Narendra Modi’s political body has always been larger than the physical man. His early claim to possessing a 56-inch chest was not simply a boast about exceptional masculinity and physical strength. It became a political theology of exceptional masculinity: the exceptional body of an exceptional leader as a sign of courage, national and civilisational greatness, protection, and sovereignty. Such claims draw the religious into the secular and the primeval into the modern, folding both into the language of contemporary politics.
But what happens when the people – the ultimate subjects of sovereign power – refuse the claims of the broad-chested great man?
Beyond electoral results and trends, the answer may lie in India’s agrarian heartland, streets, and universities. Farmers and students have repeatedly interrupted the political projection of Modi as the extraordinary man embodying the nation. They have not defeated the growing communalisation of India’s secular politics; instead, they have unconcealed something deeper: marginalised farmers and students have demonstrated that the people can become political subjects capable of shaking the throne of exceptional destiny.
In this sense, the Davids have revealed the vulnerability of the Goliath yet again.
Modi’s political persona has been carefully cultivated from contradictory elements that blur the line between fiction and reality, fable and truth. He has presented himself as the chāiwāllah (tea-seller), the chaukīdār (watchman), the faqīr (mendicant), and the ordinary Indian who rose through hardship and discipline. At the same time, he has presented himself as extraordinary: a man with a 56-inch chest, a leader called upon by Mother Ganges, a civilisational protector, and, more recently, a “non-biological” person. These identities are not merely accidental inconsistencies; together they produce a political figure who is simultaneously ordinary enough to represent the volonté générale and extraordinary enough to rise above the ordinary politics of modernity.
This is precisely where the figure of the mahāpuruṣa, or great person, becomes interesting. The political theology of the strongman begins precisely where secular accounts of leadership become insufficient: when political authority is no longer exercised merely through an office but becomes embodied in a figure whose person is made to signify the nation. The question is then not simply whether Modi invokes religion, but what happens when sovereignty acquires a body – and when that body encounters a people unwilling to remain its audience.
Mahāpuruṣa is less a theological label directly appropriated by Modi than a culturally embedded grammar of exceptional personhood that brings together civilisational purpose, masculinity, moral distinction, strength, sacrifice, and sovereignty.
The potency of this political grammar lies in its ability to collapse the distinction between sacred and secular sovereignty. Unlike the European conception of the king’s “two bodies,” religious and secular destinies can remain embedded in a singular body in Indic political thought. The story of Prince Gautama offers one striking example: he could become either a wheel-turning monarch, cakravartin, or a great renunciant. Even after renunciation, the Buddha was represented through the thirty-two marks (lakṣaṇa, Pali lakkhaṇa) associated with a wheel-turning monarch, while Aśoka later exemplified the possibility of secular governance through Buddhist kingship.
Modi’s strongman image does not draw directly from these Buddhist sources, and its political project is rooted in Hindu majoritarianism. Yet it operates within a cultural sphere where exceptional personhood can acquire meanings that cross the boundary between religious and secular sovereignty. Through a gradual, often contradictory construction, Modi becomes a figure whose biography appears to carry a destiny larger than the institutional position he occupies.
Yet this is not uncomplicated: the great man needs the people.
This can be gauged in two ways: through those who support Modi and through those who oppose him. Let us begin with his followers.
The term bhakta (literally, devotee) is precisely where the political and theological collide. In contemporary Indian politics, bhakta has become a contested term for Modi’s ardent defenders. Traditionally, bhakti described diverse devotional movements that could be egalitarian and, in some contexts, antinomian or anti-hierarchical; today, bhakta and bhakti have been secularised into contested political categories used to describe both the self and the other.
Critics speak of the andhabhakta, the “blind devotee,” to dismiss Modi’s supporters, while some of his strongest supporters have reworked the category to describe loyalty to the nation, the party, and the leader, often simultaneously. Yet an irony remains buried here: devotion presupposes an agent capable of recognising, choosing, and performing devotion.
