Why Modi’s 'age of Bharat' is trumping Nehru’s 'idea of India'

OPINION Why Modi’s 'age of Bharat' is trumping Nehru’s 'idea of India'

With Narendra Modi surpassing Jawaharlal Nehru as India’s longest democratically elected and continuously serving Prime Minister - 4,398 days of Nehru between 1952-1964 vs 4,399 days of NaMo and counting - the obvious question is who has had the greater impact on the nation and how do their legacies compare?

Irrespective of which side of the political fence, you may be on -- and with each side painting their own as a hero and the other as a villain -- a deeper comparison, beyond coloured ideological lenses and immediate politics, is apt.

Modi may be the mirror opposite of most things Nehru stood for, but in terms of impact, the tectonic shifts he has heralded in the wellsprings of the nation are Nehruvian in scale. Beyond the numbers, so deep ranging is the wider societal impact of Moditva that, among the 14 prime ministers India has had since 1947, he can only be compared with Nehru. His lasting social, political and civilisational imprint may be even more consequential and long-lasting.

Also Read: Nehru helped build the State — Modi made it deliver

At an individual level, both prime ministers couldn’t be more different. Nehru was born into privilege, came of age at Harrow and Cambridge, was forged in the fires of the freedom struggle with about nine years in British jails, and was anointed by the Mahatma as his ultimate heir at the cusp of India’s independence. Modi, the first Indian premier to be born in independent India, was famously born at the lower economic end of what Marx called the ‘proletariat’, shaped by the ‘weltanschauung’ of a party that for the first five decades of his life was not seen as pan-Indian by most Indian voters- even though it espoused a nationalist ideology - and fought his way to power, first in Gujarat and then in Lutyen’s Delhi, against the grain of elite opinion.

They are ideological opposites. Yet, there are counterintuitive similarities between both Modi and Nehru.

Modi’s power play is an inverted mirror image of Nehru’s politics (Generated via AI)

First, just as Nehru heralded what later became known as the ‘idea of India,’ to use Sunil Khilnani’s evocative term, Modi embodies what may be called the new ‘Age of Bharat’. If the Nehruvian order predicated an imagination of India as a modernist, reforming society that came to be accepted by both the elites and most mass voters as the dominant narrative of what it meant to be Indian, Modi’s Bharat embodies an alternative idea of the nation: soaked in a hard nationalism, seeped in the embrace of a civilisational legacy that is seen as essentially Hindu and an unapologetic espousal of a new Hindu-ness wrapped within the idiom of a more efficient welfare state.

Both harked back to ancient civilisational pasts, but in radically opposite ways.

For Nehru, as he wrote in ‘Discovery of India,’ he initially approached the past as “an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past.” To some extent, he writes, “I came to her [India] via the West, and looked at her as a friendly Westerner might have done. I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearances and give her the garb of modernity.”

Modi, on the other hand, seeks not to cloak the ancient in the ‘garb of modernity,’ but to redefine Indian modernity itself as part of an ancient civilisational continuity.

If the Nehruvian idea of India envisaged the newly independent nation’s modernisation as a move away from tradition, imagining tradition and modernity as polar opposites in permanent tension, the underlying Modi impulse fundamentally turns that idea on its head.

Also Read: The Modi years have seen a sustained attempt to reindustrialise India

By rekindling the historic memory of the ancient Hindu past itself as great and modern, Modi’s is a deep civilisational project that puts the notion of tradition itself at the heart of a new Indian modernity. “Unlike modern notions of nationhood, India possesses a distinct cultural identity, its own consciousness, and its own soul,” as Modi put it in 2025. “India’s ancient manuscripts reflect the continuous flow of this civilizational journey.”

From expounding on the discovery of the zero in the ancient Bakshali manuscript to Yashomitra’s Bower manuscript or Charaka Samhita and Sushrita Samhita on medical science, this is a notion of Bharat that does not seek validation in Western notions of progress but rather seeks the roots of it in a distant past. The Modi era, whether you agree with it or not, represents a radically different moral reordering of the nation.

Second, Modi, like Nehru, is uncompromising and unambiguous about ideology and ideals. As the PM emphasised in his 2019 victory speech, his party’s journey from “do se dobara (from two to once again)” stood out because “we never stepped back from our path, never let our ideals dim. We never stopped, nor got tired, nor did we bend … We will never leave our ideals, nor our sanskaar.”

This stout defence of ideas echoes Nehru’s stringent insistence in the 1952 election campaign – against reservations by conservative elements within his own party – on what he called “an all-out war on communalism”, against “sinister communal elements” which would “bring ruin and death to the country”. Nehru single-handedly turned that election into a referendum on this question.

