The Redeemer

As he forged ahead, transforming India since assuming power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi knew that politics was not only about performance but also about resonance. The former long-serving chief minister of Gujarat was an outsider to the workings of Lutyens’ Delhi, long dominated by elites who thrived on rent-seeking and a complicit ruling class. His task was not easy, yet Modi had an ear to the ground and understood how deeply people longed to be rid of the vices of corruption and all forms of appeasement, especially in a wounded civilisation where the aspirations of the majority community were stifled and mocked in the name of political expediency. He refused to connive with the misdeeds of Delhi’s grandees. His commitment was to protect the people, the outsiders with whom he struck a chord. In doing so, Modi endeared himself to the masses who cherished the man from their midst in the hallowed seat of power at the Prime Minister’s Office, re-electing him a record third time—only the second such instance in free India’s history—a feat even the powerful Indira Gandhi had failed to achieve.

Modi’s mission in Delhi was threefold: political, economic, and cultural.

The first was to restore trust in the rule of law. Unlike previous dispensations, no chits would be passed from party headquarters or from the home of any party bigwig to ministries carrying instructions on policy. He would not assign weekly time slots to billionaires to air their views, grievances, and demands, as was the practice under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Nor would he issue token statements to placate minorities, as others had done to pull in votes while showing little concern for the majority community whose interests were routinely sacrificed at the altar of pseudo-secularism. Instead, he pledged to end all forms of discrimination while also upholding the inherent values of Hinduism (‘I, the Hindu’, Open, August 23, 2020). 

At a time when people were losing confidence in governments and institutions because of corruption, nepotism, and governmental privilege, Modi stepped in to revive the economy and become the rainmaker for a country in need of a moderniser. Old playbooks were discarded, and he introduced what writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call “antifragility”, the opposite of being fragile. As Taleb explains, the concept “is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

And Modi was destined to do things on his own terms, transforming the entire country first by dismantling the cosy club that thrived in the national capital and extended beyond politics into the worlds of academicians, industrialists, cultural figures, and even socialites, a grouping that gained advantage from the status quo. Modi had said so before taking over as prime minister, in an interview with Open in the heat of the 2014 election campaign. “I believe in minimum government and maximum governance. The country is facing trouble on all fronts because of maximum government. It is interfering with every aspect of life; it is not for changing the lives of people, but to benefit a few rent seekers who think it is their God-ordained right to rule,” Modi told Open in May 2014 (‘I Will Break the Delhi Cabal of Status Quoists’, May 18, 2014).   

And there was bound to be disquiet, with some unsettled people fighting back to regain lost glory. Open had reported earlier that no other government and its policies had been scrutinised by the courts and other institutions in the face of grievance-peddling and agitation by those who saw the Modi regime as a threat to their hold over the estates they had long controlled. And they were at it barely weeks after Modi took over in 2014, an indication of the high stakes in maintaining the establishment’s status quo.

The ‘award wapsi’ drama was the first attempt. It took shape in the run-up to the Bihar polls in 2015 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) faced the combined might of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad, a numerically formidable alliance. Hindi poet Uday Prakash, protesting against the 2015 murder of scholar and rationalist MM Kalburgi, returned his Sahitya Akademi award. Nayantara Sahgal and Ashok Vajpeyi—a Congress partisan elevated as a cultural czar by Congress veteran Arjun Singh—followed. Others who returned awards included Krishna Sobti, Kashinath Singh, and Keki Daruwalla. The orchestrator of this move was Vajpeyi (‘The Politics of Grievance’, January 18, 2021). 

When one looks back, of the 39 or so writers who returned their awards, 26 did not return their souvenirs, only 13 returned their mementos; four of them neither returned their memento nor their prize money, but returned merely their award.

Modi remained undaunted by such controversies and unfair accusations against him because he was expecting all that and more, having shaken up the comfort zone of many. He went ahead with his plans for India. In its first 10 months in office, the government, compared to its predecessor, racked up a lot of credits—broadly, the push for ease of doing business (such as shaking up the bureaucracy), restoration of governance credibility (its transparent auctions for coal mines, for example, and the creation of a fair template for monetising scarce natural resources), revival of the economy’s growth momentum, and the brave efforts to push politically tough policy initiatives (like signalling an end to the open-ended nature of subsidies and diluting land acquisition norms). Some of these pointedly pro-reform decisions came despite stiff opposition from other parties, including Congress.

Prime Minister Modi had his focus on the common man, too, starting with the Swachh Bharat Mission and in offering toilets and LPG connections to improve the lives of a vast majority of Indians. Before the launch of Swachh Bharat, only 38.4 per cent of rural households had toilets in 2013-14, and this touched 84.3 per cent in 2017-18, and 98.5 per cent in 2019-20.

