I recently came across the title of a biography of Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld: Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David.
Now, Larry David is a funny man. He helped create Seinfeld, one of the most successful television comedies in history, famously described as a show about nothing. He went on to create Curb Your Enthusiasm, another remarkable achievement in the art of making something out of nothing.
And then it struck me.
India has its own Emperor of Nothing. His name is Narendra Damodardas Modi.
The difference, of course, is that Larry David made millions of people laugh by making something out of nothing. Narendra Modi has spent more than twelve years persuading hundreds of millions that he is accomplishing everything.
One is a master of self-deprecation. The other is a master of self-promotion.
The Greatest Show on Earth
Let us begin by giving credit where credit is due. Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, is an extraordinary politician. He has mastered the art of political communication, built a formidable electoral machine, cultivated an intensely loyal following, and turned himself into a brand of almost religious proportions.
He has been photographed meditating in caves, praying at temples, lunging into enthusiastic embraces of world leaders, addressing enormous crowds, and looking meaningfully into the distance.
If only distance could talk back.
If contemplation were a measure of national development, India would have surpassed Switzerland in living standards by now.
Every occasion is an opportunity for a grand proclamation. Every policy announcement, a historic turning point. Every election, a civilizational battle. Every international visit, evidence that India has finally assumed its rightful position at the head of the global table.
The world, we are repeatedly assured, now looks to India for leadership.
Vishwa Guru, they call it.
There is nothing wrong with being proud of India. It is a remarkable country, with extraordinary people, an ancient civilization, and enormous potential.
But national pride and national performance are two very different things.
One requires a flag. The other requires results.
The Great Vanishing Act
On November 8, 2016, Narendra Modi appeared on television and announced that the government’s existing ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes would cease to be legal tender. In one swift move, he had rendered approximately 86% of India’s currency in circulation by value unusable for ordinary transactions.
The objective? Eliminate black money, counterfeit currency, corruption, and terrorist financing. A bold move, we were assured. A masterstroke. India would emerge cleaner, stronger, and more honest.
Millions queued outside banks for hours. Some even died in those lines. Many small businesses went bankrupt because people couldn’t buy anything. Daily-wage workers lost income. Ordinary Indians struggled to access their own money.
And the black money?
According to the Reserve Bank of India, 99.3% of the demonetized currency found its way back into the banking system.
This did not necessarily make the money legitimate. But it did raise an awkward question about the mountain of illicit cash supposedly destined to disappear.
Here’s an even more fundamental question: What economic expertise informed this extraordinary decision, and what became of the warnings that preceded it?
Consider Raghuram Rajan, the internationally respected economist and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
In his book I Do What I Do, Rajan revealed that the government had sought his views in February 2016. He warned that the likely short-term economic costs would outweigh the potential benefits. The RBI subsequently submitted a detailed note outlining the risks, alternatives, preparations required, and consequences of inadequate planning.
The warnings were hardly ambiguous.
Then there is the curious case of Anil Bokil, a man known as Guru Uncle.
As NPR’s Planet Money reported in 2017, Bokil, a mechanical engineer by training, had pitched Modi a sweeping economic transformation plan in 2013. His organization, Arthakranti, with roots in Nagpur, had developed a 94-page PowerPoint presentation advocating radical changes to India’s taxation and monetary system, including the withdrawal of high-denomination currency.
A mechanical engineer proposing monetary reform is not inherently objectionable. Good ideas can come from unexpected places. But a PowerPoint presentation is not a macroeconomic impact assessment. And enthusiasm, however sincere, is not a substitute for rigorous economic analysis.
Bokil himself subsequently criticized the government’s implementation, arguing that it had adopted only parts of his much broader proposal.
One can only imagine what else was in the broader proposal.
None of this proves that Bokil designed Modi’s policy. Nor does it mean the RBI was excluded from the process. Indeed, the Supreme Court subsequently upheld the legality of the consultation and decision-making procedure.
But legality is not the same as sound economic judgment.
If the government had been warned about the risks, what preparations were made to mitigate them?
What independent assessments were conducted?
And where is the public accounting of how those warnings influenced the final decision?
The government had conducted an extraordinary economic experiment affecting over a billion people. Ordinary Indians became unwitting lab rats in this experiment, bearing the hardship and the cost.
The ruling party simply supplied the applause.
But here’s the bigger question: How do you hold a leader accountable for failure when he refuses to acknowledge that anything has failed?
In any normal enterprise, a CEO responsible for such a disruptive initiative would face a rather uncomfortable board meeting about its costs and benefits.
In Modi’s India, the board appears to have been replaced by a devotional singing group.
And devotional singing groups, as a rule, don’t conduct performance reviews.
When the Emperor Declared Victory Over a Virus
On March 24, 2020, Narendra Modi appeared on television and announced one of the world’s most sweeping COVID-19 lockdowns, giving 1.3 billion Indians just four hours to prepare.
