Straight Talk | Twenty-Five Years, No Defeats: What Makes Narendra Modi Invincible?

Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

Where Modi has genuinely out-thought nearly everyone trying to catch him on a stumble is turning crisis straight into proof of resolve

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Every political career supposedly has that one moment where the room turns on the person who used to own it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been handed that moment, by my count, at least half a dozen separate times since 2002. Interestingly, the room has never actually turned.

Funny timing, actually—he’s hitting 25 years in office right as Delhi fills up with marchers again. Feels about right, since that has more or less always been the backdrop to PM Modi’s career. The Cockroach Janta Party is out there along with far-Left student unions like AISA and SFI. Plus, the entire INDIA bloc leadership, all demanding the Chief Election Commissioner resign over the disputed Special Intensive Revision exercise. Rahul Gandhi’s reaching for the word treason. Mamata Banerjee wants PM Modi gone too, not just the Election Commissioner. Let’s just say it plainly: this is an Opposition running a play it has run before, with bigger crowds than this, and still losing the next election anyway. Twenty-five years in power is a hard thing to argue with on substance. So, the argument keeps moving outdoors instead.

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Newsrooms wrote Modi off after Godhra, more or less unanimously, convinced nobody outside Gujarat would touch him again. Same story in 2012—surely a bored electorate walks away after three terms, right? Demonetisation was meant to be the real killer, 2016 bleeding into 2017, the economy collapsing and taking his numbers down with it. Instead, the BJP swept Uttar Pradesh and put Yogi Adityanath in the chief minister’s chair. Farm law protests ringed Delhi for over a year—surely that was rural India finally done with him. It wasn’t.

Covid-19’s second wave left bodies floating in the Ganga and foreign commentators had basically buried PM Modi by the time the obituaries ran. Most recently, in June 2024, BJP short of a majority on its own, and outlets hadn’t even finished drafting his political eulogy before a coalition government formed under his leadership anyway.

Twenty-five years. Six Gujarat assembly elections as chief minister, three of them won outright before Delhi came........

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