Google News Preferred Source on Google News Indian Republic Logo

4399 Days: What Narendra Modi Has Done to India and What India Has Done to Him

Edited by IndianRepublic.in - Location: New Delhi, Delhi, India

✍️ Written by Saket Suman

I have been a journalist for most of my adult life and this country has become my beat, my burden and perhaps my greatest blessing. This journey has led me to cover India from its plains and its hills, from the coaching centres and the press conferences, from literary festivals, from the front lines of protests to the inside and outside of its policy corridors. I have watched promises made at election rallies dissolve in the unforgiving heat of governance. I have seen individuals become symbols and symbols become power and power become something so sinister that I will leave it unnamed here. I write of these things to establish a vantage point as essential context because what follows is written from the inside, from the ground, with the accumulated scepticism of someone who has seen some bit of this republic to resist, on this particular day, both the celebration and the denunciation that today's milestone will produce in equal and opposite measure, as reliably as the monsoon and almost as indifferent to reason.

What Narendra Modi Has Done to India, and What India Has Done to Him By Saket Suman
File Photo: What Narendra Modi Has Done to India, and What India Has Done to Him; Via:PM NaMo on X
Narendra Modi completes 4,399 consecutive days as Prime Minister of India today. He surpasses the post-election tenure of Jawaharlal Nehru to become the longest-serving elected Prime Minister in the history of independent India. 

He has governed for twelve years and fifteen days without interruption, through three consecutive electoral mandates and has become only the second leader after Nehru to accomplish this in the world's largest democracy. This record is real and there is no denying that but what it means is the question we must collectively grapple with.

The Country He Inherited

Let us not get swayed away by how the BJP hagiography presents the version of events leading up to Modi's rise but let us instead try and recollect how those who saw Indian public life in the earlier years actually experienced it. There was a government that had governed too long, grown too comfortable with its own contradictions and had been captured by a succession of crises it could not escape. There was a Prime Minister of genuine personal and intellectual integrity who had nonetheless presided over a system of extraordinary institutional decay. There was an economy that had briefly soared and was now stalling. There was a sense that something had gone fundamentally wrong with the compact between the Indian state and the Indian citizen.

There was also something else, which is harder to put in a headline. There was a crisis of national self-confidence. A sense that India was perpetually on the back foot, apologetic about its own history, unsure of its civilisational standing, waiting for the world's permission to take itself seriously.

Modi understood this. Whatever else one says about him (and there is surely too much to say on both sides of the ledger) he understood this with a precision that none of his contemporaries in Indian politics could match. He understood it as something he carried in his own body, shaped by a biography that had no inherited privilege, no dynastic entitlement, no elite institutional affiliation. The tea vendor's son who became Chief Minister of Gujarat and then Prime Minister of India understood, from the inside, what it felt like to be told that your origins disqualify your ambitions. That understanding became the emotional core of the most successful political project in post-independence India after Nehru's own.

The World Stage: India Speaks First

One remembers when Indian foreign policy was a performance of restraint dressed as principle. Non-alignment had long since curdled into non-commitment. India would issue carefully worded statements, abstain from difficult votes, hedge every bet, and present its reluctance to take positions as evidence of wisdom. The world indulged this posture, as the world indulges postures that do not inconvenience it.

Something changed. It did not change overnight and it did not change because of one man alone. The structural conditions of a rising economy and a young demographic were always going to push India toward a more assertive global presence but the political articulation of that assertiveness, the willingness to convert structural weight into actual voice, required a leader who was willing to say those things openly.

When Russia invaded Ukraine and the world divided into camps demanding Indian alignment, Modi's government held its line out of a calculated, coherent assessment of India's national interest that refused to be stampeded by western pressure. When India assumed the G20 presidency in 2023, it did not use the platform merely to host a summit but to fundamentally reorient the conversation by championing the inclusion of the African Union as a permanent G20 member and repositioning India as the conscience and voice of the Global South rather than a supplicant at the table of the powerful.

And then, in May 2025, Operation Sindoor happened. The Pahalgam attack on April 22, 2025 — twenty-six civilians killed, targeted on religious grounds, in what was the most devastating terrorist strike on Indian soil in years — produced the familiar international choreography of condolences, calls for restraint, warnings against escalation. India had heard this before. After every attack, the same script. India would absorb the blow, issue statements, and wait for the world to manage Pakistan on its behalf. That had been the pattern for three decades.

