What Sets Modi Apart

THE REGULARITY OF COMPLAINTS ABOUT DEMOCRACY IS ONLY MATCHED BY HOW IT continues to be dramatised by leaders elected or chosen. We saw them all in 2022—darers, redeemers, dreamers and the damned. They defied prophecies of extinction and played out the scripts of the saviour and the subversive, providing us with all the necessary adjectives to label the vanishing year.

The most imaginative of them animated tired ideologies with ideas and made their access to the mass mind easier. Their stories have become inseparable from the national text, and they alone revived a dead word like ‘change’. The idea of the nation as portrayed in their storytelling turned out to be a thriller that didn’t breach the decencies of democracy.

Then there were leaders who sought eternity, and their transgressions made 2022 a war-scarred year, and freedom a struggle between fear and longing. They detested democracy because its impulses collided with their fantasy of being the chosen ones. Entire countries were held captive by their existential grievances, their paranoia. They made almost every citizen a suspect in the imagined plot against the indispensable authoritarian.

The leader as streetfighter embodied the romance of resistance in 2022. When the tanks rolled in, the citizen-ruler was in the vanguard, as a living testament to a people’s sorrows and resilience. Freedom was fought in the savaged streets and in the minds inspired by the little leader who stood up for the biggest cause.

Democracy was recharged, condemned as a counter-narrative to the hallucinations of the dictator, and it was manipulated by its faux victims. Still, its passions and its very absence gave us the best stories about leadership in 2022. Its flaws were more bearable than those of its worst practitioners; its virtues were only as good as the moral foundations on which its beneficiaries rebuilt their nations.

NARENDRA MODI, UNARGUABLY the most popular democratically elected ruler today, stood tall among his peers because his convictions and clarity of purpose could harness the possibilities of the world’s most volatile democracy—and he alone realised the uses of power in an unequal society. His playbook was not borrowed from the familiar rightwing modernisers. He wrote his own. In his development model for a nation that still carries the traces of socialism accentuated by laboratory-born secularism, the economic and the cultural are perfectly compatible. It remained productive in 2022 too.

Power, in his playbook, is a relentless campaign; it is a struggle for reclaiming what was lost—or officially concealed—during India’s formative years of nation-building, when religious identities and attitudes were as anti-modern as a cultural awareness of the nation. In Modi’s India, power is a culturally intimate conversation with the reclaimed nation. It only intensified in 2022.

Power is transference. It is a shared sense of pride in self-definitions. Modi, in 2014, offered himself as a mirror to India’s multitudes steeped in cultural diffidence. They saw in him the unrealised possibilities of themselves, and ever since they have remained indebted to him for being there at the helm, as a reminder, as a talisman. Their numbers multiplied as years passed by. We saw in 2022 the awesome velocity of power transference.

Gujarat 2022 said it all. For more than a decade he was the chief minister of India. Every time he sought a mandate of the state, he spoke directly to India. Gujarat was the stage on which he performed the national act of renewal as well as reclamation. Gujarat was what set him apart as a moderniser with a pronounced cultural accent. In 2022, he once more returned home as prime minister, without ever interrupting the conversation he began two decades ago. The response was resounding—the mirror was still gleaming.

If India sees itself differently today, without cultural inhibitions, and without subverting the moral requirements of an open society, it’s because Modi has tapped into the impulses of democracy with an unmatched sense of nationalist responsibility and individual dignity. He may remain incomprehensible to a section of Indians. In their intellectual failure to make sense of him or the India he has re-launched, they create their versions of Modi, the raw material largely drawn from the stereotypes of populism and paramount-leader mythologies. In 2022, too, Modi was the better explainer of himself.

WHAT MODI MEANS becomes clearer with a cursory look at the other great democracy: for many Americans still blinded by the subversive aura of Donald Trump, democracy can be stolen by a frightened establishment. What divides America today is the loss of faith in democracy.

Elsewhere, it was the restraints on democracy that brought out the pathologies and paranoia of leadership, as seen in Moscow and Beijing. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine reminded us of another time in history, when the bloodlust of an imagined imperium crossed borders. What Putin feared most in 2022 was not the indomitable streets of Ukraine but the subterranean power of democracy at home. In Beijing, democracy was still the improbable ‘fifth modernisation’, and Xi Jinping, aspiring to be the eternal leader, wanted to control minds with the same brutality with which he controlled the coronavirus. Democracy breeds the deadlier counterrevolutionary virus and Xi dreads it.

IT WAS THE year in which the citizen president became the resistance hero. Volodymyr Zelensky shook the global conscience as he dared Putin’s tanks in Ukraine. “And we will put our hands up only once, when we raise them to celebrate our victory. As the whole of Ukraine. We do not bargain away our lands and our people,” he said on his besieged country’s Independence Day on August 24.

Freedom continued to be democracy’s unfinished agenda, and its few credible leaders’ biggest challenge.

2022 in reviewBest of 2022G20 meetingglobal leadershipNarendra ModiVladimir PutinXi JinpingZelensky