The Unforgiving Nationalist

THE STRONG LEADER HAS BEEN HERE FOR A WHILE. He changes with the ideological times. Earlier, in the Soviet era, the leader did not require the adornment of the ‘strong’ adjective. He was not just strong; the one who prefixed his supremacy with words like ‘maximum’ and ‘paramount’ ruled the mind and cultural manners of an entire population. The Great Helmsman. Our Man of Deliverance. The First Redeemer. And the mad one from the ‘purest’ of ideological bloodlines called himself the Führer. The leader was not a product of history; he was its sole arbiter.

The new strong leader is a qualified entrant to the democratic space, and his power reflects the sweep of popular will— and the impact of impatience. (The Putins and the Xis and the Kims, or the usual suspects from Latin America, are not included here as their strength comes from not the generosity of democracy but its denial.) The elected strongman, no matter from the left or the right, though mostly from the right, is born of a resentful nation’s rejoinder to the legacy of misgovernance by a weak leadership. When he dares to provide answers to the sighs and sorrows of a nation, he turns the mandate into a covenant. It is a daring that risks the accusation of the God complex; it also gains the leader direct access to the anxieties and aspirations of a people.

The strong leader has already come to acquire the aura of the Deliverer and Destroyer rolled into one towering persona making everyone else in the arena redundant. When the West’s two prominent democracies underwent a cultural shift with the Brexit vote and the Trump-quake, the sociological backdrop to the decisive leader got starker. The nation struck back with a vengeance, and the cosy assumptions of the Establishment collapsed. The abandoned and the orphaned, from both sides of the ideological aisle, rose to claim their home, their history, and their future. Politics as usual has been replaced by politics as national obligation, and the Brexit slogan of taking back control has begun to resonate beyond Britain.

Still, scholars like Archie Brown may argue that the strong leader is a myth of the modern age, that what the agent of change needs today is not extra-large authority but empathetic engagement. And then there are writers, alarmed by the arc of illiberal democracy, warning against autocrats with a democratic patois. What most of them fail to accept is the telluric force that sustains strong leadership legitimised by democracy. The leader who owes his strength to a people who see in him the unrealised possibilities of themselves.

Like Narendra Modi, the longest-serving strong leader in a democracy, and who has convinced the nation that his power continues to empower Indians. No other leader since Independence has told a bestselling national story in which every Indian is imagined as a nation-builder with such authenticity. The strength of his leadership comes from the ultimate benevolence of a democracy: trust. When India was under attack from the sponsor state of jihad, the story he has been telling was updated as an action thriller in which he was the deliverer and destroyer whom Indians could trust even more. The old cliché of the Hindu rate of stoicism gave way to unforgiving nationalism whose Hindu accent had a greater effect in Operation Sindoor—not just in the evocative nomenclature. At Pahalgam, no Indian could have missed the point: the killers first verified their victims’ religion. India’s answer, in its precision, too, brought out the cultural identity of its retaliation.

And that is how Operation Sindoor has brought India to the vanguard of the war on radical Islam. When a faith rearmed declares war on a way of life, it does not mark a clash of civilisations but a crime against civilisation. Modi’s India did not miss this larger message when it came under attack—and did not let Pakistan miss it either. Modi was doing more than bringing Pakistan to the reality of India’s political will and military power to defeat any attempt on its territory or cultural identity. He was placing the strength of Indian nationalism, the leitmotif of his storytelling, way above the power terror, armed by Jihadistan, pretends to possess. The strong leader, in Modi’s telling, draws his strength from a shared sense of Indianness. The pause after the war has only one author: the strong leader, unforgiving and unflinching, who plays out his strength as the ultimate obligation to the nation. Modi is alone in this category.

2025 India-Pakistan warleadershipNarendra ModiOperation SindoorPahalgamUnforgiving Nationalist