Hindutva Rising: The Remaking of India Under Modi

How Religious Nationalism Is Reshaping South Asia's Power Dynamics

Introduction: The Triumph of Hindutva

India’s transformation under Narendra Modi is not merely a change in leadership; it is a full-blown reengineering of the Indian state. Behind the veneer of electoral democracy, Modi’s rule has birthed a new regime—illiberal, authoritarian, and racially supremacist. At its core is the ideology of Hindutva, a majoritarian vision that reduces India to a Hindu Rashtra—a nation defined by and for the Hindu majority.

Modi, a lifelong pracharak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has enacted this vision with remarkable discipline. The RSS, founded in 1925 and ideologically shaped by the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe, particularly Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, envisions a society purified of “foreign” elements—namely Muslims and Christians.

From Golwalkar to Modi: Nazism Repackaged

The ideological foundation of the RSS, and by extension Modi’s India, bears clear resemblance to European fascist doctrines. In We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), RSS ideologue M. S. Golwalkar expressed admiration for Nazi Germany’s maintenance of “racial purity” and openly stated that minorities in India must live at the mercy of the Hindu majority:

“The foreign races in Hindustan must adopt the Hindu culture and language... must entertain no idea but the glorification of the Hindu race and culture.”

This philosophy has become institutional policy. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) are contemporary examples of how the state is redefining citizenship through a religious and racial lens. Muslims are the primary targets, but the precedent is broader: the legal transformation of India into a state that privileges one religious identity above all others.

Kashmir and the Zionist Blueprint

The Indian state’s ongoing project in Kashmir is not merely a territorial dispute or a security concern, it is a systematic reconfiguration of land, law, and identity, grounded in settler-colonial logic. Nowhere is this more visible than in the striking parallels between India’s Kashmir strategy and the Zionist model of control over Palestine. These parallels are not rhetorical; they are tactical, strategic, and ideological.

On August 5, 2019, the Modi government unilaterally revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, stripping Jammu and Kashmir of its special status. This legal maneuver was executed without public consultation, democratic process, or the consent of Kashmiri political representatives, most of whom were preemptively detained. Overnight, India’s only Muslim-majority state was demoted into a federally governed territory, subject to direct control from New Delhi.

The constitutional hollowing was merely the prelude. What followed was a rapid deployment of over 900,000 troops, the largest peacetime military occupation in the world. An internet blackout, the longest ever imposed in any democracy, lasted nearly 18 months. Habeas corpus was suspended. Media was gagged. Foreign journalists and observers were barred from entry. Schools and mosques were shuttered. Dissent was rebranded as sedition.

The Indian state, drawing from Zionist precedent, is executing a deliberate program of demographic engineering and land repurposing. In the months following the revocation of Article 370, new domicile laws were introduced that allowed non-Kashmiris, particularly Hindus from other Indian states, to acquire residency rights and purchase land in the region. This overturned decades of protections meant to preserve the region’s ethnic and cultural identity.

This is textbook settler colonialism: devalue native legal protections, enable outsider settlement, and alter the demographic character of the territory to consolidate control.

The political logic behind this is unmistakable. Like Israel’s attempts to “Judaize” East Jerusalem and the West Bank, India’s Kashmir policy is aimed at Hinduising a historically Muslim space. This is not just about land, it is about rewriting identity, history, and belonging.

The Kashmiri people, meanwhile, are treated as a hostile demographic obstacle. Their political representatives are sidelined. Their youth are surveilled, detained, or disappeared. Their religious institutions are policed. Their cultural expressions are delegitimized. Kashmiri resistance—whether political, artistic, or academic, is equated with terrorism, and countered not through dialogue, but with bullets and bulldozers.

India’s strategy here also draws from Zionist tactics of security architecture and information warfare. Facial recognition systems, artificial intelligence, and mass data collection are used to track movements and communication patterns. The Israeli firm Elbit Systems has provided India with drones and border control technologies, many of which were tested in Gaza and the West Bank before being exported to Kashmir.

This is not a metaphorical comparison. The Kashmir-Israel axis is formalized through military collaboration, intelligence sharing, and ideological resonance. Indian police officers now receive counterinsurgency training modeled on Israeli operations in Palestinian territories. “Urban warfare” tactics tested in Gaza are employed in Srinagar. The Israeli model has become India’s blueprint for permanent occupation under the cover of legality.

