The US-Israel war on Iran marks the decline of the Modi era. These years have shown, at immense cost, what happens when a leader confuses personal brand-building with nation-building.
THE US-ISRAEL WAR ON Iran has exposed, across the board, the limits of state capacity and the hollowness of carefully crafted images. Amid this escalating global crisis, India finds itself navigating choppy waters, with the captain quite literally at sea. For over a decade, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political project has rested on a narrative of muscular nationalism that brooks no dissent. Once again, when India most needs quiet competence and strategic clarity, we have a leader obsessed with optics, confused about priorities and unmoored from institutional constraints. The current moment, exposed by the crisis in West Asia, marks the end of that long summer of the Modi era.
The war poses a direct assault on Indian interests. Crude and gas prices jumped sharply the moment traffic was threatened along the Strait of Hormuz, pushing up fuel, fertiliser and transport costs for hundreds of millions of Indians already living on the edge, and shredding the Modi government’s claims of stability. Shipping insurance premiums for Indian carriers spiked and key Gulf trade routes have become more volatile, choking a lifeline for exporters and importers alike. With no credible evacuation or income-protection plan from New Delhi beyond verbose press releases, families in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who depend on remittances, have watched in fear as Gulf labour markets wobble.
Diplomatically, India has painted itself into a corner. New Delhi’s visible alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv has enraged public opinion from Tehran to Kuala Lumpur. Moreover, the Modi government has taken this position without any serious leverage over US or Israeli decision‑making, nor has it shown the courage to defend Iranian sovereignty. Modi has reduced this grave crisis in West Asia to another episode of telephone calls and photo opportunities. He has offered no parliamentary debate, no honest assessment of the risks to energy security and diaspora safety, and no explanation for why—as the leader of a country that depends on the Gulf for oil, jobs and remittances—he has tied India so tightly to a reckless US–Israeli war whose costs will be paid by Indians and not by those whose favour he craves.
Over the course of twelve years, Modi has enjoyed advantages that eluded most of his predecessors. He benefitted from a long period of low global inflation, a record decrease in energy prices, abundant global liquidity searching for emerging markets and a media that was fully under his thumb. He had time, the mandate and international goodwill. But the outcomes on growth, jobs, social cohesion and strategic autonomy are unambiguously poor. Data on employment, manufacturing and inequality point to a dual reality: dubious claims of GDP expansion coupled with stagnation in productive jobs and a widening gulf between a thin urban elite and a precarious majority. India’s external profile looks louder, not necessarily stronger, pulled closer to the US–Israel axis, while its links with its South Asian neighbours and countries of the Global South are fraying.
There are three interlocking domains where the Modi project has faltered: the mis-sold foreign-policy narrative that equated personal vanity with national power, the structural rot of an economy we do not fully grasp because of data mismanagement, and the corrosion of internal security and institutions along sectarian lines. Together, they explain why, when the tide of favourable global conditions and domestic propaganda finally receded, India discovered that much of its apparent strength was performative. Modi is under so much pressure that the propaganda machinery that once turned every minor international engagement into a civilisational triumph is now struggling to contain a tide of mockery on social media. The aura of invincibility has vanished, and the emperor is seen without his clothes.
FOR YEARS, Modi’s strongest polling numbers were on foreign policy. Images of bear hugs with US presidents, choreographed rallies in diaspora-heavy stadiums and carefully curated photographs with other global leaders created the impression of a statesman who had personally elevated India’s global standing. The regime’s own narrative was that India under Modi had broken out of an old Nehruvian hesitation, aligned decisively with the “right side of history.”
This was built on a series of fundamental miscalculations about the nature of international relations and the foundations of national strength. The Hindutva regime pursued a policy of strategic opportunism under the garb of what it called multi-alignment—eagerly courting US power while buying cheap Russian oil and weapons, kowtowing to China and muting India’s historic anticolonial solidarity with the Global South. In reality, it was a pursuit of personal validation for its leader through global appearances. The fascination with the Zionist model of a security state reflects a deep-seated desire to replicate a specific brand of ethnic hyper-nationalism in India.
This came at the cost of traditional ties and a nuanced understanding of the regional balance of power. The difficulty emerged when India’s vocal alignment with Israel coincided with the latter’s brutal genocide in Gaza. This positioning undermined India’s claim to speak for the Global South, much of which views Israel’s campaign as indefensible. Instead, Modi’s actions often suggested a desperate craving for acceptance by the Western elite, a craving that has now been met with stern rebukes from the US president, Donald Trump, and his supporters.
