Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in February questioned why the global Left considers her, US President Donald Trump, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Argentinian President Javier Gerardo Milei as a threat to democracy.

“Today, when Trump, Meloni, Milei, or maybe Modi talk, they are called a threat to democracy. This is the last double standard, but we are used to it, and the good news is the people no longer believe in their (the Left’s) lies, despite all the mud they throw at us. Citizens keep voting for us,” the Italian leader said, slamming the global Left.

The leaders Meloni bunched together, including herself, represent the far-right political ecosystem that is gaining strength across the world.

While Meloni has been in office since 2022, Milei has been president since 2023, and Trump took charge for his second non-consecutive term in the White House in January 2025. But Modi has been in office since 2014. He was the earlier chief minister of his home state of Gujarat, in the west of India, from 2001 to 2014, when he led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to victory in the national elections.

But what belies Meloni’s take is the rapid change in India’s political landscape.

Now in its third successive term in power, the BJP has already left its lasting imprint on the Indian psyche by diluting even its hardcore secular tenets, although secularism is one of the guarantees provided in the country’s Constitution.

When the BJP rode to power helming the National Democratic Alliance in 2014, it was construed as the people’s reaction to the alleged shortcomings of the previous United Progressive Alliance government led by the Indian National Congress, a key player in India’s freedom movement.

The BJP had leveraged the alleged misdeeds, including large-scale corruption, into a clamour for change. The electorate wanted a new party in power, and the BJP was the best available alternative.

The BJP projected Narendra Modi, who was then the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat and widely lauded for his administrative skills. The rest, as they say, is history.

The BJP and its ideological parent, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), are now trying to realize their long-cherished goal of converting India into a ‘Hindu Rashtra’ (Hindu nation) by leveraging their hardboiled ideology of Hindutva (loosely translated as Hinduness).

If not by tweaking the Constitution, for which the party doesn’t have enough numbers in the Parliament, they are bent on changing the very fabric of the Indian socio-religious order to have a Hindu-dominated country.

The Mughals, who were Muslims from central Asia and used Persian as their court language, were eventually adopted even by Hindu rulers and elites and are anathema to the Hindu nationalist BJP.

As expected, they made sweeping changes in the school curriculum by either dropping or diluting Mughal and Muslim history and their contributions to Indian society. They renamed roads and cities named after the Muslim rulers or had any tinge of Muslim identity.

The only exceptions were in South India, where the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu remained largely immune to the Hindutva ecosystem since they shunned the BJP and its machinations by denying it any significant political space.

The BJP juggernaut that has matured into a perpetually active election machine was, however, dealt with a blow in the 2024 Parliament elections. The election reduced the BJP to a minority in the Lok Sabha (lower house) of Parliament, and now it survives on the crutches provided by two regional parties.

The lack of a two-thirds majority literally dampened its alleged plans to officially make India a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation).

But the BJP was quick on its feet by romping home to power in the state of Delhi, of which the national capital is part, in February 2025.

While Meloni is right in the global Left being alarmed about their rise, there is a worrying reason in India, where hate has been weaponized by the BJP and its offshoots.

The India Hate Lab, part of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, which calls itself a “non-profit, non-partisan think tank” based in Washington, recently came out with its startling findings on how hate has become a marketable commodity in the Indian political landscape after the BJP came to power.

A new normal in India, hate has been wielded as a weapon by the BJP. “The number of hate speech incidents targeting religious minorities surged from 668 in 2023 to 1,165 in 2024, marking a staggering 74.4% increase.”

“Hate speech patterns in 2024 also revealed a deeply alarming surge in dangerous speech compared to 2023, with both political leaders and religious figures openly inciting violence against Muslims. This included calls for outright violence, calls to arms, the economic boycott of Muslim businesses, the destruction of Muslim residential properties, and the seizing or demolition of Muslim religious structures,” the report stated.

“In many instances, incitement to violence was framed as either retribution for alleged historical wrongs committed by Muslim rulers or ‘invaders” against Hindus or as a preemptive measure to counter an imagined Muslim threat.”

Such hate speech, according to the report, was circulated and amplified via social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, Telegram, and X.

It found that while 98.5 percent of all hate speeches were against minority communities, a huge chunk were against Muslims and a smaller number against Christians.

Nearly 80 percent of all hate speeches occurred in North Indian states ruled entirely by the BJP or its NDA allies. Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra accounted for 47 percent of all hate speeches recorded in 2024, when the nation of 1.4 billion people, comprising nearly 900 million voters, switched to election mode.

