From the middle of April until early June, staggered over the course of several weeks, the worlds biggest election will take place. More than 960 million Indiansout of a population of 1.4 billionare eligible to vote in parliamentary elections that polls strongly suggest will return Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power for a third consecutive term.

Modi is probably the worlds most popular leader. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 78 percent of Indians approve of his leadership. (The next three highest-ranked leaders, from Mexico, Argentina, and Switzerland, generate approval ratings of 63, 62, and 56 percent, respectively.) It is not hard to see why Modi is admired. He is a charismatic leader, a masterful orator in Hindi, and widely perceived as hard-working and committed to the countrys success. He is regarded as unlikely to turn to nepotism or corruption, often attributed to the fact that he is a 73-year-old man without a partner or children. Modi has few genuine competitors. His power within his party is absolute, and his opponents are fractured, weak, and dynastica quality usually equated with graft. Whether it is through maximizing his opportunity to host the G-20 or through his high-profile visits abroad, Modi has expanded Indias presence on the world stage and, with it, his own popularity. New Delhi is also becoming more assertive in its foreign policy, prioritizing self-interest over ideology and moralityanother choice that is not without considerable domestic appeal.

Modis success can confuse his detractors. After all, he has increasingly authoritarian tendencies: Modi only rarely attends press conferences, has stopped sitting down for interviews with the few remaining journalists who would ask him difficult questions, and has largely sidestepped parliamentary debate. He has centralized power and built a cult of personality while weakening Indias system of federalism. Under his leadership, the countrys Hindu majority has become dominant. This salience of one religion can have ugly impacts, harming minority groups and calling into question the countrys commitment to secularism. Key pillars of democracy, such as a free press and an independent judiciary, have been eroded.

Yet Modi winsdemocratically. The political scientist Sunil Khilnani argued in his 1997 book, The Idea of India, that it was democracy, rather than culture or religion, that shaped what was then a 50-year-old country. The primary embodiment of this idea, according to Khilnani, was Indias first prime minister, the anglicized, University of Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru, who went by the nickname Joe into his 20s. Nehru believed in a vision of a liberal, secular country that would serve as a contrast to Pakistan, which was formed explicitly as a Muslim homeland. Modi is, in many ways, Nehrus opposite. Born into a lower-caste, lower-middle-class family, the current prime ministers formative education came from years of traveling around the country as a Hindu community organizer, sleeping in ordinary peoples homes and building an understanding of their collective frustrations and aspirations. Modis idea of India, while premised on electoral democracy and welfarism, is substantially different from Nehrus. It centers culture and religion in the states affairs; it defines nationhood through Hinduism; and it believes a powerful chief executive is preferable to a liberal one, even if that means the curtailment of individual rights and civil liberties. This alternative visiona form of illiberal democracyis an increasingly winning proposition for Modi and his BJP.

Hindus represent 80 percent of Indias population. The BJP courts this mega-majority by making them feel proud of their religion and culture. Sometimes, it aids this project by stirring up resentment of the countrys 200 million Muslims, who form 14 percent of the population. The BJP also attempts to further a version of history that interprets Hindus as victimized by successive hordes of invaders. Hindus hardly comprise a monolith, divided as they are by caste and language, but the BJP requires only half their support to win national elections. In 2014, it secured 31 percent of the national vote to gain a majority of seats in Parliamentthe first time in three decades a single party had done so. It did even better in 2019, with 37 percent of the vote.

At least some part of the BJPs success can be attributed to Modis name recognition and tireless performances on the campaign trail. But focusing too much on one man can be a distraction from understanding Indias trajectory. Even though Modi has acquired a greater concentration of power than any Indian leader in a generation, his core religious agenda has long been telegraphed by his party, as well as by its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu social society and paramilitary group that counts more than 5 million members. While Modi has been the primary face of the BJP since 2014, the party itself has existed in its current form since 1980. (The RSS, to which Modi traces his true ideological roots, is even older. It will mark its 100th anniversary next year.) The BJPs visionits idea of Indiais hardly new or hidden. It is clearly described in its election manifestos and, combined with Modis salesmanship, is increasingly successful at the ballot box.

