Narendra Modi at 25: Can the ‘master of crises’ overcome the Gen Z challenge?

It is not the first time Narendra Modi has faced a crowd. For much of his 25 years in public life, crowds have been his political instrument: rallies packed with supporters, audiences hanging on to his words, voters waiting to turn his rhetoric into electoral victories.

But now, he is increasingly facing a different kind of crowd: young, restless and angry. Some of the recent protests have presented his government with an unfamiliar challenge, and are likely to become a recurring headache.

In July, Gen Z protesters led by the Cockroach Janta Party turned anger over the NEET question paper leak into a successful street campaign, forcing education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign. It was a rare moment in Modi’s career in power, which began when he became Gujarat chief minister on October 7, 2001.

This month, the new target of the Gen Z protesters and the opposition is Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the revision of electoral rolls. They argue that the Kerala-cadre IAS officer is acting at the government’s behest, ignoring concerns reportedly raised by the other two election commissioners. For Modi, who is used to dealing with a stiff political opposition, this represents a different kind of test. He has spent 25 years confronting crises and often turning them into political advantage. But the jury is still out on whether he can manage and contain the damage now unfolding.

The striking feature of Modi’s public journey has been his remarkable ability to adapt and reinvent himself when confronted with a crisis. That has helped him win back an estranged public, with electoral victories providing the final stamp of acceptance. It also explains the emphasis placed on winning elections: they provide the legitimacy and political power to push ahead, often with greater force, after a setback.

Many expected the humbling 2024 Lok Sabha verdict to slow Modi down or force him to temper his ideological framework. Instead, he drew fresh political capital from victories in several high-stakes assembly elections, including Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi, West Bengal and Assam.

His quarter-century in public life offers several examples of this ability to absorb a crisis, recalibrate and move on. When Modi was sworn in as Gujarat chief minister for the first time, Kutch was still recovering from a devastating earthquake. A cyclone had hit Kandla three years earlier, the rains had failed for three consecutive years and cooperative banks were collapsing.

The government’s account says Modi sent senior officers to Kutch, tackled the banking crisis and made water a priority, with check dams built across the state. In 2003, Gujarat passed the country’s first state disaster management law. Kutch, according to the official narrative, subsequently became one of India’s fastest-growing districts.

Then came Godhra and the riots that rocked the state. In February 2002, a train was burned and the violence that followed killed more than a thousand people. Modi’s supporters say he made law and order non-negotiable and ended the old cycle of curfews and communal riots. Special investigators found no case against him. His critics, however, maintain that the state failed to protect its people in the crucial first days of the violence and that this failure was never adequately answered. The state’s conduct was under attack in the press and in the courts. Prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had also spoken of raj dharma, the ruler’s duty towards all subjects.

What Modi did next became the first draft of a method that would define much of his political career. In July 2002, five months after Godhra, he dissolved the assembly, giving up eight months of his term. He took his case directly to the voters and, in December, the BJP won 127 of Gujarat’s 182 seats, its best result in the state until then.

The years that followed were hardly uneventful. Modi faced intense scrutiny and legal cases, the denial of a US visa in 2005 and the arrest of Amit Shah, then the state home minister. Modi later described the period as a “witch-hunt”. Gujarat voters, however, backed him again in 2007 and 2012 as he recast himself as the chief minister of development, selling a model built around security, investment and improved infrastructure. It provided the platform from which he eventually headed to Delhi.

There was another, less discussed episode that could potentially have derailed his journey to Delhi. On October 27, 2013, bombs went off around Gandhi Maidan in Patna while Modi was addressing a rally as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. He finished his speech and asked the crowd to remain calm. Six people were killed and 85 injured in explosions allegedly planted by the Indian Mujahideen. Had Modi left the stage, the resulting panic could have triggered a stampede. The speech also marked a strategic shift in his messaging, as he called on Hindus and Muslims to fight poverty together.

The 2014 Lok Sabha campaign followed the template. Modi approached the voters directly, holding around 400 rallies and travelling three lakh kilometres in nine months. Tea-stall interactions and holograms allowed him to appear in several towns simultaneously. The eventual victory, with 282 seats, gave the country its first single-party majority in three decades and provided Modi with what he called “political stability” after years of coalition governments.

In office, his first major test was the economy. In 2013, India had been counted among the “fragile five”, with high inflation, a weak rupee and a large current account deficit. The Modi government responded by targeting inflation and passing the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code and the Goods and Services Tax. India subsequently climbed from 142nd to 63rd in the World Bank’s ease-of-doing-business rankings between 2014 and 2020.

The government also initiated a banking clean-up built around the 4Rs: recognition, resolution, recapitalisation and reform. The asset-quality review that began the process was launched in 2015 under Reserve Bank governor Raghuram Rajan, whom the government did not retain for a second term later. As Gujarat chief minister, Modi had opposed the GST design proposed by the Congress-led Central government. As prime minister, however, he recognised its potential and altered it to put his own stamp on the reform.