It was not the pattern this time. On the night of May 6-7, 2025, India struck nine terrorist infrastructure sites across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in the most significant and daring military campaign since the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. The operation was tri-service, precise, and deliberate. India achieved air superiority over key sectors of Pakistani airspace within four days. Pakistan attempted nuclear blackmail. India did not flinch. A ceasefire came on May 10, and India's new response doctrine was written in the ruins of those nine sites.

I am not writing this as celebration of military action, which always carries costs that no government's press releases can fully account for. I am writing it as a journalist who has covered India to know what it meant when the Prime Minister said, from the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day 2025: "Blood and water will not flow together." That was the new doctrine. India had, for the first time in living memory, spoken on its own terms, in its own voice, with the confidence of a country that had decided it would no longer wait for the world's permission to defend itself.

This is the coming of age that this twelve-year tenure represents on the international stage. India did not become a great power overnight. But it stopped pretending it had not already earned the right to be taken seriously.

The Complexity of Governing India

There are 1.4 billion people in this country. They speak hundreds of languages. They carry thousands of years of caste hierarchy in their social reflexes. They vote in patterns that no single analytical framework can fully decode, caste arithmetic, regional pride, religious identity, economic aspiration, anti-incumbency and something beyond all of these that might simply be called democratic instinct. They are more educated, increasingly connected, increasingly aware of their rights and more impatient with the gap between what the state promises and what it delivers.

Governing this country is a sustained act of survival through permanent complexity and the fact that one man has done it continuously for twelve years through a global pandemic, a military conflict with a nuclear-armed neighbour, an Iran war whose energy-price ripples reached every Indian kitchen, and a digital revolution that rewired the relationship between the state and the citizen while creating entirely new forms of inequality and aspiration deserves to be acknowledged for the political endurance and managerial capacity it is.

The Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile trinity was a fundamental reimagining of how the Indian state reaches its citizens. Hundreds of millions of Indians received money directly into bank accounts for the first time in history. This is not nothing. In a country where the distance between a government scheme and its intended beneficiary had historically been measured in the accumulated corruption of every level of administration between them, the direct benefit transfer represented a genuine structural change.

The digital revolution under this government created the world's most sophisticated public digital infrastructure — UPI, DigiLocker, CoWIN, the framework of Aadhaar-linked services — and then deployed it at a scale that no comparable democracy had attempted. When Covid arrived in 2020, India administered over two billion vaccine doses digitally, tracking and verifying each one through a system built in months. This was not an accident. It was the dividend of investments made before anyone knew they would be needed.

The Democratic Paradox

But! I said I would write this from the inside, and from the inside there are things that cannot be unsaid. Free speech took a severe beating under this government. And it did not do so in the totalitarian manner of a state that imprisons all its critics. India did not become that and it is important to say so but in the more corrosive manner of a state that began to selectively deploy its instruments against voices that inconvenienced it. The ecosystem of investigation and accountability journalism that had flourished through much of the post-liberalisation period found itself working under conditions of increased hostility.

A parallel media ecosystem emerged that was friendly, amplifying, capable of manufacturing consensus and drowning out inconvenient questions. This is not unique to India or to this government; it is a feature of the information environment that right-wing nationalist governments worldwide have cultivated. But in India, with its linguistic diversity and its millions of first-time internet users, the scale of the distortion was larger and its effects are more profound.

But here is the paradox that any honest assessment must also hold. Indian democracy did not die. Courts became more accessible, not less. Citizens exercised their rights more frequently and more vigorously than at any previous point in the republic's history. The protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019-20 were among the largest sustained civic mobilisations since the Emergency. The farmers' agitation brought hundreds of thousands to the gates of Delhi for over a year and eventually forced the government to retreat. The Supreme Court, for all its inconsistencies, delivered landmark judgments — on privacy, on electoral bonds, on the rights of minorities. The political opposition, battered and often outmanoeuvred, continued to function, continued to contest, continued to win elections in states. Democracy in India under Modi did not end. It changed shape by operating on a more uneven playing field but it was still recognisably democratic. 

The Nehru Parallel: Two Men, Two Eras, One Civilisation

It is said, often in India, that Nehru and Modi should be judged in their own times and by the standards of their own eras. I think this is right but it does not go far enough. They should also be understood as engaged in the same fundamental project that is the attempt to give India a coherent account of itself.

Nehru's genius was institution-building. He built the IITs when India had no engineers to fill them and no industry to employ those engineers. He built ISRO when India had no rockets and no money for rockets. He built the Planning Commission when the very idea of a planned Indian economy seemed like a fantasy. He planted trees whose shade his contemporaries would not sit under but we sit under them now. The Chandrayan missions, the indigenous vaccine production that saved millions during Covid, the digital infrastructure that makes India's payments system the envy of developed nations, frankly, none of this would exist without the institutional foundations that Pt. Nehru laid in the first two decades of independence.

