India’s push for global ambitions cuts deep at home
Social, cultural paradoxes hinder economic growth
NUH, India — Inside a sprawling golf resort south of New Delhi, diplomats were busy making final preparations for a fast-approaching global summit. The road outside was freshly smoothed and dotted with police officers. Posters emblazoned with the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi bore the slogan he had chosen for the occasion: One Earth, One Family, One Future.
Not far away, however, were the remnants of bitter division: grieving families, charred vehicles, and the rubble of bulldozed shops and homes. Weeks before, deadly religious violence had erupted in the Nuh district, the site of the resort. The internet was shut down, and thousands of troops were rushed in. Clashes quickly spread to the gates of Gurugram, a tech startup hub just outside New Delhi that India bills as a city of the future.
These scenes sum up India’s contradictions as it basks in its moment this weekend as host of the Group of 20: Its momentum toward a bigger role in a chaotic world order is built on increasingly combustible and unequal ground at home.
Modi, India’s most powerful leader in decades, is attempting nothing less than a legacy-defining transformation of this nation of 1.4 billion people.
On the one hand, he is trying to turn India into a developed nation and a guiding light for the voiceless in a Western-dominated world. The country, now the world’s most populous, is the fastest-growing major economy, adept digitally and awash in eager young workers. It is also a rising diplomatic power that is seeking to capitalize on the frictions of the superpower competition between the United States and China.
On the other hand, Modi is deepening fault lines in Indian society with an intensifying campaign to reshape a vastly diverse country, held together delicately by a secular constitution, into a Hindu state. His party’s efforts to rally and elevate Hindus — both a lifelong ideological project and a potent lure for votes — have marginalized hundreds of millions of Muslims and other minorities as secondclass citizens.
The question for India, as Modi seems poised to extend his decadelong rule in an election early next year, is how much the instability caused by his religious nationalism will hinder his economic ambitions.
The sectarian clashes in Muslim-majority Nuh were sparked by a religious march held by a right-wing Hindu organization that falls under the same Hindu-nationalist umbrella as Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.
They were only the latest flare-up in what has become a seemingly constant state of tensions.
Emboldened right-wing vigilantes and the aggressively Hindu-first messaging of BJP politicians have left the country’s Muslims and Christians in a perpetual state of fear and alienation.
The northeastern state of Manipur, where its top leader has employed the BJP’s majoritarian playbook, has been burning in ethnic conflict for months, with about 200 people killed and regions effectively partitioned along ethnic lines.
In the restive Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, the government has suspended democracy for four years and is responding to any grievance with a tightening crackdown.
Asked whether his government had discriminated against religious minorities, Modi said during a state visit to Washington in June that there was no discrimination in India under its democratic values.
“We have always proved that democracy can deliver,” he said during a news conference with President Joe Biden. “And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.”
Yet BJP politicians continue their divisive rhetoric even when Modi is on the global stage. In 2020, for example, as Modi and President Donald Trump were addressing a stadium in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat, large swaths of New Delhi were engulfed in deadly violence that had been incited in part by BJP leaders.
As India’s economic growth largely enriches those at the top, the masses are still waiting for their promised prosperity. While India is now the world’s fifth-largest economy, ahead of Britain and France, its average income — a key indicator of living standard — remains in the world’s bottom third, next to countries like Congo.