Similarly, in May 2016, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (MoPNG) introduced the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) to make clean cooking fuel such as LPG available to rural and deprived households. It was implemented using the money saved on LPG subsidies through the Centre’s ‘Give It Up’ campaign. The prime minister had first made that public appeal on March 27, 2015, inaugurating Urja Sangam, a global energy meet. The Centre later said that the response had been all the more tremendous as he had promised to use the proceeds to help liberate poor women from the scourge of smoke-filled stoves that typically use coal, cow-dung cakes and firewood. In an interview to Open in 2021, the year he completed 20 years in office, first as chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 and as prime minister since, Modi had said, “My experience of 20 years as head of government says that people in government often underestimate people’s power. When we trust their power and connect with them, we get results. The country has seen this during the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Give It Up, etc. I have seen this in my Gujarat days too. The biggest difficulty of the governments in our country is the ‘silos’. And unfortunately, all the independent commentators have also become accustomed to silos. Because of this, they have no idea what are the results of an ‘integrated approach’ and ‘whole of government approach’. (‘It Is Important that Every Youngster Get Opportunities, Not Assistance that Keeps Them Dependent but the Support that Makes Them Self-Reliant To Fulfil Their Aspirations with Dignity’,
October 22, 2021).” 

But then, there was no respite from political rivals dragging Modi’s name into controversies, as evident in the Rohith Vemula suicide case of 2016. The 26-year-old PhD student took his own life for several reasons, including a grouse against the CPM-led student outfit, the Students’ Federation of India (SFI). Yet, strangely, the attack was directed at the Modi government for not saving his life and for allegedly being insensitive to the rights of Dalit and underprivileged students. Coming from Congress, which perpetuated elitism, this was ironic.

Quite ironic too were the Rahul Gandhi-led campaigns against corporate oligarchy on Modi’s watch. Congress, which had suffered from the ‘Manmohan malady’—where the government was made accountable to a panel led by then party president Sonia Gandhi whose main ambition was to anoint her son as prime minister—has a long history of promoting cronies. Apart from designated time slots to address the grievances of loyal industrialists who often tweaked policies in their favour, the priorities of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) had left the Indian banking system in uncertainty. Non-performing assets (NPAs) in the banking system fell from 11 per cent of loans disbursed in 2014 to 0.6 per cent in 2025, as infrastructure spending grew manifold from `1.5 lakh crore during 2009-14 to `55 lakh crore during 2019-25. That UPA’s generous offers to cronies in industry had created a mess in the banking system was pointed out by none other than former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor and Rahul Gandhi’s confidant Raghuram Rajan. The late Ahmed Patel was the point person for such arbitrary decisions made at the behest of Sonia Gandhi during what economists now call the wasted UPA years, marked by policy paralysis, favouritism and corruption. Back then, select industrial houses fixed policies.

That left Modi with many things to fix.

In hindsight, it can be said that the benefactors of previous dispensations led by Congress and its coalition partners—who had considered their interests supreme—did not take kindly to Modi’s commitment to good governance and transparency, from allocation of natural resources to setting up competent organisations to check misuse of government machinery, which was par for the course in their heyday. As a result, every single policy of Modi’s was dragged to the courts, which ultimately endorsed them all.

Allegations about the Rafale deal fizzled out, although Rahul Gandhi remained in the business of creating a record of sorts by handing out sound bites. Such deals only cemented India’s war preparedness and modernised its offensive capabilities. As luck would have it, in the recent limited war with Pakistan, the headquarters of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Muridke was struck by four Crystal Maze missiles, while the Jaish-e-Mohammed facility at Markaz was targeted with six SCALP missiles launched from Rafale fighter jets, all thanks to initiatives by Modi in the face of criticism from rivals jealous of his popularity.

As Open had reported earlier, most allegations against the Modi government, including against its efforts to modernise agriculture and during the Covid-19 crisis, failed to stick. Modi and his government emerged as ‘Vishwamitra’—the pharmacy of the world during Covid—supplying medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines to several countries. This demonstrated the country’s capability and resilience, as well as its resolve to weather any storm (‘Rewriting the India Story’, September 1, 2025). 

Rahul Gandhi, whose playbook mirrors Western strategies employed by political parties abroad and shaped by advisers elsewhere, has become a rebel without a cause, reduced to an irritant in Indian politics. His attempts to undermine India’s efforts during Covid while promoting the Pfizer vaccine exposed the bankruptcy and immorality of his positions. From the ‘Chowkidar Chor Hai’ campaign—rejected by the electorate—to ‘Vote Chori’ now, there is an inescapable pattern comprising the cutting-edge weapons of cancel culture, including false narratives, shoddy sources, suppressed evidence, dubious claims, and more. As Open reported recently (‘All Sound and Fury’, August 18, 2025), the ‘vote chori’ allegation follows similar charges against the Maharashtra Assembly election, held in November last year. Casting aspersions on election results is now entrenched political weaponry in the arsenal of Congress which, along with other Opposition parties, is currently engaged in a disruption project related to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. It is noteworthy that the Election Commission of India (EC) deleted over 65 lakh names in poll-bound Bihar compared to the last election, based on legitimate reasons. Ironically, despite a one-month leeway given by EC for filing of complaints and their redress, fewer than 2,000 complaints have been received, mostly from individuals. Using Bihar’s SIR as the excuse, Congress and Modi’s opponents in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, both crucial poll-bound states next year, have started raising the bogey of a possible electoral rolls manipulation to deflect attention from likely flagging political prospects. As a matter of fact, allegedly pro-Congress psephologist Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Lokniti, a research programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), withdrew a post castigating the Election Commission and apologised for sharing a data “error”.

And yet, certain think-tanks, political affiliates, and their echo chambers wilfully ignore India’s sweeping strides in preparedness, especially in defence infrastructure, that now allow it to stand its ground and challenge global powers.

The caravan rolls on.

governanceIndian economyIndian politicsModi at 75Modi’s missionNarendra Modi