THE OTHER ISRAEL:

A year away from the election, Modi still towers over his rivals. His politics of ultranationalism mixed with muscular Hinduism has perceptibly moved Indian politics to the right. His personal popularity, the BJP's deep pockets (the party is the prime recipient of electoral funding), its well-oiled party machinery, grass-roots reach, control over a servile media and governing institutions such as the Election Commission and law enforcement agencies all give him an air of invincibility. 

Modi has also been cementing his grip on power through a carefully cultivated cult of personality and suppression of dissent and civil liberties. This month, after the release of a BBC documentary highlighting Modi's role in religious violence in Gujarat state in 2002, tax authorities launched a 60-hour raid on the BBC's India offices. Last week, a Congress spokesman was dramatically deplaned and arrested for merely misnaming Modi's middle name. Discrimination against minorities, especially Muslims, is rising in an increasingly brazen project to remake India's secular republic as a Hindu majoritarian state. Lynchings and open calls for genocide of Muslims are now fairly routine. So is the brutalization of Muslim lives by state governments controlled by the BJP, for example the new trend of bulldozing Muslim homes on the pretext of unproven criminality and the targeting of Muslim men in interfaith relations on charges of "love jihad."

As a result, the stakes are extraordinarily high for next year's elections. India has already been falling rapidly in democracy rankings since Modi's rise to power. Sweden's V-Dem Institute now considers it a "electoral autocracy." Modi's critics fear that one more term for him will irreversibly alter India's constitutional inclusivity and destroy its democracy. 

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