Last April the Indian government made a jubilant announcement about poverty in the country, based on an assessment by the World Bank:
In one of the most remarkable achievements of the past decade…the proportion of people living [in extreme poverty] fell sharply from 16.2 percent in 2011–12 to just 2.3 percent in 2022–23.
If the world’s most populous country had indeed all but eradicated poverty, it would be big news, but last October in a Delhi seminar hall I heard Gaurav Datt, an associate professor at Monash University in Australia, cast doubt on the bank’s methodology; he also cited two independent assessments that showed much higher rates of poverty. One, coauthored by the respected development economist Himanshu, put it at 9.9 percent in 2022; the other put it at 26.4 percent. When I asked Himanshu about these inconsistencies, he told me that since 2014, when Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power, determining the actual poverty rate has been all but impossible. “In that year,” he said, “India stopped measuring poverty.”
Several times in the other seminars I attended that day, speakers referred to “discrepancies” between government claims to have helped the poor—for example, by providing drinking water to villages in eastern India—and reality. “What exists on paper,” one said, “is not what actually happens.” In July a Reuters poll found that thirty-seven out of fifty independent economists consider the country’s official unemployment rate of 5.6 percent to be “inaccurate” because of the government’s practice of classifying a person who works even one hour a week as “employed.” Seventeen of the fifty volunteered estimates of the real unemployment rate, ranging from 7 to 35 percent.
Official accounts of the four-day war that India fought against Pakistan last May should also be approached with caution. During October’s Diwali holidays the country’s news channels lavished attention on Modi’s visit to the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant (“Powerful”). Dressed in a naval uniform and cap, the prime minister gave the sailors festive sweets, did yoga on the flight deck, and bragged about India’s crushing victory; the Vikrant, he said, had “robbed the Pakistanis of their sleep.” In fact the carrier was barely involved in the conflict, in which between three and five Indian warplanes were shot down, with no confirmed losses of Pakistani aircraft. According to Aqil Shah of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, the war was Pakistan’s “biggest symbolic victory in recent decades.”
The Republic of India I first knew as a student of Hindi in the 1990s and then as a young reporter was socialist, secular, and poor. Rural roads were dirt tracks, there was a ten-year wait for a phone line, and much of the country lacked electricity. Maoist and separatist insurgencies sputtered in the countryside, and in cities like Calcutta people died of hunger in the streets. On the other hand, riots by religious and ethnic communities were rare, and secular-minded Hindus prided themselves on the ubiquity of Muslims in politics, the professions, and the arts. The country’s policy of planned development based on sound statistics reduced malnutrition and infant mortality. And whatever overreach one might impute to the Planning Commission—the body of civil servants that set national strategy—whatever pomposity and paternalism it had inherited from its colonial antecedents, it did not lie.
One of Modi’s first acts as prime minister was to abolish the Planning Commission. Eleven years later his government nonchalantly misleads its citizens about poverty, employment, the environment, and war. And what of the ultimate indicator of the health of the polity: the votes that people cast? In 1994 Bill Clinton hailed India, “along with the United States,” as “one of the world’s great experiments in multicultural democracy.” The Election Commission, which manages voting, was known for its probity, impartiality, and resistance to political pressure until as late as 2023, when the government brought the commission under its control in time to oversee Modi’s third successive election victory the following year—the first in which he failed to win an outright majority, forcing him into a coalition with regional allies.
In a press conference last August, Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the main opposition party, the Congress, gave substance to long-standing suspicions that the BJP stole the 2024 election in collusion with the Election Commission. Focusing on Mahadevapura, an electoral ward in the southern city of Bangalore that the Congress had been expected to win, Gandhi explained that thirty-five or so of his party workers had spent six months analyzing paper voting records and found more than 100,000 fraudulent votes—enough to decide the result in the parliamentary constituency of which Mahadevapura is a part. They had been cast, he said, by means of duplicate voters, fake and invalid addresses, bulk voters registered at the same locations (including eighty people listed as living in a single room), invalid photos, and legions of purported “first-time” voters in their sixties and seventies.
If the Electoral Commission had granted access to digital voting records, Gandhi explained, six months’ work would have taken thirty seconds. But the commission refuses to do this—for Mahadevapura or anywhere else—and it deletes CCTV footage of polling booths after forty-five days. “The EC is not giving us data because this is happening across the country,” Gandhi said. “There is a huge criminal fraud being perpetrated.” The commission is now updating the electoral rolls for more than 500 million voters across the country in a process that the Congress and its allies say will lead to the disenfranchisement of millions of low-caste and Muslim voters, who are less likely to vote for Modi and his vision of Viksit Bharat—“developed India.”