Security has remained his strongest political card. The 2016 cross-border attacks in Uri led to the surgical strikes targeting terrorist camps across the line of control. Pulwama was followed by Balakot in 2019. The Pahalgam massacre in April 2025 led to Operation Sindoor in May. The Doklam standoff in 2017 ended after 73 days, with both Indian and Chinese armies pulling back. Modi’s message in each case was one of muscular nationalism. Again, the ballot box rewarded the approach, most notably in 2019, when the Balakot strikes resonated strongly with voters.

The government now says Maoist violence has been brought to an end, recalling the 2010 Dantewada ambush in which 76 security personnel were killed. In March this year, Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced that no district in the country was Naxal-affected.

The opposition has questioned the government’s handling of several of these military episodes. After Galwan in 2020, where 20 Indian soldiers were killed, the political debate never fully closed. After Operation Sindoor, questions remained over the ceasefire and the role of those who helped broker it.

Two of Modi’s biggest political victories, however, were not responses to crises but the fulfilment of long-standing BJP ideological promises. Article 370 was revoked in August 2019, with the Supreme Court upholding the move in December 2023. The Ram temple was consecrated in January 2024 following the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya verdict in 2019. Both will remain central to Modi’s political and socio-cultural legacy. Both also required the legal and administrative acumen of Shah to translate political intent into action.

The Modi government has consistently claimed a stronger record on development and state capacity. Railways have reached Agartala, Aizawl and the Kashmir valley, including the imposing Chenab Bridge. The government says 12 peace accords have been signed in the northeast since 2019, with around 11,000 militants surrendering and incidents falling 71 per cent between 2014 and 2023. More than Rs45,000 crore has been spent on freight corridors, while work on the Ken-Betwa river-link project began in December 2024.

Covid was another major test. The government responded by pushing Indian-made vaccines, building the CoWIN platform and administering more than two billion doses. It also used infrastructure spending to support the economy and shifted education online. The latter remains open to legitimate criticism, particularly over unequal access, but the broader response helped stabilise a country of India’s scale during an unprecedented crisis.

A major source of comfort for the country was the way the energy crisis was managed during the Russia-Ukraine war and, earlier this year, after the closure of the crucial Strait of Hormuz following the Iran war. Half of India’s crude imports came through the strait. It was here that diplomatic standing and some deft manoeuvring provided a cushion. India bought oil wherever it was cheapest, without being apologetic about it. It continued buying Russian crude despite sustained pressure from western capitals, helping keep inflation below double digits. The economy grew 7.8 per cent in the quarter during which the strait remained shut.

Not every crisis ended to Modi’s satisfaction. On the night of November 8, 2016, he took 86 per cent of the country’s cash out of circulation in a bid to curb black money. Demonetisation did not achieve that objective, with almost all the withdrawn cash eventually returning to the banking system. Its most visible lasting impact was the massive push towards a digital economy, helping put India among the world’s leading digital-payments markets.

If the government would rather not be reminded of the note ban, the withdrawal of the three farm laws after prolonged protests by farmers from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh in 2020-21 was another political embarrassment. It was one of the rare occasions when Modi yielded ground. Appearing on television, he apologised and announced the withdrawal of the laws. Politically, he cut his losses after concluding that prolonging the protests offered little to be gained.

Yet neither episode exacted a substantial electoral price. After demonetisation, despite the visible hardship it caused, the BJP and the government managed to keep the political narrative in their favour. After the farm laws were withdrawn, the BJP retained power in both Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

The real secret of these 25 years is therefore not simply that Modi seeks to own a crisis, encapsulated in his phrase “aapda mein avsar”—opportunity in crisis. It is his ability to change himself to confront the crisis head-on. In 2002, he was the hard hindutva face taking on the press, the Election Commission and the Congress government. By 2007, he had become the businessman’s chief minister, talking about roads, power and growth. In 2014, he was the tea seller from Vadnagar taking on a dynasty. After Pulwama, he became the watchman and the nationalist. Following demonetisation and Covid, he recast himself as the provider of free grain, gas cylinders and houses for the economically weaker section, a leader who claimed a direct line to the poor.

From the dip in fortunes in 2024 to the high of winning West Bengal and Assam in early 2026, however, the summer of 2026 has been marked by a different kind of discontent. The Gen Z protests exposed a fault line. A younger generation appeared to be reacting differently to the dominant political communication of the past decade. Modi responded by “reinventing” himself again, taking to Instagram to communicate directly with younger voters. Since then, the medium itself has increasingly shaped political messaging.

That is why the current turmoil over the Election Commission represents a particularly fresh challenge for the government. To some, it may recall the second tenure of the Manmohan Singh government, when agitations dominated public conversation and the appetite for political change was growing. But the present crisis is still unfolding.

The opposition, cornered for more than a decade, now appears to have found a cause around which it can mobilise, with youth and student groups, including the CJP, joining hands. The CJP succeeded when it refused to back down from its demands, much as the farmer organisations did in 2020-21. The opposition is now following a similar script, refusing to retreat from its demand for the CEC’s resignation.

The real test is who blinks first. The answer could help define the contours of Indian politics in the run-up to 2029.

For Modi, the electoral verdicts in Uttar Pradesh and other states will once again determine whether he has managed to overcome another crisis during his long tenure in public office, or whether the latest challenge marks the beginning of tougher times ahead.