when i saw Pm Narendra Modi in a Pagdi…

It happened the way most things do in this city — quickly, and in a crowd. The metro doors opened at my stop and I did what everyone does: pushed out while half the platform pushed in. For a split second, caught between the two waves of people, I looked up. Modi ji stared back at me from a hoarding — maroon collar, pagdi, that familiar composed expression. Then I was through, on the platform, and my companion was already walking ahead. We had somewhere to be. There was an inauguration at Lodhi Garden.

Upstairs, the sun was waiting. No breeze, no mercy — just Delhi in full summer form. The city had no interest in the occasion we were dressed for. But my mind was still on that hoarding.My companion said something but I was only half listening. I kept thinking about that face on the hoarding. About how you can’t move through this city — through this country — without running into it.

Modi ji is everywhere and yet his presence feels like something that has long outgrown the office he holds. Prime Minister of India. Head of government of the world’s largest democracy, with nearly 980 million eligible voters. It is, by any measure, an almost incomprehensible mandate. And yet somehow, the man has become larger than even that. Not a politician. Not merely a leader. A brand. Something closer to myth. In India, there are people who don’t follow politics but follow him — the way you follow a god, not a government.

And that is precisely where something quietly breaks.

When a leader ascends to godhood in the public imagination, accountability becomes a kind of blasphemy. To question is to offend. To criticise is to be anti-national. The architecture of worship, once built, is self-defending — it doesn’t need enforcers because the devotees police each other. You see it in drawing rooms, in office corridors, in family dinners where someone clears their throat and the conversation moves on. A god is not asked to explain rising unemployment. A god is not held responsible for crime rates that climb quietly in the background of his mythology. A god simply is — and to demand performance from divinity is to miss the point entirely.

This is how majoritarian creep works. It doesn’t arrive with a declaration. It arrives in the language people begin to accept as normal — who is a real Indian, whose loyalty is always already suspect, which community’s grief counts and which doesn’t. It arrives in laws that are written wide enough to mean everything and narrow enough to target anyone.

It arrives in courtrooms that take longer and longer to push back, in a judiciary whose activism has grown cautious, whose silences speak in a register that lawyers understand even when the public doesn’t. India is not yet what it could become. But the distance between here and there has been shortening, and the road is being paved with the kind of incremental normalisation that is almost impossible to point to in the moment.

Meanwhile, on every phone in every pocket, the other India runs parallel. WhatsApp forwards that don’t need to be true to be believed — they only need to be repeated. Carefully produced videos, doctored images, outrage packaged for sharing. The algorithm rewards heat over light, and the groups — family groups, colony groups, old school groups — become unwitting pipelines for a particular version of the country, one in which a religious minority is always on the verge of some civilisational aggression, in which history is a wound that must be kept open and bleeding to remain useful. It is a sophisticated operation dressed in the clothing of grassroots feeling. And it works. Election after election, it works — not despite the visible evidence of governance failures, but alongside it, drowning it out.

Because the numbers exist, if you look for them. The press freedom indices, the rankings that place India alongside countries we would not otherwise compare ourselves to. The journalists who find their accreditations revoked, their phones seized, their bail applications pending for months. The media houses that have, one by one, learned which stories to run and which to let go quiet. The public sector undertakings that have moved, with remarkable efficiency, into the hands of a small constellation of private industrialists — airports, ports, roads, the infrastructure of the nation sold or leased with a speed that outpaces scrutiny. These are not conspiracy. They are documented. They are on record. They simply do not trend.

The auto turned into the lane that leads to Lodhi Garden. Through the trees I could see the shapes of old stone monuments — Mughal, Lodi, Sayyid — standing in the indifferent afternoon. Dynasties that also, in their time, believed themselves permanent. I stepped out, soaked through, squinting in the light, and followed my companion toward the sound of a microphone being tested somewhere ahead.

Something was being inaugurated today. I was still trying to work out what was being quietly closed.