Modi understood this about Pt. Nehru even as he dismantled much of what Nehru built and contested the Nehruvian vision of India's cultural identity. The Viksit Bharat 2047 project — the vision of a fully developed, self-reliant, globally respected India by the centenary of independence — is, at its structural core, a Nehruvian bet on the future. It is a wager that investments made now, in infrastructure, in digital public goods, in clean energy (India reached its 50 percent clean energy target in 2025, five years ahead of schedule), in defence indigenisation, will compound into a transformed country by 2047. The yuongsters who will sit under those trees are not yet born.

The difference between the two men lies in their account of India's past. Pt. Nehru's India looked forward by looking westward as he was drawing on Enlightenment rationalism, Fabian socialism, scientific temper as the inheritance that would carry a new nation into modernity. Modi's India looks forward by looking inward as he is now drawing on civilisational roots, on the pride of continuity rather than the aspiration of rupture, on the emotional power of a history that was always there but had been taught to apologise for itself. India is large enough to hold them both and it is perhaps the tragedy of contemporary Indian discourse that it insists on choosing.

The Spoilage Warning

Now I must say the thing that no one in the government's orbit wishes to hear, and that its critics say so loudly and so constantly that it has begun to sound like a tic rather than an argument.

Crony capitalism has risen under this government. This is not an allegation but a structural observation. When the state has the power to make or break fortunes through regulatory decisions and when proximity to state power becomes a competitive advantage, the incentives for corruption and capture multiply regardless of the personal intentions of the leader at the top. India is marching on a capitalist outlook in service of a broadly socialist goal, which is to uplift its most marginalised citizens, and the tension between those two impulses has intensified.

But there is something much more dangerous than the corruption we can name and quantify. It is the use of covert proximity to state power to delegitimise honest and hardworking Indians, to deploy the machinery of harassment and character assassination against individuals whose only offence is that they inconvenience someone with access to a powerful man's ear. I have seen this and I am living through it.

This matters as a strategic warning because India's Viksit Bharat will be built on merit or it will not be built at all. The country's competitive advantage in the world through the demographic dividend, the engineering talent, the entrepreneurial energy of a billion-plus aspiring people is premised on the idea that effort and ability are rewarded. Every time a capable person is displaced by a connected one, every time an honest institution is bent to serve a private interest, every time the covert backing of somebody powerful is used to settle scores rather than serve citizens, India loses a fraction of the future it is trying to build. The fractions accumulate. The frustration accumulates. And frustrated democracies of India's complexity are capable of going in directions that no one in power today would really want.

Modi must face this because the project he has articulated for India requires it. You cannot build a great nation on the back of small men serving smaller interests.

4399 Days and Beyond

So what, finally, does 4,399 days add up to? It adds up to an India that is more confident on the world stage than it has been at any point since independence. It adds up to a military doctrine that has replaced studied ambiguity with strategic clarity. It adds up to a digital public infrastructure that is genuinely world-class and that has brought the state into direct relationship with its citizens in ways that were just unimaginable a generation ago. It adds up to an economy that, for all its inequalities and all its failures to fulfil its own promises, remains one of the fastest-growing large economies on earth at a moment when the global economic order is being reorganised under conditions of maximum uncertainty.

It also adds up to a democracy that is more polarised, more personality-dependent, more hostile to dissent in practice than it claims to be in principle. It adds up to institutions that have been, in some cases, weakened rather than strengthened by the proximity of power. It adds up to a media environment that is, in too many corners, less free and less honest than the country's democratic health requires. And the sum total of much of what is happening today adds up to a country that is in the middle of becoming something much greater. That work must continue, with honest reflection and sustained policies.

(Saket Suman is the author of The Psychology of a Patriot. He was a Special Correspondent at The Times of India and the head of Arts/Books/Culture verticals at what was India's largest independent newswire.)

Loading... Loading IST...
US-Israel Attack Iran
View →
🌍 IRAN WAR MONITOR TRACKER ON
Loading headlines...

Loading Top Trends...

How India Works

Scanning sources...

🔦 Newsroom Feed

    🔗 View Source
    Font Replacer Active
    ABOUT US CONTACT US PRIVACY POLICY TERMS & CONDITIONS INDIAN DIPLOMACY PARLIAMENT SESSION POTUS TRUMP KREMLIN ALERTS LOP RAHUL GANDHI PM NARENDRA MODI