Put another way, while Indias current political moment has much to do with supplyin the form of a once-in-a-generation leader and few convincing alternativesit may also have something to do with shifting demand. The success of the BJPs political project reveals a clearer picture of what India is becoming. Nearly half the countrys population is under the age of 25. Many of these young Indians are looking to assert a new cultural and social vision of nationhood. An illiberal, Hindi-dominated, and Hindu-first nation is emerging, and it is challengingeven eclipsingother ideas of India, including Nehrus. This has profound impacts for both domestic and foreign policy. The sooner Indias would-be partners and rivals realize this, the better they will be able to manage New Delhis growing global clout. The Nehruvian idea of India is dead, said Vinay Sitapati, the author of India Before Modi. Something is definitely lost. But the question is whether that idea was alien to India in the first place.

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Indians bristle at reports of how their country has fallen in recent years on key markers of the health of its civil society. It is nonetheless worth contending with those assessments. According to Reporters Without Borders, India ranked 161st out of 180 countries for press freedom in 2023, down from 80th out of 139 countries in 2002. Freedom House, which measures democracy around the world, marked India as only partly free in its 2024 report, with Indian-administered Kashmir receiving a not free designation. Only a handful of countries and territories, such as Russia and Hong Kong, experienced a greater decline in freedom over the last decade than India. The World Economic Forums 2023 Global Gender Gap Index ranks India 127th out of 146 countries. The World Justice Project ranks India 79th out of 142 countries for adherence to the rule of law, down from 59th in 2015. As one legal scholar wrote in Scroll.in, the judiciary has placed its enormous arsenal at the governments disposal in pursuit of its radical majoritarian agenda. Consider, as well, access to the web: India has administered more internet shutdowns than any country in the last decade, even more than Iran and Myanmar.

The social indicator that worries observers of India the most is religious freedom. Troubles between Hindus and Muslims are not new. But in its decade in power, Modis BJP has been remarkably successful in furthering its Hindu-first agenda through legislation. It has done so by revoking the semi-autonomous status of majority-Muslim Kashmir in 2019 and later that yearan election yearpassing an immigration law that fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslims from three neighboring countries, each of which has a large Muslim majority. (The law, which makes it more difficult for Indian Muslims to prove their citizenship, was implemented in March. The timing of this announcement seemed to highlight its electoral benefits.)

Perhaps more damaging than these legislative maneuvers has been the Modi administrations silence, and often its dog whistles of encouragement, amid an increasingly menacing climate for Indian Muslims. While Nehrus emphasis on secularism once imposed implicit rules in the public sphere, Hindus can now question Muslims loyalty to India with relative impunity. Hindu supremacy has become the norm; critics are branded anti-national. This dominance culminated on Jan. 22, when Modi consecrated a giant temple to the Hindu god Ram in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. The temple, which cost $250 million to build, was constructed on the site of a mosque that was demolished by a Hindu mob in 1992. When that happened three decades ago, top BJP leaders recoiled from the violence they had unleashed. Today, that embarrassment has morphed into an expression of national pride. It is the beginning of a new era, said Modi, adorned in a Hindu priests garb at the temples opening, in front of an audience of top Bollywood stars and the countrys business elite.

Modis vision of what it means to be Indian is at least partly borne out in public opinion. When the Pew Research Center conducted a major survey of religion in India between late 2019 and early 2020, it found that 64 percent of Hindus believed being Hindu was very important to being truly Indian, while 59 percent said speaking Hindi was similarly foundational in defining Indianness; 84 percent considered religion to be very important in their lives; and 59 percent prayed daily. The BJPs dominance is primarily demand-driven, said Sitapati, who also teaches law and politics at Shiv Nadar University Chennai. Progressives are in denial about this.

