The ruling BJP and its acolytes are celebrating Narendra Modi having beaten the record of Jawaharlal Nehru as “elected” prime minister across all available media.
Note that to make Modi taller than Nehru, the years 1947 to 1952 have been deleted.
Should Modi’s prime ministership ultimately be judged on the day it clocked 4,399 days, surpassing Nehru’s number by one day, or by what endures? Records are for statisticians; legacies are best left to history.
Nonetheless, longevity as an elected prime minister is significant as it requires public consent. But amid the fetishizing of a record-breaking tenure one is reminded of an iconic dialogue from Rajesh Khanna’s blockbuster “Anand” – where though dying of cancer he tells his friend, Bhaskar Chatterjee, played by Amitabh Bachchan: “Babumoshai, zindagi badi honi chahiye, lambi nahi” — Life should be big, not long.
Record-breaking longevity proves electoral success; it does not automatically confer greatness. So one must ask: Has India under Modi become more just, free, prosperous and confident in its institutions?
Consider the statistics on economic justice. The BJP quotes the World Bank to claim that under Modi the rate of poverty has declined from one in two persons in the 1970s to one in twenty in 2022. To be fair, poverty reduction was part of a long arc predating him. But the promise of distributive justice will also have to account for the fact that in 2022-23, the top one percent held 40% of India’s wealth, and the fortunes of 119 billionaires multiplied almost tenfold in a decade. Nearly 80% of the workforce remains in informal jobs, and unemployment among graduate youth has remained between 35 to 40% for decades. Modi’s promise of two crore jobs a year was never met.
As for justice for minorities, ask Muslims what they think of the legal system while targeted legislation, differential enforcement of the law and mob violence against them continues.
Under Nehru, justice was more aspirational than achieved. Yet he laid the constitutional foundations for its growth — equal citizenship, abolition of untouchability, secularism. He was acutely honest about the gap between vision and delivery, once saying his greatest challenge was “creating a just state by just means… perhaps too, creating a secular state in a religious country.” Unlike the present regime, he did not pretend the gap did not exist.
On freedom, Modi’s record is troubling. India ranks 157th out of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index. V-Dem classifies India as an “electoral autocracy.” The government’s response is to damn the indices rather than take corrective measures. Nehru placed immense faith in free speech, independent courts and an adversarial press. The institutions he built had enough resilience and autonomy to outlast his errors.
India is certainly more prosperous under Modi — GDP growth is above 7% (in FY 2025-26, 7.7%), driven by strong domestic demand. By modern standards, Modi’s economic record is better than Nehru’s licence-raj economy which stifled entrepreneurship. However, growth became possible later precisely because Nehru built the industrial, scientific and educational institutions — a network of CSIR laboratories, ISRO, Atomic Energy Establishment (later renamed BARC), steel plants, dams, IITs, AIIMS — that underwrote it.
If Nehru trusted the state too much, Modi’s failure is in trusting the market not only for growth but also for equity, which is not in the market’s DNA. Prosperity is badly distributed and while the aggregate looks good, it is not the lived experience of everyone. Growth that is lambi in its macro numbers but not badi in its reach is incomplete.
As for institutions, it is true that the Election Commission (EC) conducts the world’s largest elections mostly peacefully, and the Indian Army appears confident and capable. But allegations of large-scale electoral exclusions and manipulation of voter rolls have considerably eroded trust in the EC. Is the military supported by the confident political leadership it deserves or did Modi duck responsibility by telling the Army Chief to take his own decision in an aggressive land grab by China: “Jo uchit samjhen, woh kariye” (Do whatever you think is appropriate)?
The financial and criminal investigation agencies are openly partisan — 115 of 121 political leaders investigated for corruption by the Enforcement Directorate belong to the Opposition, and 23 saw charges dropped after they joined the BJP. If Nehru built institutions as conscious acts of nation-building, Modi appears to be using them to ensure his party stays in power.
But who will convince those raised in RSS shakhas on an anti-Nehru diet? Nehru is the foundational grievance of the RSS, which opposes his idea of a secular and plural India. In its perspective the BJP does not merely contest elections to defeat other parties – rather elections are stepping stones to dismantle the secular constitutional order that Nehru symbolises.
The antipathy is systematic and evident in Nehru’s symbolic erasure. The Nehru Pavilion at Pragati Maidan was dismantled . The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library was renamed. Even his style were not spared, with the iconic Nehru jacket rebranded the “Modi jacket.” The India Nehru built must be unmade brick by brick — renaming roads, building a new capital, abrogating Article 370 with its Nehruvian stamp of asymmetric federalism.
The erasure of Nehru is essential because every reference to him suggests that Modi is a tenant in Nehru’s house — a constitutional, institutional and republican structure designed and constructed under his leadership. To establish dominance, Modi must rid the house of its secular, socialist legacy and make it home for his own ideology: pro-business, Hindu nationalist, intolerant of dissent, wedded to a unitary nationalism.
The irony is that the more he is belittled, the more Nehru inadvertently illuminates what is being lost. The creation of a lapdog media and the refusal to hold press conferences recalls Nehru’s commitment to a free press. The weakening of judicial independence harks back to the autonomous judiciary Nehru built. Each provocation of communal violence recalls why he made secularism a state doctrine.
A prime ministership is badi not when it is celebrated in its own time by sycophants using state resources, but when it proves indispensable to later generations. It is not so when it leaves institutions weaker, inequality deeper and social trust frayed. Nehru’s zindagi (life) was badi — he built institutions that outlasted him and proved their worth precisely when they came under attack.
Let us also remember that Adolf Hitler ruled for 12 years, Benito Mussolini for 21, Josef Stalin for 29, Francisco Franco for 36, Robert Mugabe for 37 and Muammar Gaddafi for 41 years. History’s verdict on their long tenures is well-known.
https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/longevity-isnt-legacy-modi-meets-anand-4036504
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