How Modi Governs: Decoding The Leadership Style and Power Concentration

The Narendra Modi government represents a qualitative change in how India's executive power is organised, exercised, and communicated. While India's Constitution creates a collective Cabinet — the Council of Ministers collectively advising the President — and previous Prime Ministers governed through coalition management, factional balancing, and Cabinet consultation, the ruling PM Modi has established a governing style THAT IS characterised by concentration of decision-making in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), minimal Cabinet deliberation on major decisions, heavy reliance on a circle of trusted officers, and direct-to-voter political communication that sometimes bypasses both Cabinet colleagues and mainstream media. 

File Photo: PM Narendra Modi chairs a meeting of the CCS

The India Forum's November 2025 analysis described power as having been "highly concentrated in India in the person of the Prime Minister Modi, and a handful of his acolytes, like Union Home Minister Amit Shah" with "checks on the power of the top leadership minimal because many of India's political institutions have been rendered ineffective."

This governing style has been analytically characterised as "personalised," "presidentialist," and "top-down" by multiple academic sources. Fair Observer (July 2025) described how "an excessive concentration of power within the Prime Minister's office and among a small group of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers led to the formation of a confidant coterie," and noted that "his reliance on this small circle marginalised democratic governance, frustrating senior ministers, party leaders and top officers." 

The National Bureau of Asian Research (April 2026) described "policymaking becoming even more centralised in the Modi era, which has been marked by personalistic and top-down leadership." This concentration of power has both enabled rapid policy decisions (demonetisation announced with four hours' notice; Article 370 revocation with minimal cabinet consultation) and produced some situations with feedback loops that larger consultative processes provide are absent.

What You Need to Know

• Modi's key governance innovations include: merging the Railway Budget with the Union Budget (ending 92 years of separate railway budgets); advancing the Budget presentation date from February 28 to February 1 (giving effect from the start of the financial year); abolishing the distinction between plan and non-plan expenditure; replacing the Planning Commission with NITI Aayog; and introducing Mann Ki Baat (the monthly radio address to citizens) as a direct communication channel bypassing news media.
• Demonetisation — the November 8, 2016 announcement declaring 500 and 1000 rupee notes invalid with hours' notice — was described by multiple former Cabinet ministers and finance officials as decided within the PMO with minimal consultation; Cabinet members reportedly learned of the decision hours before the public announcement; the Reserve Bank of India's eventual guidance note was retrospective.
• Operation Sindoor (May 2025) — India's military strikes against Pakistan-linked targets following the Pahalgam terror attack — was decided and executed through the PMO and NSA, with parliamentary oversight and Cabinet consultation limited and retrospective.
• V-Dem's Democracy Report 2025 listed India among the worst offenders on "government effort at censoring the media" alongside Afghanistan and Myanmar; Freedom House's 2025 India report noted that reporters without borders ranked India 161st in press freedom; the independence of key media outlets has declined as business owners with government connections have acquired previously independent channels. These listings exclude, almost deliberately, the pretentious liberal quotient in India that runs narratives through media, books, social media and festival circuit, clinging on to both sides of political powers as per the whims of time, but has been a greater disabler of free expression in India. 
• The Modi government has used ordinances (executive orders when Parliament is not in session) extensively; one article noted that "Modi resorted to passing a number of ordinances, or executive orders, to enact his policies, leading to further centralisation of power" when parliamentary channels faced delays.

How It Works in Practice

1. PMO as the decision hub: The Prime Minister's Office under Modi functions not as a coordinating secretariat but as the primary policy decision centre. Major decisions — economic (demonetisation, GST rate adjustments), security (Article 370 revocation, surgical strikes, Operation Sindoor), and political (appointment of election commissioners, CBI directors) — originate in the PMO rather than in the relevant ministry or through Cabinet committee deliberation. Ministries operationalise PMO-directed decisions rather than originating them.

2. Political communication as governance: Modi's communication apparatus — Mann Ki Baat (monthly radio addresses to 600 million listeners), social media accounts with hundreds of millions of followers, government advertising worth thousands of crores annually — allows direct voter communication that is simultaneously governing (presenting government achievements) and political (maintaining personal brand equity). This direct communication channel makes Modi less dependent on mainstream media and reduces the political cost of media criticism.