Sitapati has critics on the left who claim his scholarship underplays the militant roots of the BJP and RSS, helping to rehabilitate their image. But on the question of demand and supply: The BJPs dominance is limited to the countrys north, where most people speak Hindi. In the wealthier south, where tech firms are flourishing, literacy rates are higher, and most people speak languages such as Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam, the BJP is decidedly less popular. Southern leaders harbor a growing resentment that their taxes are subsidizing the Hindi Belt in the north. This geographic cleavage could come to a head in 2026, when a national process of redistricting is expected to take place. Opposition leaders fear the BJP could redraw parliamentary constituencies to its advantage. If the BJP succeeds, it could continue winning at the polls long beyond Modis time.

Despite all this, Sitapati contends that the country remains democratic: Political participation is higher than ever. Elections are free and fair. The BJP regularly loses state elections. If your definition of democracy is focused on the sanctity of elections and the substance of policies, then democracy is thriving. In Indian society, he said, culture is not centered on liberalism and individual rights; Modis rise must be viewed within that context.

Liberal Indians who might disagree are vanishing from the public eye. One clear exception is the Booker Prize-winning novelist Arundhati Roy. Speaking in Lausanne, Switzerland, last September, she described an India descending into fascism. The ruling BJPs message of Hindu supremacism has relentlessly been disseminated to a population of 1.4 billion people, Roy said. Consequently, elections are a season of murder, lynching, and dog-whistling. It is no longer just our leaders we must fear but a whole section of the population.

Is the mobilization of more than a billion Hindus a form of tyranny of the majority? Not quite, says Pratap Bhanu Mehta, an Indian political scientist who teaches at Princeton University. Hindu nationalists will say that theirs is a classic nation-building project, he said, underscoring how independent India is still a young country. Populism, too, is an unsatisfying term for describing Modis politics. Even though he plays up his modest background, he is hardly anti-elitist and in fact frequently courts top Indian and global business leaders to invest in the country. Sometimes, they directly finance Modis success: A 2017 provision for electoral bonds brought in more than $600 million in anonymous donations to the BJP. The Supreme Court scrapped the scheme in March, calling it unconstitutional, but the ruling is likely too late to have prevented the influence of big donors in this years election.

Mukul Kesavan, a historian based in New Delhi, argues that it would be more accurate to describe the BJPs agenda as majoritarianism. Majoritarianism just needs a minority to mobilize againsta hatred of the internal other, he said. India is at the vanguard of this. There is no one else doing what we are doing. I am continually astonished that the West doesnt see this.

What the West also doesnt always see is that Modi is substantially different from strongmen such as Donald Trump in the United States. While Trump propagated an ideology that eclipsed that of the Republican Party, Modi is fulfilling the RSSs century-old movement to equate Indianness more closely with Hinduism. Surveys and elections both reveal this movements time has come.

People arent blinkered. Theyre willing to accept trade-offs, said Mehta, explaining how growing numbers of Indians have accepted the BJPs premise of a Hindu state, even if there are elements of that project that make them uncomfortable. They dont think the majoritarian agenda presents a deal-breaker. For now, at least. A key question is what happens when majoritarianism provokes something that challenges public acceptance of this trade-off. The greatest risk here lies in a potential surge of communal violence, the likes of which have pockmarked Indian history. In 2002, for example, 58 Hindu pilgrims were killed in Godhra, in the western state of Gujarat, after a train that was returning from Ayodhya caught fire. Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, declared the incident an act of terrorism. After rumors circulated that Muslims were responsible for the fire, a mob embarked on three days of violence in the state, killing more than a thousand people. An overwhelming majority of the dead were Muslim. Modi has never been convicted of any involvement, but the tragedy has followed him in ways both damaging and to his advantage. Liberal Indians were horrified that he didnt do more to stop the violence, but the message for a substantial number of Hindus was that he would stop at nothing to protect them.

