IN the sprawling scroll of India’s story, few figures have fused longevity with luminosity, persistence with power, endurance with epochal impact quite like Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From small town Vadnagar to New Delhi’s boulevards, he has traversed the arduous ascent from anonymity to authority.
He has crafted not merely a career but a canon of charisma, conviction, and control. With RSS as his ideological parent and spiritually nourished by Bharat Mata, no other leader has realised Hindutva’s ideological dreams with such clarity.
Modi, the ideal son, has achieved in 10 years what earlier leaders could not achieve in generations – thereby reshaping India’s cultural and constitutional map. He consecrated the Ram Temple.
The criminalisation of triple talaq was hailed as gender justice, but also showcased his Government’s willingness to reform personal law in line with commitment. Curriculum reform infused textbooks with a sharper nationalist narrative, while the Kashi Vishwanath corridor in Varanasi and Mahakal redevelopment in Ujjain revived ancient sacred centres, blending religion with state-led modernisation. Modi has made faith and politics inseparable. The PM has translated longnurtured popular aspirations into tangible state policy.
In doing so, he has not only reshaped the Indian State, but attempted to restore the grandeur of India’s civilisational identity once celebrated as Sone ki chidiya (golden bird). HE is the youngest PM after Rajiv Gandhi and, with over two decades of uninterrupted power – first as Gujarat’s longest-serving Chief Minister and then India’s PM for more than a decade – he ranks as the longest-serving PM after Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Unlike many of his predecessors, Modi has cultivated a larger-than-life persona: a leader of discipline, conviction, and extraordinary energy. His austere lifestyle, relentless work ethic, and mastery over communication have set him apart in an age of fleeting political reputations.
Modi thrives on symbolism and spectacle, yet he also relies on the power of detail like numbers, targets, and deadlines to turn policy into performance. Modi is no ordinary administrator. He is the architect of audacity who transforms statistics into symbols, digits into dreams, and numbers into national narratives. His are not sterile figures but soaring signposts, banners of belief unfurled before a billion. The PM Ujjwala Yojana promised cooking gas connections to 80 million households, transforming the lives of rural women. The Jan Dhan Yojana broke global records by opening more than 500 million bank accounts.
Mass mobilisation
His communication is choreography: Swachh Bharat, Startup India, Skill India, Khelo India – each initiative is an invocation, each scheme a sermon. He turned sanitation into sanctity, entrepreneurship into evangelism and sport into spirit. Slogans have been his most potent weapon of mass mobilisation. By simplifying complex policies into catchphrases, he created a sense of participation that transcended caste, class, and region. Modi’s slogans are not empty rhetoric but instruments of governance and political theatre, turning administration into a shared national project.
His dream of making India a $5-trillion economy, though pushed back by pandemic shocks, remains the defining benchmark of his economic vision. His foreign policy carries echoes of confidence; India is no longer just a modern power but an ancient civilisation reclaiming its global role. But under Modi, centralised decision-making became more muscular than any PM but Indira Gandhi. Ministries and party apparatchiks look to the Prime Minister’s Office for direction, enabling speed in execution, but weakening institutional feedback.
These shortcomings stem not only from structural challenges, but also from Modi’s centralised style of governance. By relying heavily on control and speed, he leaves little room for course correction. Success becomes more optical than substantive, with announcements often outpacing ground realities.
Even as ‘Minimum Government, Maximum Governance’ rings a clarion call, it functions as a paradoxical pact. The State did not wither; it was welded into new wires of digital delivery. Bureaucracy did not vanish; it was vanquished by vigilance under the PMO’s gaze. Thus emerged a system where efficiency expanded but independence imploded, where execution excelled but institutions were enfeebled.
Ideology, however, has been his indelible imprint. He is the Sangh’s paragon, prophet, and the progeny who delivered the civilisational covenant. In one concentrated decade, he converted good economics into good politics.
Where earlier governments hesitated to embrace pro-business reforms for fear of electoral backlash, Modi moved decisively. He opened insurance and defence to 100 per cent foreign investment, attracted record inflows of capital, and made India a rising star on the global Ease-of-Doing-Business index.
Reform with rhetoric
Where his predecessors practised prudence by popularising pallid prose, Modi infused reform with rhetoric, industry with incantation. Massive investments in expressways, ports, and airports underscored his belief that infrastructure was the backbone of growth.
His Atmanirbhar Bharat campaign sought to turn self-reliance into a nationalist rallying cry, positioning economic expansion as an extension of civilisational pride. Unlike Manmohan Singh, who delivered growth but paid political costs, Modi recast capitalism as a cultural resurgence, turning balance sheets into battle cries, commerce into civilisational continuity.
Governance under Modi is gospel, grandstand, and galvanisation. The Ram Temple consecration was more than a religious event. It was staged as the rebirth of Hindu pride and a message to the world that India’s cultural soul had returned to the centre of its statecraft. His foreign policy carries echoes of this confidence. India is no longer just a modern power, but an ancient civilisation reclaiming its global role. In mythological terms, Modi is the dutiful son who upheld Bharat Mata’s principles above all else.
And yet, beneath the blaze of banners, the blemishes beckon. Cylinders that cannot be refilled, accounts that slumber in silence, factories that falter, toilets that stand unusable. Programmes proclaimed with pomp occasionally perish in practice. Spectacle sometimes overshadows substance. Now at 75, Modi bestrides the republic as magistrate and myth, ascetic and architect, ruler and rhetorician.
Piercing question
Yet history, inexorable and impartial, will pose its piercing question: did this reign raise the poorest from penury? Did it balance power with pluralism, ambition with amity, grandeur with genuine justice? Here, sacrifice is the main metaphor; just as Rama renounced royal privilege to honour Kaushalya’s moral compass, Modi has devoted his political career to living by the ideological discipline of the RSS’s Bharat Mata trope.
That’s also his filial dilemma. In the Ramayana, Shravana Kumar carried his parents to pilgrimage on his shoulders. For redemption, Dasharatha was forced to send his son Rama into exile for 14 years.
Rama’s renown lay not in coronation but in compassion, not in conquest but in conscience. Likewise, Modi’s majesty will not be measured merely in temples consecrated, slogans sung, or slogans coined, but in whether he carved a genuinely secular, pluralist and tolerant republic resurgent and righteous, prosperous and peaceful, confident and compassionate. Only then will the ‘golden bird’ he so ardently invokes truly shine – not as a symbol alone, but as a civilisation renewed in substance as well as spirit.
