India today feels almost unrecognisable to me. In just a decade, so much has shifted that I sometimes catch myself wondering if I imagined the country I grew up in. Things we once thought were out of reach are now everyday realities, arriving so quietly and quickly that we hardly noticed the change.
Take a simple memory: I remember planning a passenger train journey from Chennai to the Northeast and budgeting for a week-long delay without blinking. Today, my first search throws up “Chennai – Dimapur flight.” That contrast alone tells a story of speed, scale, and systems that finally work.
I’ve also watched the political news ecosystem transform. A decade ago, a certain tribe of scandal-chasers feasted on endless scams; now they seem stranded in a new normal where that fountain has largely dried up. Their nostalgia for the “glory” days says more about the past than the present.
Even the bureaucracylong a symbol of status and distancehas had a reckoning. I read with disbelief as some IAS officers protested the open-office plan at the new Kartavya Bhavan, lamenting the loss of private cabins that supposedly enabled “our critical thinking and confidentiality.” The very renamingRajpath to Kartavya Path, Central Secretariat to Kartavya Bhavansignals a civilisational shift: from imperial hauteur to dharmic duty.
I see this decade as a continuationand a decisive deepeningof a process that the late Atal Bihari Vajpayee initiated through his New Telecom Policy, the Golden Quadrilateral, and a bolder foreign policy. Yet even Vajpayee, operating in the cannibalistic era of coalitions, mostly changed the paint while leaving the inherited imperial structure intact.
Narendra Modi, in my view, dug deeper. He didn’t just alter structures; he excavated foundations and forced us to look at the rotespecially a recalcitrant bureaucracy and an unaccountable judiciarylong shielded by an entrenched ecosystem. Unlike Vajpayee, he internalised a hard lesson: true transformation demands an absolute majority.
The contrast with the decade before 2014 is stark. That period not only reversed many NDA-1 gains but also indulged secessionist impulses that kept India fragile. If the post–Rajiv Gandhi years felt chaotic, the Modi years have felt like stability with intent.
Transformation, I’ve come to believe, is first lived and only later analysed. We didn’t realise when UPI became oxygen. We didn’t notice when defence brokeragethe old middlemen who held national security hostagewas uprooted. We registered, almost in passing, that the six-week rhythm of Jihadi attacks on Indian soil had stopped after 2014. We read that Maoist terror had been rolled back and that schools in places like Gadchiroli were functioning againwithout pausing to take in the magnitude.
We learned that Article 370 was gone when it was tabled in Parliament. We watched a once-dominant legacy media ecosystem lose its stranglehold over ministries, businessmen, and public opinion. We saw Pakistan turn into a pariah even within parts of the Muslim world, and we watched India stare down China at Galwan. We’ve even watched the United States recalibratesometimes grudginglyas India demanded to be taken seriously, with frustrations occasionally surfacing in slurs like Peter Navarro’s recent remark about Brahmins.
To me, the throughline is audacity, ambition, and scale. Direct Benefit Transfer, demonetisation, GST, and an unapologetic “India-first” foreign policy aren’t just policies; they are irreversible thresholds. No opposition party will risk attacking DBT. The GST debate is now about rates and slabs, not reversal. And the Congress party’s long estrangement from national interest explains a fair part of its current abyss.
Modi’s first term felt like a reset to basics: wealth creation at the level of the individual, and national asset-building at the macro level. A simple truth emergeddoors open for a prosperous nation. Our real crisis for seven decades was a refusal to fix the basics: infrastructure, education, and health. In that sense, this has been national reconstructionwork that should have begun in 1947 but was derailed by an elite “trading in patriotism,” as D.F. Karaka memorably put it.
I still remember octroi gates choking our highways and Nani Palkhivala calling for their removal in a ferocious essay. I remember when a four-lane highway was a revelationVajpayee’s legacy. Today, two generations assume our highways were always like this. The same is true of power cuts. Reforms in the first Modi term made that torment recede. Healthcare? Painfully, historical data shows our government hospitals often functioned better under British rule. Education? The less said the betterbut yes, the basics.
And there’s the federal reality: many of these are state subjects. I’ve watched the centre’s reconstruction push stall in non-BJP states that treat the PM as an enemy rather than a partner. I remember how UPA governments stalled Golden Quadrilateral segments so a former Prime Minister’s fame wouldn’t outshine a dynasty. That same spiritof politics over progressstill lingers.
Over the last decade, Rahul Gandhi’s rhetoric has felt, to me, less like opposition and more like a personal vendetta that invites foreign actors and Far Left allies into our arena. In Tamil Nadu, the revival of Dravidian separatist narratives has normalised talk of an “invasion of the Vadakkans,” casting all north Indians as Aryas, or Brahmins. Kerala tells its own, more dangerous story.