As my research on bhakta shows, the devotee is not simply an inert object of manipulation. The modern bhakta can choose, withdraw, reinterpret, criticise, redirect, and occasionally negotiate their allegiance. The secularisation of bhakta and bhakti therefore produces an unexpected possibility: the same category that defines loyalty also creates the possibility of withdrawing it. This reveals something fundamental about strongman politics: it remains contingent upon the depoliticisation of certain categories and the theologisation and de-theologisation of others, including the most important category of all – the popular will.
In other words, a strongman’s claim to strength remains contingent on the people’s will. De-politicisation and de-theologisation may limit the domains in which popular will can be expressed, but they cannot entirely escape the need for popular acceptance. De-politicisation can take the form of privatising public assets or removing previously politicised questions of state activity from spaces of public debate and deliberation. De-theologisation, meanwhile, can detach religious ideas from their historical and material contexts and reintroduce them as instruments of political legitimacy and consensus-building.
Yet both processes remain contingent upon some form of popular acceptance, whether expressed through electoral majorities or the construction of a broader ‘popular will’. The paradox, then, is that what is presented as beyond popular decision nevertheless requires the people to recognise it as legitimate. There is a familiar political-theological structure here: exceptional authority derives its force precisely from claiming a position above the ordinary order while presenting itself as necessary to sustain that order.
For the strongman, this produces a similar tension at the level of political personhood: authority must be simultaneously grounded in popular identification and elevated above ordinary political contestation. In modern European thought, Carl Schmitt famously located sovereignty in the capacity to decide on the exception, while Giorgio Agamben later developed the paradox of a sovereign power that stands both inside and outside the juridical order it sustains.
The strongman transposes a related problem from the juridical to the personal: the leader must remain sufficiently of the people to claim their legitimacy, while becoming sufficiently exceptional to claim authority over the ordinary forms through which that legitimacy is expressed. This exposes another contradiction within the construction. On the one hand, Modi claims to be one of the people; on the other, he insists that he is unlike ordinary politicians. The former gives him democratic authenticity; the latter gives him exceptional authority.
This contradiction does not imply weakness. Quite the contrary, it is a fundamental mechanism of strongman politics. But it becomes a weakness when a section of the people can thwart the claim by saying: we are not you; you are not one of us.
Consider the farmers’ protests of 2020. Tens of thousands of farmers mobilised around Delhi against three controversial agricultural laws that they argued would strengthen corporate power at the expense of farmers. The Modi government initially defended the reforms as necessary for “modernisation.” The protests persisted for months despite police action and were ultimately successful in forcing the government to repeal the legislation in 2021.
The significance of the protests goes beyond agricultural policy. Modi’s populist appeal has repeatedly rested on the claim that he speaks like and for ordinary Indians against elites, blurring the boundary between the people and himself while transforming a majoritarian political will into a purported national will.
This thins an already corroded boundary between religion and politics in two ways. First, the construction of a majority can flatten differences of caste and other social disparities. Second, the question of who enforces this will – who speaks on behalf of the people, an essentially political question – is pulled into the arena of the religious through the strongman’s claims to extraordinariness.
This is not confined to domestic policy. My research on populism and foreign policy shows a similar mechanism in Modi’s rhetoric toward China, where questions of national security, territorial sovereignty, and interstate relations become performances of his authenticity and his capacity to understand what Indians supposedly demand. The institutions do not mediate the volonté générale; it increasingly appears inherent in the person.
But popular movements – even when limited in scope and inter-class solidarity – produce a grammar of difference and dissent. The farmers were not merely saying that the Modi government was wrong. They challenged the government’s authority to speak on their behalf and, in doing so, challenged the ordinariness that Modi claimed to represent.
The distinction is important. The strongman claims, “I embody the people.” The response is: “No, thanks. We can speak for ourselves.” Such dissent interrupts exceptionalism.
The farmers’ protests are not the only example. The same problem has repeatedly surfaced when the strong-handedness of the Modi government has confronted students, from protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act across Indian campuses in late 2019 to the nationwide student-led “Cockroach” movement of 2026. These mobilisations have brought questions of citizenship, examination irregularities, corruption, university autonomy, unemployment, and political accountability onto the popular stage. The young citizen is not merely a demographic category to be managed; the student becomes a political subject.
