The Grand Distraction: How Modi’s India Is Repeating Its Deadliest Mistake

 

The Grand Distraction: How Modi’s India Is Repeating Its Deadliest Mistake

History isn’t subtle when it wants to warn us. Nations don’t fall because of outside forces alone, they collapse when they rot from within. India, a civilization that outlived invaders, emperors, and empires, always crumbled first because of one fatal flaw: division.

Today, under the decade-long leadership of Narendra Modi, history is being rewritten, not in textbooks, but on the streets, in institutions, and the psyche of a divided nation. What’s unfolding isn’t just incompetence; it’s a textbook lesson on how internal decay paves the way for external disaster.

Modi didn’t arrive as a divider. He came draped in the promise of “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas”, development for all. What India got instead was a masterclass in selective development: businessmen from Gujarat flourishing while the rest of the nation wrestles with crumbling bridges, defective airports, and collapsing highways, all generously funded by loans the common man will spend generations repaying.

The political opposition? Reduced to fugitives and court regulars, courtesy of a judicial system turned into an assembly line for harassment. Meanwhile, the real criminals, those draining the nation’s wealth, sit in Parliament, corporate boardrooms, and photo ops, flashing wide smiles and deeper pockets.

The Prime Minister’s advisors, once expected to steer the ship, now serve more as court poets, serenading the ruler with tales of imagined glory, shielding him from inconvenient realities like unemployment, farmer suicides, and a diplomatic neighborhood now fully leased out to China.

Yes, while India’s foreign policy is busy manufacturing headlines about international yoga days and photo-ops with Silicon Valley CEOs, China has silently and systematically built economic fortresses across South Asia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, checkmate without firing a bullet. But rest easy: we have bans on TikTok and grand speeches in Madison Square Garden to console us.

At home, what passes for governance is theater, and not even good theater. Modi’s speeches have devolved into Bollywood outtakes, each one a careful blend of half-truths, emotional baiting, and muscular posturing. His latest masterpiece? Urging Pakistan’s youth to dismantle terrorism one moment, and threatening them with military strikes the next, an act that would embarrass even C-list movie villains.

The ideological ecosystem he nurtures prefers cow urine over science, mythology over history, and pseudoscience over policy. Soldiers' welfare is forgotten, farmer protests dismissed, economic downturns spun as “opportunities,” and the rising debts of the poor casually blamed on their supposed lack of national spirit.

But let’s be clear: the real genius lies elsewhere.

The true masterstroke of the Modi era has been the perfection of a political weapon older than the wheel, distraction.

While citizens argue over temples, beef, and rewritten history books, public sector wealth is siphoned off to the chosen few. Billionaires, friends of the regime, fatten while millions slip into debt, juggling rising costs and falling wages. National assets are sold cheap, newsrooms are sold cheaper, and the truth is auctioned off to the highest bidder.

And the people? Kept busy, not working, not dreaming, but fighting: over religion, over caste, over myths fed to them nightly by news anchors who’d fail basic journalism school but excel at shouting matches.

Manufactured terror threats, communal flare-ups, endless primetime hysteria, all part of the script. No real questions. No accountability. Just an endless cycle of rage, to keep the real theft hidden.

This isn’t a bug in the system, it is the system.

"Keep them angry. Keep them blind. And loot the empire while they wave the flag."

India, once a symbol of resilience, now risks becoming a tragic replay of its past. The warning signs are neon-bright. Internal decay, fueled by division and apathy at the top, is the oldest invitation to collapse. We have seen this movie before, in the fall of the Mauryas, in the decline of the Mughals, in the British colonization that followed centuries of internal squabbling.

Today, Modi’s India stands at that same dangerous crossroads. A nation hollowed from within, too distracted to see what’s being stolen from under its nose.

The question is simple: Will we learn from history, or repeat it, one foolish slogan at a time?