The US partnership has not followed a positive arc. Military interoperability has increased, foundational defence agreements have been signed, and India has edged closer to the US’s Indo-Pacific strategy. But this shift has eroded India’s earlier hedging strategy that preserved room to manoeuvre between Washington, Moscow and Beijing. India joined initiatives styled by the Quad, a strategic security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan and the United States, as well as supply chain projects, but did little to insulate itself from US secondary sanctions or technology controls. The personal ties that were mistaken for national strength have proven to be ephemeral. India’s silence in the face of the attack on Iran revealed its strategic paralysis. When the interests of a superpower are challenged, the friendly hugs and the stadium rallies vanish into the background. The result is a kind of half-alignment: India is close enough to the United States to antagonise China and alienate many other countries but not deep enough to secure the ironclad guarantees and market access that characterised postwar US alliances with countries such as South Korea and Japan.
This misadventure has left India in a state of strategic loneliness. The Modi government had already alienated India’s traditional partners in Europe through a perceived disdain for their liberal values and is now desperately trying to repair those ties. But nowhere is the cost of this drift clearer than in relations with Russia. For decades, Moscow provided reliable defence supplies and diplomatic cover to India. New Delhi’s tightrope act apropos Russia’s war in Ukraine has accelerated Moscow’s search for new partners, including deeper strategic intimacy with Beijing. As India’s dependence on discounted Russian oil grew, its leverage has paradoxically shrunk. It became a large customer with limited political influence rather than a strategic partner.
South Asia, which Modi promised to integrate under his Neighbourhood First policy, has moved away from India’s influence, let alone control. Hindutva ideology, with its stated vision of Akhand Bharat that subsumes all its smaller neighbours, is structurally incompatible with a stable South Asia. Sri Lanka’s economic collapse, political turmoil in Pakistan, the Gen Z uprising in Nepal, the Monsoon Revolution in Bangladesh and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan have unfolded as Indian leadership looked askance. Rather than nurturing regional institutions and developmental partnerships, India has often reverted to coercive tactics and short-term electoral signalling, particularly toward Pakistan. Operation Sindoor, in May 2025, produced fleeting domestic applause but little structural security or influence in South Asia.
The most glaring failure of this period has been the inability to achieve parity or even a stable deterrence with China—India remained largely paralysed in the face of Chinese incursions in Ladakh. While the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, spent the last decade building a formidable industrial base, creating energy reserves and modernising the People’s Liberation Army, Modi was preoccupied with managing headlines. That is how China was able to continue buying cheap crude from Iran when Modi stopped doing so, under Trump’s pressure, in 2019. Unlike India, China could stand up to US pressure on trade tariffs. Under Modi, the power gap has widened so much that the world no longer speaks of India and China in the same vein.
This is the cumulative effect of a foreign policy that has prioritised leader-centric spectacle over institutionalised strategy. If there are any gains like stronger ties with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, they rest on fragile foundations. When crises such as the attack on Iran or Ukraine happened, the Modi government appeared like a deer caught in the headlights. The claim to be the leader of the Global South rings hollow when India’s positions repeatedly echo Washington and Tel Aviv more than Jakarta or Brasília. The bill for Modi’s transactional approach to diplomacy has now arrived, and his government finds itself unable to protect India’s interests or reputation on the global stage.
the heart of modi’s promise in 2014 was economic transformation. The slogans were many and memorable: Make in India, Startup India, Digital India, Atmanirbhar Bharat. The underlying pitch was that a decisive leader could cut through bureaucratic inertia, liberate entrepreneurship and create millions of jobs for India’s youth. Twelve years on, the empirical picture is sobering.
While official GDP data was used for years to paint a picture of the fastest-growing major economy, recent findings by the former chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian and his colleagues pulled back the curtain on the great Indian growth delusion. Their research, published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics in March, demonstrated that the headline GDP numbers have been significantly overestimated due to flaws in the 2011–12 base year series and the subsequent shifts in the methodology of measuring growth. The paper re‑examined the 2011–12 base‑year national accounts and concluded that India’s actual growth was closer to four percent rather than the six percent touted by official press releases. The overestimation is concentrated in the post-2014 years, when Modi’s ministers were boasting about the “world’s fastest-growing major economy,” while growth under the previous government was actually understated. This discrepancy is not merely a technical error but a deliberate obfuscation of the structural rot in the economy. The long‑standing puzzle of why investment, exports and formal employment remained weak despite gangbuster GDP numbers dissolves once you accept Subramanian’s simple explanation that real growth was never as strong as the propaganda claimed. For ordinary Indians, this clarifies what they have felt for years: stagnant wages, precarious work and little improvement in economic security under Modi.