Against the larger backdrop of the political theology of the strongman, students occupy an especially interesting position: the powerless against the powerful, Davids against Goliath.
This matters because Modi’s political vision – at least the one electorally marketed – is saturated with futurity: a new India, civilisational revival, development, national greatness, and India’s place in the world. His face has been carefully crafted in tandem with this futurity. In a sense, it is an “India-to-come” that the strongman represents; the nation’s destiny becomes tied to the leader’s persona.
Yet the powerless margins – from students and farmers to the Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh – disrupt this arrangement. Their dissent is repeatedly discredited by being linked to conspiracies, foreign influence, or threats to national unity.
This is precisely why dissent from marginalised sections of the nation is so threatening to a political persona constructed around exceptional personhood. It does not merely question what the leader has done. It asks who possesses the authority to define the people, the nation, and its future.
Modi’s strongman image, therefore, becomes softened and vulnerable through the very methods by which it is asserted. As my research on the intersection of populism and foreign policy shows, masculine bodily tropes of strongman politics become political symbols: the “broad chest” signifies courage, discipline, fearlessness, pride, protection, and sovereign capacity, while the “red eyes” signify the capacity to confront adversaries.
But the political body cannot be measured only by the leader’s words. Its fragility becomes visible through resistance.
The irony of Modi’s strongman persona is not simply that its spectacular performances of strength can be contradicted by political realities. Such claims of strength must continually be narrated, staged, repeated, defended, and contrasted with supposedly weaker predecessors. Claims to divine or exceptional strength therefore do not eliminate human vulnerability; they make vulnerability politically consequential.
One revealing example is the Galwan Valley standoff between India and China. The controversy surrounding Modi’s remarks during the crisis demonstrated the difficulty of reconciling the projection of invulnerability with the strategic realities of international politics. The same tension exists domestically.
A strongman can survive disagreements between facts and claimed realities, between domestic policy and foreign policy, and between claims of security and experiences of insecurity. What a strongman cannot easily survive is the revelation that his electorate possesses an independent will – that the people can hold a view different from the “national” view and can organise and protest.
This does not mean that protests by farmers, students, women, minorities, or other dissenting groups automatically undermine Modi’s political authority. The point is subtler: protests reveal the limits of the exception.
A dissenting student or farmer with a specific grievance does not need to claim divinity. They need only mobilise their identity and its political predicates. They do not produce an exception; instead, their subjectivity within the law forces the sovereign who claims to stand above ordinary politics to confront themself as a political subject.
The very capacity to say no can shake the theological dimension embedded within the political.
This capacity to dissent from a constructed “popular will” destabilises the foundation of political and theological extraordinariness. It limits the claim to universality and the authority to represent imaginaries such as the nation, the people, and political will. This is precisely why the theological must construct the banal as its opposition: protesters become “cockroaches”, “pseudo-intellectuals”, or whatever other category can push them to the margins of political imagination. The necessity to construct the banal is not simply a choice; it is a dialectical cost of maintaining the exceptional.
It becomes necessary because the exceptional figure depends upon delegitimising the dissenter as a political and rational subject capable of representation. This discrediting of dissent is therefore neither merely rhetorical, limited to insults and name-calling, nor simply an act of dehumanisation. It is something deeper: a refusal to recognise the other as a political subject, rendering them redundant and banal through juridical power, political rhetoric, or the pretence of security.
Terms such as “cockroaches” and “pseudo-intellectuals” are therefore not simply derogatory or dehumanising. They function as a political technology for reducing the rhetorical force of political subjectivity itself: an effort to produce a hierarchy of political life in which the “exceptional” can be distinguished from the “banal.”
But the inevitable necessity to produce the banal also reveals the fragility of the exceptional. If the exceptional were truly self-sustaining, it would have no need to continually diminish those who refuse its claim to represent the whole.
The political body, however broad its chest, remains vulnerable at the knees.
That is the broken idol of the strongman: not a leader who has ceased to command devotion, but a leader whose supposed transcendence can still be interrupted by the people from whom his authority is said to originate.
