The New India: Expanding Influence Abroad, Straining Democracy at Home

NEW DELHI — On the margins of a summit meant as a show of force for a Russian leader seeking a turnaround on the battlefield, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India leaned in with a different message.

“Democracy, diplomacy and dialogue” — not war — is the answer, he told Vladimir V. Putin as the cameras rolled this month, before declaring that the two would speak more about how to bring peace in Ukraine.

That assured interaction in Uzbekistan was the latest display of India’s rise under Mr. Modi. An ambitious and assertive power, India has become increasingly indispensable in the search for answers to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from diplomacy to climate change to technology and trade to efforts at diversifying supply chains to counter China.

It is India’s credentials as the world’s largest democracy that Mr. Modi rides on the global stage. But at home, diplomats, analysts and activists say, Mr. Modi’s government is undertaking a project to remake India’s democracy unlike any in its 75 years of independence — stifling dissent, sidelining civilian institutions and making minorities second-class citizens.

While past Indian leaders exploited religious divisions and weaponized institutions to stay in power, Mr. Modi’s focus has been more fundamental: a systematic consolidation of power, achieved not through dramatic power grabs but through more subtle and lasting means, aimed at imprinting a majoritarian Hindu ideology on India’s constitutionally secular democracy.

Mr. Modi has bent to his will the courts, the news media, the legislature and civil society — “referee” institutions that guarded India’s democracy in a region of military coups and entrenched dictatorships. As he has done so, the country’s indispensability on major global issues, coupled with challenges to democracy in both the United States and Europe, has ensured little pushback from Western allies.