In the wake of the student protests at Jantar Mantar, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders expressed outrage at the vulgarity of certain slogans directed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But isn’t this tantamount to turning the tables? Modi was, easily, the first Indian political leader to resort to language unworthy of his office as early as the 2000s, whilst he was leading the Gujarat government. Yet these were not mere slips of the tongue or gaffes uttered in the heat of the moment, but a deliberate rhetorical strategy.Sarcasm and populismIn 2005 he told Shekhar Gupta, who objected that he was not elevating the level of the political debate, that he “believe[d] in sarcasm.” This is well illustrated by the bad taste of the rhetoric he then reserved for his adversaries. He called Sonia Gandhi “Pastaben” (“Sister pasta”, in reference to her Italian origins), “Shetangana” (literally “the white woman”), “Suparnakha” (a demoness in the Ramayana and the sister of Ravana), and “Congress ki vidhwa” (the widow of Congress). As for Rahul Gandhi, he nicknamed him “Jersey Cow”. In parallel, he called Manmohan Singh, “Maun (silent) Mohan Singh”, accusing him of saying and doing nothing about issues like inflation and the decline of the rupee… In 2012, during the state election campaign Modi also said: “We have banned gutka [cancer-causing tobacco snuff] in Gujarat. We want to banish cancer from this land. We want to banish Congress too.” This formula is made of words, but it does not only belong to the discursive genre: it is a metaphor evocating pathological images. Interestingly, these derogatory words were listed disapprovingly by Narendra Modi’s professor of political science, Pravin Seth. Political scientists, indeed, have identified sarcasm as a symptom of populism, an anti-intellectual repertoire that Narendra Modi has been exploring for more than 25 years. For populists, sarcasm kills two birds with one stone: first, it differentiates them from the usual rhetoric of politicians – who belong to the establishment – because of some provocative and vulgar overtones. Secondly, it is supposed to reflect their popular – plebeian – identity. The populist, to relate to the masses, assumes that he must show that he shares their culture, their manners, and their language, in opposition to the elites’ “propriety” as Pierre Ostiguy has demonstrated. Modi’s sarcasm is a twofold technique of address: he is supposed to speak like ordinary people and to transgress the codes of good behaviour of the establishment (including the Khan market gang and the Lutyens Indians) in the name of an authenticity that the elites have betrayed. Modi clearly offers a great illustration of Ostiguy’s theory who shows that a successful populist “leader is both like me […] and an ego ideal” – or perceived at least as embodying this alchemy. That is why body language often plays a key role in manufacturing the image of the populist who must appear as a strong man to convince the populace that he is the right conduit for expressing revenge: the revenge of “those at the bottom” against the elites and those they protected.When the culprits play the part of outraged innocentsBut Modi is more than a populist, he’s a national-populist, a category conceptualised by G. Germani to designate the leaders who claim that they represent not all the citizens, but the majority, made of the sons of the soil – and as a result he indulges routinely in communal rhetoric and even hate speeches.In the 2014 and 2019 elections, he took care to correct the image he had acquired by presiding over the 2002 pogrom when he headed the Gujarat government: his preferred campaign themes were economic development and defense of the nation. In 2024, he largely reverted to the anti-Muslim repertoire he had adopted in 2002, no doubt because he felt victory was slipping away from him and thought that returning to the fundamentals of Hindu nationalism would help him retain the majority. In all, according to Human Rights Watch , which analysed 173 of Modi’s campaign speeches, 110 of them included language falling into the category of “hate speeches“. The Islamophobic character of his remarks was first manifested in his strong references to Hindu nationalist obsessions. The first of these echoes “Muslim invasions” dating back to medieval times. Modi, who likes to say that he is closing a 1,000-year parenthesis during which foreigners dominated India, is playing on the fear and resentment still aroused by the memory of forced conversions and the destruction of temples for which Muslim invaders were allegedly responsible. Today, these intruders are no longer hordes of horsemen – as the BJP’s propaganda films showed them in anime films finally banned by the Electoral Commission – but migrants to whom Modi attributes the same acts. On May 14, at an election rally in Jharkhand, he thundered:“It has become difficult to follow our faith in Jharkhand today. The idols of our gods are being destroyed. Infiltrators with a jihadi mindset are ganging up and attacking, but the Jharkhand government is looking away and is supporting them from afar. These infiltrators have threatened the security of our sisters and daughters”. At the end of this quotation, a second theme emerges: the vulnerability of young Hindu women, whom Muslims covet and are even prepared to marry by force and convert. Modi took up this theme in another speech, also delivered in Jharkhand, in the middle of a tribal area, on May 28:“In many areas today, the Adivasi population is rapidly declining while the number of infiltrators is increasing. Are the infiltrators not occupying Adivasi lands? Have our Adivasi daughters not been targeted by infiltrators? Our daughters’ safety is threatened, is it not? Their lives are in danger, they are being murdered, an Adivasi daughter is burned alive, another Adivasi daughter’s voice