3. Welfare delivery as political infrastructure: PM-KISAN (₹6,000 annual payments to 110 million farmers), PM Awas Yojana housing, UJJWALA gas connections, Jan Dhan bank accounts — these schemes create traceable direct beneficiary relationships between the central government and individual citizens. The DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer) system deposits money directly to Aadhaar-linked bank accounts, cutting out intermediaries and creating legible beneficiary networks. Modi's political persona is visible at the point of delivery (scheme named after PM, Modi's photograph on scheme communications) in ways that were less common in previous governments.

4. Bypassing institutional checks: Multiple institutional checks — Parliament's scrutiny through bill passage in Rajya Sabha, judicial independence through appointment processes, ECI independence through appointment legislation, CAG's accountability function through reduced public audit visibility — have weakened under concentrated executive power. Freedom House's 2025 report specifically noted that "121 political leaders investigated by the Enforcement Directorate since 2014, 115 belonged to opposition parties" and "23 out of 25 opposition leaders accused of corruption who later joined the ruling BJP saw their cases dropped."

5. Post-2024 adaptation: The 2024 election's result — BJP falling short of a majority — introduced coalition constraints that the 2014–2024 period with single-party majorities did not impose. Foreign Affairs' June 2025 analysis described the RSS's reassertion of control over the BJP as the most significant structural change post-2024, suggesting that the highly personalised Modi governing style may be moderating under collective Sangh Parivar oversight and coalition partner constraints.

What People Often Misunderstand

• Concentration of power in the PMO is not unique to Modi: India's Prime Ministers have historically had strong PMO influence; Indira Gandhi's PMO was described as even more dominant in the 1970s; what distinguishes Modi is the combination of PMO concentration with massive digital communication reach and RSS organisational backing.
• The Modi governing style has produced several genuine governance improvements: The JAM Trinity (Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar identity, Mobile connectivity) enabling DBT payments; GST simplification; IBC insolvency framework; and infrastructure investment have been acknowledged by economists across the political spectrum as substantive governance achievements.
• "Presidentialisation" is a global trend, not only an Indian phenomenon: India's parliamentary system structurally allows a party leader with a large majority to govern presidentially; the difference between 2014–2024 and previous periods is more about BJP's single-party majority than about any constitutional change.
• Critical academic and civil society analysis does not reflect public rejection: Modi's approval ratings consistently exceed his party's, and democratic indices' classification of India as "electoral autocracy" coexists with genuine mass electoral support for the BJP; the tension between democratic quality indices and electoral popularity is a real feature of India's political situation, not a contradiction to be resolved by choosing one side.
• Operation Sindoor's political and strategic implications are contested: The May 2025 military operation against Pakistan and the ceasefire have been assessed very differently by different analysts; some see India's deterrence credibility enhanced; others, including Fair Observer, describe it as exposing limits of highly centralised decision-making in crisis management. The Indian government maintained a tough and nationalistic posture throughout.

What Changes Over Time

The post-Sindoor period (May 2025 onwards) and the 131st Amendment defeat (April 2026) both illustrate specific limits of even concentrated executive power in India's constitutional system: military operations require diplomatic management that international actors have leverage over; constitutional amendments require two-thirds parliamentary majority that coalition arithmetic cannot always supply. The NBR's April 2026 analysis of India's post-Modi leadership succession — identifying Yogi Adityanath and Rahul Gandhi as the two most prominent potential future leaders — shows the growing relevance of the succession question as Modi's third term proceeds.

Sources and Further Reading

• The India Forum — India Under Modi: Shrinking Democracy, Growing Inequalities: https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/india-under-modi-shrinking-democracy-growing-inequalities
• Fair Observer — The Current Politics of Narendra Modi: https://www.fairobserver.com/politics/the-current-politics-of-narendra-modi-exposes-the-limits-of-his-leadership/
• NBR — After Modi: Political Leadership and the Future of Indian Foreign Policy: https://www.nbr.org/publication/after-modi-political-leadership-and-the-future-of-indian-foreign-policy/
• Freedom House — India Freedom in the World 2025: https://freedomhouse.org/country/india/freedom-world/2025

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