The outcome of this year’s Indian elections has raised hopes for a curb on India’s slide toward twenty-first-century fascism. Even so, the prognosis remains tenuous as the signal of a truly Indian people’s democracy continues to flicker amid majoritarian chants and a prime minister still trying to assume the status of aloof god-man and exalted leader.

Narendra Modi’s regime, during his previous ten years in power, was successful in retooling the Indian postcolonial state to become more overtly colonialist. Now in Modi’s third term, with his mandate significantly diminished by an electorate refusing to worship at his feet, we will learn whether the colonialist drive of the Indian state can be restrained by the diversity and the immensity of the needs of its people.

The problem of postcolonial colonialism in India was first recognized by a forgotten critical theorist, revolutionary, and political leader, Manabendra Nath Roy. As early as the 1940s, M. N. Roy, anticipating what we would now call “postcolonial theory,” concerned himself with analyzing the factors that would give rise to the decay of democracy in South Asia (such as capitalist rule by abusive business interests, family dynasties, caste hierarchies, and deification of leaders).