Distorting the truth to aggressively propagate a narrative of progress was Modi’s practice long before he rose to power nationally. In 2012, when he was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, he was the subject of a penetrating profile by Vinod K. Jose of the Delhi-based magazine The Caravan. Ten years after a huge anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat that Modi did nothing to stop, his public rehabilitation was so far advanced that, in Jose’s words, “more than 10,000 businessmen from 100 countries” descended on the state for a summit. Despite the huge sums that local conglomerates and foreign-based multinationals poured into Gujarat, however, Jose found that growth rates under Modi were “not significantly higher than they were in the prior two decades,” while the state scored poorly on poverty, “with 44 percent of children under five suffering from malnutrition.” Anyone challenging the veracity of the “Gujarat miracle,” furthermore, risked being accused of “twisting the truth in order to malign Modi and every Gujarati.” One prominent critic of the chief minister in the local party was murdered, another was expelled from the party, and a third was disgraced after pictures of him in the company of naked women—“later determined to be fake”—came to light.
It is telling that the last incisive profile of Modi to appear in the Indian media dates from thirteen years ago. In 2019 a former television news editor summed up arrangements between the government and the media: “Do not say anything about Modi and [Amit] Shah [Modi’s powerful interior minister, known in India as the home minister], and you are free to talk about whoever else you want to.”
Last winter I spoke at a literary festival in northern India about my books on the Ottoman Empire. A social scientist I met there told me that while Modi might be on track to expand the middle class into a body of consumers 100 million strong, the vast majority of Indians haven’t benefited from his liberalizing policies. A poet said that when he criticized Modi’s indifference to the environment in a poem, his publisher censored the line. A Muslim woman with a Hindu husband expressed apprehension about the hostility toward mixed marriages that the prime minister and his allies have stirred up. But these conversations happened in quiet corners, away from the festival stage. Over several days I was in the audience for many panels, from which I didn’t hear the name Modi once.
I was back in India last autumn in part to research a book on the future of agriculture. I visited sustainable farms in Madhya Pradesh in the center of the country and Andhra Pradesh in the south. To anyone familiar with the big industrial farms of the US, Brazil, and Australia, India’s agricultural heartland is strikingly different: a congested congeries of smallholdings often no more than an acre in size, where caste and communal relations and the reciprocal demands of citizens and the state play out against the intimate backdrop of the village.
In a village in western Andhra Pradesh, I was surprised when a family of landless Dalits expressed gratitude to me for stepping over their threshold and accepting a glass of water; it turned out that no local official—inevitably of a higher caste—had ever paid them such a courtesy. As we conversed, three women returned from picking tomatoes for a landed neighbor, holding their day wage of 250 rupees—around $2.80. Until recently Dalits across South India benefited from schools and clinics that had been set up by a charity, the Rural Development Trust, sparing them the discrimination that they encounter from government institutions. But in September the Deccan Chronicle reported that the trust was “on the verge of closure” as a result of the government’s decision to limit NGOs’ access to foreign funds because their real aim, Amit Shah told Parliament in 2022, is to “change the demography of the country” by effecting religious conversions. While I was with the Dalit family I met two children whose education had been interrupted and another whose severe disability was no longer being treated as a result of the government’s actions.
At a self-help meeting in the same village, I learned that freak rains had all but obliterated the peanut crop, leaving farmers unable to repay loans they had taken out to buy fertilizer and seed. “I know twenty farmers who have committed suicide,” said one. “It’s not the debt. It’s the shame.” To break the grip of local moneylenders, the village offers interest-free loans. I met one woman who had received 15,000 rupees—$170—to open a two-room hotel. Another farmer who had been crippled in an accident received compensation of 50,000 rupees.
In recent years many farmers have been driven to the cities by declining yields caused by an increasingly volatile climate, excessive water extraction, and overuse of artificial fertilizers. To its credit, Modi’s government is promoting sustainable practices as a way of restoring depleted soils; many of those who stayed on the land have adopted cover cropping, the use of cow manure as fertilizer, and the traditional haveli system of rainwater storage, and their yields have recovered. By the time of my visit to Andhra Pradesh, the exodus had been partially halted, and scores of farmers were back in the villages they had reluctantly abandoned.
