-Acts
Between 2014 and 2024, Narendra Modi’s words sought to remake India. The speeches attest to Prime Minister Modi’s unrestrained power within his government to reconfigure a gigantic electorate. Modi’s words conjured a world wherein aggrieved Hindus across India may believe in his salvific power to lead India to glory. Modi’s speeches – fervent, narcissistic, significant – became the locus of engagement between him and his “subjects”. Modi’s domineering oratory marshalled crowds, turning his government’s repeated incapacity and misconduct into grievances against those who critique and oppose his positions, his party, and its ideological and political agenda.
Innumerable speech-encounters between Modi and his subjects were formative in delivering India for the Hindu Nation in 2014 and 2019. His rallies were thronged with people, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands. His speeches extended the illusion of intimacy between him and the people while simultaneously reflecting the rising grandeur and drama of his role. Modi spoke to Hindus as a people, a unitary collective. He narrativised political messaging to create fear. The Prime Minister used speech-acts to ostensibly command, convey, scold, accuse, threaten, pledge, endorse, educate, amass, convince, mobilise, and govern. A vortex of emotions and meanings, catalysed to emit strength, induce behaviours, and exhort masses of people.
How have Modi’s obfuscations of state power misled the public? In 2023, the Indian Penal Code (IPC, 1860) was replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS, Indian Justice Code), effective July 1, 2024. Modi termed it: “A watershed moment in our history…the end of colonial-era laws. A new era begins with laws centred on public service and welfare.” In actuality, the BNS broadens the definition of terrorist actions beyond what the extreme Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) encompasses, curtails freedoms, targets political opponents and dissent, and criminalises “intentions” and “feelings”.
Modi’s speeches and appearances, carefully crafted, fashion an iconography of allure and invincibility. The deification of Modi, an elected leader, has been self-purposed to induce attachment and ecstatic merger between Modi’s aura and people’s aspirations. Modi presents himself as the spiritual force able to realise people’s yearnings. Modi professes to stand for India’s fulfilment. To those who feel powerless, he bestows the promise of power. To those who feel belittled, he bestows the promise of pride. To those who feel wronged, he bestows the promise of retribution. To oppose Modi, the leader, therefore, is to betray the nation. To unite with the leader promises the achievement of greatness.
The intensity of the speech-encounters between Modi and his Hindu subjects has become the performative mechanism for creating a shared social world for his acolytes that simultaneously serves to exclude “Others”. Stronger than the sum of its making, this habitus has repeatedly inflamed Hindutva adherents to vengeance and redemption. Violence is promoted as a form of personal and national purification.
On May 26, in a televised interview, Modi stated that “Parmatma [god] sent me for a purpose…I have completely dedicated myself to god.” In asserting that his presence on earth as divinely ordained, does Modi see himself as a messiah incarnate? Was Modi seeking to imply that his grip on India’s prime ministership is without end?
Like others before him, Modi relies on repetition to orate the import of an idea and stir an audience. His words codify national enemies, seek to mobilise, and expand Hindutva’s base, and guide “ordinary people” away from the disarray in the political and economic life of the country. In the time of social media, these exhortations reverberate, amplified through platforms such as WhatsApp and X, rendering Modi omnipresent across India.
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Fascistic collusions
Modi has been vigorously supported by henchmen, old cronies who helped deliver the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 and newer disciples of the current regime. His calls to action were repeatedly prolonged by Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati/Giri, and others. A wave of emergent front runners responded, using virulent speech, even calls to genocidal violence, to gain prominence and contend for power within the party’s hierarchy. Repeatedly, the prime minister failed to call them to order.
Taken together, the Hindutva leadership’s sinister and public vilification of minorities, the political opposition, dissenters, and “seditious” Hindus; comprehensive engineering of social facts; and demagoguery have reified fascistic Hinduism and architectured its manifesto. Most distressing is how this massive and malicious enterprise has found deep resonance among millions and millions of people of dominant descent in India. Irrespective of social conditions, such predilection is not a given and cannot be normalised. It is the dangerous outcome of the collision between authoritarian rulers and majoritarian desires, built upon the fault lines of an inveterate casteist, classist, gender oppressed, and segregated society.
