Sandra Destradi
India’s populist, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power for over a decade and won a third consecutive mandate in 2024 under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In many ways, Modi is a prototypical populist leader. He has styled himself as a self-made man, an outsider to the corrupt political establishment, the son of a tea seller devoted to the service of his people. This self-presentation casts him as someone able not only to speak in the name of the people, but even to personally embody the popular will against established political elites.1
Populism is commonly understood as a “thin-centered” or “thin” ideology—that is, a limited set of ideas about what society should look like. Specifically, populism “considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and . . . argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”2 Who exactly constitutes the people and the elite is mostly determined by a “thick,” more comprehensive ideology combined with populism—in the BJP-led government of Modi, the ethnonationalist ideology of Hindu nationalism, which focuses on the notion of Hindutva (Hinduness). This thick ideology is promoted by the BJP and by a family of related organizations, chief among them the paramilitary volunteer organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
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