Beyond Modi's triumphalist narrative

Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems increasingly fond of presenting India not merely as a rising power, but as a country that has already arrived. In his latest speech at Shri Ram College of Commerce, the message was unmistakable: terrorism has been pushed back, Kashmir is peaceful, Maoist violence is being defeated, the economy is booming and India has acquired the confidence to enter another country's territory and strike whenever it chooses.

It is a powerful political narrative. The trouble is that reality is rarely as cooperative as political speeches.

The most worrying part of Modi's speech was not his familiar account of India's economic transformation. It was his warning that if Pakistan indulges in any "misadventure", Indian forces will enter Pakistani territory and strike. Such language may play well to a domestic audience, but in South Asia it carries consequences that go well beyond electoral politics.

India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed states. The idea that one can casually threaten to cross an international border and assume that the other side will simply absorb the blow is not strategic confidence. It is a dangerous misunderstanding of deterrence.

Pakistan has demonstrated before that an Indian military action does not necessarily end the matter at the point where India wants it to end. Any future attack would have to be calculated against the certainty that Pakistan would respond. That is precisely what deterrence is supposed to achieve.

Modi's confidence about Kashmir is equally interesting.

India may have tightened its security control over occupied Jammu and Kashmir. But control is not necessarily the same thing as peace. A heavily militarised territory in which dissent is tightly controlled may look quiet on television without having become politically settled.

The Pahalgam attack of April 2025 was a particularly uncomfortable reminder of this distinction. It exposed serious gaps in a security architecture that had been presented as increasingly comprehensive. The subsequent crackdown included thousands of detentions, demolitions and restrictions on political and intellectual expression.

India can point to an official decline in terrorist incidents. But the more interesting question is what happens when the definition of "terrorism" becomes so broad that political dissent, separatist sentiment and legitimate grievances begin to disappear into the same security category.

The banning of books on Kashmir tells its own story. A government genuinely confident about the permanence of its political settlement normally does not need to be frightened of books.

Nor does Modi's claim that peace has spread from Kashmir to India's Northeast quite fit the evidence.

Manipur remains the obvious contradiction. The ethnic conflict that erupted in May 2023 has killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands. According to figures placed before the Manipur assembly, 306 people had been killed and 49 remained missing. Thousands continued to depend on relief arrangements.

This is where the distinction between a strong state and a successful state becomes important.

India may have a growing economy that does not however gives it a licence to turn every statistic into proof of national perfection.

Take the much-celebrated 7.8 per cent quarterly GDP growth. It is an impressive headline number. But economists have raised questions about the statistical base from which growth is being measured. Former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg has argued that changes in the base and revisions substantially alter the picture.

This is where Modi's comparison with 2013 becomes somewhat predictable.

Every government likes to compare itself with the worst moment of its predecessor. India's problems in 2013 were real - high inflation, a large current-account deficit, policy paralysis and a series of corruption scandals. But the existence of serious problems then does not automatically make every problem today disappear.

There is another inconvenient part of the story: India's democratic and institutional record.

Reporters Without Borders now places India at 157th out of 180 countries in its 2026 World Press Freedom Index, firmly in the "very serious" category. V-Dem has also classified India as an electoral autocracy.

The same contradiction appears in India's communal politics. The India Hate Lab recorded 1,318 in-person hate-speech events targeting religious minorities in 2025, a dramatic increase from previous years. Muslims were overwhelmingly the principal targets in the incidents it documented.

And that is precisely why the triumphalism is unnecessary.

India does not need to pretend that it has solved every internal problem in order to establish itself as a major power. Because major powers are ultimately judged not simply by the size of their GDP or the length of their railway network. They are judged by how they use power.

This brings us back to Pakistan.

There is a temptation in Pakistan to answer every Indian boast with a Pakistani boast. Modi says India can strike Pakistan; someone in Pakistan responds that Pakistan can strike deeper into India. That may satisfy television audiences on both sides, but it is not serious strategic thinking.

The real question is whether either country can afford another war.

India may have a larger economy. Pakistan may possess a credible nuclear deterrent and considerable military capability. Neither fact changes the basic reality that a war between the two would be enormously costly and unpredictable.

The ability to cross a border is not the same as the ability to control what happens afterwards.

The history of South Asia is full of wars that were expected to be short, decisive and manageable. They rarely remained so.

Modi's speech was intended to project confidence. Yet confidence becomes convincing only when it is accompanied by restraint. Otherwise it begins to look less like strength and more like theatre.