The Hindu Sena, one of Hindutva organisations which filed the intervention application in the case seeking a probe into hate speeches by Muslim leaders. Photo: Facebook/HinduSenuOfficial
Hindu nationalists have used hate speech to provoke grassroots proponents and fence-sitters, using hostile messaging to proliferate political institutions and social media and target opponents, media, and vulnerable communities. The BJP-led government routinely exploited dishonest speech, illiberal governance, and toxic masculinity to militarise the state and massify the Hindu Right’s cadre. Hindu nationalist leaders manipulated the escalating participation of Hindutva-inclined civil society into colossal, riotous actions to exact retribution and discipline voters. Many who did not actively participate, acquiesced through silence.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state of over 250 million, 19% of whom are Muslims, the BJP’s 2024 losses also attest to voter concern regarding incumbent head of state, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu nationalist hardliner. Adityanath has directed various campaigns to override the rights of Muslims and other vulnerable communities. In a video that surfaced in 2014, he reportedly stated that: “If [Muslims] take one Hindu girl, we’ll take 100 Muslim girls. If they kill one Hindu, we’ll kill 100 Muslims.” Adityanath enabled Hindu right-wing activists to make significant inroads within the state machinery. The National Crime Records Bureau data shows that 23,612 riots were reported in UP from 2017-2019.
The Hindu nationalist sweep of Odisha in the 2024 elections is a contrary case in point. Addressing a series of public events in Odisha, in May 2024, Modi, the prime minister of a constitutionally secular republic, started a meeting by invoking Hindu gods: “Jai Jagannath! Jai Sri Ram!” At another, he claimed that the people had developed a “deep emotional connection” with the BJP. At yet another event, Modi spoke of “unprecedented achievements” to be heralded by his government in the next five years.
In Odisha, Hindutva workers were inspired by the BJP’s coalition with the Biju Janata Dal as early as March 2000. Just before, in August 1999, Sheikh Rahman, a male Muslim garment merchant, was tortured in Padiabeda, Mayurbhanj district, his hands severed, burned to death. Approximately 10 percent of the state’s population was conscripted by Hindutva organisations between 2000 and 2008. Dalits and Adivasis were criminalised for their beliefs, practices, and counter-memory, and refusal to be forcibly assimilated into dominant Hinduism. Adivasis across Odisha were forced to chant, “Garbh se kaho hum Hindu hai” [Say with pride that I am a Hindu] at majoritarian rallies. Dalits who elected to convert to Christianity were brutalised to “return” to Hinduism. Massified violence against Christians of Dalit and Adivasi descent erupted in 2007 and 2008, in continuum with the ferocious targeting of Muslims in the state. The absence of accountability to these events bolstered the BJP’s electoral incursion in Odisha.
Weaponising acrimony
In weaponising majoritarian subjects as agents of hate, the imaginary of India as a Hindu State is fait accompli. In propagating its mandate, between 2014 and 2024, the BJP government sought to amalgamate prejudice with discrimination. State policy and practice focused on the intersections of racism and cultural nationalism. In doing so, Hindu nationalists erected a “deeper state” establishing crime zones and regulated anarchy to fortify structural racism and criminality, and forge robust proximities between Hindu Right cadres and militias, government, and law enforcement.
India’s Muslim communities and cultures are foremost among those fallaciously presented as causal to India’s historical, present, and future malfunctions. Islamomisia and racialisation of Muslims serves to homogenise Hindus as a “race”. Hatred (of Muslims) has been justified based on concocted behaviours (i.e., hypermasculinity) and falsified evidence (i.e., “love jihad”). Fascistic Hinduism, portrayed as patriotic nationalism, became the war to save and fabricate the Hindu Nation, carried out via malevolent operations that polarised and religionised the body politic, like “bulldozer justice,” anti-conversion campaigns, and the prejudicial citizenship experiment privileging Hindus.
