‘If only his politics were as good as his economics’ — this is a familiar refrain in liberal commentaries about Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The suggestion is that there is a disconnect between Mr. Modi’s economic policies that liberal commentators approve of, and his Hindutva politics that they disapprove of.
The merits of the arguments about Mr. Modi’s economics and politics apart, this liberal view is formed by an inadequate understanding of Hindutva as an ideology, and an unquestioning adherence to the dubious claim that liberal democratic politics and free market capitalism are inevitable cohabitants.
Hindutva understands the link between politics and economics differently. The free market slogan, ‘good economics is good politics’, works in the inverse in the Hindutva scheme of things, as ‘good politics is good economics’. This is a strand of thought that runs through all of Mr. Modi’s speeches, but the one he made during the consecration of the Ram temple in Ayodhya in January 2024, a milestone in the BJP’s political journey, is particularly instructive.
