In 25 years, has Modi made lasting changes?

Today, on October 7, Narendra Modi completes 25 years as the head of an elected government, 12-and-a-half of them in Gandhinagar and 12-and-a-half in New Delhi. In all this time, he has never lost an election he contested. Consider how rare that is in a polity as competitive and diverse as ours, which has routinely shown governments the door after one term. But longevity is a statistic. The real question is whether Modi has altered India, its society and its people, in ways that will outlast him and whether he leaves behind a philosophy that will guide the future?History offers a test. Long-serving leaders leave behind not records but premises, and a premise is proved when the opposition is compelled to govern by it. Eisenhower kept Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Tony Blair built New Labour inside Margaret Thatcher’s free markets paradigm. Bill Clinton conceded Ronald Reagan’s case against big government. Singapore still runs on Lee Kuan Yew’s manual. That is the standard. Let us apply it.Finishing the taskFirst, finishing the job. Indian governance had a habit of sampling: announce a target, reach a third of it, leave the rest for the next Plan or generation. Mr. Modi’s habit is the opposite; a task once taken up is finished in all its dimensions. In Gujarat, it was the chronic shortage of water. Carried to Saurashtra and Kutch, supplied to homes and agriculture, and the scale from the lakhs of humble check dams to the mega Narmada dam — water scarcity in Gujarat was converted from lived reality to historical memory. Bank accounts covered 58% of households in 2011; over 59 crore Jan Dhan accounts later, financial inclusion covers all. Article 370, parked for 70 years, was fully and irrevocably settled in 2019. Naxalism, which every government had learnt to live with, was given a date, March 31, 2026, and declared all but over in Parliament a day before it. As many as 100 million plus devotees visit Ram Mandir every year, built after 500 years of struggle. Hundred per cent is the only acceptable number.Second, the end of diffidence. For decades India waited for the West to go first and followed, never itself venturing into the frontier of any technology or policy. Private rockets now lift off from Sriharikota. The SHANTI Act of December 2025 opened nuclear power to private capital. QR codes now power billions of big and small transactions, a revolution conceptualised and scaled in India. In May 2025, after Pahalgam, India struck a nuclear-armed adversary’s air bases with missiles — the only country in history to do it — and waited for Pakistan to ask for the ceasefire. Thirty years of paralysis ended in four days.Third, the scale of ambition. When COVID vaccines reached Western arms in December 2020, Indians did not ask when their turn would come. They assumed it was now, and it was: January 2021, two vaccines made in India, 220 crore doses later. Earlier vaccines took decades to arrive. A generation now treats world scale as the default and anything smaller as failure. The same ambition now informs how we build our trains or railway stations or airports or chips or how it should be India’s factories that should build the frontier smartphones.Fourth, redefining popular democracy. Caste and region have not stopped mattering, but no election at scale can any longer be won on identity alone. “I am your caste” or “I am this dynasty” is past its sell-by date; every party must now promise delivery, and even Opposition manifestos read as lists of “guarantees”. The more remarkable evidence is pro-incumbency: three consecutive national mandates, and governments returned after full terms in State after State. Delivery, it turns out, is a vote bank.Fifth, civilisational resurgence. For the first time the person at the top takes unabashed pride in India’s Sanatan heritage, its plural Indic traditions and its past achievements, and sees no contradiction between a Ram Mandir and a Gaganyaan. Mr. Modi also ended the Nehruvian-leftist paradigm of North Indian monopoly on India’s civilisational heritage. He promotes Tamil culture as enthusiastically as he does the Bengali renaissance. This has seeped so deep into popular culture, from Kantara to Hanuman Ansh, that the box office now punishes those who sneer at it. No future leader or party who dismisses this inheritance will be accepted, whatever his party. Civilisational resurgence also enhances confidence in modern Indian nationhood with unabashed pride in India’s achievements and no quarters given to India’s adversaries.Sixth, dignity. The poor were, for 60 years, a parade: counted, photographed, promised to, and kept poor enough to remain a constituency. Mr. Modi replaced the parade with empowerment delivered to the doorstep: a house in the woman’s name, a toilet, a gas cylinder, a loan without collateral, a health insurance to cover all in the family. Nearly 25 crore people exited multidimensional poverty in nine years, and women moved from beneficiaries to Lakhpati Didis and, by law, to a third of legislature seats. No politician can return to the old model and survive.The premises he has made universal are harder to contest. No half solutions; no problem left to fester. India belongs at the frontier. Ambition must be world scale. Democracy must be built on delivery. India’s civilisational self is a world good. The marginalised are citizens to be empowered and left free to flourish. Look around and decide which of these would you want changed? If your answer is none then you have also answered why Mr. Modi has held national attention for 25 years running and will define our national standards for many decades to come.Akhilesh Mishra is CEO, BlueKraft Foundation