is taken away. Who are these people targeting Adivasi daughters?”A third theme emerges here in the background: the demographic haunting to which both the denunciation of “infiltrators” (migrants) and the fear of Hindu women being targeted by Muslims refer. The fear of Hindus becoming a minority in India – irrational given that their community represents nearly 80% of the population – has been manufactured and exploited by the BJP and its predecessors for decades. Modi exploited it by expressing alarm about the fertility of Muslim families, which he attributed in particular to polygamy. In 2002, during his first election campaign, he used a slogan borrowed from Muslims: “Ham panch, hamare pachis (there are five of us – meaning a husband and his four wives – and we have 25 children).” In 2024, he revisited this excess, often referring to Muslims with a periphrase: “those who have more children“. Narendra Modi’s speeches clearly contravened the laws governing public life in India, especially as they were made after the Code of Conduct regulating election campaigns came into force on March 16, 2024. In April, in reaction to his remarks in Rajasthan, thousands of citizens lodged a complaint with the Election Commission. The Commission merely reminded the BJP and the Congress of their duties in a letter of almost identical content, and in retrospect justified its failure to call Modi to order in an eloquent manner: “We deliberately decided – this is such a huge nation – that the top two people in both the parties [BJP and Congress] we did not touch “. The reference to a second actor is not without interest. On the BJP side, the one who was thus safe from the slightest remonstrance was none other than Amit Shah, who indulged in provocative speeches routinely. During the 2019 election campaign, he had gone one step further in his strategy of dehumanising Muslims in West Bengal by declaring: “Infiltrators are like termites in the soil of Bengal (…) A Bharatiya Janata Party government will pick up infiltrators one by one and throw them into the Bay of Bengal”. Beyond hate speech, senior BJP figures have called for the murder of Muslims in India. In January 2020, just before the Delhi riots, Anurag Thakur, Minister of Sports and Information and Broadcasting said: “Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maro salon ko (shoot the traitors of our country)”. Local BJP officials have also resorted to this rhetoric of the worst possible taste.Thus, in March 2023, in Hyderabad, a city whose heartland is dominated by Muslims, T. Raja Singh (a former BJP elected official) chanted, “You are half cut [as in, circumcised], we will cut you fully”. At a Bajrang Dal demonstration in Farrukhabad, Uttar Pradesh, activists chanted: “Jab katue kate jayenge, Ram Ram chilayenge (when the circumcised – a derogatory term for Muslims – will be chopped, they will cry Ram Ram).”Keeping up appearances at all costs How can a political party whose leaders – including the head of its government – have made vulgarity, hate speech and calls for murder the key elements of their polarisation strategy take offence at the good-natured mockery directed at them by India’s youth?There are two complementary explanations for this paradox. First, wherever populists come to power, they establish authoritarian regimes where dissent is unacceptable. This drift is inherent in populism, a system in which electoral victory is embodied from day one in a charismatic leader: members of parliament who have won a seat owe everything to him, as do his ministers. Consequently, ministerial collegiality disappears and parliament becomes little more than a rubber-stamp chamber. Next, the bureaucracy is brought to heel – starting with the Electoral Commission – and then the judiciary succumbs in turn. Finally, the media are bought up by cronies, so that no dissenting voices are easily heard any more. This allows the populist to claim: ‘I am the people’ – and Modi readily speaks on behalf of the 1.4 billion Indians he is supposed to embody. Under these circumstances, who would dare to ridicule the man who identifies with the whole of India? Only anti-national elements could have such audacity! Their rhetoric is unacceptable and must be declared illegitimate; and since the political system is still supposed to allow for diversity of opinion – given that the Constitution remains democratic on paper – one way of delegitimising the Cockroach Janata Party’s opposition is to discredit its rhetoric by ignoring its political foundations and focusing instead on its form.Secondly, the RSS has always been careful not to reveal its extremist leanings. This is partly a legacy of its recent history: was it not banned in 1948 because of its association with Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin? Adopting violent rhetoric and practices would have exposed it to the same sanction, and it has therefore endeavoured not to leave itself open to any criticism, outsourcing its dirty work to groups from which it could distance itself if need be, such as the Bajrang Dal. Furthermore, Hindu nationalists cultivate a highly civilised ethos in the name of the samskaras of Hinduism, allegedly drawn from the sources of their Brahmanic culture. They therefore pride themselves on being non-violent in order to distinguish themselves more clearly from Muslims, for whom jihad is said to be a hallmark. Hence their rhetoric regarding ‘love jihad’, ‘land jihad’, ‘USPC jihad’ and so on.For all these reasons, paradoxically, the political force that has most clearly degraded political discourse in India is now playing the part of the outraged. And Narendra Modi, moreover, added to the sense of gravitas during his speech on August 15 to mark Independence Day, where he once again put on a façade of respectability…which no longer fools many young people, it seems.Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.