In the midst of this, I often ask a simple question: why do some of Modi’s Indian opponents refuse to see what even Donald Trump once praisedModi’s obsession with making India great again? The contrast with P.V. Narasimha Rao is instructive: Rao’s reforms were historic, but they were pushed by crisis and foreign pressure. Modi’s vision, by contrast, has been consistent since 2013civilisational strength, economic clarity, and an end to schismatic vote-hunting, corruption, and cowardicegrounded in his track record as Gujarat’s three-term Chief Minister.
Perhaps the sharpest attacks on Modi come because he projects strengthand uses it, at home and abroad. That unsettles an old mindset cultivated by the Nehru-era durbar: cowardice and inferiority complex vis à vis the white world, and a convenient opportunism that prefers “Aman ki Asha” after a terror attack. As Faulkner once hinted, we fear discovering the strength within us most of all.
Arun Shourie diagnosed this malaise sharply in 2003: “We have become what an American author calls ‘Negaholics’addicted to the negative as an alcoholic is to drink… We look for, we latch on to the negative… our instinct is not to believe evidence of [an] accomplishment…” He noted the striking difference between how India was viewed abroad and how we spoke about ourselves at homeand urged us to “listen to the new India.”
Under Modi, I’ve watched India’s global clout grow even as a theatre of chaosonline and on the streetstries to bury the reality of our ascent. Old scripts persist: poverty porn, “Hindu terror,” women’s safety used as cudgels, farmer injusticenow upgraded with episodic street violence that feels quasi-anarchic. Much of this, to my eye, is orchestrated abroad and executed at home with the aim of regime change. Ironically, that very intensity is a backhanded acknowledgement of India’s rising leverage.
And then there was Peter Navarro’s openly racist slur: “I would simply say to the Indian people, please understand what is going on here. You’ve got Brahmins profiteering at the expense of the Indian people. We need that to stop.” Historically, Western anti-India rhetoric often ends in Brahmin-bashinga pattern pioneered by colonial missionaries and amplified by deracinated elites. Navarro likely knows nothing about Brahmins; the statement betrayed frustration with a more self-assured India.
That self-assurance, for me, is rooted in our Hindu civilisational mettle. The world, whatever its hedging, increasingly sees India as a Hindu country. It wasn’t accidental that Modi rallied the world to declare International Yoga Day. It became a springboard for reclaiming Bharatavarsha’s spiritual footprintfrom a 125-year-old Shiva temple in Muscat (echoing Sindhi, Kutchi Bhatiya, and Marwari mercantile dominance in the Gulf, and the Pushtimargi-built Govindaraja Temple) to renewed ties across Brhad-Bharata, and with Suriname, Fiji, and Maldives (from the original “Mala-Dvipa”).
I distinctly recall a meeting with Narendra Modi years ago. Asked about the essence of Sanatana culture, he likened it to a Sadhu’s meditation matboth ends rising when one sits in the middle. Force one end down and the other springs up, and vice versa. The lesson was balance: sit in the centre with equanimity. History shows those who tried to destroy Sanatana Dharma ultimately destroyed themselves.
I see that philosophical clarity in many of Modi’s cultural initiatives: the rebuilding of the Rama Mandir, the Mahakal corridor, the Kashi corridor, and dozens of visible and invisible efforts to return the Hindu narrative to the community that lives it.
Yes, I hear some Hindus calling him “Maulana” Modi. I understand where the instincts come fromthe trauma of post-independence politics. But I also believe lasting change demands patience, perspective, and a long view. History shows that Hindu politicians who wore secularism as virtue often became the harshest deriders of our own Devatas. If anything, our real contest is with those entrenched habits, not with Modi.
Sometimes I think of Libanius, that last sage of Pagan Rome, mourning as new converts demolished temples where Gods once spoke to their devotees. His grief reminds me that civilisational continuity depends on courageous custodianship.
For all the gains of the past decade, I see one urgent area for improvement: educationespecially the humanities. Marxists captured the educational establishment and cultured three generations of ideological hostility; that fixed deposit is still paying them dividends. The state must, in my view, stop micromanaging education and instead become a regulator with oversight. Historically, education here was community-driven; even the British saw that Western methods, alien to our conditions, harmed more than helped. Grant Duff admitted as much.
Macaulay’s Minute did lasting damage, but even the British stopped short of a full-scale language and culture policy. That aberration arrived after a questionable freedom. Decolonization is generational work, and it begins at home. Kartavya Path and the Central Vista are powerful symbolsbut real success will come when we decolonise our minds. The late Sri Dharampal even suggested converting Rashtrapati Bhavan into a museum of colonial horrorsan unflinching, educational mirror.
Overall, Modi’s decade has, in my experience, been a force for national good. Airports and seaports compete on efficiency and profitability. A startup ecosystem and a gig economy have emboldened young Indians who carry a new swaggerborn of personal and financial freedom. Above all, we’ve begun to recover cultural heft, and a unity that a splintering secularism had long eroded.
Inspired by this post on The Dharma Dispatch.
