January 6 marks the fourth anniversary of an unprecedented attack on the United States Capitol and American democracy. Far more than advancing “the lie” about a stolen 2020 election, the insurrectionists of January 6 presented the world with an alternative understanding of America, one arising from fears of white replacement and steeped in Christian nationalist ideas and imagery. Despite being the only twice impeached U.S. president and a convicted felon, Donald Trump not only won the last election, but also gained majorities in both the Senate and the House and made inroads into Asian, Black, and Latino American communities that typically vote Democrat. These facts should prompt us to reframe January 6 not as a shameful setback for MAGA, but as a catalyst for the movement’s onward march. To what kind of America will Trump 2.0 take us? This is where a comparative lens can be useful.
The steady decline of India as the world’s largest democracy presents a foretaste of America under Trump 2.0. On December 6, 1992, India had a similar watershed moment when a mob of Hindus demolished an ancient mosque, the Babri Masjid, which they believe rested on the birthplace of their god Rama (or Ram). The mosque not only reflected the heritage of India’s sizeable Muslim minority (15 percent) but was also protected by a Supreme Court order. As such, it represented India’s commitment to being a secular, pluralistic democracy. The demolition of the mosque and the massive rioting that followed was not a setback, but a catalyst for the political advancement of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its project of “Hinduizing” India (known as Hindutva, which literally means “Hindu-ness”).
It may seem odd to compare the storming of the U.S. Capitol with the demolition of a sixteenth-century mosque, but the commonalities are worth engaging. In both cases, extremists confronted liberal democracy with an alternative national myth about a lost or stolen heritage needing “rebirth”. In America, this is the “Again” part of MAGA. In India, it is a golden Hindu past that preceded the arrival of Muslim or British conquerors.
Decades after the Babri Masjid demolition, the Hindutva movement has gained momentum under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s BJP-led government has clamped down on Indian news media, universities, NGOs, and other sources of dissent and has inspired acts of vigilante violence against religious minorities. Learning from India is not like peering into a crystal ball; it presents an opportunity for self-reflection and a possible foretaste of American institutions under Trump 2.0.
What Lies Ahead?
Like America’s January 6, the events of India’s December 6 evoked sweeping condemnation in secular, mainstream news media. Headlines and op-eds questioned whether India was witnessing the birth of a theocratic, fascist order and the end of its secular democracy. Others held out hope that the extremist act would repulse the general population by revealing the fangs of the Hindutva movement. But the events of December 6 only added fuel to Hindutva fire. In the years following the demolition, the BJP’s parliamentary performance surged, and by 1998 the party secured enough seats to form its first government.
As much as the Hindutva movement has bloomed under Modi, his nationalism is different from the earlier December 6 variety. The political scientist Sumantra Bose describes Modi’s agenda as “Hindutva 2.0,” one that eschews the vulgarity of the Babri Masjid demolition and presents a more sanitized, technocratic, and corporatist vision of Indian growth. In contrast to its December 6 legacy, Hindutva 2.0 presents India as a leader on the world stage and embraces Modi’s “Gujarat model,” a phrase which harkens back to Modi’s promotion of industrialization, infrastructure, and big business while he was chief minister of his home state of Gujarat (2001-2014). But for critics of Modi, the “Gujarat model” refers to how Modi’s Hindu nationalism encourages vigilante violence against non-Hindus. In 2002, as chief minister, Modi sat on his hands while large-scale atrocities were committed against Muslims in his home state. Critics also read the “Gujarat model” into the Modi government’s passivity when Hindu-Christian riots in Odisha (2008) and Manipur (2023-24) cost Christians their lives, homes, and churches.
The prominence of Elon Musk in the Trump world indicates the new administration’s emphasis on SpaceX-like technocratic efficiency. This vision will accompany the dramatic reduction of the size of the federal government, tax breaks that mostly benefit the rich, and new global trade policies believed to advance American interests. As with India, this outward veneer of efficiency will likely be accompanied by chaos, inequality, and vulnerability for those impacted by Trump’s deportation agenda, immigration policies, and elimination of government jobs.
Modi’s glowing image among his supporters masks a dark underside to his legacy and persistent problems relating to poverty, unemployment, and the effects of climate change. Moreover, his government has become increasingly intolerant of political dissent of any kind. It has effectively tamed national news media establishments, making them reluctant to interrogate its policies or Modi himself. India ranks near the bottom of the 2024 World Press Freedom Index, in no small part due to the suppression of media under Modi’s Hindutva regime.
In America, Trump’s embattled relationship with mainstream media is likely to result in similar showdowns and limits on what the media is able or willing to say. Having labeled the media “the enemy of the people” and threatened to exact revenge on the media outlets he opposes, Trump 2.0 might pursue a course that resembles that of Modi’s India. The U.S. media has longstanding ties to corporations, but outfits like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times show signs of Trump-ward capitulation. The recent defamation settlement in favor of Trump with ABC News could signal more battles with the press in years to come.
