Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, began his response by grandstanding.

“Till now tears from the eyes of victims of Sikh families have not been dried,” Modi deflected when accused by critics of turning a blind eye to religious extremism in his country. “You are enacting drama.”

Modi’s equivocal response is representative of the foul, deft artifice that has plagued India’s political landscape, undermined the nation’s immense economic promise, and left a wide berth for violent Hindu nationalism to flourish. To unpack and understand the Indian apparatus is no simple task. A complex machine of seven major religions, dozens of bureaucratic factions, and thousands of fervent ideologues vying for center stage, India seems paralyzed—incapable of finding unity in anything but the religious brutality that convulses the nation.

The current Prime Minister represents the Bharatiya Janata Party, translated to the “Indian People’s Party,” or enshrined colloquially as “BJP.” As of 2015, it is the India’s largest political party—no surprise seeing what the right-wing establishment has to offer to a country that is roughly 80 percent Hindu; the BJP has historically drawn its support through a Hindu nationalist position. The social conservatism the party advocates, splashed with a strong atmosphere of religious bias, has cultivated a nation that courts the dangers of outright jingoism.

Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, and many indigenous tribes form essential religious minorities with centuries of rich history in India. Religious pluralism and freedom are protected by India’s Constitution just as they are in the United States. The country espouses unique Western values. However, a disturbing pattern has emerged within this secular democracy that seems to suggest the very opposite. As surely as violence breeds a greater capacity for violence, this pattern has steadily intensified with almost no opposition in its way.

Towards the end of each month, Reverend Phil Oswald receives a call asking if he would be willing to baptize Hindus so they can become Christians. The seasoned pastor of Delhi International Christian Fellowship, he knows better than to accept. “They always follow the same script,” he says. “It’s obviously a setup.”

Not everyone is able to avert Hindu nationalist influence as easily. In September, a mob of about 1,000 people lynched a fifty-year-old Muslim man in a village near New Delhi. His son was beaten to critical condition. The alleged offense? False rumors that he was storing beef, the meat of a sacred animal to Hindus, in his refrigerator. Perhaps more unsettling was the outlook later expressed by prominent Indian politician Manohar Lal Khattar in an interview with the Indian Express—“Muslims can continue to live in this country, but they will have to give up eating beef... The cow is an article of faith here.”

Khattar later apologized, but the case drew international attention when members of the governing BJP went so far as to publicly condemn police for even filing murder charges.

And while Prime Minister Modi remained hesitant to denounce the killers and contradict his party, it was Bollywood actor Aamir Khan who eventually spoke out against the unaddressed vitriol towards religious minorities, recounting his and his wife’s experiences as Muslims living in India. “She fears for her child. She fears about what the atmosphere around us will be. She feels scared to open the newspapers every day,” Khan said during the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards in New Delhi, referencing the recent lynching. “You feel why this is happening, you feel low.”

A spokesman for BJP then censured the actor for his remarks, saying, “Don’t forget, India made you a star.” The party added that it was “not all right to malign our incredible India.” The Times of India reports that nearly 50 young boys and girls under the aegis of Hindu nationalist groups burned effigies and posters of Khan in Dehradun. Similarly, BJP members in two other cities also set Khan’s effigies on fire, condemning the actor for insulting his country.

Even more broadly, a “homecoming” campaign led by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist group that once employed the Prime Minister, uses militants to proselytize Muslims and Christians in mass conversion assemblies through intimidation and bribery. Violence against Christians and their places of worship continually exacerbates—arson is suspected in the burning of one of New Delhi’s biggest Christian churches in December—a group of around 30 Hindu radicals left a pastor and four other Christmas carolers in the city of Hyderabad severely injured. Scholars and activists who are criticized by Hindu groups become routine targets for abuse, sometimes murdered for their work. Even on the most microscopic level in a country of over one billion people, caste-oppression and prejudice under Hinduism are inescapable. 

