It is not good for us to worship an individual. Only an ideal or a principle can be worshipped.
—Mohandas Gandhi, addressing a meeting of his admirers in April 1937
INDIA CLAIMS TO BE THE LARGEST DEMOCRACY in the world, and its ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claims to be the largest political organization in the world, with a membership base even greater than that of the Chinese Communist Party. Since May 2014, both the BJP and the government have been in thrall to the wishes—and occasionally the whims—of a single individual, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. An extraordinary personality cult has been constructed around Modi, its manifestations visible in state as well as party propaganda, in eulogies in the press, in adulatory invocations of his apparently transformative leadership by India’s leading entrepreneurs, celebrities, and sports stars.
This essay seeks to place the cult of Modi in comparative and cultural context. It will show how it arose, the hold it has over the Indian imagination, and its consequences for the country’s political and social future. It draws on my academic background as a historian of the Indian Republic, as well as on my personal experiences as an Indian citizen. However, since I am writing about a distinctively Indian variant of what is in fact a global phenomenon, what I say here may resonate with those who study or live under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world.
The term “cult of personality” was popularized, with regard to Joseph Stalin, by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his now famous speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. According to an English translation of Khrushchev’s speech, he remarked that it was “impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to elevate one person, to transform him into a superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such a man supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.”
The case of Stalin was not singular or unique. In the decades following World War II, the communist world was awash with cults of personality—of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, of Fidel Castro in Cuba, of Enver Hoxha in Albania, of Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Yet indisputably the greatest—not to say most deadly—of all the communist cults following Stalin’s was that of Mao Zedong in post-revolutionary China. Consider, for example, an editorial by Lt. Gen. Wu Faxian that appeared in the Liberation Army Daily on Aug. 13, 1967:
Chairman Mao is the most outstanding, greatest genius in the world, and his thought is the summing up of the experience of the proletarian struggles in China and abroad and is the unbreakable truth. In implementing Chairman Mao’s directives, we must absolutely not regard it as a prerequisite that we understand them. The experience of revolutionary struggles tells us that we do not understand many directives
