As Modi went about his business, wielding swords at rallies and berating “secularism,” the word used in India to emphasize its constitutional principle of equal rights for all religious beliefs, his devotees in India and the United States went about their mob business on the internet and in the media and social media. There was the innovative abuse directed at the 69 percent who would not vote for him, who did not buy into his vision—the more polite terms being “presstitute,” “sickularist,” and “libtard.” The new Indians boasted of Modi, of his manly 56-inch chest (it’s actually 44 inches, his waist 41, and his belly 45, if his personal tailor is to be believed), but inches were only another way of expressing Modi’s machismo. Teenagers tattooed images of Modi on their bodies, and he was lauded as the country’s most eligible bachelor. The fact that he was in fact married, to a woman with whom he had never lived, who has never been given financial support—and who, after Modi became prime minister, would be denied a passport because she possessed no marriage certificate—was largely forgotten, or drowned out with abuse and threats.

In an essay a few months after the Gujarat massacres, Ashis Nandy, a clinical psychologist and one of India’s best-known public intellectuals, recalled how he had interviewed Modi in the early ’90s, when he was “a nobody, a small-time RSS pracharak trying to make it as a small-time BJP functionary.” Nandy wrote, “It was a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category.” Modi, Nandy wrote:

met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defense of projection, denial, and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence—all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist.

Nandy soon found himself the subject of a criminal case lodged by the Gujarat police. It accused him, of all things, of disturbing the harmonious relationship between religious communities. In a way, it proved Nandy’s point about the authoritarian personality who attempts to silence all dissent while expressing no doubts at all about his own actions and beliefs. Vinod Jose, in a meticulously researched profile published in 2012 in Caravan magazine (I am a contributing editor to Caravan), had noted how Modi made others apologize, turning criticism into entrepreneurial opportunity. In February 2003, two Indian industrialists, at an event with Modi, commented on the Gujarat violence; Modi engineered a written apology from the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the trade association that had organized the event. “We, in the CII, are very sorry for the hurt and pain you have felt,” the letter stated, adding that it regretted “very much the misunderstanding that has developed since the sixth of February, the day of our meeting in New Delhi.”

For those who have not apologized, and who have continued to stand up to Modi, different measures have been applied: legal intimidation, government pressure, social abuse, scurrilous gossip, police cases, and mob violence. Setalvad, one of Modi’s staunchest opponents, found her residence in Mumbai raided last July by the Central Bureau of Investigation, a federal agency, even as the Gujarat government attempted to have her arrested for financial fraud. The Ford Foundation, which has funded some of the projects carried out by Setalvad’s organization, discovered itself in the crosshairs of both the federal government and the state of Gujarat, the latter accusing the foundation, in a repeat of the charges against Nandy, of “abetting communal disharmony.”

With a defeat in November’s state elections for Bihar, in the eastern part of the country, Modi’s new India has amped up its sectarian Hindu nationalism, unleashing an astonishing degree of violence against all those who might not subscribe to this worldview, training its rhetoric and weaponry against anyone who might be identified as “anti-national,” which includes all those critical of Modi, the Hindu right, and Indian nationalism. In January 2015, immigration officials prevented a Greenpeace India staffer from boarding a flight to London, where she was scheduled to speak to British members of parliament about the environmental risk of a proposed mine in Madhya Pradesh, in central India, co-owned by a company listed on the London stock exchange. The government also identified Greenpeace India as working against the national interest, canceling its license to receive funds from outside India. Later that year, the writer Arundhati Roy was issued a criminal contempt notice by a Nagpur court, for an article she published in Outlook magazine about G.N. Saibaba, a disabled political dissident confined to a wheelchair, who had been awaiting trial for a year. Roy argued Saibaba should not be prevented from getting bail if Bajrangi and Kodnani, convicted for their role in the 2002 massacres, could, and if Amit Shah, once charged with ordering extrajudicial executions, functioned with impunity as president of the BJP “and the right-hand man of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.”

Shortly afterward, Rohith Vemula, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student at the University of Hyderabad who was a Dalit, the most oppressed of India’s castes, committed suicide. Vemula had protested the BJP student wing’s forcible disruption of the screening of a documentary on riots provoked by the BJP as part of Modi’s prime ministerial campaign, and had been targeted by the Hindu right. Described as anti-national by two ministers in Modi’s cabinet, and barred by authorities at the University of Hyderabad from entering its hostels and public spaces, a practice reminiscent of the ostracization of Dalits by upper-caste Hindus, he hanged himself.

In February, Kanhaiya Kumar, a student leader at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a public university in Delhi portrayed as an elite left bastion by the Hindu right, was arrested by the Delhi police on the orders of a BJP minister for sedition. During two of Kumar’s court appearances, lawyers (or men who claimed to be lawyers) assaulted students and faculty who had come to show their solidarity with Kumar. For good measure, they also beat up journalists who attempted to record the violence.

As in the 2002 massacres and their aftermath, the degree of violence under Modi’s rule differs depending on the target. In the case of Mohammad Akhlaq, a Muslim man lynched in September on the suspicion of eating beef, it was a mob at the door with swords and pistols. When a group of writers returned the national awards they had received in protest of the Modi government’s sectarianism, a Bollywood actor led a march against these writers for having “hurt the spirit of India,” ending with a much-publicized meeting with Modi.

Against this backdrop, with violence piling up almost faster than can be recorded, Modi has functioned as a talking mask. Despite his ubiquity on social media, with two Twitter feeds, one personal and one official, and despite being constantly photographed in expensive clothes—he wore a reportedly $16,000 suit made on Savile Row when meeting Obama in Delhi last January, a gift to him from a businessman, which was auctioned off later—he is perhaps the most closed-off head of state India has seen. He rarely gives interviews to the media, and never to journalists who might be critical of him. But he is always making pronouncements, sometimes providing free internet for rural India with the assistance of Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes solving climate change for the world in a Twitter conversation with @potus, tweeting an endless stream of banalities.