When Prime Minister Narendra Modi touches down in California later this week, he can look forward to being feted by thousands of adoring fans and some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful CEOs. But he will also be welcomed by billboards castigating him for his allegedly “regressive agenda”.

This follows a widely publicised letter by US-based academics that accused the Modi government of disregarding human rights, censoring critics, undermining the judiciary, and suppressing religious freedom. The academics also urged companies to be wary of investing in India.

At one level, this outpouring of tender concern for India verges on the comic. A casual observer may be forgiven for thinking the learned scholars had managed to confuse India’s cacophonous democracy with authoritarian Russia or China’s one-party state. But the protests against Modi’s California visit also underscore a fatal weakness of many of his critics: a lack of proportion that undermines their credibility and marginalises their concerns among ordinary Indians.

You might call this affliction Modi Derangement Syndrome. It describes the inability to discuss anything related to the prime minister in less than apocalyptic terms. For instance, on a television programme a couple of years back i debated Modi’s prospects with a Delhi University English professor who claimed that the then Gujarat chief minister had “presided over the genocide of millions”. On the brighter side, at least my co-panelist wasn’t a math professor.

Since Modi led BJP to power last year – in the largest democratic exercise in history – his critics have produced a steady drumbeat of stories that suggest that India has taken a sharp authoritarian turn. (With her gift for understatement, Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy prefers “totalitarian”.) In this dystopian tale of jackboots on the Ganga, the fragile flower of India’s democracy is in the process of being stomped into pulp.

Too bad that Indians haven’t got the memo about their own awful situation. According to a survey released last week by the Pew Research Center, Modi’s approval rating stands at a staggering 87%. Ordinary Indians credit him (in order) for his effort to build toilets, create jobs, fight terrorism, check inflation and help the poor. Moreover, the prime minister’s approval rating has risen nine points since Pew’s last survey two years ago.

Bluntly put, the idea that India’s democracy is threatened is hogwash. Modi may be the most powerful prime minister India has seen in a generation. But his power is constrained in ways that would be unimaginable to a genuinely authoritarian figure such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or even Turkey’s Recep Erdogan.

To begin with, India’s federal polity concentrates most decisions that affect day-to-day lives with chief ministers rather than the prime minister.

In an authoritarian country there would simply be no room for a Mamata Banerjee, a Naveen Patnaik or a Jayalalithaa, powerful satraps who draw their authority not from the capital, but directly from the people. Indeed, the same holds true, to varying degrees, for BJP chief ministers such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Raman Singh and Vasundhara Raje. If anything, by boosting fiscal outlays to the states the Modi government has strengthened Indian federalism.

Nor would an authoritarian leader worth his goose step let opposition parties stymie his economic agenda. Can anyone imagine Putin losing a battle to make it marginally less hard to acquire land for industry and infrastructure, or Erdogan allowing a handful of opposition legislators to obstruct a widely touted reform such as the Goods and Services Tax?

I can’t think of a single English language newspaper of consequence whose roster of regular columnists leans towards the government. Some of the most prominent new online publications appear to be in a race to see who can stake out the most consistently antigovernment positions.

To be sure, the Modi government has hardly helped its own case. Instead of shoring up the prime minister’s goodwill among social media users, the communications and IT ministry has actively wrecked it. Its support for the notorious Article 66A curbing internet freedom – a law Modi had publicly opposed as chief minister – must count as one of the government’s most spectacular own goals. Ill-fated attempts to ban pornography and force users of social media and messaging applications to store encrypted messages for 90 days are right up there as well.

Similarly, the home ministry has often reflected the sensibility of a Bareilly sub-inspector rather than the sophistication expected of the world’s largest democracy. You do not have to be a fan of Greenpeace’s histrionics to think that deplaning one of its activists was counterproductive. You can believe that Teesta Setalvad turned the worthy cause of justice for Gujarat riot victims into a shrill personal vendetta, and still find the raids on her foolish.

In the end, though, the government’s missteps suggest pettiness and inexperience more than sinister designs on democracy. They merit pointed criticism, not wild exaggeration. Modi Derangement Syndrome only crowds out reasonable debate.