A riveting account of how a popularly elected leader has steered the world's largest democracy toward authoritarianism and intolerance Over the past two decades, thanks to Narendra Modi, Hindu nationalism has been coupled with a form of national-populism that has ensured its success at the polls, first in Gujarat and then in India at large. Modi managed to seduce a substantial number of citizens by promising them development and polarizing the electorate along ethno-religious lines. Both facets of this national-populism found expression in a highly personalized political style as Modi related directly to the voters through all kinds of channels of communication in order to saturate the public space. Drawing on original interviews conducted across India, Christophe Jaffrelot shows how Modi's government has moved India toward a new form of democracy, an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens who are harassed by vigilante groups. He discusses how the promotion of Hindu nationalism has resulted in attacks against secularists, intellectuals, universities, and NGOs. Jaffrelot explains how the political system of India has acquired authoritarian features for other reasons, too. Eager to govern not only in New Delhi, but also in the states, the government has centralized power at the expense of federalism and undermined institutions that were part of the checks and balances, including India's Supreme Court. Modi's India is a sobering account of how a once-vibrant democracy can go wrong when a government backed by popular consent suppresses dissent while growing increasingly intolerant of ethnic and religious minorities.

From the author of Where Power Lies and The Spin Doctor's Diary, comes a new book that tells the story of Narendra Modi's meteoric rise to power on the international stage, The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi's Campaign to Transform India. With exclusive access to the architects of Modi's campaign, Prime Minister Modi and his current cabinet, Mr. Price has delivered an insider's account of this incredible political movement. In examining Modi's character and his position as leader of an increasingly powerful nation, Mr. Price explores the global impact of Modi's victory and its on-going transformation of international politics. On May 16, 2014, Narendra Modi was declared the winner of the largest democratic election ever conducted in human history. But how did this impoverished chai wallah, who sold tea on trains as a boy, rise to become Prime Minister of India? Political parties in the West pride themselves on the sophistication of their election strategies, but they all have a lot to learn from this election. Modi's campaign was a master class in modern electioneering. His team created an election machine that broke new ground in the use of social media, the Internet, mobile phones, and digital technologies. Modi took part in thousands of public events, but in such a vast country it was impossible to visit every town and village in person. How did he do it? Via "virtual Modi"-a life-sized 3D hologram-beamed to parts of the vast nation he could not reach in person. These pioneering techniques brought millions of young people-the holy grail of election strategists everywhere-to ballot boxes. Under Narendra Modi's leadership the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a crushing victory in the 2014 general election leaving the Congress Party of the Gandhi political dynasty in disarray. For the first time in the history of India, an opposition leader swept to power with an overall majority. Former BBC correspondent and political consultant Lance Price was granted exclusive access to Prime Minister Modi and his team of advisers to write this book. With complete freedom to tell the story as he found it, Price details Modi's rise to power, the extraordinary election victory, and its aftermath. The book examines Modi's rise, his unprecedented mass appeal despite the controversies surrounding him (including the West shunning him), and the pivotal role he will now play on the international stage. The Modi Effect exposes the changing landscape of electioneering in twenty-first century global politics through the story of Modi's campaign, when message management and technological wizardry combined to create a vote-winning colossus.

States today are far more engaged in diplomacy than ever before, actively building relations with other states to harness their mutual commercial and cultural strengths. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s outlook to global affairs is no different, yet there is a nuanced approach in linking India’s foreign policy to domestic transformation. While on the one hand, his policies seek to attract foreign capital, technology and open foreign markets for Indian products, on the other, they are geared towards regional stability, peace and prosperity. All events are texts to be analysed and the authors in this volume do so but emphatically underline that India’s diplomacy under Modi has got a go-getting edge, that it is no longer foreign anymore but a matter of public affairs and that with Modi at the helm, India is set to leverage its role and make itself a ‘diplomatic superpower’. The nuanced and thought-provoking essays, by some of the most well-respected analysts and practitioners of diplomacy, make this book a must-read for not just professionals and serious readers but for the uninitiated as well.

Modi's World tells the story of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vigorous diplomacy and his aspiration to elevate India's place in the world. It offers insights into Modi's foreign policy inheritance, his efforts to build on the foundations laid by his recent predecessors, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh, and set more ambitious international goals of his own for India. The book, based on Raja Mohan's columns for the Express, examines the new opportunities that Modi's energy and intensity have generated for India's relations with the major powers and its neighbours in the subcontinent, Asia and the Indian Ocean. Raja Mohan reviews India's new initiatives under Modi to put diplomacy at the service of economic development, deepen the ties with the diaspora, and develop a new vocabulary for Indian foreign policy. He takes a close look at Modi's attempts to end Delhi's defensiveness on the world stage, inject greater flexibility into India's positions on trade and climate change, discard past slogans like non-alignment, and construct a new framework of pragmatic internationalism. At the same time, Raja Mohan takes a critical look at some of the domestic constraints that could limit Modi's ambition to make India a 'leading power' in the world. Crisply argued and written, Modi's World provides the reader a sharp focus on an area of intense activity.

An incisive look at India under Narendra Modi essays by Meghnad Desai, Andrew Whitehead, Sudheendra Kulkarni, Rashmee Roshan Lall, Sevanti Ninan, R. Jagannathan, among others Making Sense of Modi's India attempts to understand the meaning and implications of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party's massive victory in the May 2014 general election, regarded as a watershed in post-Independence India's political history. The book brings together a cross-section of leading voices from academia, media and politics to examine the factors behind the dramatic resurgence of Hindu nationalism and Modi's own meteoric rise.Where is India headed under Modi? What exactly are the contours of the 'new' India he has promised to build? And is his promise of 'development' real or a cover for a hidden agenda? The book raises these questions in an attempt to contribute to - and hopefully shape - the debate on the future of modern India.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.