The Modi Magic in India finally hits the wall

What the brief but intense military confrontation between India and Pakistan has revealed about Indian PM Modi

All the hubris and bravado that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown while projecting his country as the rising superpower with himself at the helm over the past decade has been, well, hubris and bravado.

But that has been the case only for the skeptical minds who can tell a man from a god. For a vast number of Indians spellbound by Modi, though, every word and deed that emanated from him during the period proved his genius. Again and again.

Some in India have gone so far as to call for him to be made the Prime Minister for life. After all, if a leader is doing so much good by enriching the country and reclaiming the country’s lost glory on the world stage, why bother retiring him?

I always hoped this fantasy would hit the wall of reality someday but was pretty pessimistic about it.

I don’t harbor any ill-will against India and empathize with the Indian people in their quest for prosperity and progress. But, despite the ongoing conflation, India is not Modi and Modi alone is not India. So, my hope was for India to prosper and for Modi to face a reality check.

For citizens of Nepal, a country surrounded by India on three sides, what builds up around Modi in his country is no laughing matter. His propaganda—and venom—reaches Nepal faster than it does to some of the remote parts of India.

As has been clear over the past months and years, the agents of his Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are bankrolling bigotry, communal strife and violence in various parts of Nepal. Many in Nepal’s far right parrot and glibly regurgitate the same toxic and venomous lines—including the calls for genocide against the Muslims—in public that Modi’s leaders and cadres speak first in India.

This is why Modi is a foe for anyone in Nepal who wants to seek a just, peaceful and harmonious future for the country. The more he consolidates power in Delhi, the higher is the threat of Modi’s brand of venomous politics being normalized in Nepal.

So to me, it has been a pleasant surprise that the Indo-Pak confrontation following the Pahalgam terror attack has shown some cracks in the seemingly unbreakable propaganda machinery Modi has built.

Following the ceasefire deal between the two sides that was recently announced by the American president Donald Trump, Pakistanis have been largely celebrating but many Indians have been forced into introspection for the first time since 2014.

Pahalgam attacks were the vile and cowardly acts of terror. The perpetrators deserve the harshest of punishment. To the extent it or its proxies are involved in planning and execution of the attacks, the Pakistani government has also to be held to account.

The narrative that emanated from India after the attacks, however, was that India would severely—and potentially fatally—damage Pakistan in response to the attacks. While the official spokespersons from the government and the military kept giving measured and restrained statements, Modi’s attack dogs in the so called ‘lapdog’ media went on to cacophonously call for—and even claim—a total obliteration of Pakistan.

According to them, India as the mighty superpower was at the verge of crushing the Pakistani state in a matter of days if not weeks. Some went as far as to proclaim that India had already occupied and controlled the Pakistani capital Islamabad.

Parallelly, a vile Islamophobic campaign to insult, smear and demonize the Muslims, including those within the Indian border, ensued. The impending obliteration of Pakistan was then equated with the obliteration of the Muslim race.

By the time the realities of war forced India’s hands into a ceasefire, the narrative war had evaded control even from Modi’s apparently unbreakable propaganda machinery. The attack dogs of the ruling party and the leader went on as far as abusing the family members of the foreign secretory of their own country. His crime? Announcing the same ceasefire that the Modi government had agreed to.

A minister at one provincial government and a henchman of Modi’s party, went on as far as obliquely referring to Sofiya Qureshi, a decorated colonel in India army as the ‘sister of the same community as terrorists’. Her crime? Delivering press notes from the side of the Indian army. Even bigger crime? Being a Muslim.

These desperate acts of malice, though, cannot hide the larger debacle for Mr Modi who, along with the entire coterie of his worshipers, had been deluding himself into believing that the world was about to look at him as viswa guru or the world’s teacher. It was only a matter of time before the world leaders, out of awe at India’s power and Modi’s wisdom, came to lay their heads in the viswa guru’s feet.

With the brief skirmish against a much smaller, poorer and economically strained Pakistan, India’s military and strategic weaknesses have been exposed even as it prepares for a potential confrontation with China that is orders of magnitude more powerful than India itself, leave alone Pakistan.

As the calls to obliterate Pakistan have fallen flat with a ceasefire, the propaganda machinery has shifted gear in an attempt to project the ceasefire as a success or ‘mission accomplished’. But a few themes are now slowly emerging that will be uncomfortable for Modi for a long time to come and have the risk of undermining India’s position vis-a-vis Pakistan in the coming days.

First, even as India has legitimate grievances against Pakistan when it comes to the issue of cross-border terrorism and the latter’s proximity, patronage and potentially funding of terrorist groups, India can no longer ignore Pakistan’s sovereignty with impunity when it comes to dealing with the terror. Regardless of the dispute around whether or how many Indian Rafale fighter planes Pakistan shot down, the Pakistani resolve to fight has just changed the equation.

The so-called surgical strikes, which keep the jingoist nationalism in India pumped up including through propaganda films ostensibly based on real strikes, may now come with a much heavier cost in the future.

Second, India so far had been successfully fending off the Pakistani attempt to internationalize the plight of the Kashmiri people. Even though they were much less boastful, Modi’s predecessors had firmly held the red line and refused to give in to any pressure to do so. With a single post in social media, the nuance-light American president has successfully dragged the issue of Kashmir into the international arena. With feeble official push-back from the Indian side, the issue has already gained a lot of international attention.

Third, as an Indian commentator Akash Banerjee succinctly explains in this video, the manifestly arrogant foreign policy of Modi government led by his brazenly loose-tongued foreign minister S. Jayshankar seems to have been heavily backfiring to the extent of virtually isolating India at its moment of need. Banerjee explains that in a tragic irony, Jaishankar’s reel-friendly chest-thumping in the international forums has turned out to have pleased the domestic audience at the cost of India’s diplomatic standing.

The purely transactional and amoral stance that India has taken in the Russia-Ukraine conflict seems to have been reciprocated by India’s supposed allies at Quad and elsewhere. The smaller countries in South Asia, fed up with manipulation and bullying from New Delhi, have also left India in the cold at the moment when it really needed their backs.

In essence, everything that Modi and his acolytes sold as the strengths of Modi’s foreign policy proved to be the exact opposite when the moment of truth arrived.

At this point, it is hard to tell if this setback for Modi will last long, especially when it comes to domestic electoral politics. Once a population elevates a leader to the throne of god, it often follows him to the point of self-immolation. Having known this, Modi has gone as far as suggesting himself before the last general elections that a biological body could not have potentially accomplished the things that he had done:

“Until my mother was alive, I used to think I was born biologically. After her demise, when I look at my experiences, I am convinced that I was sent by god. This strength is not from my body. It has been given to me by god. That's why God also gave me the ability, strength, pure heartedness, and also the inspiration to do this. I'm nothing but an instrument that god has sent.”

I am hopeful that the number of Indians believing in the godness of Narendra Modi is yet to hit the critical threshold beyond which there remains no hope for sanity to prevail in the society. This is why any reality check that comes Modi’s way is good news for India. And for Nepal.

Bonus contents for Nepali speakers: