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This chapter examines the life and political career of Narendra Modi, from his origins in Gujarat to his time with the Hindu nationalist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and his move into politics, first as a backroom figure and then as a politician. It explores too his time as Gujarat Chief Minister, from 2001 to 2014, and the political style he evolved to manage that state. It looks at Modi’s relationship with the Hindu nationalist tradition and the development of his version of Hindutva, which some term Moditva (Modi-ness). Finally, it lays out Modi’s rise to national prominence and his leadership methods as Prime Minister.

This chapter analyses one of the most prominent aspects of Narendra Modi’s attempt to reinvent Indian foreign policy: his push to turn India into a ‘world guru’. It argues that this idea is deeply embedded in Hindu nationalist thinking and is widely supported on among the contemporary Hindu Right. The chapter traces the development of the idea that India ought to do more to build and leverage ‘soft power’ in international relations from the early 2000s onwards. It explores the Modi government’s effort to infuse India’s public diplomacy with Hindu nationalist themes, to promote yoga and supposedly Hindu ideas about the management of the environment and climate. It looks too at the unusual methods that the Modi government used to try to make India a world guru, including the use of inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogues.

Terrorism constituted an important element of the wider ensemble of ideas and images that Narendra Modi’s election campaign disseminated. It reiterated the Bharatiya Janata Party’s idea of India as, essentially, a Hindu nation; Hindus as authentic citizens and Muslims as the ‘other’. Based on a survey of Modi’s election speeches, BJP’s publicity material and the extensive commentary and analysis focused on the person of Narendra Modi, this paper argues that terrorism as an election issue was carefully calibrated by Modi’s managers: a spectre of imminent threats was raised, dangerous ‘other’ identified, the outgoing government was lambasted for failing to quarantine the danger, and an alternative Modi model of battling terrorism held up. This had the effect of crafting the tough, muscular, macho Hindutva icon who would rein in ‘Islamic terrorism’, and consolidating and rallying a majoritarian vote bank behind this leader.

This essay explores the long-distance nationalism of the Gujarati diaspora in the United States, specifically its attempts to influence politics in the Gujarati homeland since 2002. Through an ethnographic focus on key political mobilizations surrounding the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s controversial leadership and entry into the United States, it examines how and why the diaspora actively shapes partisan politics in the homeland. The desire to endorse an illiberal political project of Hindutva through extensive appeals to liberal democracy such as electoral representation, the rule of law and personal freedoms and rights, is a crucial feature of Gujarati diaspora politics. It suggests that the complex transnational linkages between the Gujarati diaspora and Gujarat are best understood in terms of the diaspora’s political and economic aspirations in the homeland.

In Gujarat, close relations between a robust business community, politicians and the bureaucracy crystallized at an early date and survived under the Nehruvian system. In the 1990s, Gujarat liberalized its economy more quickly than most other states. In the 2000s, the economic policy of the new chief minister, Narendra Modi, gave a new dimension to the state’s business-friendliness because it benefited SMEs, the entrepreneurial basis of Gujarat, less than large corporate houses. This “model” had implications not only for the economy (as evident from the problems that the SMEs started to face—as well as the exchequer for fiscal reasons), but also for the society (big firms need fewer workers than SMEs), the polity (grand corruption was a corollary of this pattern), and the environment (big companies were allowed to breach rules and regulations in that domain too). These issues are illustrated by relations between Narendra Modi and Gautam Adani.

This chapter analyses the Modi government’s management of national security. It explores the role played by both inherited Hindu nationalist and newer understandings of India’s role as a potential ‘net security provider’ and ‘leading power’. It examines the government’s handling of India’s relations with China and the United States, as well as with Pakistan. And it addresses the vexed issue of security sector reform and military modernisation. It argues that despite considerable ambition and a concerted and largely successful attempt to build a stronger partnership with the US, Modi’s India struggled to come to terms with the sheer scale of the task of extending and leveraging the country’s hard power.

This chapter analyzes the confluence of environmental politics, biopolitics, and the cultural role of yoga in India. It begins with an overview of India’s current economic development challenges and shows how the country’s current prime minister has subsumed both yoga bodies and water bodies into biopolitical discourse to support a neoliberal economic boom that will contribute to the proliferation of anthropogenic climate change. The chapter then argues that alternative forms of yoga aimed at nurturing intimacy between the human body and the natural world are helping to prevent unnecessary climate-change-producing development activities in India, including the river-linking project and other massive hydroelectric projects that threaten India’s riparian environments.

This chapter examines the Modi government’s foreign economic policy, focusing especially on its reform agenda – including signature projects like ‘Make in India’ – and its relations with other South Asian states. It argues that despite Modi’s rhetoric about globalisation, inclusion and connectivity, his government’s economic agenda was conditioned more by inherited Hindu nationalist ideas than by liberal principles. These ideas, the chapter contends, tethered the Modi government to a form of economic nationalism. It explores the limited reforms pursued, and the consequences for India’s economy and its trade and investment relations with other states. Finally, it discusses the Modi government’s evolving attitude to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which threatened to draw India and other South Asian states further into Beijing’s economic orbit.

Foreign policy has been one of the unexpected areas of focus for the Modi government. This chapter begins with a brief overview of Modi’s inheritance and principal contributions like departure from the long standing non-aligned international position of India. Modi has embraced realpolitik over moralpolitik through his emphasis on ‘India First’, and as a result, India, which was hesitant in the past to draw closer to any major power, has done so with the United States of America. In the next section, India’s engagement with major powers like the United States of America, China, Russia, Europe and Japan is analyzed, and the idea that a structural shift could be observed as India moved closer to the West is discussed. However, India’s neighborhood challenges have been accumulating, and the Modi government has not been able to transcend them. In conclusion, the Modi regime has also focused on soft power with gusto, but this has been neutralized by internal fault lines fueled by vigilante groups.

The Obama Doctrine’s emphasis on soft power, engagement, and American military retrenchment has fundamentally misread the dynamic of power in the world’s most important geopolitical region in the twenty-first century. President Obama’s vaunted Asian pivot remains largely hollow because of the combination of an increasingly authoritarian China’s swelling ambitions and prodigious military buildup, which has coincided with American retrenchment and neglect of its prospective democratic allies in the region, such as Japan and India. Neither American soft power nor the president’s salutary but insufficient and belated attempts to cultivate democratic India and Japan diplomatically will suffice to reverse the precipitous decline in American credibility that is alarming the region. The source of President Obama’s serious and serial errors lies in his untenable depreciation of American hard power as well as his doctrine’s untenable neglect of regime type and ideology as critical variables for identifying friends and foes. The Obama Doctrine has dangerously discounted the importance of Chinese authoritarianism as a source of its relentless expansion while unwisely slighting democratic India and Japan as geopolitical counterweights to China’s hegemonic ambitions.

In the Introduction, Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen and Christophe Jaffrelot elaborate on the unparalleled majoritarian turn of politics in India today, its present effects and future impact. The Introduction delimits the ascendance of Hindu nationalist dominance in India via the institutions of state and within civil and political society, and also names the key elements in the contemporary ascendance of Hindu nationalist dominance to establish a majoritarian state in India. The triumph of the BJP in 2014, the article elaborates, brought about two unprecedented events: never had the Hindu nationalist movement won an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, (the lower house of parliament), and never had this movement, known for its hostility to the personalization of power and its collegial governance, been so influenced by one politician, Narendra Modi. The Introduction outlines the key themes and issues elaborated upon in the interdisciplinary collection that delves into the politics, representations, and aspirations, the aspects and events, and the traumas and dislocations of the seemingly continuous yet structurally reconstituted contemporary experiment to establish a majoritarian state in India.

