Politics

Aug 3, 2026 Devesh Kapur

India’s relatively weak state capacity has long hampered its development. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been promising to address the problem since he came to power in 2014, but his government’s emphasis on centralizing power and strengthening executive control has had the opposite effect.

WASHINGTON, DC—Recent student-led protests, which forced Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s typically unyielding regime to capitulate on key demands, dented Modi’s personal aura of power and exposed the limits of his government’s ability to curb dissent through heavy-handed repression. But the protests also exposed a broader and more prosaic characteristic of the Indian state: incompetence.