If Prime Minister Narendra Modi were even a fraction of what Ramachandra Guha believes he is, this column would not exist. And if it did, I would be writing it from a prison cell – if not under house arrest, then certainly under gag order.
There is a strange new game in India’s elite drawing rooms and editorial dens: it’s called Compare Your Tyrant. The rules are simple: pick the current prime minister, draw a line to 1975, pretend there’s no difference and scream ‘Emergency!’ louder than the other panellist. This week, Guha took the trophy with his well-rehearsed claim: Narendra Modi is ‘Indira Gandhi on steroids.’. It sounds punchy. But like most performance-enhancing metaphors, it inflates more than it informs.
Modi is Indira’s photo-negative
Indira inherited power. Modi fought for it.
Indira suspended civil liberties. Modi gets called a dictator while being lampooned on front pages and livestreams. Indira jailed journalists. Modi gives them more column inches to curse him than they know what to do with.
If Modi were anything like Indira, the same Ram Guha wouldn’t be giving interviews comparing regimes – he would be in solitary confinement, asking for a typewriter. Thapar’s studio would be seized, and Scroll.in would be a government mouthpiece, not an anti-Modi echo chamber.
What if Modi had done an Emergency?
Let’s play the thought experiment, Guha won’t:
Journalists: jailed without charge? No, they get fellowships, awards, and bestsellers titled ‘How India became a dictatorship’.
Opposition: silenced and locked up? No, they are winning elections, forming coalitions, and accusing Modi of fascism… on TV channels.
Judiciary: neutered? No, it quotes Faiz and lectures the executive.
Press: gagged? Modi doesn’t muzzle journalists – they bark louder.
This is not tyranny. It is theatre. And Guha is cast as the narrator of a tragedy no one else is watching.
Majoritarianism with universal delivery
Guha warns of ‘galloping majoritarianism’. But under Modi, welfare has galloped to every corner of the country without caste, creed, or community filters: LPG to Muslim homes in Uttar Pradesh, houses to Dalit families in Madhya Pradesh, toilets in tribal Odisha, bank accounts in rural Bengal, highways in Kashmir, water in Naxal-hit Chhattisgarh, electricity in Assam, and Ayushman Bharat for all, no voter ID cross-checks required If this is majoritarianism, it’ has got a remarkably inclusive logistics chain.
What they hate
Guha and friends aren’t rattled by policy – they are rattled by Modi himself. No pedigree, no foreign degree, no Delhi club pass. He skipped the Oxbridge pipeline and took the Gujarat express.
He doesn’t look, sound, or behave like the kind of PM India’s intelligentsia had bookmarked. And worse, he wins. Consistently. So yes, he has a personality cult. So do Stalin, Mamata, Kejriwal. Even Guha’s Twitter fans cannot tell the difference between a history lecture and a prophecy. But only Modi is called Hitler in a kurta. Why? Because he is unapologetically rooted, rhetorically lethal, and alarmingly popular.
A decade, give or take
Guha says it will take decades to ‘undo’ Modi’s legacy. What he means is: it may take decades to restore the old order where books were reviewed by friends and governments were run by family.
But if you shout Emergency every time a non-Congress PM speaks, people stop listening. If he truly fears dictatorship, he should be the first to acknowledge its absence – the fact that he can write, speak, broadcast, and be widely published is proof that the Emergency he dreads is entirely in his mind.
Because if Modi were Indira Gandhi on steroids, Guha would not be giving interviews. He would be in solitary, waiting not for a typewriter, but for a lawyer.