Modi has invested in infrastructure, simplified taxation, and moved hundreds of millions of people into the digital economy. Inflation is low, and the middle class consumes avidly. When I was on a train from Bangalore, the center of India’s IT industry, to Chennai, the capital of the prosperous southern state of Tamil Nadu, the auto executive sitting next to me finished watching a cricket match on his phone and told me that Modi’s granting of a tax break to the automobile industry on the occasion of the Hindu festival Navratri had prompted a surge in orders. Maruti Suzuki, the country’s biggest carmaker, had sold 30,000 in a single day. “It will be a busy October,” he said.
Busy for some. In October an article in The Economist noted that if you compute India’s GDP per person using purchasing power parity, which attempts to capture differences in prices for the same goods, you end up with a respectable $12,000. But when I visited Subhash Chandra Garg, the former top official at the finance ministry, in Delhi, he told me that per capita GDP gives the truer picture: “In 2024 it was $13,660 in China and $83,660 in the US. In India it was $2,650. We’re 140th in the world.”
In the decade after Modi came to power, the economy grew at an average annual rate of about 6 percent, a bit less than it did under the previous Congress government. This year the growth rate will be higher but still well short of the nearly 10 percent that China averaged during its period of economic liftoff between 1980 and 2015. Almost half the Indian population—which currently stands at 1.45 billion and is expected to peak at 1.7 billion in the mid-2060s—is under twenty-five, and every year between seven and eight million people enter an employment market that cannot accommodate them.
According to the Centre for Social and Economic Progress, a Delhi-based think tank, urbanization is happening much more slowly in India than it did elsewhere in Asia. While around 65 percent of Chinese people live in towns and cities, the figure for India is 35–36 percent. Manufacturing as a share of GDP stands at 13 percent, slightly lower than it was when Modi took office, and far lower than in South Korea and Taiwan in their tigerish phases. If you want to understand why the prospect of a truly developed India is remote—despite all the hype of Viksit Bharat—these are the figures to watch.
An opposition member of Parliament, Derek O’Brien, wrote recently, “Even though corporate profits are at a 15-year high, companies have been…cutting jobs.” In 2023–2024, for example, three IT firms eliminated 64,000 positions. Skepticism over the private sector’s ability to generate employment only increases the attractiveness of the public sector, with its promise of positions for life, no matter how lowly. In 2024 there were 19 million applicants for 64,000 jobs at Indian Railways; 46,000 graduates and postgraduates applied for jobs as road sweepers and rubbish collectors in the state of Haryana.
And yet hundreds of thousands of public sector positions remain unfilled. One reason is that recruitment exams are frequently canceled because the questions have been leaked; in 2024 an investigation by The Indian Express, a national newspaper, found that more than forty had been compromised by leaks over the previous five years, affecting 14 million candidates in fifteen states. A school principal in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh told The Atlantic’s Robert Worth that more than five hundred out of seven hundred teaching positions in her district were vacant. “Little of this dysfunction is visible,” Worth wrote, “because the school allows students to graduate despite the enormous gaps in their education.” In Mumbai I met a taxi driver from Uttar Pradesh who, despite officially having passed exams on a range of subjects at the age of fifteen, couldn’t read.
Cities concentrate capital and labor, spurring growth. As V. Geetha, a civil society activist, told me when we met in Chennai, they also break down caste and language divisions. “In a slum you’ll feed another mother’s child,” she said, “and you’ll dump yours on a neighbor when you go out to work.” But ill health is rampant in Indian cities, although death from starvation is now much less common than death by breathing poisoned air. In 2022, according to The Lancet, more than 1.7 million Indians died as a result of air pollution, a 38 percent increase over the 2010 figure. Of the world’s ten most polluted cities, six are in India.
When the journalist and author Naresh Fernandes showed me around the Mumbai suburb of Bandra, we passed an old man drinking tea outside his house, surrounded by bodyguards: the father of Salman Khan, one of an aging cohort of Muslim Bollywood superstars. Between December 1992 and March 1993, 1,200 Mumbaikars died in communal violence sparked by the destruction by Hindu zealots of a mosque that had been built at what was, according to Hindu tradition, the birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. In my first piece in these pages, in 1999, I noted the failure of the city’s elite, including Bollywood, to stand up to what appeared to be a containable Hindu nationalism.* “Things have gotten worse since then,” Fernandes said, and later he sent me footage of Khan and Modi flying kites together. In early 2024 Modi inaugurated a huge temple complex on the site of the dismantled mosque. “The generations after a thousand years,” he told the crowd of billionaires, actors, cricket stars, and politicians, along with tens of millions watching on TV, “will remember our nation-building efforts today.”