Representative image of a bulldozer demolishing a settlement. Photo: By arrangement/File
In Dumka on December 15, 2019, Modi asserted that the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA), protests: “were a “conspiracy against the country,” calling protesters “conspiracy makers.” On December 18, 2019, BJP leader Kapil Mishra stated, “Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko [Shoot the traitors of the nation, shoot the */derogatory].” On December 22, another BJP leader, Anupam Pandey, reiterated on Facebook Live: “Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko.”
Between December 12 and 23, 2019, police fired on civil society dissenters across India who were protesting the ratification of the CAA on December 12, 2019, resulting in the deaths of 25 persons, a majority of whom were Muslim males. On December 24, Mishra recorded a public message, stating, “Will your eyes open up when the fire has reached your homes?” On December 25, Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati used slurs against Muslims, labelling them “jihadis” and “pigs.” He described anti-CAA protesters as “enemies,” calling for them to be incarcerated, and should they still not conform, for them to “be sentenced to death.”
In Rajasthan, where the BJP lost 10 seats in the 2024 national elections, Modi had stated in April 2024, that a Congress win would lead to the redistribution of people’s wealth [possessions] among “those who have more children” and to “infiltrators,” reportedly referring to Muslims. In May 2024, in Uttar Pradesh, Modi alleged that the “Congress and the [winning] Samajwadi Party tried to spread lies in the name of CAA. They tried to push Uttar Pradesh and the entire country towards riots.”
The right-wing is still in power
The 2024 elections were not a decisive victory for India’s right-wing and the right-wing is still in power. Upper caste urbanite Hindus reportedly voted for the BJP in large numbers. Dissenting votes were driven by minority and marginalised communities, Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, Adivasis, and their allies. Among and beyond them, millions of wage labourers, farmers, and economically shattered communities–devastated by the government’s policies, discourses, and practices—voted to oust the BJP.
Following his investiture on June 9, Modi proposed to “move forward with new energy and new courage.” Can Modi, who has been politically narcissistic, stabilise a coalition government and keep in power those that have abetted him since Gujarat, such as Home Minister Amit Shah? Among the nerve centre of the Hindu Right, the RSS, and its affiliate organisations, many are disgruntled with Modi, and may seek to assert control. This may engineer a crisis within the ranks of the BJP, and lead to the incurable disempowerment of Narendra Modi and a party governed by his ideals. However, this will not halt the march of Hindu nationalism in India. Rather, it may prompt the Hindu Right to rely upon its grassroots infrastructure to optimise previously deployed and new strategies of mass violence and aggressive social disruption.
The electoral gains by the I.N.D.I.A. alliance reflect immense voter discontent with the BJP’s blatantly despotic policies, securitization, dog whistling that provoked social violence, information insecurity, economic implosions, and democratic backsliding. The political terrain is ideologically discordant. Can the I.N.D.I.A. alliance amend its own frailties, to halt the rightward trend and recuperate India’s democracy?
The majoritarian deluge into the country’s bloodstream has induced disorder and caused extensive damage across the education sector, law and order, judiciary, and development, and will require forceful political and social reform. The decade-long divisive and violent transformation of society heralded by the Modi-led BJP and the Hindu Right has led the onslaught on India’s already conflicted democracy and engineered severe estrangements and alienation between neighbours, communities, and peoples who rely on each other in everyday life. Targeted communities and nonbelievers are ruptured from the impact, which like slow-release poison, has galvanised a savagery that has spread to terrify and destroy life-worlds.
In modern history, authoritarian regimes have been unable to retain their stranglehold on power. But they have often not gone quietly. The longer the Modi regime endures, the more likely will be its desperation to grasp at domination and the more hazardous its actions. For the Modi-led BJP government surely fears that, once dislodged, accountability is to come.
Angana P. Chatterji (@ChatterjiAngana) is Chair of the Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Initiative, Centre for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Chatterji’s recent publications include Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India.
