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One of the defining themes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule since 2014 has been the campaign to “decolonize” the Indian mind. For his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), rooted in India’s nativist tradition, it has been a long-standing goal to purge the deep linguistic, cultural, and intellectual inheritance from British rule and Western influence. Modi has been vigorous in pursuing this goal.

Yet the eagerness at home to discard the British Indian legacy has been accompanied by an impressive and successful push to transform relations with the Anglo-Saxon world: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

One of the defining themes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule since 2014 has been the campaign to “decolonize” the Indian mind. For his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), rooted in India’s nativist tradition, it has been a long-standing goal to purge the deep linguistic, cultural, and intellectual inheritance from British rule and Western influence. Modi has been vigorous in pursuing this goal.

Yet the eagerness at home to discard the British Indian legacy has been accompanied by an impressive and successful push to transform relations with the Anglo-Saxon world: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In doing so, the BJP has flipped the liberal script of postcolonial India. While the Modi government—together with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist movement of which the BJP is the political vehicle—rails against the English language and the wider colonial inheritance, the late Prime Minister Manmohan Singh praised English and the British institutions for their contributions to modern India’s rise in a 2005 Oxford lecture.

It was not the kind of speech that many of Singh’s colleagues in the Indian National Congress party, which has a long political tradition of posturing against the West, would have made. In public, India’s liberal left elite has always bristled at the politics and economic system of the “imperialist” Anglosphere. But it also celebrated English arts and letters. Many continue to flaunt recognition in the Anglosphere as the ultimate mark of success.

The BJP has inverted the formula: As its decolonization agenda at home seeks to cut the remaining cultural ties, the government is growing the political and economic partnerships with the English-speaking world. Beneath both the right and left postures, though, India’s middle classes have voted with their feet........

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