Shortly after the election results in India last week that returned the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and its leader, prime minister Narendra Modi, to power, a video began circulating on social media. Shared widely by Modi’s supporters, it purported to show a “millionaire Indian” celebrating Modi’s victory in New York City’s diamond district by throwing dollar bills into the air, westerners scrambling to pick up the money.

It turned out to be a hoax, one in an unending series of absurd claims through these elections, some of them emanating from Modi himself. Yet much about what Modi’s electoral victory means, for India and the world, can be inferred from this piece of dross: the peddling of falsehoods as truth, the unabashed celebration of wealth and profiteering, the idea that Modi’s enriched Indian fanboys now command respect from the west. That, in essence, is what counts in what is routinely called the world’s largest democracy.

This claustrophobic bubble of spectacle offers little breathing room for truth. The truth, however, is that amidst an electoral democracy involving 900 million adults, Modi’s rise exposes uncomfortable realities about both India and democracy, increasingly host to violent majoritarianism that itself is morphing into outright fascism.

For details of who Modi is, what the BJP is—for their connection to a shadowy paramilitary organization of Hindu supremacy that took its inspiration from European fascism in the twentieth century—I refer the reader to the essay I wrote for this magazine in May 2016. In the aftermath of its publication, I was subjected to a barrage of denouncements and threats via Indian social media, which seems to include paid thugs of the BJP as well as likeminded follower in both India and the Indian diaspora in the United States. One man said, on Twitter, that he would cut my finger off. And yet this was nothing compared to the routine threats of violence, sexual and otherwise, that women, minorities, and dissenters are subjected to in Modi’s increasingly intolerant India, where people have been lynched by mobs, assassinated by hitmen, arrested by the police on questionable pretexts, driven to suicide through threats and social pressure, and assaulted in judicial complexes, in full view of the police.

Despite the many signs of trouble in Modi’s India, the BJP retains an air of respectability. India’s elites—educated, urbanized, upper caste Hindus—are today either rabid Modi supporters or conveniently indifferent to his majoritarian menace. The powers of the west have embraced Modi too, despite his record, when chief minister of Gujarat, of unleashing a pogrom against Muslims in 2002, violence so egregious that the Bush administration felt compelled to cancel his visa. In 2014, Modi’s election as prime minister was greeted with eagerness, by Wall Street, by Silicon Valley, by American journalists and by Indian pundits, by people who otherwise tend to assure you of their liberalism and commitment to human rights while swirling their expensive wine. Modi wasn’t really an instigator of violence against minorities, they argued, as much as the leader India needed at this historical juncture, a neoliberal dynamo who could modernize the country, sweeping aside the vestiges of labor legislation.