The Modi myth and the false binary of Hindutva vs economic development

A few days after fresh instances of censorship (an actor’s claim of being disinvited from a university event for his anti-establishment views and the cancellation of a scheduled discussion on political prisoners by a prominent Mumbai cultural festival), India hosted a flamboyant visit by French President Emmanuel Macron amidst the fanfare of the Artificial Intelligence Impact Summit 2026 which was held in New Delhi. Most people would say there is no connection between the suppression of dissent and India’s staging of these high-profile events.

For many years now, it has been widely held that the relentless erosion of civil liberties in the country (seen in recurring attacks on minorities, the arrest of civil rights activists, tax raids on media houses and threats to cartoonists and stand-up comics) is attributable to the authoritarian personality of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his powerful appeal as a fundamentalist Hindu leader. Conventional wisdom within the liberal intelligentsia, articulated in numerous books, documentary films and media columns has it that the Hindutva rhetoric of historical injustice and hurt pride has turned millions of Indians into adulators of Modi and the promise he holds out for majoritarian rule.

I have long argued that this explanation, axiomatic for many, is erroneous. The diminution of democratic freedom and of secular rights in present-day India is undeniable. But their cause is far more complex than is commonly suggested.

My perspective, as a writer who combines journalistic research with deep scholarship, is based on a close observation of the socio-political trajectory of post-liberalisation India and a focused study of the western state of Gujarat which has often been described as a laboratory for Hindutva. I visited the state frequently between 2005-2010 to look into its recent socio-political history for causes of the brutal mass communal violence of 2002. I was distracted from my purpose by something peculiar taking place in the commercial capital, Ahmedabad. Every few weeks when I went there it seemed something new had come up: a giant convention centre, a luxury hotel, a flyover, a mall, a highway. A modest, provincial city was transmogrifying before my very eyes.

To call what I was witnessing “development” would have been a misleading way of communicating the complex set of strategies that were at play there, of which the physical structures were only manifestations. It was a new kind of politics being practiced by the state’s then controversial chief minister that I sensed would catapult him to national prominence and find replication at the Central level. I decided to continue looking at Gujarat’s recent past but to change my focus and study this phenomenon.

This was not as simple as it seemed. The backdrop to this unconventional politics was the mandate for development signalled by the 1991 structural reforms programme, a key component of which was the International Monetary Fund-World Bank-propelled push towards urbanisation (cities are the “engines of growth”).

Programmes like the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission provided the basis for the hyper development of a city like Ahmedabad. To make sense of the emerging politics of this developmental model I realised that I had to step outside familiar political frameworks and look instead at the substantial global scholarship on the evolution of the urban form in the neoliberal era at the turn of the 21st century.

Keeping this in mind, I studied the unusually fast-paced construction underway in Ahmedabad and found that what had struck me so vividly on my visits to the city was not a coincidental coming together of random projects but a planned operation. After the ebbing of violence in 2002, Narendra Modi had presented the adverse coverage of the riots in the national and international media to Gujaratis as a calamity, a blow to the state’s asmita, or pride, that needed to be redressed. He asked the state’s people, particularly its business community, to join him in an exercise aimed at changing the negative perception of the state.

In Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein describes how leaders often exploit a crisis to introduce potentially unpopular free market policies counting on the fact that populations may be too traumatised to participate in or resist the change. Sometimes this is done in tandem with developers keen to profit from the mandate for reconstruction.

India’s 1991 shift to a capitalist economy was propelled by a fiscal crisis which required an emergency loan of $2.2 billion from the International Monetary Fund. In 2001, development and government agencies flocked to build a new modern city of Bhuj from the rubble of an earthquake. A couple of years later, Modi embarked on an ambitious exercise to package Gujarat as an attractive business destination. The exercise involved measures such as a biannual “Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit” for potential investors, the refurbishment of ports and highways in the state and, most conspicuously, the makeover of Ahmedabad.

The atmosphere of fear and grim uncertainty following the protracted mob violence of 2002 and the mythology it built around Modi enabled the packaging exercise to be pushed through with minimal oversight and resistance and with a speed that would have been unimaginable in other circumstances. In 2014, glowing claims about this exercise paved the way to his prime-ministership.

These claims were made most visibly by national television anchors in the lead-up to the 2014 parliamentary elections where they referred repeatedly and with breathless awe to the “Gujarat Model”, painting it as a picture of a high-growth, hyper-capitalist model – albeit with poor indices on conventional measures, such as health and nutrition. Had the media done a more in-depth study or looked at available scholarship on the subject, it would have found that the Gujarat Model was not only about “roads, highways and GDP”, as it vaguely claimed, but a much more elaborate global process.

Place marketing is a process evolved in the neoliberal era of making spaces, particularly cities, attractive to people and companies with money to spend, mainly transnational corporations, business travellers and tourists. Scholars have identified a number of strategies that are associated with the process, the most common of which is gentrification. Airports are made over, select neighbourhoods are beautified, and special business enclaves and recreational areas with nightclubs and cafes are created. There are several other strategies that cities use to market themselves, including staging large cultural events, sprucing up historical sites or monuments to attract tourists and fostering a service or industrial specialisation.

By 2005, Ahmedabad had acquired the status of a megacity. The state government increased the area of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation from 198 square kilometres to 500 square kilometres by merging seven municipalities and expanded the total area of the urban agglomeration to 1,300 square kilometres. Eleven-kilometre-long concrete banks with plans for highways and residential blocks came up alongside the river that snaked through the city.

A Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (“double the size of Paris’s La Défense and eight times more built up than the London Docklands”) was conceived. Ahmedabad’s pharma industry and its hospitals, some established as charitable institutions by local philanthropists, were reoriented to brand Ahmedabad as a destination for medical tourism and its old walled city was refurbished to successfully bid for Unesco World Heritage certification in 2017. Some of the projects were already discussed or underway when Modi became chief minister but by bringing them under his ambit and clubbing them with new projects he created an impression of a wide-ranging developmental plan under his leadership.

The Ahmedabad makeover borrowed every rule from the place marketing playbook. But there was a twist in that every element in the Ahmedabad makeover was infused with a Hindutva ideal. For instance, a high street emerging as the new centre of the expanding city acquired a distinctly Hindu ethos while Muslim ghettos on the city margins swelled with refugees escaping mixed neighbourhoods from the city after the 2002 violence. Public space was commodified with a distinct bias towards the Hindu middle class. A new Heritage Walk focusing on violence in the freedom struggle subtly questioned Gandhi’s legacy. Even the city’s name was differently spelt to rid it of its Islamic associations.

The remaking of Ahmedabad suggested that the key to explaining Narendra Modi was through his ideological commitments. He is committed to the Hindutva ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. And he is committed to neoliberalism. And he is committed to both at the same time.

Conventional thinking in the mainstream media projects India’s economic liberalisation programme and Hindutva as two opposing tendencies. The former is perceived as being outward- and forward-looking, cloaked in the accoutrements of modernisation and promises of economic growth and world connectivity, while the latter is seen as being insular and primitive in outlook, peopled by saffron-robed acolytes reliving a mythical past. This construct of economic liberalisation/liberalisation-led development and Hindutva as opposites in the popular media is a false binary.

Hindu nationalism made its presence felt in the early decades of the 20th century but made little headway politically for several decades. It was only in 1989 that the Bharatiya Janata Party won 86 seats in Parliament, marking an upward trend which continued in subsequent years enabling it to form governments in various states and at the Centre.

The congruence between the timeline of the political ascendancy of the BJP and the onset of structural reforms is not a coincidence. That is when the middle class, the BJP’s traditional support base, grew in size from 2.5 million households in 1990 to nearly 50 million in 201. Television freed from government ownership emerged as the trumpeter of this new consuming class which also came to be culturally defined in upper-caste Hindu terms. The communitarian underpinnings of socialism, which provided a logic to secularism by implying that the weak (minority) were entitled to the protection of the strong (majority), were overturned by a vigorously rapacious individualism.

Economic liberalisation provided a favourable climate for Hindutva to grow. And in turn, I suggest, the rise of Hindutva and the climate of religious conflict have played a critical role in realising the project of economic liberalisation.

Three of the country’s most pro-capitalist leaders (Rajiv Gandhi, Bal Thackeray and Narendra Modi) consolidated power on the back of citywide riots. The shaping of Mumbai into a world-class city beginning in the late 1990s saw mill workers forced out of the city, fishing communities displaced, the poor pushed into informal work and large stretches of coastal mangroves destroyed.

Workers of the Shiv Sena and other Hindutva affiliates maintained an atmosphere of intimidation through those years by attacking vehicles and television studios and whipping up a fury with their angry rhetoric over a perceived threat to Indian culture and national security from sources such as a Michael Jackson concert, Pakistani cricketers and Valentine’s Day celebrations.

As Zoya Hasan claims, resistance to the new economic policies of liberalisation was displaced by Hindutva adherents “from the realm of concrete economic policy to a confrontation with the cultural politics of globalization”.

Violence in a restructuring society then is a far more complicated business than it appears to be. The celebrated makeover of New York in the early 1990s, for instance, was preceded by a war against homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes and unruly youth by then mayor Rudy Guliani. Urban geographer Neil Smith called Guiliani’s politics “revanchist”, recalling nationalist reactionaries in 19th-century Paris fighting to reinstate the bourgeois order and to wreak revenge on the working class which had “stolen” their vision of French society from them. Revanchism creates a hierarchy of claims on citizenship.

Justus Uitermark and Jan Willem Duyvendak write in their article “Civilising the City: Populism and Revanchist Urbanism in Rotterdam” that “Revanchism ... is predicated on a belief system that naturalises as universal the interests and cultural codes of the White middle class while at the same time it essentialises marginalised individuals into subjects who cannot be reformed.”

The dehumanising of those whose fortunes are destined to decline in the new economy is a common feature of restructuring. And it explains why Modi emerges stronger rather than weaker from allegations of extreme insensitivity, beginning with his harshness towards victims of the 2002 violence to his apparent unconcern for migrants forced to trudge miles after his sudden declaration of a lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Every display of callousness magnifies his aura as a capitalist moderniser and empowers him to act without blowback. He feeds off bellicosity and usefully extends it to a growing list of targets: protesting farmers, students, civil rights activists and political opponents.

As Ajay Gudavarthy wrote for Scroll: ‘The BJP views the defeated Opposition as prisoners of war. They are deliberately ignored, they are insulted, they are sermonised to, and they are dealt with unfairly. This is an essential feature of the script. … Behaving unfairly towards minorities is an essential strategy for majoritarian consolidation.’

Much of the commentary on India under Narendra Modi is either about the violence against members of religious minorities and Dalits by Hindutva activists or about the administration’s intolerance of dissent and the use of state agencies to punish political opponents and other critics. These align with perceptions of Modi himself.

Astute political analysts are thrown by his arbitrary diktats and his obduracy towards petitioners. Modi’s effusiveness in greeting foreign leaders, his love for the media glare and his penchant for buying bullet trains and building gigantic statues provoke ridicule. The Central Vista project which revamped the historic colonial era Central administrative area in Delhi had one commentator comparing him to a mid-20th century African autocrat with a vanity project; another compared him to Mungerilal, a 1980s Indian television soap opera character based on the chronic daydreamer Walter Mitty. A picture emerges of a fanatical, capricious and megalomaniacal leader, a self-aggrandizing man who is so consumed by bigotry that it is impossible to know what he will do next.

It is a compelling image but it is a myth.

Modi is not a conventional Indian politician. He belongs to the league of capitalist-modernisers like China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro. His motivations are systemic not opportunistic (for the most part) and cannot be understood through the familiar matrix of short-term economic gains and losses and electoral politics that is routinely applied by political analysts.

If we apply the paradigm of the remaking of Ahmedabad, which I would suggest constitutes the Gujarat model to Modi’s leadership of India, we can perceive phenomena such as Modi’s frequent foreign visits, his “Make in India” and similar campaigns to encourage manufacturing activity and his passion for the bullet train (a shiny symbol of speed) as elements of a place marketing exercise to sell India to the world.

All of Modi’s political moves and programmes, including demonetisation, schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana to expand the reach of banking and even huge political leaps, such as revoking Jammu and Kashmir’s special status within the Indian Constitution, become steps (ordering, enumerating, expanding opportunity, extending the formal economy) in a project of neoliberal transformation.

