At this pace, he will remain a promising Prime Minister at 70 because that’s all he has, a collection of promissory notes. Modi’s achievement is not in the good that he has done but in the memory of the era he has erased. His argument for a Congress-mukt Bharat works because the Congress is no longer remembered for its history but for the last decade of corruption and indecisiveness. Today, the Congress is the marginal party that has started thinking marginally. Its latest achievement is to erase a memory and to create a new aspirational Indian which is tired of being weak kneed. Yet, if anyone who suffers from Congress envy, it is Modi. His attempt to sneak into the KYC calendar, his efforts to appropriate Congress achievements shows that India might be Congress-mukt but not Modi’s mind. He is haunted perpetually by the colossal achievement of Nehru and Gandhi and he knows he is pig meat next to them. They were natural leaders while Modi senses he is a Complan Boy, a quick-go genius who has yet not reached the heights of tower of history.

Once one sets aside the psychology of the last few years, the sociology becomes stark and worrying. Modi’s acts were to develop a vocabulary, a language for his idea of majoritarianism which operated not in norms but in the terms of the logic of numbers. As a result, dissents or the margins or the minority is seen as unpatriotic and anti-national; as a set of opinions and attitudes to be suppressed and even eradicated rather than to be discussed. Between majoritarianism and patriotism, Modi constructs the new India. His idea of India has no place for environmentalists critiquing development, minority entitlement to citizenship. The Constitution is important but development is sacred. A coastline has been hypothecated to Adanis in the name of development. What is presented as nationalism is middle class aping of the West where Modi promises good behaviour to Trump and Abe. India is now a second class American nation following the American dream.

The NRI becomes a special class to Indians nostalgic for culture yet committed to technology. The BJP articulates its techno-fundamentalism convinced that ancient India is the beginning of Silicon Valley. Security completes the glossary. Instead of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, Modi gives us security, patriotism and development. To do this, he suppresses the University, rewrites history, destroys the vitality of the NGOs and the voluntarism of the old civil society. We have the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal as the new civil society extending the policing function in state. Dissents are suppressed; twice - once by the State, once by the majoritarian arm of the Civil Society. Within such a new institutional framework, violence is no longer a pathology but an instrument of history and extension of politics.

A friend of mine emphasised the danger of this dualism between a static psychological politics and dynamic sociology revealing the violence of everydayness. He said it reads a bit like Indian biographies which read more like good conduct certificates rather than dynamic narratives. Modi’s four years is credited by the Media as a certificate of his intentions rather than a narrative of activity.

He exorcises India of its Nehruvianism, only to replace it with a nukkad RSS ethics, more accessible, far more coercive and violent. In fact, violence is a commodity that is replayed and consumed from the 2002 riots to the Afrazul and Akhlaq episode. The video is the accompaniment to every act of brutality. What accompanies it is the silence of Modi on Unnao, Kathua, lynching to every act of witch-hunting. The inflationary spread of violence as rape, brutality, lynching has been the constant tenor of the regime from torture in Kashmir to the lynching on the streets. In fact, murder has become an act of psychological cleansing in the Modi era. One never reads any of this in the sycophantic editorials of our time.

In four years, Modi has created a majoritarian morality where numbers and force is all. Even election becomes a numbers’ game; the ethics of democracy is irrelevant. What we are presented with is animous hate, resentment animated as democratic paradigm where voyeuristic violence exorcises a fabricated past. What it adds to it are the necessary attributes for the future: Maschimo, managerialism, and a middle class aspiration. Such a syndrome sets the basis of the regime which has to do something whether that something works or not.

Most people justify Modi by saying at least he is doing something, contrasting it with passiveness of decades of Congress rule. Four years is time enough to move from form to content, and cross examine what he is doing. Modi as a performative act is impressive. His supporters equate intentions with achievement. In the fifth year, we have to disentangle the two, psychologise the first and sociologise the second. Year five of Modi could be interesting in a critical way.