This middling growth has also been overwhelmingly K-shaped, where a tiny elite at the top captures the lion’s share of the wealth while the bottom sixty percent of the population struggles with stagnant real wages and rising costs. This is not a coincidence but the intended outcome of a model based on cronyism and the promotion of so-called national champions. The concentration of economic power in the hands of a few favoured conglomerates has stifled competition and created a rent-seeking economy that is inimical to genuine innovation. The reliance on big-ticket infrastructure projects funded by massive public debt has not translated into the kind of multiplier effect that was promised.
The failure of the manufacturing sector is the most damning indictment of this policy. Despite the fanfare of the Make in India initiative, the share of manufacturing in India’s GDP has actually declined under Modi. India has failed to capture the global supply chains that were exiting China, losing out to more agile competitors such as Vietnam. The production-linked incentive scheme announced in 2020 and expanded later promised billions of dollars in subsidies to firms in electronics, pharmaceuticals, solar and other strategic sectors. The gains in smartphone exports or semiconductor announcements, while real, are highly concentrated and fully dependent on imported components. India risks repeating the mistake of subsidising the assembly of iPhones without building deep industrial capabilities, the opposite of the path that China pursued.
The result is a chronic unemployment crisis that has been disguised by two techniques: statistical opacity and welfare-heavy rhetoric. The government has stopped publishing official poverty data and has diluted or delayed employment surveys that might reveal the full extent of underemployment. But pre-election surveys consistently show unemployment and price rise as top concerns for voters. Graduates queue for low level government posts, millions exit the labour force out of sheer discouragement, and informal work with no social protection remains the default. Data from independent agencies and even the government’s own periodic labour force surveys suggest a labour market in deep distress. The booming start-up stories from Bengaluru and Gurugram sit uneasily atop this reality.
High unemployment among the youth is not just an economic statistic but a social catastrophe, a ticking demographic time bomb that fuels the very politics of division that Modi’s politics thrives upon. When the state cannot provide jobs, it provides enemies to blame.
Inequality has sharpened in this period. Independent estimates, using tax data and national accounts, suggest that the top one percent has captured a disproportionate share of income and wealth gains since 2014. While the Modi government touts the expansion of digital benefits and free-food schemes as evidence of pro-poor governance and preventing destitution, they do not create the stable, formal-sector livelihoods that underpin sustainable growth. Cronyism and proximity to the top political leadership have become increasingly important determinants of corporate success, undermining the level playing field that genuine competition requires. The reality of Indian lives has become a grim struggle against inflation and precarity, while the billionaires on the Forbes list continue to multiply their fortunes.
Meanwhile, basic public goods that make growth inclusive have languished. Public health expenditure remains low by emerging-market standards. The pandemic exposed the fragility of India’s health infrastructure, with shortages of oxygen, beds and medical staff producing desperate pleas from families and grim scenes of bodies along rivers. Learning losses from prolonged school closures have not been systematically addressed. Environmental degradation, from air pollution in the Indo-Gangetic plain to water stress in peninsular India, threatens long-term productivity but receives only episodic attention when pollution hits emergency levels in the national capital with alarming regularity.
To say that the economy is not in great shape is an understatement. It is an economy where hyped headline growth coexists with a crisis of good jobs, where some cities seem to flourish while vast regions stagnate, and where the state’s energies are spent on branding exercises rather than sober institutional reform. This is not the India that could have confidently absorbed a strategic shock like the attack on Iran. It is an India already near the edge.
THE FACADE OF A RISING POWER and the pretension of strong leadership cannot conceal the erosion of internal security and institutions since 2014. From Manipur to Kashmir, from attacks on minorities to the politicisation of investigative agencies, the Modi years have seen a systematic hollowing out of the very machinery that holds a complex and diverse country together.
The situation in Manipur is a haunting metaphor for the abdication of state authority. For years now, a part of the country has been in a state of civil war, with the Modi government appearing either unable or unwilling to intervene effectively. Ethnic violence by the Meitei majority in the valley against tribal Kuki communities erupted into full-scale clashes in May 2023. By August, the Supreme Court was describing it as an “absolute breakdown of law and order” in the state. It noted serious allegations that the law enforcement machinery had been inept and had, at times, colluded with perpetrators, and it ordered investigations into these claims. Over two hundred people were reportedly killed, tens of thousands displaced, and thousands of weapons taken from state armouries. When violence resurged in 2025, even after the resignation of the Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister and the imposition of president’s rule, many Manipuris told investigators that they had “begged the prime minister to intervene, but he just didn’t care.” The silence from the top continues to be deafening.
