NEW DELHI — Of all the pictorial charts used in Indian schools as teaching aids, it was the Ideal Boy that haunted my generation. The Ideal Boy woke up and brushed his teeth with care, saluted his parents, prayed, had his meals on time, helped others, performed sundry duties and, more puzzling, took “lost children to police post.”

The Ideal Boy embodied certain Indian values, and though these seemed innocuous enough, there was something about his smudgy features, identifiably mainstream Hindu and North Indian, and his expression of saintly smugness that scarred my child brain. Now that I am an adult, and that the right-wing has come back to power in India, I understand why I was so queasy back then. The feeling was a foreboding that otherwise unobjectionable traditional Indian values — respect for one’s family, obedience to elders, modesty for women — might be invoked to reject or repress certain groups.

The new Bharatiya Janata Party government seems determined to look to Asia for political and cultural inspiration. Prime Minister Narendra Modi projects an image of himself as an authority — even an authoritarian — figure, in keeping with the regional ideal of a strong leader. All the while he has been careful to reach out to his counterparts. His first scheduled trips abroad will be to Bhutan and then Japan: and the Chinese foreign minister has just ended a visit to India.

His approach isn’t just a personal predilection; it also reflects a wider shift within India: the search, especially among right-wing politicians and intellectuals, for a common set of Asian cultural norms that would help them create and strengthen a new sense of Indian identity.