Twenty-two years later, Modi is a mainstream leader catering to a national constituency that is much more diverse than that of Gujarat. While the riots once loomed large in his biography, Indians now see them as just one part of a complicated career in the public eye. What is unknown is how they might react to another mass outbreak of communal violence and whether civil society retains the muscle to rein in the worst excesses of its people. Optimists will point out that India has been through tough moments and emerged stronger. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in 1975, giving her the license to rule by decree, voters kicked her out of power the first chance they got. Modi, however, has a stronger grip on the countryand he continues to expand his powers while winning at the ballot box.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets a crowd in Varanasi, India, on March 4, 2022.Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images

Just as citizens cant subsist purely on the ideals of secularism and liberalism, its the same with nationalism and majoritarianism. In the end, the state must deliver. Here, Modis record is mixed. Modi sees Japan as a modelmodern in an industrial sense without being Western in a cultural sense, Sitapati said. He has delivered on an ideological project that is Hindu revivalism mixed with industrialization.

India is undertaking a vast national project of state-building under Modi. Since 2014, spending on transport has more than tripled as a share of GDP. India is currently building more than 6,000 miles of highways a year and has doubled the length of its rural road network since 2014. In 2022, capitalizing on a red-hot aviation market, New Delhi privatized its creaky national carrier, Air India. India has twice as many airports today than it did a decade ago, with domestic passengers more than doubling in quantity to top 200 million. Its middle classes are spending more money: Average monthly per capita consumption expenditure in urban areas rose by 146 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, India is whittling down its infamous bureaucratic hurdles to become an easier place for industry. According to the World Banks annual Doing Business report, India rose from a rank of 134th in 2014 to 63rd in 2020. Investors seem bullish. The countrys main stock index, the BSE Sensex, has increased in value by 250 percent in the last decade.

Strongmen are usually more popular among men than women. It is a strange paradox, then, that the BJP won a record number of votes by women in the 2019 national election and is projected to do so again in 2024, as voter participation, and voting by women, continues to climb. Modi has targeted female voters through the canny deployment of services that make domestic life easier. Rural access to piped water, for example, has climbed to more than 75 percent from just 16.8 percent in 2019. Modi declared India free of open defecation in 2019 after a campaign to build more than 110 million toilets. And according to the International Energy Agency, 45 percent of Indias electricity transmission lines have been installed in the last decade.

The most transformative force in the country is the ongoing proliferation of the internet, as I wrote in my 2018 book, India Connected. Just as the invention of the car more than a century ago shaped modern America, with the corresponding building out of the interstate system and suburbia, cheap smartphones have enabled Indians to partake in a burgeoning digital ecosystem. Though it didnt have much to do with the smartphone and internet boom, the government has capitalized on it. Indias Unified Payments Interface, a government-run instant payment system, now accounts for three-fourths of all non-cash retail transactions in the country. With the help of digital banking and a new national biometric identification system, New Delhi has been able to sidestep corruption by directly transferring subsidies to citizens, saving billions of dollars in wastage.

The private sector has been a willing participant in Indias new digital and physical economy. But it has also been strangely leery of investing more, as two leading economists describe in this issue (Page 42). Businesses remain concerned that Modi has a cabal of preferred partners in his plans for industrializationfor example, he is seen as too cozy with the countrys two richest men, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, both of whom hail from his native state of Gujarat. Fears abound that New Delhis history of retroactive taxation and protectionism could blow up the best laid corporate plans.

Because he has corralled great power, when Modi missteps, the consequences tend to be enormous. In 2016, he suddenly announced a process of demonetization, recalling high-value notes of currency as legal tender. While the move attempted to reduce corruption by outing people with large amounts of untaxed income, it was in fact a stunt that reduced Indias growth by nearly 2 percentage points. Similarly, panicked by the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, Modi announced a sudden national lockdown, leading to millions of migrant workers racing homeand likely spreading the virus. A year later, New Delhi largely stood by when the delta variant of COVID-19 surged through the country, killing untold thousands of Indians. No amount of nationalism or pride could cover up for the fact that, on that occasion, the state had let its people down.

Now, with a population hungry for good news, India is looking to take advantage of the best foreign-policy deals. There are plenty to be struck in a shifting global order. The United States power is in relative decline, Chinas has risen, and a range of so-called middle powers are looking to benchmark their status. Modi is projecting an image of a more powerful, muscular, prideful nationand Indians are in thrall to the self-portrait.