Some borrow directly from Gujarat: the 2014 Swachh Bharat or Clean India mission extended the logic of a 1997-1998 USAID programme in Ahmedabad to improve hygiene and create green spaces to aid the circulation of capital and healthy labour. The hasty beautification of Delhi before the G20 Summit is another instance of the neoliberal preoccupation with appearances. And Modi’s partiality to industrial giants such as the Ambanis and Adani corresponds to the heroic, entrepreneurial role marked out for the ultra-rich by Friedrich Hayek, the grandfather of neoliberalism.

The recurring violence and violent rhetoric against minorities serve to consolidate the hegemony of the majority even as Hindutva ideals find expression in the architecture of an emerging India. And Modi’s reliance on media advertising is of a piece with the surging role of marketing in the public space. One can say that if analysed through the correct framework, Modi’s thinking, far from being arbitrary and erratic, is formulaic and predictable.

India’s democratic backslide too is hardly unique in today’s world. Over the past four decades as country after country has fallen into the embrace of neoliberalism, a new mindset has taken over the world. An economic ideology which projects the market as the answer to mankind’s diverse needs and holds profit maximisation as its motto subsumes all other priorities. The state as the medium facilitating the neoliberal dream has demanded a strengthening of its powers and large enough numbers have lustily cheered it on.

Across the world environmental protections and human rights are being weakened or withdrawn. Reports of violence against racial minorities and refugees and the brazen killings of journalists from various places and an unravelling of civil rights in Donald Trump’s America confirm the fact that citizens’ rights once thought to be intrinsic to democracy are being eroded everywhere, even in the world’s leading democracy.

In India, the line of causation for these phenomena is routinely and unthinkingly drawn to majoritarianism. The widely talked about sociopolitical consequences of neoliberalism, which even filtered into an influential journal of the International Monetary Fund, the bulwark of the free market in 2016, rarely enter into the reckoning. For instance, inequality, which is raging in the world and is currently as high in India as it was in the days of the Raj, according to a recent study by Thomas Piketty and others for the World Inequality Lab.

Indeed, outside of a limited circle of academics and developmental activists, neoliberalism finds hardly any mention. The media and ordinary Indians talk blandly of “development” and “privatisation” as if they are standalone activities, not part of a powerful, multidimensional ideology favouring unfettered marketisation and a top-down approach currently dominating the world.

Most Indians, particularly the country’s fast-expanding middle class – expected to rise to 715 million in 2030-’31 – are in love with Western modernity, a feature they share with other post-colonial societies. It is a powerful dream: of unmitigated prosperity through capitalism, an infrastructure equal to the West, the efficiency of the private sector in the public realm and glossy cities resembling Asian favourites Shanghai and Singapore.

A “new” India, kickstarted by the Congress and grown with intensified zeal by Narendra Modi is coming into being. Ports, bridges, transportation facilities and buildings being constructed or upgraded at a rapid pace. Cities are exploding with towers made up of astronomically priced apartments. India’s road network is now second only to the US and seven bullet train projects are in the planning. And crores of rupees are being spent on extravagant beautification projects.

The widespread fanatical faith in the benefits of “development” means that no discussion is possible on priorities for public spending. And scant attention has been paid to consequences and the steep costs, both financial (the scale of borrowings), environmental and human, of infrastructural development is possible.

Nor has there been much said about aspects of form and aesthetics despite the powerful cultural and symbolic possibilities of place marketing and branding. The absence of public engagement has left a vacuum that Hindutva has stepped into, as one can see from initiatives such as India’s successful lobbying for the United Nations to designate an International Yoga Day and from the birth of a new tourist circuit connecting the temple towns of Ayodhya and Varanasi to Kevadia in Gujarat, the site of the Statue of Unity, a 182-metre-high state of Sardar Patel, an iconic national leader appropriated by the BJP.

Ahmedabad continues to be strategically significant as the stream of world leaders (Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump) and plans for staging the 2030 Commonwealth Games in the giant stadium bearing the prime minister’s name shows. But the city and its remaking in the early 2000s also provides a key to understanding the political thinking shaping the country’s present.

This piece draws the author’s introductory essay to the December 2025 paperback edition of Ahmedabad: A City in the World (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Amrita Shah is a writer, journalist and scholar based in Mumbai.

Source: Scroll
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