A more shocking finding was that three of the most influential BJP leaders, Modi, his interior minister Amit Shah, and the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, the saffron-clad monk Yogi Adityanath, accounted for a good chunk of hate speeches.

The findings in the report are staggering and scary at the same time.

One might even wonder where the country that until a decade ago was known for tolerance, secularism, and free speech is heading.

The Gujarat Riots of 2002 are still fresh in the collective memory of India. The state, which has for long been a BJP stronghold, had witnessed Hindu-Muslim riots that left over a thousand people dead, most of them Muslims.

The riot was a consequence of the burning of a few coaches of a train that left over fifty Hindu volunteers dead. They were returning from Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, where Hindu right-wing activists had in 1992 torn down a 16th-century Babri Masjid (Babri Mosque), claiming it was built over a Hindu temple of Lord Rama.

A prolonged court battle led to the inauguration of the newly built temple complex at the same spot in January 2024.

In its defense, the BJP has always reminded the principal opposition party, the Congress, of its own role in violating civil rights.

It needs to be admitted that Congress did err in protecting free speech and civil rights. It was its government, headed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, that in 1975 suspended civil rights and introduced press censorship during the infamous National Emergency.

A popular movement of rival political parties, including the precursor to the BJP, then defeated her in the 1977 election, after which she was briefly jailed over a corruption charge, as democracy prevailed.

Congress leaders in Delhi were responsible for targeting its Sikh population after two Sikh bodyguards shot and killed Indira Gandhi in 1984. The assassination was in revenge for the then prime minister’s decision to send the army into the revered Golden Temple, the Vatican of the Sikhs, in Amritsar, Punjab, months earlier. The operation was to flush out armed separatist Sikh militants who had occupied the temple complex.

A few Congress leaders from Delhi led a retaliation by targeting Sikhs, leaving over 2000 of them dead in Delhi alone.

The Congress had, however, taken correctional steps under Indira Gandhi’s son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, who quickly gained the confidence of the Sikh population, who had felt offended and alienated by his mother.

But what is happening under the BJP is vastly different from the blotches the Congress party is still burdened with.

India has been sliding in the world press freedom ranking, one of the key markers of democracy. As per the 2024 World Press Freedom Index of Reporters’ Without Borders, India stood at 159 of 180 countries, a tad better than the 161 it was a year before.

India witnessed 84 Internet shutdowns in 2024, just one fewer than Myanmar, ruled by a military junta. “Despite a modest decrease in shutdowns from 2023 (116 Internet shutdowns), India still imposed 84 in 2024, the most disruptions ordered in a democracy that year,” Access Now stated in its report in February 2025.

The BJP and its associates have always rejected these reports as based on wrong assumptions rather than hard facts.

Another issue of massive concern is the “othering” of Muslims, who constitute over 14 percent of Christians who form about two percent of India’s 1.4 billion people.

Progressive voices that have been rooting for secularism, as enshrined in the country’s Constitution, have been warning against neglecting, let alone targeting, the minorities who have made immense contributions to Indian society, culture, education, arts, and the economy.

“The longer Hindu nationalists are in power, the greater the change will be to Muslims’ status and the harder it will be to reverse such changes.” The Council on Foreign Relations quoted Ashutosh Varshney, professor at Brown University, as saying in an article.

Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen emphasized that the 2024 Parliament election results that reduced the BJP to a minority in Parliament meant the people were against its plans to convert India into a Hindu nation.

“India is not a Hindu Rashtra has been reflected in the election results. We always hope to see a change after every election,” the highly respected scholar had said.

Democrats around the world have been cautioning about the weakening of democracies around the world. The concerns gained further traction with the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the rise of the far right in Europe.

But India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, is not one to buy that argument. Instead, he urged the West to look at democratic models in the global South.

“I think this is something the West should look at because if you do want democracy eventually to prevail, it is important that the West also embraces the successful models outside the West," he told a panel discussion held as part of the Munich Security Summit in February 2025.

The BJP and its acolytes have always held that Hindu Rashtra was logical since there is no Hindu nation, unlike Muslim and Christian states. The argument, however, contravenes India’s Constitution, which provides equal rights and opportunities for its citizens, irrespective of their faith.

It’s natural for Modi’s lieutenants to defend him, his government, and its policies. But it’s unreasonable to expect the democratic West to remain mute spectators.

Whether it is the national emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi or communal disturbances in India, the West and the rest always had a viewpoint. That’s unlikely to change.