My deeper fear is that Mr. Modi lacks a free-marketer’s natural suspicion of the state. He seems wedded to the third-way politics he developed in Gujarat State, where he was chief minister from 2001 to 2014, in which the machinery and assets of an overburdened socialist state are left intact, but the bureaucracy is cleansed of inefficiency and corruption. Not surprisingly, all that has been achieved in his first two years in office is clean government at the top, while the rest remains more or less unchanged.

This has disappointed many on the economic right who supported Mr. Modi in 2014, hoping he would be India’s Reagan or Thatcher. Sadanand Dhume, a free-market advocate, conceded in The Wall Street Journal in March that the prime minister was a “cautious tinkerer” rather than “a committed reformer.”

A young businesswoman who supports the prime minister put it well. “He goes to the West and sees prosperity in terms of jobs and physical infrastructure, which he is trying to emulate,” she wrote to me in an email. “But he fails to see the invisible underpinnings of Western civilization, which are political and economic liberty.”

Mr. Modi’s election unleashed passions that only a roaring economy can contain. As I traveled through India recently, from Varanasi to Mumbai to Delhi, I was moved by how much people still trust the prime minister. When I asked them what happened to the “good days” he had promised, they invariably replied, “It will take time.” But I sense an anticipation that could turn sour.

It is election season once again. The scorching capital city is full of news of B.J.P. victories in places where the party rarely wins, including socialist bastions like Kerala and Bengal. It seems like a clear message to the man who promised an alternative to India’s toxic socialism that he should stay the course. For decades, the old socialist state preyed on the people it was meant to serve. The rage that developed against it propelled Mr. Modi forward. It was not a mandate for gentle reform, but for profound change from the ground up.