Moditva and Its Discontents
- by: Arifa Zahoor Ahmed
- Date: September 9, 2025
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In 2014, when Narendra Modi swept to power promising development, many Indians hoped his government would finally deliver growth and stability. A decade later, Modi has indeed transformed India but not in the sense imagined. The country stands transformed by Moditva, or the institutionalization of Hindu nationalism, where Modi’s populist authority and Hindutva merge to recast India along majoritarian faultlines. The mural of Akhand Bharat or “unbroken India” which includes Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar, and Bangladesh as part of India hangs in the Indian Parliament, and makes plain that Moditva is not just remaking India at home but projecting its majoritarian vision across South Asia. What follows is a study of how Moditva has become entrenched across Indian politics and society, reshaping citizenship and belonging, and testing whether the world’s largest democracy can still call itself inclusive.
The driving force behind this transformation is Hindutva, the century-old ideological project of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organization of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Hindutva’s rallying cry is that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation, and non-Hindus may belong only by accepting second-class status. Under Modi this vision has become the architecture of an ethnic democracy, where the state is reshaped to privilege one community at the expense of all others. Its most brutal expression came in Gujarat where Modi, as chief minister, presided over the 2002 riots that killed more than 2,000 people (most of them Muslims) and led the United States and European Union to bar him for “severe violations of religious freedom.” Gujarat became what Jaffrelot has called the “laboratory of Hindutva,” where CM Modi tested the mechanics of ethnic democracy and refined a playbook that he would later scale nationally as premier. Moditva is no longer a regional experiment but has since become the organizing principle of Indian politics.
Once elected to power in New Delhi, Modi’s government moved swiftly to institutionalize exclusion through law. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 created a religious test for citizenship, fast-tracking non-Muslim refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Coupled with the National Register of Citizens (NRC), it raised the specter of rendering millions stateless in their own homeland. That same year, Article 370 and 35A were revoked, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its constitutional autonomy and opening the door to demographic engineering in India’s only Muslim-majority state. In 2025, amendments to the Waqf Act weakened Muslim control over community property, while a proliferation of state-level anti-conversion laws and “love jihad” statutes criminalized interfaith marriage under the guise of protecting Hindu women. These legal maneuvers by the BJP government were among others that formalized a reengineering of the Indian state along ethno-religious lines.
The impact of Moditva is felt daily in the lives of India’s minorities. Since May 2025, more than1,800 Muslims have been deported to Bangladesh without due process, despite the absence of any treaty permitting such expulsions. In Gujarat, over 12,000 homes were demolished in Ahmedabad, disproportionately targeting Muslim families. Outside the law, vigilante violence thrives. Lynchings over beef consumption, and policing by “cow protection” squads and white collar bhakts across school canteens and government offices, are routine across cities and villages. Instead of curbing these actions, the state often amplifies it, with BJP leaders framing Muslims as infiltrators, demographic threats, or civilizational enemies.
The logic of Moditva extends into India’s peripheries. In Manipur, ethnic clashes between Hindu Meiteis and Christian Kuki-Zo groups since 2023 have displaced over 60,000 people and killed over 250 people. Reports of extrajudicial killings, prolonged curfews, and the destruction of religious sites reveal how state institutions often side with majoritarian interests.
Moditva does not obtain with religious bigotry alone; it goes out witch hunting ethnicities and political ideologies that cross paths with it. The 2020-21 farmers’ protests came at the head of many years of political angst in Punjab, whereby 100,000 farmers had taken their own lives to escape debt and despair between 2014 and 2022. The 2020 farm laws, designed to deregulate agriculture, triggered the largest protest movement under the Modi government, uniting farmers across caste and religion until the laws were repealed. Nearly 700 among them died in the course of these protests. The more recent Bharat Bandh protests in July 2025 saw tens of millions protest new labor codes, underscoring how discontent cuts across religious communities. Growth and stability under the Moditva regime is uneven and exclusionary by design.
The misfortune is that India’s trajectory could have been different. Through discriminatory laws, extrajudicial violence, economic marginalization, and the suppression of regional and class-based resistance, Moditva has steadily eroded the pluralistic foundations of India. Moditva’s malign combination of communalism, rights violations, and Brahminic chauvinism has become the BJP’s governing ethos, undergirded by institutions repurposed to entrench majoritarian rule. A decade into Modi’s rule, the question is no longer whether India has changed, but whether it can reclaim the inclusive vision on which it was founded. The answer will determine not just who gets left behind, but what kind of democracy India will be in the decades to follow.
