SEMINAR 756 – August 2022 18 Modi’s ‘people’ and populism’s imagined communities SUBIR SINHA INDIA at 75 stands on the verge of a fundamental constitutional moment. With Hindutva replacing secularism as the state ideology, de facto and de jure, the universal ‘We the People’ of the Preamble to the Constitution stands ready to be eclipsed by a more specific people: ‘Hindus’. If the de jure transition to Hindu Rashtra happens, the idea of ‘We the People’ will become one of graded – indeed degraded – citizenship, approaching what Jaffrelot 1 has called an ‘ethnocracy’, eroding political equality between Hindus and those of other religious affiliations. As per global literature 2 most democracies are reporting a weak- ening, as strong-leader-led populist/ majoritarian/authoritarian parties have been elected to office and have acted to hollow out and pre- empt democracy’s more substantive and radical possibilities. Commonly, such parties have come to power identifying ‘enemies’ within and outside the nation, using them as a foil against which the ‘pure people’ have been imagined. * I would like to thank Ajaz Ashraf and Vidya Venkat for their comments on a previous draft. 1. Christophe Jaffrelot, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2021. 2. For example, ‘Global State of Democracy’, IDEA, 2021. https://www.idea.int/gsod/global- report