This is not an isolated episode but the result of a deliberate politics of division and hatred, which has been Modi’s primary tool of mass mobilisation since his Gujarat days. When the politics of the state is predicated on targeting minorities such as Muslims and Christians, often under the cover of cow protection or anti-conversion laws, the inevitable consequence is the erosion of the rule of law and the emboldening of vigilante groups. The same pattern of delayed response, partisan policing and centralised indifference has appeared in communal pogroms, lynchings and targeted violence elsewhere. Civil-society groups and international observers have recorded increasing restrictions on religious freedom and shrinking space for dissenting voices.
Kashmir remains in a state of unresolved tension. The 2019 revocation of Article 370 and the downgrade of the former state into union territories were carried out under military lockdown, mass detentions and sweeping communications blackouts. The move was advertised as a bold solution that would normalise the region, integrate it economically and eliminate separatism. Years later, political activity remains tightly controlled, internet suspensions recur, and reports of human rights abuses continue. Now, even Ladakh is not normal. No tangible economic gains have occurred, but every other sphere of activity in the region has been overshadowed by the erosion of civil liberties and the lack of a credible political process.
Institutional decay extends beyond security. The Enforcement Directorate, the Central Bureau of Investigation and tax authorities have been deployed repeatedly against opposition politicians, journalists and civil-society organisations, while allies of the BJP rarely face scrutiny. The judiciary oscillates between occasional interventions, such as its sharp words on electoral bonds, and long stretches of deference on core constitutional questions. The Election Commission’s decisions on the Special Intensive Revision, party symbols and the posting of officials in states increasingly invite accusations of bias. Universities and cultural institutions have been pressured to conform, research grants have been politicised, and academic freedom has been curtailed.
The cumulative effect is a climate of fear and self-censorship that corrodes institutional performance. Bureaucrats have learnt that loyalty to the ideological leadership matters more than adherence to law or domain competence. Police officers have recognised that action against Hindutva goons carries professional risk, while excess against democratic protesters is rarely punished. Big media houses have internalised red lines, editors have aligned themselves to Hindutva ideology and avoid any reportage that might antagonise the Modi government or its corporate allies. This is what institutional collapse looks like in a formally democratic setting: a thousand small capitulations.
In such an environment, when economic performance disappoints and foreign-policy missteps accumulate, there is always another enemy to invoke, another minority to demonise, another critic to brand antinational. The more everything else falters, the more aggressive the communal rhetoric becomes, because it is the last adhesive holding together a fraying coalition of interests for the Sangh Parivar.
This strategy of permanent polarisation may win elections, but it is losing the country. The nastiness that was mistaken for strength by a section of the electorate is now producing diminishing returns. A state that cannot protect its own citizens from communal violence or ensure the safety of its borders is a state in decline. The social contract between the citizen and the state is broken and the future rise of India is being sacrificed for the immediate survival of a regime that has run out of ideas.
TWELVE YEARS IS a long time in the life of a republic. It is more than enough to reshape institutions, reorient the economy and reposition the country in the world. Modi inherited power at a moment of extraordinary opportunity: a young population, relative geopolitical calm, cheap capital and commodities, and a chance to learn from China’s industrial rise without copying its authoritarianism. How he wasted that opportunity is painfully clear.
The metaphor that Modi’s admirers once used so liberally now returns in a different register. The “Vishwaguru”—world leader—image, the narrative of a civilisational state reclaiming its rightful place, depended on a degree of global stability and domestic acquiescence that has vanished. The loud projection of strength abroad has not compensated for the weakness of institutions at home.
This reality cannot be wished away with another shock policy like demonetisation or another appeal to religious grievance. The time for meaningful reform and institutional rebuilding was during the years of plenty, but those years were squandered at the altar of hubris. The time to thatch the roof is indeed in the summer, not in the middle of a rainstorm. India stands in that storm now, its roof leaking, its captain clueless, its crew divided and exhausted. Repair is still possible but requires a vastly different politics, one that values character over conceit, constitutionalism over chauvinism, and democracy over despotism.
These years of the Modi experiment have shown, at immense cost, what happens when a leader confuses personal brand-building with nation-building. India has been running on a combination of inflated numbers and inflamed passions. The tide has now turned. What remains is the hard, unglamorous work of reconstruction, which will have to be undertaken by those less enamoured by their reflection and more committed to the hard discipline of democratic governance.
Sushant Singh is the consulting editor at The Caravan
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