Pratap Bhanu Mehta is Contributing Editor at the Indian Express. He has been vice-chancellor of Ashoka University and president, Centre Policy Research, New Delhi, one of India's top think tanks. Before he started engaging with contemporary affairs, he taught political theory at Harvard, and briefly at JNU. He has written extensively on intellectual history, political theory, law, India's social transformation and world affairs. He is the recipient of the Infosys Prize, the Adisheshiah Prize and the Amartya Sen Prize.
A hundred days on, Modi 2.0: Its purpose is the show of power, nationalist fervour, social control
The hundred days is not a catalogue of specific actions, some good some bad. They are certainly marked by Modi’s energy, drive, imperiousness and unerring instinct to dominate the political discourse. They, rather, reveal the consolidation of a regime type.
The first hundred days of Narendra Modi’s second term as prime minister raise a profound question that goes beyond a mere cataloguing of the government’s actions and policies: What is the nature of the regime we are spawning? As we look at the hundred days, two political phenomena stare us in the face. The first is that despite a very poor economic performance, Modi remains immensely popular. Even his staunchest critics have to acknowledge that he has made himself an inescapable figure, someone who has colonised our consciousness so much that even criticism only serves to underscore his importance and reinforce his imaginative hold. His triumph is not what he does; it is that he is the focal point of everything we do.
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