What emerges is not a security paradigm, but a colonial doctrine disguised as counterterrorism. It allows the Indian state to present itself as both victim and enforcer: victim of Islamist terrorism, enforcer of order and democracy. But the reality on the ground is inversion: the democratic state acts as occupier, while the occupied population is stripped of agency, voice, and rights.

This demographic and psychological warfare is reinforced through legal manipulation. Laws like the Public Safety Act (PSA) and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) are liberally applied to detain citizens without trial for months or years. In many instances, Kashmiri minors have been detained under “preventive custody” for throwing stones or for sharing anti-state posts online. This juridical abuse mirrors the Israeli policy of administrative detention—arrest without charge, trial, or end.

The consequences are devastating. Kashmir today is not just a militarized zone, it is a laboratory of high-tech authoritarianism. Every policy implemented here, from surveillance to sedition, is replicated across India. Just as Israel uses Palestine to perfect and export its tools of control, Kashmir has become India’s proving ground for domestic repression.

Even the language used by Indian leaders echoes Zionist framings: terms like “integration,” “normalcy,” and “development” mask a deep colonial logic. These words are deployed not to describe reality, but to manufacture it, to deny the existence of conflict and erase the voices of those who resist.

What India is constructing in Kashmir is not peace. It is submission. Not unity, but domination. Not progress, but a fortress democracy built on fear, suspicion, and erasure.

And as with all settler-colonial projects, the endgame is neither justice nor resolution, it is normalization. India wants the world to forget Kashmir. It wants its own people to believe the problem is solved. It wants silence to replace struggle.

Law as a Weapon

Under Modi, India’s legal apparatus has been aggressively weaponized to crush dissent. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) has been invoked to arrest poets, professors, and activists on fabricated charges. Many are held without trial for years. Those arrested under such draconian laws are disproportionately Muslim, Dalit, or tribal.

The Bhima Koregaon case is a cautionary tale of how India now treats ideas as crimes. The accused, many elderly and ill, have been denied bail while evidence against them remains flimsy or allegedly planted.

Digital spaces are similarly under siege. The 2021 IT Rules gave the state power to censor news platforms, pressure tech companies, and track dissenting voices online. In this environment, free expression has become a liability.

Manufacturing the Internal Enemy

Modi’s political machine thrives on division. Muslims are routinely scapegoated for public health crises, criminalized through accusations of “love jihad,” and lynched by cow protection mobs. The state rarely prosecutes perpetrators. Instead, it often honors them.

During the 2020 Delhi riots, Hindu mobs attacked Muslim neighborhoods while law enforcement looked on, or participated. BJP leaders stoked the violence, and the victims overwhelmingly came from the minority community.

This is no longer fringe violence. It is state-enabled pogrom. The goal: create a permanent internal enemy to rally the majority and silence critics.

Demographic Engineering and the “Two-Child” Panic

Right-wing leaders frequently promote conspiracy theories about Muslims overtaking Hindus demographically, a falsehood rooted in supremacist panic. States like Uttar Pradesh and Assam have proposed population control measures targeting “overbreeding” minorities, all under the guise of economic reform.

This rhetoric aligns with the "Great Replacement" theory popular among white supremacists in the West. In India, however, this ideology isn’t fringe, it’s policy. It's used to deny welfare, employment, and voting rights to entire communities.

The Cult of Modi and the Hollowing of Institutions

A defining feature of authoritarian regimes is the elevation of the leader above institutions, the law, and even the nation itself. In Narendra Modi’s India, this phenomenon has reached unprecedented proportions. What began as a branding exercise in 2014, casting Modi as a man of the people, a “chaiwala” turned reformer, has transformed into a full-fledged personality cult where the state and the leader are indistinguishable.

Modi’s image is omnipresent. From massive billboards to ration bags, vaccine certificates, highway signs, and even space missions, every act of public administration is framed as a personal gift from Modi to the people. The visual dominance of his likeness in state communication recalls the iconography of authoritarian rulers: a leader who becomes the sole face of national progress, national identity, and national destiny.

This construction of Modi as India incarnate is not just aesthetic, it is structural. Power is increasingly centralized in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), while key institutions that were designed to act as checks and balances have either been co-opted or dismantled. The Cabinet has been reduced to a rubber-stamp body, with ministers operating more like spokespeople than policymakers. Real decision-making lies with a handful of bureaucrats and advisors loyal to the Prime Minister.