One evening in Mumbai I was invited to the home of an elderly Muslim man who said that never in his eighty-six years—not even during the violence of 1992–1993—had things been so bad for Indian Muslims. Returning to my hotel I identified my driver as a Muslim by the absence of religious symbols in his cab; Hindu cabbies are not so reticent. When I asked him about the future of the community, he could hardly contain his frustration. “You saw what happened in Kathmandu?” he demanded, referring to an arson spree by disgruntled Nepali youths on September 9. “The same will happen here.”
In Mumbai I also met the “brand ambassador” of a foreign fashion house who told me that the country is undergoing a “Renaissance” that is expressed in a strong demand for Indian art, traditional cures, and spirituality. Certainly India’s educated elite has shed its former attachment to Harris tweed and P.G. Wodehouse, while a huge new domestic tourism industry caters to pilgrims whose aspiration to visit temples around the country has superseded the old longing to see Disneyland and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I asked the brand ambassador about tensions within the Renaissance, and she replied with a smile, “Change is never smooth.”
In Chennai, in an office in a large walled compound of the kind the British laid out to shield their officials from the uncertainties of the city, Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, Tamil Nadu’s former finance minister and current IT minister, lamented the shortfall in jobs for the young, adding, “The demographic situation is beginning to swamp us.” Alluding to the febrile public mood since the death in September of at least forty-one people in a stampede at a political rally and to the unsettling prevalence of bootleg alcohol—last year some fifty-five people died after drinking liquor laced with methanol—he likened the state to a “tinderbox.”
Rajan explained the resentment that India’s relatively rich and socially advanced south feels toward the poor, acquisitive, and above all procreant north. In 2023 Bihar’s crude birth rate—the number of children born per thousand people—was more than twice that of Tamil Nadu, while “both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP, the amount of wealth transferred from the south to the north in tax has increased every year since 1990.” Rajan’s comments reminded me of a sardonic social media post showing a picture of South Indians on bicycles with the caption:
On our way to study and work hard, so that we can contribute more taxes to Bihar and Uttar Pradesh so that they can raise their children and send them to [the southern city of Bangalore] to work.
No less galling than the government’s tax transfers—and the possibility that next year, when a moratorium on redrawing electoral boundaries expires, the north may gain additional parliamentary seats—are its efforts to impose Hindi, the lingua franca of much of North India, on states where it is little spoken and much disliked. Earlier this year unexpectedly strong popular opposition forced the BJP government of the western state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, to abandon its plan to force primary school children to learn an additional language—in effect, to learn Hindi. According to M.K. Stalin, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu—Rajan’s boss—Hindi has killed off twenty-five languages in the north alone. Using the English that he learned at a British-style boarding school and refined during spells at MIT and Lehman Brothers, Rajan exclaimed, “Our whole identity is Tamil! Our script goes back three thousand years!” Then, referring to the codification of Hindi by the British, he said, “Do you expect us to swap such riches for a language cooked up by a Scottish bureaucrat?”
The public face of cultural and religious homogenization is Modi’s plump, saturnine home minister, Amit Shah. In 2019 Shah had the constitution changed in order to end the autonomy that Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, had enjoyed since independence. Further legal changes last year fast-tracked citizenship for Hindus and other religious minorities who had arrived in India before 2015 from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan, without making an equivalent provision for Muslims. In 2019 and early 2020 protesters against this measure and a proposed National Register of Citizens, whose main purpose is to weed out Muslim “infiltrators” from Bangladesh, were attacked by Hindu nationalist mobs abetted by the police. More than fifty people, most of them Muslims, were killed.
Shah has been promoting Hindi for years, and demographic change is on his side. The 2011 census found that 690 million Indians know Hindi, and population growth is fastest in the so-called Hindi belt, comprising much of the Gangetic Plain. The language has been purged of many of the Arabic and Persian words that are an unwelcome reminder of long centuries of Muslim rule over the subcontinent, and English loanwords have been swapped out for Sanskrit-derived neologisms (yuddhapot for “warship,” pandubbi for “submarine”). Hindi is being “purified” of foreign influences in much the same way that Greek, Turkish, and other languages were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In June Shah predicted that the time would soon come when English-speaking Indians feel “ashamed…. It is impossible to understand the country’s history, culture and religion using a foreign language.” The word he used for religion, dharm, meaning the laws that govern right conduct, implicitly excludes the country’s Muslims.