Under Modi, the government has also clamped down on prestigious national universities, sometimes by appointing its ideologues to positions of influence, or by intimidating or arresting professors for being “unpatriotic” because they criticize the government’s policies. In public schools and universities, the BJP government has promoted history that centers on Hinduism, portrays Islam or Christianity as the religion of foreign conquerors, and downplays anything that would portray Hindus in a negative light, such as the caste system.
These developments resemble how education has become politicized in America. History writing is hugely contested, especially in connection to portrayals of America’s history of slavery and objections to so-called “critical race theory.” Project 2025’s desire to eliminate the Department of Education arises, at least in part, from cultural and ideological concerns about federal control over education. In the name of combatting liberal bias or sexually explicit content, some states, such as Florida or Iowa, have pulled books from the shelves of public schools.
No aspect of the Hindutva agenda under Modi is more alarming than its vilification of and violence towards Muslims. India’s Muslims number nearly 15 percent of India’s population of 1.4 billion, exceeding that of many Muslim nations. Lacking any representatives in the Indian Parliament, India’s Muslims contend with unprecedented levels of fear and insecurity on account of the Hindutva agenda. Under Modi, the primary avenue for anti-Muslim violence is not direct action on the part of the government, but what Christophe Jaffrelot calls the “authoritarian vigilante state.”
In his recent campaign for reelection, Modi dog-whistled Muslims when he decried “infiltrators” and “those who have more children” and portrayed Muslims as taking resources away from the Hindu majority. Such rhetoric emboldens non-state Hindutva activists to engage in well-documented lynchings of Muslims for alleged cow slaughter (in breach of Hindu veneration of cows) or “love jihad,” whereby Muslim men are accused of marrying Hindu women to convert them to Islam. Under Modi, violent attacks on Christians have also spiked, largely in reaction to their commitment to propagating their faith among the poor.
Trump is no stranger to dog-whistling or policies that impact non-white U.S. citizens. During his last term as president, his anti-Muslim ban coincided with rising Islamophobia and a spike in hate crimes directed against American Muslims. His anti-China rhetoric and renaming the coronavirus the “China virus” was accompanied by a surge in anti-Asian hate. Only time will tell if Trump’s ways of relating to the world, or his domestic policies will lead to surging prejudice and violence directed against non-white Americans.
The True Believers
In his classic work, The True Believers (1952), Eric Hoffer describes how all mass movements contain elements of fanaticism arising from “ills that afflict the frustrated.” They produce charismatic leaders who are adept at creating mortal enemies and embrace hatred and violence as tools of political advancement. Clustered around the true believers are masses of people who find meaning and identity in the movement without necessarily sharing its core myths. These other supporters may tug and pull in different directions, but they all seek to benefit from the movement’s advancement.
The true believers of the MAGA and Hindutva movements consist largely of those guided by some form of Christian and Hindu nationalism. To center religion in these movements is not to deny its intersection with issues of race, caste, masculinity, immigration, information, or economics. Strangely, Trump himself may not be a true believer in the religious sense but has formed a symbiotic bond with Christian nationalists who view him as possessing a divine mandate. His “Trump Bible” and rallies that conclude with a solemn ambiance resembling Evangelical worship services are cases in point. Modi, on the other hand, is a believer in Hindutva. He assumed the role of high priest at the consecration of the rebuilt Ram temple and even claimed he was “not born biologically,” but was sent by God.
Those who write about Christian nationalism in the U.S. often highlight its intersection with white supremacy (for instance, Robert Jones, Philip Gorsky and Samuel Perry, or Katherine Stewart), or Christian masculinity (Kristin Kobe du Mez), and both are captured in the notion of “white Christian nationalism.” A recent study by Matthew Taylor describes how networks of charismatic evangelists have consecrated Trump as a messianic figure whose electoral victory will allow them to seize control of all aspects of American society from media to entertainment and education (known as “Seven Mountains” theology). This is the “Christ-tva” that mirrors India’s “Hindu-tva.” The latter is led by upper-caste elites who believe in cultivating a more masculine Hinduism to reclaim India from “beef-eating Muslims,” militant leftists, or foreign-funded Christian proselytizers.
What religion offers in both contexts is a language of apocalyptic confrontation and a source of divine validation which, for true believers, takes priority over secular law. This helps explain why “patriots” or kar sevaks (“servants of the cause”) are willing to breach democratic tipping points with indifference to public shaming and, in fact, deep-seated glee in advancing their divine mandate. Both the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the subsequent construction of a Ram temple in its place were celebrated by the BJP, just as devotees of MAGA commend the January 6 insurrectionists as martyrs and patriots. Neither event was “politics as usual”; both were frontal assaults on the principles of liberal democracy itself.
Cover photo: US President Donald Trump speaks with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi on February 25, 2020. (Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP)
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