Similarly, Modi is unambiguous on the question of secularism and what he sees as its cynical manipulation. “Especially for the last 30 years in this country”, he said in 2019, “there has been a printout, a tax, a label so fashionable that you could do anything and treat it like a purifying bath in the Ganga. It was completely false, and the tax was called secularism.” As he later told his NDA partners, minorities were made to live in fear by vote-bank politics and that this must end with ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’ being extended to ‘sabka vishwas’.

From the opposite end of the spectrum, Nehru, in August 1950, was so adamant on this issue that he famously resigned from the central working committee of his own party as a sitting prime minister, when facing dissent from his party leadership on this fault line. With much of the Congress’s traditionalist Hindu brass unhappy with the Nehru-Liyaqat pact of 1950, which led to the resignation of the Hindu Mahasabha’s Shyama Prasad Mukherjee from Nehru’s cabinet, Nehru first challenged what he saw as “communal and reactionary forces” at the Congress Nasik session on 20-21 September 1950 with his ‘Resolution on Communalism.’ Eventually, by resigning from both the CWC and his Congress Parliamentary Board on this issue in August 1951, he forced a contest with the Hindu traditionalists at the top of his party and wrested control of the party machinery.

Third, like Nehru’s conception of a “tryst with destiny” and an India awakened after a long slumber, Modi offers to his supporters a long-term civilisational vision of a radical break with the past and of a “Naya Bharat”. The idea of Viksit Bharat@2047 is precisely that. As Modi has emphasised in his speeches, “You will have to leave the thought process of the 20th century. This is the 21st century, this is a new Bharat.”

If the Nehruvian order and his idea of development were represented by his characterisation of big dams as the “temples of modern India”, Modi’s India, in this realm and outside of identity politics, is best symbolised by UPI, Digital India and toilets as the new vehicle of upward mobility and progress. It is hard developmentalism, albeit coated in the promise of addressing the mental scars and the emotional wellsprings of what V.S. Naipaul once called a ‘wounded civilisation.’

Fourth, just as Nehru saw economics essentially as a tool for development and delivering millions out of poverty, so does Modi. His declaration that there are only two castes of Indians now, those that are poor, and those engaged in alleviating poverty, is intellectually not too dissimilar to the Nehruvian idea of a welfare state and what came to be known as the Bombay Plan to harness private capitalism for nationalist goals.

Also Read: The Modi Milestone - Building a market-driven, tech-tonic, multi-aligned India

Fifth, for a prime minister who came to power amid a storm of discontent over corruption and the promise of ushering in ‘Acche Din’, about one-fifth of Indian voters today have no living memory of an India without Modi at the helm. If Nehru was Chacha Nehru to an entire generation of Indians, Modi too has appealed especially to younger voters, newly empowered women voters and has grown his party’s support base beyond traditional barriers of caste, class, gender and geography.

His assiduous courting of a new generation of young voters with outreach tools like ‘Exam Warriors’ or through the NaMo app is often snorted at by liberal elites but constitutes a seriously underrated aspect of his outreach. If Nehru was Gandhi’s anointed heir, Modi too has explicitly sought to appropriate the Mahatma’s legacy, including in his new call for a national renewal mission to coincide with the 75th anniversary of Gandhi’s Quit India Movement call.

Finally, just as with all-time great cricket teams, comparisons over time can often be puerile. Just as with a Bradman or a Tendulkar, each leader, in the final reckoning, must be judged by the standards and challenges of his own time. On that count, it is easy to forget that when Modi first stormed to national power in 2014, at a time when it was essentially considered unthinkable for any leader to attain a ‘272’ majority. No one had achieved such a feat for three decades before that. That Modi remains India’s tallest political leader over a decade later - with arguably stronger political capital today than in those heady days - is a testament to how he has changed the political paradigm.

He has irrevocably shifted the grammar, structure and idiom and nature of India’s polity itself and transformed his party into the ‘New BJP’ in a way that is likely to outlast his own politics.

Nehru harnessed the moral authority of the freedom struggle and a new nationalism to forge the only major post-colonial state that remained a democracy - until Indira Gandhi’s Emergency interregnum in 1975 - but in what effectively functioned in the early years as a one-party state. Modi’s ‘New BJP’ emerged amid the heat and dust of an Indian electorate that is far wider, deeper and facing much greater scrutiny in an age of social media and AI. Its electoral juggernaut has already reshaped our politics. The social and cultural drivers of the ‘Age of Bharat’ he has heralded may be reshaping us civilisationally in ways that could well leave a far deeper imprint.

Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated!

Find the best of Al News in one place, specially curated for you every weekend.

Stay on top of the latest tech trends and biggest startup news.