Factories shut down. Public transport stopped. Millions of migrant workers suddenly found themselves without jobs, income, or a means of returning home. Families, including young children, began walking hundreds of kilometers to their villages.
The lockdown may have been necessary. But apparently, planning for the people whose lives it would upend was an optional extra.
Then came January 28, 2021.
Addressing the World Economic Forum at Davos, Modi proudly proclaimed that India had effectively contained COVID-19.
India, he proclaimed, had saved humanity from a major disaster.
It was an extraordinary declaration. The pandemic was still raging across the world, vaccines were only beginning to arrive, and the virus had shown no particular interest in political speeches.
But the Emperor had already spoken. Victory had been declared.
Unfortunately, somebody forgot to inform the virus.
Within weeks, India was engulfed by a devastating second wave. Hospitals ran out of beds and medical oxygen. Desperate families searched for treatment. Crematoriums overflowed. Bodies, many believed to be of COVID-19 victims, were recovered from the Ganges.
Meanwhile, massive election rallies and religious gatherings, including the Kumbh Mela, had proceeded despite the growing danger. Political enthusiasm, it seemed, was not subject to the same epidemiological constraints as ordinary human activity.
Then came another uncomfortable question: How many Indians had actually died?
India officially reported approximately 481,000 COVID deaths by the end of 2021. The World Health Organization subsequently estimated 4.74 million excess deaths during 2020–2021—nearly ten times the officially reported COVID toll. Excess mortality includes deaths indirectly associated with the pandemic, so these are not identical measures. The government disputed the WHO’s methodology.
Whatever the precise figure, the scale of the tragedy was staggering.
But we are interested in the questions behind the catastrophe.
What scientific advice informed the government’s declaration of success?
What preparations were made for another wave?
What warnings were available, and how did they influence decisions about oxygen supplies, hospital capacity, and mass gatherings?
And perhaps the most important question of all:
When a government publicly declares victory over a crisis that has not ended, who is responsible for ensuring that political triumphalism does not displace scientific preparedness?
A virus does not recognize political authority. It cannot be persuaded by slogans, intimidated by television debates, or impressed by the size of an election rally.
And it certainly cannot be instructed to respect a premature victory declaration.
During India’s gravest public-health crisis in generations, the distance between the government’s declarations of competence and the suffering visible on India’s streets became impossible to ignore.
The Emperor had promised strength.
The people needed oxygen.
The Fifty-Six-Inch Chest and the Missing Questions
Foreign policy and national security provide another fascinating window into the Modi phenomenon.
Few politicians have invested so heavily in the imagery of personal strength. The powerful leader. The decisive commander. The man before whom enemies supposedly tremble.
And yet relations with China have presented a complicated and often uncomfortable reality.
The deadly Galwan clashes of 2020, subsequent military standoffs, restricted patrolling, and negotiations over disengagement exposed the difference between chest-thumping rhetoric and the challenges of defending a disputed border.
The October 2024 agreement restored Indian patrolling arrangements in Depsang and Demchok, an important diplomatic development. But other buffer zones and the wider military confrontation have remained significant unresolved concerns.
That is not to dismiss the work of India’s armed forces or its diplomats. Quite the opposite.
It is to ask whether the enormous political investment in the image of an invincible leader has made it harder to discuss national-security setbacks with honesty.
Pakistan offers a similar lesson. Military operations are complex undertakings whose results cannot be measured by television graphics, studio shouting matches, or the volume of patriotic music accompanying the evening news.
Yet political theater increasingly threatens to displace sober assessments of what military operations actually achieve.
Patriotism requires us to support the country. It does not require us to believe that every government decision is a military masterpiece.
A fifty-six-inch chest may make for an impressive election slogan.
Unfortunately, international borders are not known to respond to measurements of the prime minister’s tailoring.
The Man Who Speaks to Everyone. Except Journalists.
Narendra Modi is unquestionably a gifted communicator.
He can speak for hours at political rallies. He can address enormous international gatherings. He can deliver monthly radio monologues, speak directly to the nation, and participate in carefully organized interviews.
But there is one particular form of communication that has proved strangely difficult.
An open, unscripted press conference with independent journalists asking questions and follow-ups.
For more than twelve years in office, Modi has avoided the kind of regular adversarial questioning that democratic leaders should regard as a routine responsibility. In 2019, he attended a press conference but declined to answer the journalists’ questions, leaving them to his party president Amit Shah.
Imagine that.
A man who can address a billion people apparently finds a roomful of journalists a rather less appealing proposition.
And we are speaking of the same individual who, during a 2024 interview, suggested that his extraordinary energy was not biological in origin but bestowed by God.
This, I confess, raises several questions.
