Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the coming of a “New India” in 2017 – in his Independence Day speech and his New Year’s Eve address that year.
After his re-election in 2019, the project of superimposing a new India gathered pace.
Since then, it is clear to any observer of Indian politics that a transition is under way – the old order is almost done away with.
In the name of attacking Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress Party, and so on, what has been actually happening is a frontal attack on the constitutional republic that came into being in 1950.
By invoking ideas of New India, Viksit Bharat, and Hindu nationalism, a new regime has been ushered in.
Many would choose to believe that the new regime is still some way off.
They would cite the many weaknesses of current power structures to argue that neither a new regime nor a new hegemony has successfully installed itself.
However, it would be well to realise that the regime’s penchant for repression and violence, its impetuousness, and its irritability are not signs of unsteadiness.
It is a regime characterised by excitable assertions of power and a crass show of strength.
Its opponents are at a loss as to how to counter it.
The question of how to tame the current regime must therefore begin with a clear-headed mapping of its core characteristics.
India’s new regime obviously relies on many strategies.
Its public image and operational identity are characterised by the Modi phenomenon, but its core comprises three interwoven factors – three body parts, so to speak: Hindutva makes for the head, civil society for the arms, and the state for the legs that kick hard.