The Election Commission, once a fiercely independent body, has bent to executive pressure in recent years, delaying investigations into electoral violations, allowing disproportionate airtime to the BJP, and remaining silent in the face of open hate speech. The Commission’s credibility has eroded to the point where opposition parties routinely accuse it of collusion. Electoral democracy remains intact on paper, but the playing field is now so tilted that the process itself has become a tool of authoritarian consolidation.

The judiciary, particularly the Supreme Court, has fared no better. Once regarded as the guardian of constitutional morality, the Court today often defers to the executive on issues of fundamental rights and civil liberties. High-profile cases, ranging from the abrogation of Article 370 to the persecution of activists under sedition laws, have seen the judiciary either delay hearings indefinitely or deliver judgments that align conveniently with government interests. Judges who dissent face transfer, marginalization, or vilification.

This erosion of judicial independence is not accidental, it is by design. Modi’s government has repeatedly sought to control judicial appointments through efforts like the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC), which was struck down by the Court but continues to linger as a threat to its autonomy. Meanwhile, the lower judiciary, already overburdened and under-resourced, is quietly being reshaped through ideological appointments and politically motivated case assignments.

The press, once vibrant and unruly, has largely fallen in line. A handful of independent outlets still exist, but the bulk of mainstream media functions as a propaganda arm of the ruling regime. Channels like Republic TV, Times Now, and Zee News routinely demonize dissent, manufacture consent, and deflect attention from government failures. Investigative journalists are harassed, raided, jailed, or driven into exile. The result is not just censorship, but a complete inversion of truth, where lies become news and questioning the state becomes sedition.

Investigative agencies like the Enforcement Directorate (ED), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and Income Tax Department have become political weapons. Opposition leaders, critical journalists, NGOs, and even Bollywood actors are routinely raided and charged on dubious grounds. Yet the same agencies mysteriously go silent when it comes to BJP leaders accused of financial crimes, hate speech, or incitement.

The civil service, once a relatively neutral bureaucratic body, has been reshaped to align with the ideological priorities of the regime. Lateral entries from right-wing think tanks, politically motivated transfers, and threats of suspension for noncompliance have created a culture of fear and conformity. Dissent within the bureaucracy is now virtually nonexistent.

Modi has achieved what many strongmen attempt but few execute with such finesse: the decoupling of democratic form from democratic function. Elections are held, but their fairness is suspect. Courts exist, but justice is delayed or denied. A free press is allowed, but freedom is suffocated. Civil society is not outlawed, but it is surveilled, infiltrated, and defunded.

This is not merely the erosion of institutions, it is their conversion. Institutions now serve the ideology of the ruling party, not the Constitution. They are no longer guardians of the republic but enforcers of the regime.

And at the center of this transformation stands Modi, not just as a political leader, but as a myth. His carefully cultivated image of divine humility and paternal authority insulates him from criticism. Policy failures are deflected onto bureaucrats, state governments, or foreign conspiracies. Successes, real or manufactured, are attributed solely to his genius.

In this context, governance becomes theater, accountability becomes heresy, and politics becomes worship. This is not democracy. It is authoritarian populism with Hindu supremacist characteristics, cloaked in the symbolism of tradition and the machinery of elections.

Zionist Parallels and Global Fascist Synergy

India’s ideological transformation under Modi has not occurred in a vacuum. It is part of a broader transnational pattern where ethno-nationalist regimes draw inspiration from, and strategically align with, each other to consolidate control and suppress dissent. One of the most consequential parallels can be drawn with Zionist settler colonialism, particularly in how the Indian state has modeled its policies in Kashmir and beyond on the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The India-Israel relationship has flourished under Modi, both materially and ideologically. It is not just about defense contracts or diplomatic convenience; it is an exchange of statecraft. India is the world’s largest buyer of Israeli weapons. Israeli companies provide crowd-control technologies, cyber surveillance tools, and urban warfare training to Indian forces, tools that are deployed in Kashmir and increasingly across India’s own restive democratic spaces. This military alliance is underpinned by a shared logic: minorities are suspect, militarization is necessary, and dissent is terrorism.

More fundamentally, Hindutva’s admiration for Zionism lies in its core strategy: settler ideology masked as national revival. Both movements claim ancient religious entitlement to land, view demographic balance as a national security issue, and use legalistic mechanisms to legitimize structural inequality. Just as Israel weaponized citizenship, land ownership, and building permits to marginalize Palestinians, India under Modi has introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act, land reforms in Kashmir, and anti-conversion laws that serve to erode the status and rights of Muslims and other minorities.