This chapter analyses the reasons underlying the revival of communalism in western UP in the 2000s, culminating in one of the most extremely violent riots in recent decades in UP in Muzaffarnagar and adjoining districts in 2013. Two longer-term developments played a key role: sustained construction of everyday communalism by the BJP–RSS at the grass roots from the early 2000s, followed by the long and divisive electoral campaign for the 2014 national elections under Narendra Modi; a deepening agrarian crisis which contributed to the breakdown of the relatively harmonious, socioeconomic relationship between Hindus—primarily Jats—and Muslims in the rural areas, making them highly vulnerable to communal feelings. These shifts allowed the BJP through well-organized and sustained mobilization to deepen the sociopolitical divide between these communities, leading to communal tension and riots. While the former constitutes the political and aggressively visible form, the latter constitutes the underlying political economy aspect.

This chapter outlines, by way of background, the evolution of Indian foreign and security policy after the country became independent in 1947. It discusses Jawaharlal Nehru’s dominance in the first phase and the generation of a Nehruvian tradition of thought about India’s international relations. It then explores the shift to a more realist approach under Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, and the post-Cold War transformation of foreign policy, prompted by a looming crisis in India’s economic and diplomatic circumstances. It traces the emergence of a more confident policy of ‘multialignment’ during the 2000s, as India’s economy grew and its regional importance developed with it. In the conclusion, it outlines Modi’s approach, comparing and contrasting it to those pursued by his immediate predecessors, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.

The 2014 national elections were an ideological showdown between the main political parties with distinctly different visions offered to Indian voters. The BJP advocated a de-emphasis on statism and recognition whereas the Congress and many regional parties favored the status quo. Voter surveys of the 2014 election provide clear evidence of this ideological divide both among party members and voters of particular parties. The divide was furthered by Narendra Modi, the chief campaigner for the BJP, whose personal appeal was important to the electoral success of the BJP. Consistent with theoretical expectations ideologically motivated voters were more likely to participate in political activity around election time. They are also able to distinguish between the ideological vision offered by the various parties and coalitions.

Jyoti Puri examines Hindu nationalism’s traffic in a popular strand of yoga, one aimed at enhancing health and wellbeing, which has become popular in India and across the world, and while many ‘yogas’ coexist, this chapter enquires into the Hindu Right’s mobilization of this iteration of yoga in representing India as Hindu, which has gained purchase in India, US, Europe and elsewhere. Puri explores the convergence of support around yoga, raising the question of its political and cultural significance to pro-Hindu forces. Looking at nation branding through the lens of yoga provides an opportunity to consider the image-making that is currently underway, advancing Hindutva’s exclusionary programs at home while navigating imperatives of international politics, business and foreign investment, and other fundamental elements of neoliberal capital.

This chapter explains the reasoning behind the choice of the states and summarizes the findings of the three state case studies. We chose Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Gujarat based on the criteria that the states should be reforming, large, at different levels of development, and with records of fast growth. Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh were similar until the mid-1990s, but then the former took off with per capita income and poverty levels greatly diverging in its favor. Visionary leadership of Chief Minister (CM) Chandrababu Naidu played a key role in this transformation. Bihar suffered from neglect and sometimes exploitation by both national and domestic leadership. However, the state turned around when Nitish Kumar became CM in 2005 and systematically addressed law and order and development issues. Finally, Gujarat has had a more consistent history of sustained growth, but it too took a jump under CM Narendra Modi.

This concluding chapter draws common lessons from the three case studies, discusses the latest developments in the states and their likely implications, and speculates on how the promise of a changed approach to federalism that assigns an enhanced role to the states under the newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi might impact the future outcomes. The chapter argues that scholars need to give greater attention to the study of states to understand the process of development. This is particularly important in a large country like India in which many states house more people than most countries and where state governments wield considerable legislative and executive powers. The new Prime Minister has promised to give states considerable flexibility to amend the laws on the subjects under the Concurrent List of the Constitution based on the local circumstances. This flexibility will considerably enhance the legislative and policy space of the states.