Aakar Patel: This Is Modi's Weakest Moment — But the RSS Will Outlast Him

A Weaker Modi, Not a Weaker RSS

Asked by host Bushra Khanum whether the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is quietly auditioning a successor to Narendra Modi, the journalist and author Aakar Patel says no. Modi's authority, in his telling, was never on loan from Nagpur. "Modi's power does not come from the RSS," he said, pointing out that Modi and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat are near-contemporaries, and that Modi's own decades-old RSS training took place under Bhagwat's father. The organisation, Patel argues, will show its hand only once Modi is gone.

On the present moment, though, Patel — currently chair of Amnesty International India, after nearly thirty years in journalism — is unambiguous. This is Modi's weakest stretch in office, he says, not because of any single crisis but because of what has followed it: open contempt from young Indians of a kind he has not seen directed at Modi before, and a government that, after a mass march toward Parliament, asked the Supreme Court to drop the FIRs filed against protesters. That retreat, in his reading, has no precedent in the Modi years.

Twelve Years Is a Long Time to Hide Behind

Part of the explanation, Patel suggests, is simple fatigue — he cites Ralph Waldo Emerson's line that "every hero becomes a bore at last" once he has been on the screen long enough. But the sharper problem is arithmetic. Twelve years, he notes, was enough time for Adolf Hitler to build the Autobahn, invade much of Europe, and lose a war; it was enough time for Jawaharlal Nehru to build the scientific and cultural institutions India still relies on. After that long in power, backed by two outright parliamentary majorities, a government can no longer credibly ask for more patience.

That, he argues, is the real context for this year's student protests over the delayed NEET medical entrance exam — protests he says were never really about the exam itself. "They believe that they have no future today," he said of the young people involved, a grievance he expects to persist rather than fade with time.

What Makes This Protest Different

Patel places the current unrest alongside the 2019–20 anti-CAA/NRC movement and the farmers' protest that forced the repeal of three farm laws. All three, he says, share a pattern: when Indians mobilise in large enough numbers, governments retreat. The NRC was shelved after the movement led by Muslim women; the farm laws were withdrawn after months of sustained protest. What is new this time, he argues, is that the government accepted a principle of accountability by removing a minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, rather than merely reversing a policy — "a cabinet telling itself that we have made a mistake," as he puts it.

Patel is careful to separate this political opening from the deeper structure of Hindutva politics, which he does not expect to dissolve alongside it. But he also argues that religious extremism is not, in his words, native to the region — the "natural state" of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, he says, is not an extremist one, and normalcy will return once the current government leaves power.

An Ideology Believed, Not Deployed

Patel resists the idea that Hindutva is simply a tool the BJP uses to win elections. "Hindutva is not just a means to an end" for Modi and the BJP, he said — it is something the party's leadership believes in, rooted in the 1920s framework laid out by V. D. Savarkar, in which Muslims and Christians are treated as people whose true loyalties lie outside India, toward Mecca, Jerusalem or the Vatican, regardless of where they actually worship. Even sympathetic economists, Patel notes, will not defend the government's economic record — but no one in that camp objects to the communal turn the BJP has taken since 2014, from the first cow-slaughter laws to the "love jihad" statutes introduced from 2018 onward. That, he says, is precisely why the project will not simply be abandoned.

The Export Version of Hindutva

Asked why Bhagwat travelled to New York to declare that Hindus who want Muslims excluded from India are not real Hindus, Patel reads it as theatre for a Western audience rather than a genuine shift. He describes an underlying insecurity that seeks foreign validation for India's self-image as a democratic "Vishwaguru," while avoiding any honest account of domestic policy. Abroad, he says, BJP figures reach for the language of Gandhi and Nehru rather than admit what is actually happening — that authorities "run bulldozers on Muslims' shops," that Muslims were excluded from the CAA, or that voter-roll exercises disproportionately affect Muslim voters. Bhagwat's choice to address that particular audience in English, rather than the Hindi he typically uses to lecture domestic crowds, Patel takes as confirmation of who the message was really for.

A Hindu Rashtra Without the Paperwork

Pressed on whether an undeclared Hindu Rashtra already exists, Patel situates India against the few states that have actually built religious constitutions. Nepal, a Hindu kingdom until 2008, required its head of state to come from a Kshatriya lineage and kept a Brahmin priest at court — yet even its Smriti-derived laws stopped short of formally barring women or lower castes from reading or working. Pakistan bars non-Muslims from its presidency and premiership by law. Iran, he notes, is unusual in having a genuine vertical religious hierarchy, with the Supreme Leader at its apex, that a diverse Sunni-majority country like Pakistan never had.

India, Patel argues, has no equivalent legal architecture, and he doubts it ever will — because of scale. "Our greatest asset and the RSS's greatest liability is our minority population," he said, contrasting India's roughly 200 million Muslims with the under-1-percent Jewish population of 1930s Germany: a population that large cannot be excised without damaging the nation itself. What the project has achieved instead, he says, is exclusion by attrition — no Muslim currently sits in the Union Cabinet, none among the BJP's roughly 95 Rajya Sabha members, and none among its approximately 1,000 state legislators. Absent a constitutional bar like Pakistan's or Nepal's, he concludes, a Hindu Rashtra remains "a belief," not yet "a reality in any practical sense" — even if daily governance increasingly behaves as though it were.

The Opposition's Blind Spot

Patel is equally critical of the opposition, which he says has failed to give Muslims genuine political agency even while relying on their votes. Parties that will visibly champion Dalit or Adivasi grievances, he argues, go quiet on Muslim issues specifically — a caution he attributes to politicians calculating there is little electoral benefit, and possibly some cost, in being seen to do so. He extends the charge to the judiciary, media and civil society more broadly, all of which he says failed to defend the constitutional value of fraternity even as it eroded.

Against that backdrop, Patel describes the endurance of Muslims since 2014 — including the continued, uncharged detention of activists like Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam — as a form of strategic patience he does not expect to last indefinitely. "This cannot continue for a long time," he said. "It has to break eventually."

What Comes After Modi

On succession, Patel distinguishes between a person and an institution: Modi will eventually lose office or die, he says, while the RSS — unsplit and unbroken across a century — is the more durable force, and will ultimately decide who leads the BJP next, much as it arbitrated between Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L. K. Advani in the 1990s. He is skeptical that Amit Shah, whom many see as Modi's likely successor, commands independent popular support.

Closing on a rapid round of predictions, Patel named ego as Modi's biggest weakness, said he expects Modi to contest the 2029 election, and named the RSS — not any individual — as the real face of the BJP after Modi eventually departs. He does not expect Rahul Gandhi to become the next prime minister, though he is careful to say he cannot forecast results that far out. He does, eventually, expect communalism in India to end. Asked what a history of Modi might say a decade from now, Patel offered a single line: "Successful at communalism, a failure at development."