Rarely compared, Indian and Turkish democracy have in common the fact that they have both emerged considerably weakened from the last decade. Built on an ideal of secularism guaranteed by their constitutional texts, they have both seen the religious gradually invest their political and social space.
While "the world's largest democracy" dons the orange robes of Hinduism, the "model for reconciling Islam and democracy" is strutting around draped in green in the eyes of the world - each falling in the annual rankings of press freedom, respect for the rule of law and other democratic indexes. Soon they are under the yoke of authoritarian and populist regimes, as if caught in the contemporary wave of dirty democracies. Even if a series of systemic and national conjunctures come into play, it seems that in both cases these declines are part of a very precise era: that of the reign of Narendra Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the turn of the years 2014. Commonly qualified as populists, their practice of power is driven by an uncomplexed nationalism supported by a shifting but loyal electorate. While India is reforming its citizenship in 2019 to exclude Muslims arriving on its soil after 2014, Turkey is trying to set itself up as a refuge and reference point for Muslims around the world after seeing its constitution reformed in favour of the concentration of power in the hands of Erdoğan. The dynamics are similar: religious men in power in secular nations undergoing profound change.
Placing the Modi model and the Erdoğan model in perspective is therefore an opportunity to think not only the religious populism as a renewal of nationalism but also as a tool for profound state reform.
Modi came to power in 2014 after a long political career in the state of Gujarat. Erdoğan became Prime Minister of Turkey in 2003 after a mandate at the head of Istanbul and then became President of the Republic in 2014. If both initially appear to be men of virtues who bring change and economic development, they took a decisive turn around the years 2014-2016. Modi - although already heavily contested since 2002 for his involvement in the anti-Muslim pogroms in Gujarat - was elected in 2014 on promises of growth, but campaigned in 2018 on identity and religious issues. Erdoğan has for a long time supported Turkey's candidacy for entry into the European Union, with economic and political reforms in its favour, to the point of hardening its power over the Kurdish and Syrian issues, then very openly following the failed coup d'état of 2016.
In both cases, the decline of democratic principles was accompanied by the rise of a fundamentally personal political practice embodied by a strong man who established a new link between state and nation. If we will return to the nature of the nation to which Erdoğan and Modi refer later, let us pause for a moment to consider the kind of bond they embody. The press and Western research do not hesitate to put them in the box of populists and have covered this issue extensively in order to highlight the rhetorical and practical springs that singularly link Modi and Erdoğan to the people. While Modi has a very direct relationship with his electorate, which includes the use of social networks (in notably through a dedicated application, "Modi app"), Erdoğan, for example, has a tendency to express itself in a more popular language than its predecessors, which has quickly made him stand out from the elites he castigates. The two men also have a very similar "man of the people" narrative that their campaign and communication teams never tire of claiming. Coming from a family of small shopkeepers in a medium-sized Gujarat town, Modi frequently relates that he used to help his father sell tea at the Vadnagar train station. Similarly, Erdoğan likes to recall his modest teenage years spent in the popular Kasimpasa district of Istanbul where he sold simits in the street. Apart from their common belonging to the working classes, which reinforces their closeness to the people, a common element of their journey is even more significant in terms of their link with religion. Indeed, both Modi and Erdoğan received a thorough religious education during their youth, which is all the more remarkable as it was rare at that time. At the age of 8, Modi joined the nationalist Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which today plays the decisive role of Hindutva militia. He also spent a lot of time in various religious centres in the country during a grand tour of India at the end of the 1960s. For his part, Erdoğan is doing his high school in an Imam Hatip, an institution which is dedicated to training imams and whose teaching is based mainly on the study of the Quran and the Arabic language. Later, both of them took their first steps in politics through religious organisations, either by joining the RSS for the first one or by joining the Millî Selâmet Partisi, a political party of Islamist obedience for the second one. With regard to Modi's and Erdoğan's career path, the logic of a populist practice of power turned towards the religious is thus taking shape.
In both cases, the desire to remain in power in a period of declining popularity was the trigger for a new practice of power, centred on a discourse designed to flatter a religious electorate suffering from a decline in popularity, or rather presented as such. Thus, as Christophe Jaffrelot points out, Modi gradually redrew the boundaries of the Indian electorate by circumventing the caste vote through the introduction of an ethno-religious vote. While the BJP was mainly supported by the Other backaward classes (OBCs), which represent the average fringe of the population, it managed to include more rural and poor populations by fostering a sense of Hinduism among them. This rhetoric has proved to be particularly effective in the northern states of India, where the promotion of practices derived from Hinduism, such as yoga promoted through the creation of a dedicated ministry, has helped to federate the more reluctant populations of southern India. This progressive superposition of belonging to the nation resonates with the power practice of Erdoğan which tends towards the promotion of a "new Turkey" fundamentally oriented towards the practice of Islam. It is then a question, following the example of Modi with the Muslim (but also Christian) population, of being part of an anti-Western discourse that is fundamentally opposed to secularism. The denunciation of the elites as traitors to the nation, in the nails of contemporary populism, is then illustrated by a shared denial of the progressive heritage of the twentieth century. For Modi, as for Erdoğan, it is a rather delicate exercise in denouncing values judged to be contrary to the nation, which are the achievement of men considered to be the "founding father" of the nation. While Erdoğan has fallen back on the attack of the secular "Western elites" to glaze its rejection of Kemalism, Modi suggests that the Muslims of India have their place in Pakistan without being able to openly denounce the pluralism of independence defended by Gandhi, even if he was assassinated by a member of the RSS.