“We will bring back those [religious minorities] who have lost their way,” said Mr. Bhagwat, a spokesperson for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Even the casual observer can feel the blind nationalism that has taken root with the Bharatiya Janata Party—it is an ideology that is too ignorant and too immature for a 21st century nation. As barbaric as religious persecution might be, what is truly shameful is how India’s governing political authority continues to condone if not tacitly champion it. There is an overwhelming sense of inevitability, that Hindu extremists are pursuing the “right” thing, that the status quo ought to be a Hindu state.

This climate of fear and intolerance seeps into India’s culture, corroding not only principle but also tangible aspects of the economy. When Modi won a dramatic victory in 2014, he seemed capable of modernizing the economy, re-stimulating growth as Reagan did for the United States in the 80’s. The youth looked to Modinomics to unite the multi-faceted India under an umbrella of economic prosperity. However, since then, change has come sparingly if at all.

Modi has always advertised India as a country that has dispelled the myth that democracy and rapid economic growth cannot flourish simultaneously. In theory, the untapped, diverse first-world nation would be more morally attractive than China, and certainly more domestically stable than Pakistan. As International Policy Digest puts it, “India is in a unique position whereby it is viewed by the West as a vital ally in a volatile region.” Yet at the same time as Modi struggles to lure international investment and stamp out corruption, his own party’s ideological intolerance is one step back for every two steps forward.

Critics consistently accuse Modi’s government of failing to deliver economic reforms that would create more social development programs; this is because the conservative groups that constitute the BJP decide their approval ratings in terms of how much India has accomplished towards achieving Hindu nationalism, rather than how much Modi has done to alleviate chronic poverty. Not only has India’s long-term track been shifted towards a medieval ambition, but the consequences of this new mindset are becoming quite clear. The religious bloodshed, allurement, and fraud sullying the nation inevitably casts a shadow over the credibility of India’s financial sector, morphing the promising identity of India into the old archetype of a third-world country.

In 2014, Modi’s failure to rein in the backwards agenda of his Hindu-nationalist supporters actually resulted in a virtual government shutdown. Important economic legislation was tabled by Parliament due to repeated adjournments and bitter divisiveness over the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh “homecoming” campaign. The sanctioned discord induced by militant Hindu behavior has encroached upon every system within India—socially, economically, even politically.

“This is far too serious a national issue for anyone but the prime minister to address,” Abhishek Singhvi, a spokesman for the Indian National Congress party, said in an interview with The New York Times.

Moody’s Analytics, a research arm, has called for the BJP to rein in the rhetoric of its Hindu nationalist constituents, “or risk losing domestic and global credibility.” There is a consensus that the image of intolerance will adversely affect India’s economy in terms of business and trade.

Grassroots movements have begun in stride; more than 40 writers, scientists, and artists have recently returned prominent national awards in an act of protest against what acclaimed biologist P.M. Bhargava phrased as “the government’s attack on rationalism.” Members within Parliament continue to demand a government response. But the only avenue for true, substantive progress remains through Narendra Modi himself. 

Returning to Modi’s original quote—“Till now tears from the eyes of victims of Sikh families have not been dried. You are enacting drama.”

Rather than admit error in the midst of growing religious intolerance, the Prime Minister sidestepped into a war of comparisons and accused critics of hypocrisy, stating the main opposition Congressional faction had no right to speak out since they had presided over the bloody anti-Sikh riots in 1984. It is a stance that acknowledges the malice of minority discrimination, but neither embraces nor condemns it. It is this stance that permeates his administration—a willfully ignorant and faux-moderate propensity towards inaction. 

India is a country that desperately needs change, not passivity, not drama. Modi must break the silence that tolerates intolerance, and issue a stern statement even if it means isolating the very constituents of the BJP who originally carried him to power. He must demonstrate resolve, and a readiness to look past the religious tension that has currently arrested foreign investment, suspended political progress, and vitiated national harmony.

Perhaps only then can Modi lift India from metaphorical darkness, and be praised for placing his people in front of his party.