Even the optics echo each other. The bulldozer has become a symbol of state power in both regimes, used to destroy homes in East Jerusalem and raze Muslim neighborhoods in Uttar Pradesh. The politics of humiliation are deliberately choreographed: the public spectacle of demolition, the rhetoric of cleansing, the message of domination.

The ideological exchange is not coincidental. Leaders and strategists in both countries have publicly affirmed their admiration for one another. Modi called Netanyahu a "true friend," while BJP-aligned think tanks frequently host Israeli security experts as models for Indian policy design. Indian police academies now train their officers using Israeli manuals. Kashmir, like Gaza, is being turned into a laboratory for high-tech authoritarian control.

But this alignment goes beyond bilateral ties. It is part of a global architecture of modern fascism, where states with vastly different cultures converge on the same principles: strongman rule, majoritarian supremacy, surveillance capitalism, and militarized nationalism. The Narendra Modi government finds common cause with Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Trump-era America, and Netanyahu’s Israel, not because they share identical enemies, but because they deploy identical tactics.

This new fascism is not one of ideology alone, but infrastructure. It thrives on digital profiling, media monopolies, data-driven repression, and the fusion of religious myth with state violence. It does not need concentration camps to suppress dissent, it uses biometric databases, “anti-terror” legislation, AI surveillance, and financial blacklisting.

And like all fascist projects, it requires constant enemies: Muslims, journalists, activists, “urban Naxals,” students, and NGOs become the fodder for a permanent state of exception.

Zionist settler logic has shown Hindutva how to institutionalize this: how to turn constitutional democracy into a regime of permanent crisis. Both systems rely on a mythic past to justify present-day repression. Both reduce citizenship to a function of loyalty and identity. And both understand that so long as global capital flows, and Western powers are complicit or silent, repression can be scaled without consequence.

India’s embrace of Zionist strategies is not a mirror image, it is a remix. But it follows the same trajectory: turn the homeland into a fortress, declare dissenters as internal threats, and weaponize democracy to destroy pluralism from within.

Conclusion

What has emerged under Modi is not merely a right-wing government with illiberal tendencies. It is the architecture of a 21st-century ethnostate, one that fuses digital surveillance, populist mythology, and supremacist ideology to reshape the very nature of the republic. India under Modi represents a chilling case of authoritarianism not imposed through military coups or totalitarian takeovers, but engineered from within the democratic system itself.

This transformation is not accidental. It is deliberate and ideological. It rests on the belief that India belongs exclusively to one religious and cultural majority, and that others, Muslims, Christians, Dalits, dissenters, must either assimilate, remain silent, or be expelled from the idea of the nation. It is not just a cultural project; it is a state project. One that rewrites the Constitution not with ink, but with police batons, bulldozers, and biometric databases.

The racial supremacist parallels are unmistakable. The RSS vision of a Hindu Rashtra draws openly from Nazi racial theory. The legal mechanisms of disenfranchisement mimic Zionist exclusion of the native population through demographic warfare. The treatment of dissent recalls McCarthyist purges in the United States—but with far fewer restraints and far more lethal consequences.

What distinguishes Modi’s India is how it blends old fascism with new tools. Surveillance technology, facial recognition, social media manipulation, and digital blacklists are deployed with the same ideological precision as book burnings and racial laws of the 1930s. But in Modi’s India, these tools come draped in the language of “development,” “security,” and “national interest.” It is fascism without the armbands, efficient, algorithmic, and plausible.

This is why the global community must not be fooled by the electoral victories or the imagery of modernity. Majoritarian fascism in India is no less dangerous because it is elected. In fact, it is more dangerous precisely because it masquerades as democracy. The world has seen this before, ethnic cleansing wrapped in flags, apartheid justified as security, genocides prepared under the guise of national rebirth.

To treat Modi’s India as just another populist experiment is a grave error. It is a foundational realignment of the Indian state into a supremacist project, where law is weaponized, institutions are hollowed, and power is centered in the persona of a single leader elevated beyond reproach.

What India faces now is not a momentary crisis, but a structural transformation. And what the world faces is the precedent that one of the largest and most celebrated democracies can be converted, openly, legally, and proudly, into a racialized autocracy.