United We Stand (Against One Guy)
A longer one. Sit with it.
I've started noticing a strange kind of consensus in Indian public life, and it's not the kind anyone brags about at dinner. Somewhere in the last decade, criticizing the Prime Minister stopped being a political position and started being a personality trait — a free, renewable resource that costs nothing to produce and never runs out of demand. You don't need policy knowledge. You don't need to have read a single budget document. You just need a punchline and a platform, and the applause arrives before you've finished the sentence.
I want to walk through what I actually see happening, because I think the pattern is more interesting than the outrage.
Nothing good survives the news cycle intact
Infrastructure gets built, and the story becomes the contractor who allegedly cut corners. A welfare scheme reaches its hundred-millionth beneficiary, and the story becomes the three percent it failed to reach. India becomes one of the fastest-growing large economies on earth while half the developed world flirts with stagflation, and somehow the story is still about what's wrong here. I'm not saying nothing is wrong here — plenty is, always, everywhere, and pretending otherwise would just be the same dishonesty wearing a different flag. I'm saying the ratio has become absurd. Ten good things happen quietly. One bad thing happens loudly. Only the loud one gets a hashtag.
And somewhere inside that same reflex, "secularism" quietly stopped meaning what it used to. It used to mean the state treats every religion equally. Increasingly, in practice, it seems to mean one religion gets to be mocked freely, its festivals treated as content, its symbols treated as punchlines — while criticism of literally anyone else's faith gets treated as a hate crime in waiting. I've written about this at length elsewhere on this blog, so I won't retread the whole argument here, but I think it's worth naming plainly in this context too: a lot of what gets called "secular criticism" in Indian discourse is really just comfortable, one-directional mockery, dressed in a word that used to mean fairness.
Then there's the part that actually strikes me as the strangest, and the part I think deserves the most attention: nobody seems to be looking outward. The world right now is dealing with an energy shock out of the Middle East, inflation ticking back up across major economies, growth forecasts getting quietly revised downward from Washington to Brussels, and a global mood that even cautious institutions are describing as fragile. Against that backdrop, a country managing relative stability, still growing, still functioning, gets treated domestically like it's uniquely failing. I don't think comparative context excuses every domestic problem. I think it's just honest to notice that almost nobody arguing on my timeline seems to be comparing India's actual position to anyone else's. The criticism operates entirely in a vacuum, as if the rest of the world isn't also on fire right now, just in different rooms.
And here's the part I keep turning over, the one I actually think future historians will find strange about this moment: the sheer, mismatched coalition it takes to unite against this one man. Communists and Congress. Regional parties who've spent decades hating each other more than they've ever hated the BJP. Actors with foreign-funded NGOs standing next to student unions who'd normally consider them class enemies. People whose entire political identity is built on opposing each other, all momentarily willing to stand on the same stage, for the same photo, against the same target. That is not a normal coalition. That's not a shared vision for the country. That's a shared obsession with one man, and I don't think obsession is usually where good governance ideas come from.
I want to be honest about the hole in my own thesis here, because I think this essay owes you that, the same way the last one did. "India has never seen everyone come together against one leader" is a compelling line, and it isn't actually true. During the Emergency in the mid-1970s, an even stranger coalition assembled against Indira Gandhi — socialists, the old Jan Sangh (the direct ancestor of today's BJP), regional parties, student movements, all standing together under the Janata banner, despite agreeing on almost nothing except that one leader had to go. That coalition won. It also collapsed within three years, because the only thing holding it together was what it was against, not what it was for. I think that's the actual lesson history is offering here, if we're willing to take it rather than just take the flattering half of it: broad coalitions built purely on opposition to one man are not new, they are not proof of anything uniquely dangerous about this particular leader, and they have a well-documented tendency to fall apart the moment they actually win, because opposition was never a governing plan.
I also think the fairer version of the other side's argument deserves real space here, not a dismissive line at the end. If a government does preside over police violence against students, or an exam system genuinely fails the people depending on it, broad-based criticism isn't manufactured hatred — it's what accountability is supposed to look like in a democracy, and the fact that ideological opposites can agree on that much might be a healthy sign, not an ominous one. I don't think every critic on my timeline is acting in bad faith. I think plenty of them are responding, honestly, to real failures, and lumping all of that together with lazy mockery does them a disservice too.
So what should India actually learn from a moment like this? Not, I think, that criticism itself is the enemy — a democracy that can't tolerate criticism isn't one worth defending anyway. I think the lesson is narrower and less satisfying than either side wants: that opposition assembled purely around hatred of one man has never, in this country's history, translated into a coalition capable of governing once it wins, and that a citizenry which can only unite against something, never for something, is telling on itself a little more than it's telling on the man it's united against.
I know which side of that I fall on. I'm just old enough now to remember that the last time this exact coalition trick worked, it didn't actually fix anything. It just changed who got to be disappointing next.
— Pooja