In Madhya Pradesh I asked a civil servant if there were Muslims in a particular village. With the pained expression of a man who has tried his hardest to find the good in humanity and been let down, he replied, “There are Muslims everywhere, and everywhere they make a nuisance of themselves.” Whether it is “love jihad” (the seduction of innocent Hindu girls by Muslim men), “land jihad” (Muslims buying up property in order to drive away Hindus), or “spit jihad” (the practice of Muslim vendors expectorating on the henna they sell to Hindu women), few are the abominations that are not casually imputed to Muslims, in addition to the standard charge of loyalty to Pakistan. After eleven years of BJP rule, it is no longer possible in the country with the world’s third-largest Muslim population—more than 200 million—to imagine a Muslim president, chief justice, or national cricket captain, positions that it would have been unremarkable for a Muslim to hold for most of India’s independent existence. Whenever India’s Muslims are not being threatened, lectured, or lynched, they may as well not exist at all.
The longer elected authoritarians stay in power, the more they exploit the advantages of incumbency, manipulating elections and undermining institutions. This process is far advanced in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stacked the judiciary, gagged the media, and jailed the opposition. In Brazil it was interrupted by the Supreme Federal Court, which prevented President Jair Bolsonaro from interfering in the 2022 election and later sentenced him to twenty-seven years in prison for his involvement in a plot to overturn his defeat.
India is becoming more like Turkey and less like Brazil. Rahul Gandhi is at liberty, and a few independent media outlets survive. But if the Election Commission has, as Gandhi maintains, been captured by the BJP, and the Supreme Court has been compromised to the extent that it will not rule against the government on any question that is critical to its survival, as I was assured is the case, there remains no institution to which Indian democrats can turn with confidence.
On November 5, the day before polls opened in Bihar, Gandhi announced that Congress workers had found evidence of a huge electoral fraud in state elections held in Haryana in October 2024. According to the Congress leader, no fewer than 2.5 million votes were cast illegally using duplicate or nonexistent electors, invalid addresses, and voters registered in bulk to the same address. Gandhi showed a photo of a hairdresser from the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte that had been downloaded from the Internet and appeared twenty-two times on the Haryana electoral rolls. He played footage of the state’s BJP chief minister smilingly reassuring supporters, before the count, that the party would win because “arrangements” were in place.
On November 3 Modi the commander in chief and Modi the sanyasi—the ascetic—gave way to Modi the brownshirt. The event was a campaign address in Bihar, where the Congress was accused, without evidence, of offering illegal immigrants the vote. Modi is a treacly, insinuating speaker. “A dangerous conspiracy is afoot,” he said, staring through his rimless Bulgari glasses. The Congress “is putting Bihar in danger, your children’s future in danger, your daughters’ lives in danger.” Then he began to goad. “Should your free rations go to the infiltrators? Should your free health care go to the infiltrators? Should your children get bread or not?” The crowd happily roared back the right answers, and Modi extended an incriminating finger. “Tell me, will you let the infiltrators take over?” Rabble-rousing such as this, along with a promise to create 10 million jobs, swept Bihar’s existing coalition government, of which the BJP is a part, to a decisive victory in the November election.
On my last train journey I met Abhijeet, a young scriptwriter on the TV show Lafangey (The Loafers), about three young men trying to make their way in the world. One is given money by his poor family to take a government exam, only for the questions to be leaked and the exam canceled. His money spent, he starts gambling on India’s most lucrative cricket competition, the IPL. The second turns down a well-paid job far away in order to stay with his girlfriend, who gives him hell for his poverty and lack of ambition. The third tries to become a film star but has to settle for being a grocer. Abhijeet seemed happy enough with life. He and his cowriter had made enough money to consider upgrading their 1BHK (one bedroom, hall, and kitchen) in Mumbai to a 2BHK, which would give them separate bedrooms. After our conversation I made my excuses, left the compartment, and opened the door of the moving train. Few things in life are as consoling as dangling your legs from the door of an Indian train as the countryside rushes past: a flash of electric blue, a peacock in a peepul tree, and the great plain in all its convulsive, alluvial glory.
—December 17, 2025
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