The Fear Has Lifted: Aakar Patel on Modi's Weakest Hour

A Weakness Without Precedent

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nous, the author and columnist Aakar Patel was asked the question hanging over Indian politics this year: after the youth-led protests that followed the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) controversy and gathered at Delhi's Jantar Mantar, is Narendra Modi passing through the weakest moment of his political life? Patel's answer was a qualified yes. Not because Modi has never faced trouble before — the Bharatiya Janata Party lost its parliamentary majority in the 2024 general election — but because, until now, his personal image had survived every setback intact. What changed this year, Patel said, was the language. For the first time since Modi became prime minister, he heard young people, including Generation Z voters from the very middle-class and upper-middle-class Hindu households that have traditionally backed the BJP, speak about him with open contempt. That, in Patel's reading, is new.

Twelve Years Leave No Place to Hide

Patel offered two reasons why he believes this moment will not simply pass. The first is almost literary: he quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation that "every hero becomes a bore at last," arguing that after so many years on the same stage, repetition breeds fatigue. The second is structural. Twelve years, he said, is an extraordinarily long time to hold the office of prime minister, and it leaves nowhere to hide. He compared the record unfavourably: Adolf Hitler's twelve years as German chancellor were long enough to build the autobahns, invade France, march on Russia, lose the war and die; Jawaharlal Nehru's first twelve years as prime minister, ending around 1960, were long enough to establish many of the scientific, cultural and educational institutions that still stand in India today. Modi, Patel argued, has held two back-to-back parliamentary majorities — 282 seats in 2014, 303 in 2019 — and still, in his thirteenth year in office, promises that the big changes are yet to come. That excuse, he said, no longer holds.

What Made the NEET Protests Different

Asked how this year's unrest compares with the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests and the farm-law agitation, Patel said the underlying pattern is familiar: whenever a large enough number of Indians take to the streets — Muslim women leading the CAA-NRC protests, Sikh farmers camped at Delhi's borders, or now a generation of students and young professionals — governments have eventually been forced to retreat. What is different this time, he argued, is that for the first time a principle of accountability was established. The resignation of a serving Union minister, Dharmendra Pradhan — a minister since 2014, not a junior figure — marked a genuine departure. Modi had apologised on television to farmers in 2021, and the CAA itself was never actually implemented; but forcing out a sitting minister is something no earlier protest movement achieved. Patel argued that a government built around the idea that only Modi's own popularity and image deserve credit for its successes found it especially damaging to be seen publicly discarding a loyalist.

The Politics of Fear, Ending Ungracefully

For Patel, the deeper story is the disappearance of fear itself. He described Modi's twelve years, and BJP-RSS politics more broadly, as fundamentally a politics of fear — silencing critics, jailing dissenters, suppressing any demand for accountability. What struck him was how suddenly that fear seemed to lift. He does not think it built up gradually and only surfaced this year; he called it an abrupt, generational break, driven by young Indians unwilling to keep waiting for a government to make good on its promises. That impatience, he suggested, is itself a verdict on the country's own record over eighty years of independence — from viral videos exposing substandard school meals to Bengaluru building three airports for the wealthy while the majority who cycle, take buses or walk see no comparable public investment.

Hindutva as Belief, Not Strategy

The host pressed Patel on whether these shifts extend to how Muslims and other minorities are treated, given that the government's core agenda — the Uniform Civil Code, the rhetoric of "infiltrators," the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, questions over citizenship, bulldozer demolitions, mob lynching — remains unchanged. Patel was blunt: he expects that agenda to continue, because for Modi and the BJP, Hindutva is not a means to an end but a sincerely held conviction. He traced it to the 1920s ideological framing associated with Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, under which Muslims and Christians are treated as suspect because their spiritual loyalty is presumed to lie with Mecca, Jerusalem or the Vatican rather than with India as a "holy land." No serious BJP-aligned economist, Patel noted — not even sympathetic voices such as Surjit Bhalla — claims the economy is performing as promised. Yet the base remains satisfied, he argued, because of how thoroughly the communal agenda has been carried out since 2014, particularly after the 2015 beef-related laws and the "love jihad" laws that began in 2018. That satisfaction, in his view, is precisely why the agenda will not be abandoned.

Why a "Pure" Hindu Rashtra Cannot Be Built

Is India already a Hindu Rashtra in all but name? Patel answered with comparative history. Before 2008, he noted, Nepal was the world's only constitutional Hindu state, resting on two pillars: an executive headed by a Kshatriya king, and a Brahmin priest to advise him — though even Nepalese law never went so far as to bar Shudras from education or women from work, because the modern world would not tolerate it. Pakistan, despite being founded as a Muslim homeland, never became a true theocracy either, he argued, because its Sunni-majority population is too internally varied to submit to a single religious hierarchy, unlike Iran's vertically ordered clergy under a Supreme Leader. The RSS faces a comparable structural problem in India: there is no single law that could formally convert a plural, constitutional republic into a Hindu Rashtra, and no individual who could plausibly be crowned its king. Patel recalled that the politician Subramanian Swamy once proposed disenfranchising Muslims outright — an idea he sees now unfolding in miniature through the SIR process.

