By Amrita Shah

A few days after fresh instances of censorship (an actor’s claim of being disinvited from a university event for his anti-establishment views and the cancellation of a scheduled discussion on political prisoners by a prominent Mumbai cultural festival), India hosted a flamboyant visit by French President Emmanuel Macron amidst the fanfare of the Artificial Intelligence Impact Summit 2026 which was held in New Delhi. Most people would say there is no connection between the suppression of dissent and India’s staging of these high-profile events.

For many years now, it has been widely held that the relentless erosion of civil liberties in the country (seen in recurring attacks on minorities, the arrest of civil rights activists, tax raids on media houses and threats to cartoonists and stand-up comics) is attributable to the authoritarian personality of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his powerful appeal as a fundamentalist Hindu leader. Conventional wisdom within the liberal intelligentsia, articulated in numerous books, documentary films and media columns has it that the Hindutva rhetoric of historical injustice and hurt pride has turned millions of Indians into adulators of Modi and the promise he holds out for majoritarian rule.

I have long argued that this explanation, axiomatic for many, is erroneous. The diminution of democratic freedom and of secular rights in present-day India is undeniable. But their cause is far more complex than is commonly suggested.

My perspective, as a writer who combines journalistic research with deep scholarship, is based on a close observation of the socio-political trajectory of post-liberalisation India and a focused study of the western state of Gujarat which has often been described as a laboratory for Hindutva. I visited the state frequently between 2005-2010 to look into its recent socio-political history for causes of the brutal mass communal violence of 2002. I was distracted from my purpose by something peculiar taking place in the commercial capital, Ahmedabad. Every few weeks when I went there it seemed something new had come up: a giant convention centre, a luxury hotel, a flyover, a mall, a highway. A modest, provincial city was transmogrifying before my very eyes.

To call what I was witnessing “development” would have been a misleading way of communicating the complex set of strategies that were at play there, of which the physical structures were only manifestations. It was a new kind of politics being practiced by the state’s then controversial chief minister that I sensed would catapult him to national prominence and find replication at the Central level. I decided to continue looking at Gujarat’s recent past but to change my focus and study this phenomenon.

This was not as simple as it seemed. The backdrop to this unconventional politics was the mandate for development signalled by the 1991 structural reforms programme, a key component of which was the International Monetary Fund-World Bank-propelled push towards urbanisation (cities are the “engines of growth”).

This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.