You claim in the editorial “Modi is humbled by India’s farmers” (FT View, November 24) that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “about-face has dented his image as an imperturbable strongman”.
In fact, the opposite has happened. His U-turn on farm laws has proved, if proof was ever needed, that he is neither an elected despot nor an authoritarian prime minister, but a humble man with an ear held firmly to the ground.
Martin Wolf, in an opinion piece in 2019 (“Elected despots feed off our fear and rage”, April 24, 2019) referred to Modi as an elected despot, for in his opinion, elected despots come to power when the democracy they represent happens to be weak or on the verge of collapse. But Indian democracy was expanding, not declining when Modi came to power — India started liberalising its democracy in the 1980s, first by reversing many of the illiberal constitutional changes that had taken place during the Emergency of the 1970s, and then by decentralising the level of governance to the village and municipal level. All these show that the trajectory of Indian democracy was pointing upward, not downward when Modi won power.
Modi is a relatively inexperienced prime minister, and thus may have displayed many dictatorial streaks. But to demonise him with questionable evidence, as Wolf did back in 2019 or the FT habitually does, must end up lending him more not less credibility.
Simren Kaur
Jalandhar City, Punjab, India
Letter: Demonising Modi only lends him credibility
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