Two Hundred Million Reasons Persecution Never Ends

What the RSS possesses instead, Patel argued, is India's Muslim population itself — at once, in his words, the movement's greatest asset and its greatest liability. He pointed out that Germany's Jewish population in 1930 was under one percent, compared with roughly 200 million Muslims in India today; a population that large cannot be excised without damaging the nation itself. That, in his account, is why the practical form of Hindu Rashtra has become permanent, low-grade persecution rather than outright expulsion: near-total exclusion from formal power — no Muslim in the Union Cabinet, none among the BJP's Lok Sabha MPs, its roughly 95 Rajya Sabha members or its roughly 1,000 state legislators — paired with a steady stream of laws and policies designed to make daily life harder. That, he said, is what success looks like for this project: not a finished Hindu Rashtra with a constitutional basis, but an unfinished one sustained by continuous targeting. On Mohan Bhagwat's recent remarks in New York — that Hindus who want Muslims expelled are not true Hindus — Patel saw no real shift, only what he called an inferiority complex seeking Western validation, since RSS leaders cannot admit abroad, in English, what domestic policy already does in practice.

The Opposition's Muslim Silence

Patel was equally critical of the opposition. Asked why parties that depend on Muslim votes hesitate even to name Muslims directly — preferring the vaguer term "minorities" — while speaking forthrightly about Dalit and Adivasi grievances, he agreed the criticism was fair. Muslims, he said, are the one community targeted specifically by law and policy since 2014, yet the judiciary, media, opposition and civil society have all largely failed to defend them, whether from an inability or an unwillingness to engage. He was equally candid about his own generation's failure: for years, people like him assumed conditions would improve once the BJP eventually left office — a comfortable, "tired" assumption, in his phrase, that events have not borne out.

A Patience Nearing Its Limit

Patel offered unusual praise for how Muslims have absorbed the pressure of the past decade, saying the patience shown since 2014 might not have been matched by any other community in any other country, and pointing to the continued imprisonment of activists such as Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam as cases the world understands to be about religious identity rather than any proven offence. He described a private test he sets himself: honestly asking whether a child begging at a Delhi traffic signal has any real future, and concluding that she will likely live out her life exactly as she is living it now. Earlier generations, including his own, assumed things would eventually improve, much as independence-era optimists once did; he no longer believes that assumption was justified, and he does not think a community excluded this completely from power can remain politically passive indefinitely.

After Modi, the RSS Picks the Referee

On succession, Patel was candid about the limits of prediction but offered a structural view. He does not think the RSS is searching for a Modi alternative now, precisely because Modi's authority does not derive from the organisation — it comes from a personal popularity that makes him, in Patel's assessment, the only BJP leader bigger than the RSS itself. He noted that Modi is roughly the same age as RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, and trained decades ago under Bhagwat's own father, Madhukarrao Bhagwat, giving him a long personal history with the organisation's leadership. Only once Modi departs, Patel argued, will the RSS visibly assert itself, much as it did in the succession contest between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani in the 1990s. He predicted that whoever follows Modi is likely to be more openly hardline, since internal battles in an ideologically driven party tend to be won by its more extreme wing, and that Amit Shah, often described as Modi's strategist, lacks any independent capacity to draw crowds on his own. Institutionally, he argued, the RSS's century-long durability — an organisation that has never split or fractured — will outlast any individual leader, including Modi. He pointed to Gujarat, where Congress has not won a state election since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, aside from one brief Janata Dal interlude, as proof that India's first-past-the-post system can sustain one-party dominance for decades regardless of underlying discontent; the BJP, he suggested, could plausibly hold on nationally with a reduced tally even if support keeps eroding. What he considers inevitable is not necessarily a change of government but a change in what any government can credibly promise: he does not expect the grand pledges of a "developed nation" or "superpower" status to survive contact with three consecutive youth uprisings — the CAA protests of 2019-20, the farm-law protests of 2020-21, and the unrest of this year — which he reads as evidence that Indians, across the political spectrum, have simply stopped being willing to wait. Asked directly in a closing rapid-fire round, Patel said he expects Modi to contest the 2029 election, named ego as Modi's biggest weakness, identified the RSS as the organisation that will define the BJP's face after Modi eventually departs, and said he expects Hindutva to survive Modi's exit. On Rahul Gandhi, his answer was more guarded: not necessarily the next prime minister, he said — he does not know what the results will actually be.

The Verdict

Pressed to imagine how history might eventually judge Modi, the interview closed on a framing that the conversation had circled around throughout: a leader who reshaped Indian politics decisively, but along two very different axes. Across the hour, Patel's own account traced exactly that split — an extraordinary, durable success at embedding a communal, exclusionary politics into the machinery of the state, alongside a persistent, unresolved failure to deliver the development, jobs and institutional strength promised since 2014. It is a split he expects only to widen, not because Modi himself will change — at 75, Patel said, deep personal change is unlikely — but because the country underneath him, especially its young, has stopped being willing to wait.