In an August survey by the reputed Pew Research Center, 68% of Indians say, in recent years, India’s global influence has gotten stronger. In a 2023 Lokniti-CSDS Survey, 54% (and 71% of those with high media exposure) believed that India has emerged as the Vishwaguru under the leadership of Narendra Modi. According to Pew, 79% of Indians have a favourable view of Modi.
Opinion surveys do not tell us the complete reality, but are an important statistical tool to understand large social trends. Why are these facts, therefore, noteworthy? Because they do not match with foreign assessments about the world standing of India, or that of Modi.
Thus, according to Pew, only a 28% median (19 countries) said that India’s influence has grown stronger. While a 46% median (23 countries) had a favourable opinion of India (against 34% unfavourability rating), in many of these countries, especially in Europe, the favourability of India was substantially higher in earlier surveys in 2008/2013. And, unlike domestic opinion and the BJP’s relentless propagation of the idea that Modi is a popular global leader leading the world, only 37% median in 12 countries have confidence in him against 40% who have no confidence. In the US, where 51% people favour India, the confidence in Modi is 21%, while in Israel, where 71% favours India, the confidence in him is 41% demonstrating huge gaps. As much as 40% of Americans (and 59% in the 18-29 age category) have never heard of Modi (the lowest percentage amongst the leaders in the survey: Zelenskyy, Macron, Scholz, Netanyahu, Modi, Xi and Putin).
This staggering difference between domestic and foreign evaluation, and the substantial domestic acceptance, even across partisan lines, of the belief that India is already a Vishwaguru, are significant for two things: first, the success of the BJP and the government in making their version of nationalism almost ironclad, and second, the relevance of the concept of post-truth. Post-truth, as scholars describe it, is the “erosion of simple factual truths, truths that technically anyone could verify” and “the systematic use of blatant lies”. While lies always existed in history, under post-truth, truth itself becomes immaterial.
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Thus, while the official discourse is that India’s reputation has increased phenomenally under Modi, and the tagline for G20 is India is the “Mother of Democracy,” in Kafkaesque irony, India has suffered the greatest loss of global reputation since the Emergency of 1975 precisely because of severe democracy erosion and religious majoritarianism in the last nine years. This has been subject to widespread, global condemnation and criticism, as documented by the responses from foreign media and academia, human rights and democracy reports and rankings by organisations like the Varieties of Democracy Institute, Freedom House, Economist Intelligence Unit, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders, to name only a few, and even responses from governments and legislatures in the West, and Gulf countries, etc., who otherwise practice only realpolitik.
Yet, under post-truth, this “reality” of criticisms does not make any difference to the domestic self-assessment of India as a Vishwaguru, or ironically, even strengthens it. While the government and its supporters have, rightly, questioned the hypocrisy of the “colonialist” and “imperialist” Western governments in criticising the democracy record of other countries, they have also, wrongly, painted all foreign criticisms as a part of grand conspiracy against a rising India, and Hindu civilisation. Here, the domination of the idea of nationalism draws in even those who are not narrowly identified with Hindutva. Like many other majoritarian ethnic projects elsewhere, the populist, Hindu nationalist project of Narendra Modi and the BJP and have managed to build an immunity which disqualifies even domestic critics as anti-national.
Of course, foreign governments, especially in the West, have lent credence to the Vishwaguru narrative by increasing strategic and economic cooperation with India and with acts like their leaders appearing together with Modi in Indian diaspora rallies, duly marketed breathlessly by the mainstream media for a domestic audience. But the fundamental animator of the changed geopolitical scenario in which India becomes more important is China and the necessity for a bulwark against it (in contrast to India, in 2019, a median of 70% in 25 countries said China played a bigger role in the world compared to a decade before – Pew 2019). Besides, there are factors like the demographic size of India, its inevitable economic rise, its democratic legacy, and the power of a large diaspora, which make the world increasingly engage with India, irrespective of the ruling party (as early as 2010, President Obama had said that India is not emerging, but “has already risen” as a power). Yet, the Hindu nationalist project has successfully made these factors seem like Modi government achievements.
The country after India which has the most inflated opinion about its power is Russia, with a 30% difference between self-evaluation and foreign assessment (Pew 2018). And we have seen the kind of depredations its great power ambitions have wrought on its own people and the world.
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Ultimately, a political discourse centred around Vishwaguru is deeply scarring for democracy. Not only does it hide the democratic backsliding in the world’s largest democracy, but also deflects attention from the fundamental problems in a country with a nominal per capita GDP of $2,388 (ranked 139 out of 192 countries) and the largest global population of poor (230 million people, almost equivalent to the fifth most populous country in the world). While 60% surveyed in 2023 believe that their incomes do not meet basic needs, 42% feel that nothing has changed and 22% feel that conditions have deteriorated, astonishingly, 47% of poor believe that India has emerged as a Vishwaguru (Lokniti-CSDS 2023) demonstrating how post-truth communications have penetrated even the most vulnerable.
Of course, propaganda, fake news and a near domination of the mainstream media have aided Hindu nationalism and its Vishwaguru claims (for example: the government assertions on COVID-19 vaccination and the Russo-Ukraine War). But post-truth in general, or specifically regarding Vishwaguru, which is also based on religious and civilisational supremacy, cannot be countered by facts alone. Facts cannot survive without socio-political structures supporting them. What has led to the domination of Hindu nationalism is the collapse of trust in “secularist” politics, making the former’s claims less about facts and the truth, and more about who is making the claim. While Hindutva has been defeated electorally at the state level, a political imagination that can challenge its nationalist project and propose a new, inclusive and modest nationalism is yet to be identified. Remember, the Modi government has used the shield of a muscular nationalism to easily weather crises like demonetisation, COVID-19 excess deaths, Chinese aggression at the border for three years, and alleged Adani stock manipulation.
But what can be attempted in the meantime is the delineation of the ill effects on democracy of a lower middle-income country, with a human development rank of 132, in the thralldom of being a Vishwaguru.
Nissim Mannathukkaren is Professor, International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. He tweets @nmannathukkaren. Some of the arguments here and supporting data are elaborated in an article co-authored with Drew MacEachern recently in the Third World Quarterly).