This complex relationship to a national memory that is still vivid among the Indian and Turkish populations (if one simply believes the omnipresence of statues and other posters of Atatürk and Gandhi in the streets of Istanbul or Mumbai) is in both cases overtaken by a layering of nation and religion: Gandhi and Atatürk may have founded the State, Modi and Erdoğan defend the nation in what is most supposedly ancestral. This idea is particularly illustrated in the relationship of the two heads of state to historical heritage. The rewriting of history tends for both Modi and Erdoğan to insert their respective mandates in the long term of the supposed deep identity of the nation, in a return to the purity of eternal India (in particular by erasing the five centuries of the Mogul Empire from school textbooks) or to the splendour of the Ottoman Empire.
Their mandates are thus part of an attempt to reclaim an extremely symbolic historical heritage. On 5 August 2020 Modi inaugurated the start of work on the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque built in the 16th century on a site claimed in violence by the troops of the Sangh Parivar as the birthplace of the god Rama. Approved by the final decision of the Supreme Court in November 2019, this demolition will allow the reconstruction of a Hindu temple on the ruins of the mosque, bringing Modi into the pantheon of historical defenders of Hinduism in the face of the "Muslim invaders". At the same time, Erdoğan has made the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque a political battle, eventually offering it a place in the line of the great men of the Ottoman Empire linked to this place. In both cases, the emotional symbolism of the "reconquest" is part of a wider dynamic of modification of the public space in a desire for a return and promotion of the religious heritage. Whether it is the intensification of the debates around the respect for cows in the streets of India, or the multiplication of mosques in Istanbul under the mandate of Erdoğan, religious nationalism is relayed by the same desire to be part of the long time of the claimed nation which goes beyond the discourse to cling to the stone.
Through redefining the contours of the nation by the religious, while at the same time practising the power to incarnate this same nation, Erdoğan and Modi gradually strived to overlap the religious nation with the state and its institutions. This phenomenon can be observed in law as well as in new state practices. Under Erdoğan, the transformation of the Turkish state is above all characterized by a concentration of power towards the figure of the President of the Republic, who establishes a direct link between the person of Erdoğan, the incarnation of a religious nation, and the presidential function at the head of the state. The reform of the constitution by referendum in 2017 is absolutely turned towards the man of the presidency, since it is a matter of considerably extending his powers, which were already well strengthened in the aftermath of the failed coup d'état. Therefore, it seems that the seizure of power by Erdoğan, and the support of half the population, comes as a confirmation of the resonance of the nationalist discourse of Erdoğan. The many arrests, purges and other imprisonments after 2016 are largely carried out on the grounds of keeping "traitors to the nation" away. While not directly related to religion, the current severity inherited from the coup targets sections of the population considered to be the westernized and secular elites on which Erdoğan relies to bolster the conservatism and faith of part of its electorate. The government's reaction to the protests of the Bogazici academic body is the most recent example. On the other hand, if Modi cannot numerically change the constitution, he deploys his new nation by law. Some refer to the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu rule) which is said to have passed from fact to law, especially regarding muslim populations that have been long marginalised in institutions (they represent 14.2% of the national population but 3.7% of the deputies in the national parliament) and are globally more precarious than the Hindu populations. The recent Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) provides for the exclusion of migrants arriving in India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh before 31 December 2014 from access to citizenship, as these three countries are found to be Muslims. The restriction of access to the right for these Muslim populations has led to numerous challenges throughout the country, particularly in Delhi and Assam. Moreover, the takeover of the state of Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in the country in August 2019 and until then under semi-independent status, as well as the repression that followed, accentuated the systematic marginalisation of Muslim populations through reforms initiated by Modi.
The religious discourse that is unfolding in the state internally through the stigmatisation and oppression of populations considered as anti-nation on religious criteria (secular, Muslim) is reinforced by the building of power internationally in a mode of prosperity and religious defence. If the construction of Turkey as a Muslim force on the international scene, and especially towards the European Union, is no longer to be proven, Indian soft power is increasingly moving towards a focus on the Hindu heritage, in opposition to Pakistan, but also more widely thanks to a large diaspora of Hindu-nationalist obedience. Other factors may be evoked: the sponsorship of Hindu personalities abroad, following the example of the guru Sai Baba who has sections in dozens of countries and who travels as much as the Pope, or the hyper-mediatisation of the big Hindu festivals to which foreign journalists are invited in the context of the tourist advertising programme "Incredible !ndia" launched in Europe. The religious soft power of India as well as Turkey is moreover reinforced by regional desires which reinforce the religious nationalist discourse internally. The historic animosity with Pakistan, recently awakened by the clashes on the Sino-Indian border, constitutes a practical basis for denouncing the Muslim enemy who would endanger the nation within its borders.
Modi and Erdoğan thus propose a model of populism that is joined in a similar use of religious rhetoric as a redefinition of the outlines of the nation they embody and defend. While this perspective is an opportunity to uncover joint synergies on the two men's practice of power, it would be wrong to confuse the structure of the political parties that support them. While Erdoğan and his party have been present in the Turkish political wake for more than twenty years, Modi's rise does not seem to correspond only to the emergence of the BJP but of a more total ideology, the Hindutva, structured around a real militia (RSS) and several organisations, above all developed in parallel with the institutions that Modi will have ended up integrating.
Finally, the challenges faced by these two leaders caught between the fallout of the global pandemic and the internal protests of a certain fringe of the population (peasant revolts in India, student movements in Turkey) open up new perspectives on the resistance of these well-established powers to new shocks.