If the prime minister’s energy is divinely sourced, does it fall under the Ministry of Power? Is it renewable? Can it be transmitted? And, most importantly, is there a mechanism for parliamentary oversight?
The theological implications are fascinating. The constitutional implications are rather less amusing.
Democracy rests on the principle that political leaders are ordinary human beings entrusted with temporary authority.
They are answerable to the people. Not dispatched from heaven with an exemption from cross-examination.
God, to the best of my knowledge, has never held a press conference either.
The Empire of Applause
What makes the Modi phenomenon particularly interesting is not simply the man himself. It is the enormous apparatus of admiration surrounding him.
A vast ecosystem of political activists, television personalities, social media promoters, party spokespersons, and enthusiastic supporters has elevated the prime minister into something approaching an infallible national figure.
Criticism is routinely interpreted as hostility toward India. Questions about policy become attacks on national pride. Disagreement is recast as disloyalty.
This is one of the most dangerous confusions a democracy can entertain.
The prime minister is not the nation. The government is not the Constitution. And patriotism is not a lifetime subscription to the ruling party’s public-relations department.
One of the great achievements of modern political marketing has been to make ordinary citizens feel personally insulted when someone criticizes a politician they admire.
Think about that for a moment.
An elected official makes a questionable decision. Someone points it out. And thousands of perfectly respectable citizens, many of them accomplished professionals, respond as though their family honor has been violated.
There is something deeply comical about watching a retired corporate executive defend every decision of a politician with a passion he probably never demonstrated at his own company’s annual performance review.
Perhaps that is the ultimate triumph of the Modi brand. Its customers have become its unpaid customer-service department. And unlike most customer-service departments, this one does not accept complaints.
But What About the Achievements?
Modi’s supporters will quite reasonably point to India’s expanded digital payments ecosystem, substantial infrastructure development, welfare transfers, electrification, improved sanitation coverage, and India’s growing economic and diplomatic prominence.
These are not imaginary developments.
Some build on institutions and programs established by earlier governments. Others reflect initiatives undertaken during Modi’s tenure. Many have brought tangible benefits to ordinary Indians.
To dismiss them all would be intellectually dishonest.
But recognizing achievements does not absolve a government of responsibility for failures. Nor does it establish that every success occurred because of one man.
The real question is whether India’s progress represents the extraordinary transformation promised by Modi—or the continuation of a much longer national journey, one that has involved generations of Indians, multiple governments, and institutions whose contributions are now routinely overshadowed by one individual’s publicity machine.
India's achievements have many authors, but the credit invariably finds its way to one man. Its failures, meanwhile, are generously distributed among the remaining 1.4 billion.
And that brings us to the central absurdity of the entire enterprise.
The Emperor’s Greatest Achievement
Perhaps historians will eventually conclude that Narendra Modi’s most extraordinary accomplishment was not demonetization, infrastructure, economic reform, or foreign policy.
It was the transformation of Indian political life into an almost continuous referendum on Narendra Modi.
Every achievement belongs to him. Every failure belongs to an opposition party, a previous government, a bureaucrat, a foreign conspiracy, an insufficiently patriotic citizen, or some mysterious combination of the above.
He has managed to become simultaneously the most powerful man in India and, when things go wrong, a curiously powerless bystander.
That is an impressive political innovation.
The prime minister is everywhere when a ribbon must be cut.
He is considerably harder to locate when responsibility must be accepted.
India’s citizens deserve something better than perpetual political theater. They deserve competent institutions, accountable leadership, a functioning justice system, educational opportunities, economic mobility, freedom from religious intimidation, and the confidence that their constitutional rights do not depend on their political preferences.
They deserve a government that is more interested in delivering results than taking credit.
And they deserve a prime minister who can answer difficult questions without a script.
The Final Episode
Larry David built a comedy empire around life’s petty absurdities, awkward encounters, and the peculiar inability of human beings to recognize their own ridiculousness.
Narendra Modi has built a political empire around an almost opposite proposition: that one man can embody the aspirations, achievements, wisdom, and destiny of an entire civilization.
There is one more difference.
Larry David’s characters rarely learn anything. That is part of the joke.
In politics, however, the consequences are borne by real people.
The migrant worker walking home during a lockdown. The small trader whose business did not survive demonetization. The graduate searching for a decent job. The student whose future depends on a credible examination system. The minority citizen wondering whether equal citizenship is becoming conditional. The voter anxious about whether their name will remain on the electoral roll.
These people are not supporting characters in somebody else’s political epic.
They are India.
And their lives—not the number of statues, slogans, selfies, stadium appearances, or Howdy-Namaste standing ovations—are the appropriate measure of a government’s success.
The tragedy is not that India has an emperor who has accomplished nothing. It is that a country capable of accomplishing so much has been encouraged to measure its greatness by the glory of one man.
And that, perhaps, is the greatest nothing of all.