Modi is seen through a video camera as he speaks at the final session of the G-20 summit in New Delhi on Sept. 10, 2023.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

One window into Indias newfound status on the world stage came last September, after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the stunning announcement that Ottawa was investigating credible allegations that Indian government agents had orchestrated the murder of a Sikh community leader in British Columbia. New Delhi flatly denied his accusations, calling them absurd. The person who was killed, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, had sought to establish a nation called Khalistan, carved out of territory in his native Punjab, a state in northwestern India. In 2020, New Delhi declared Nijjar a terrorist.

A Canadian leader publicly accusing India of a murder on Canadian soil could have been a major embarrassment for Modi. Instead, the incident galvanized his supporters. The national mood seemed to agree with the government line that New Delhi didnt do it but with an important subtext: If it did, it did the right thing.

Its this idea that We have arrived. Now we can talk on equal terms to the white man, Sitapati said. Its not just revisionism to examine how colonial powers masterminded the plunder of Indias land and resources; even the word loot is stolen from Hindi, as the writer and parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor has pointed out. The BJPs project of nation-building attempts to reinstill a sense of self-pride, often by painting Hindus as the victims of centuries of wrongs but who have now awoken to claim their true status. This is why the Jan. 22 opening of the Ram temple took on epic significance, reviving among Hindus a sense that they were rightfully claiming the primacy they once enjoyed.

The flashier the stage, the better. For much of 2023, India flaunted its hosting of the G-20, a rotating presidency that most other countries see as perfunctory. For Modi, it became a marketing machine, with giant billboards advertising New Delhis pride in playing host (always alongside a portrait of the prime minister). When the summit began in September, TV channels dutifully carried key parts live, showing Modi welcoming a series of top world leaders.

Weeks earlier, Indians united around another celebratory moment. The country landed two robots on the moon, making it only the fourth country to do so and the first to reach the moons southern polar region. As TV channels ran a live broadcast of the landing, Modi beamed into mission control at the key moment of touchdown, his face on a split screen with the landing. The self-promotion can seem garish, but it feeds into a sense of collective accomplishment and national identity.

Also popular is New Delhis stance on Moscow, thumbing its nose at Western countries seeking to sanction Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. While Russia exported less than 1 percent of its crude to India before 2022, it now sends more than half of its supplies there. China and India are together purchasing 80 percent of Russias seaborne oil exportsand they do so at below-market rates because of a price cap imposed by the West. There is little consideration for morality, in part because Indians, like many in the global south, now widely perceive the West as applying double standards to world affairs. As a result, theres no moral benchmark. For India, an advantageous oil deal is just that: good economics and smart politics. (India and Russia also share a historic friendship, which both sides are keen to continue.)

New Delhis growing foreign-policy assertiveness stems from a knowledge that it is increasingly needed by other countries. Allies seem aware of this new dynamic. For the United States, even if India doesnt come to its aid in a potential tussle with China in the Taiwan Strait, merely preventing New Delhi from growing closer to Beijing represents a geopolitical win that papers over other disagreements. For other countries, access to Indias growing market is paramount. Despite the BJPs hostility to Muslims, Modi receives a red-carpet welcome when he visits countries in the Persian Gulf.

Indias embrace of its strategic interestsand its confidence in articulating that choiceis of a piece with broader changes in how the country views itself. Modi and his BJP have succeeded in furthering an idea of India that makes a virtue of sacrificing Western liberalism for a homegrown sense of self-interest. By appealing to young peoples economic aspirations and their desire for identity in an increasingly interconnected world, the BJP has found room to advance a religious and cultural agenda that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. This vision cannot be purely top-down; the will of a nation evolves over time. In the future, there will likely be further contests among other ideas of India. But if Modis BJP continues to win at the ballot box, history may show that the countrys liberal experiment wasnt just interruptedit may have been an aberration.

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The New Idea of India: Why Narendra Modi Is the Front-Runner in the World's Biggest Election - Foreign Policy