Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has come a long way. After being virtually banned from the U.S. for years over his failure to control anti-Muslim riots in his home state of Gujarat in 2002, he came to Washington for a triumphant first visit Monday with President Donald Trump—complete with bear hugs, defense deals and a welcoming tweet from the first lady.

The Hindu nationalist’s arrival in Washington was a reminder that of all the recent revolutions at the ballot box, Mr. Modi’s was the first. This week, pundits noted similarities between the two populist leaders: Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi have made political careers out of anti-Muslim animus, tapped nationalist passions, stoked the fires of intolerance and pursued vendettas against impertinent media outlets.

Yet these symmetries unfold in fundamentally different contexts. America has experienced a political upheaval, but it retains that supreme achievement of a mature democracy: It has two credible sides, left and right; the two sides have held, more or less; and the pendulum may swing again before long.

India has experienced something quite different in the three years since Mr. Modi took power. The “other side”—liberal India, secular India, the India of Nehru and Gandhi—hasn’t merely been decimated electorally; it has ceased to exist as a cultural and moral force. In area after area of life—from politics to media to cinema—there is now Mr. Modi’s India, and then a great void. The India of my childhood, with its fond notions of Hindu-Muslim unity, has gone under. It is as complete and comprehensive a defeat as one can imagine.

Last month, I traveled to Gorakhpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where nearly 20% of the residents are Muslim. In state elections this March, Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, won some 300 of the 400 seats. Mr. Modi’s choice of chief minister was Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest in saffron robes and longtime parliamentarian. His anti-Muslim rhetoric has been so hateful—he has told his followers that if Muslims “kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men”—that he was once beyond the pale. Today, his popularity threatens to eclipse Mr. Modi’s. As S. Prasannarajan, the editor of Open magazine, told me recently, “Yogi Adityanath becoming chief minister of [Uttar Pradesh] is the single biggest event in Indian politics since Modi became chief minister of Gujarat.”


On my flight to Gorakhpur was R.P.N. Singh, a member of the ancien régime and a former member of Parliament from the opposition Congress Party. (The party of Nehru was reduced to 44 seats out of 543 in 2014.) Mr. Singh—a graduate of India’s equivalent of Andover, the son of an MP, and a minister under Indira Gandhi—was well-mannered, soft-spoken and self-effacing. After the flight, he introduced me to a BJP politician in the corrugated iron shed that is Gorakhpur airport.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trump walk from the Oval Office to the Rose Garden during their White House meeting Monday. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

The BJP man, dressed in a saffron kurta, with a chrome watch around his wrist and an expensive gold pen dangling from his pocket, looked the part of a venal politician. He was unable to resist mentioning that he had been repeatedly elected, which felt like a jab at the recently defeated Mr. Singh, and I realized that Indian politics now belonged to this other kind of leader. The class of person Mr. Singh represented had served—as Nehru had—as intermediaries between India and the West. But that age of custodianship was over, and India was in Indian hands, as it had never been before.

The effects of this change were visible in cinema too. A new kind of movie, with a bold, mythical Hindu theme, had become the biggest Indian hit of all time. “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion”—the tale of “warring cousins who fight for the kingship of an ancient kingdom,” as the Times of India put it—was not a Bollywood film but a south Indian film. (The south Indian states each have robust film industries, but they are regional; never before has a south Indian film so dominated the national and international stage.) Karan Johar—the film’s distributor in north India—told me that it had defied all expectations.

Its director hadn’t intended it to cater to the Hindu right; but, by exciting old myths of valor and strength, it had. Steeped in Hindu ideas of kingship and virtue, the film diverged from traditional Bollywood pieties about a shared Hindu-Muslim culture. Mr. Modi’s India has scant room for romantic ideas about Muslims or their place in Indian society.

The remaking of India’s cultural landscape was affecting the English media too. When I was covering the 2014 election for Open magazine, there were two—maybe three—English-speaking journalists who openly supported Mr. Modi, and they were pariahs for it. Three years on, the change was staggering. Old TV hosts with bow ties and Oxbridge accents were being weeded out; Barkha Dutt, the country’s most famous liberal anchor, was off the air; and earlier this month, the owners of New Delhi Television, a private broadcaster critical of the government, were raided by a government agency. But the raid almost wasn’t needed: The channel, out of step with the times, was fading. Meanwhile, a new nationalist channel had taken to the air, making no distinction between enemies of the government and enemies of the country. Within weeks, Republic TV had seized a 52% market share, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Council of India.


The most obvious consequence of India’s new anti-Muslim atmosphere has been a spate of gruesome cow and beef-related murders. The cow is sacred to Hindus, but the current hysteria has been engineered. During his 2014 campaign, Mr. Modi whipped crowds into frenzies over a supposed conspiracy by his political foes to slaughter cows and export beef.

Since he took power, India has seen more than 60 incidents of cow-related mob violence, in which the overwhelming bulk of the 23 reported fatalities were Muslim. Mr. Modi has had very little to say about these deaths. On Wednesday, anti-lynching protests erupted in cities nationwide, and Mr. Modi finally bluntly condemned the violence. “We belong to a land of nonviolence,” he said, invoking Gandhi.

But it may be too late; the Indian street is on the boil. In the U.S., Mr. Trump faces a free press, a galvanized opposition and a Republican Party with deepening misgivings. In India, Mr. Modi faces only himself.

—Mr. Taseer is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Way Things Were.”