Boris Johnson is starting to look a lot like a certain authoritarian, and it's not Trump

Watching Donald Trump and Narendra Modi parade their bromance in front of a 100,000-strong crowd in Ahmedabad, western India, I wondered how much influence post-Brexit Britain will have on either authoritarian. Now that we have quit the EU, Boris Johnson wants and needs favourable treatment from both men.

I was on my way to Delhi at the moment Britain cast off the shackles of the European Union, but when I got there, I found Brexit aroused little more than bemusement verging on indifference. “We are waiting to see how Brexit unfolds,” said Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, the external affairs minister. No-one else had much more to say about it.

Yet Westminster – often seen as taking its cue from Washington – has more in common with Delhi than first appears. For while Trump has been in the White House for a mere three years, Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalists have held power for almost six. Modi provides a more detailed model for how the Johnson-Cummings axis may reshape politics in the coming years.

Both the British and Indian administrations like to portray themselves as a decisive break with the past; tolerance of criticism being one tradition both have discarded. Downing Street’s efforts to sideline the media are often termed Trumpian – but Modi has not held a single press conference since he took office in 2014. The BBC under threat? In India, outlets who upset the authorities lose reporters, editors and official advertising.

The Hindu militant organisations which are the backbone of the BJP, notably the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have had six years to promote the claim that Hindus, who comprise 80 per cent of the population, are the only true Indians – with the violent results now being seen on the streets of Delhi. The many Hindus who disagree with such sectarianism, along with any of the 13 per cent Muslim minority who protest, are deemed “anti-national”. Many more are cowed into silence by an increasingly compliant police and judiciary (Johnson, too, has set about restricting judges’ ability to overrule the government).

The British prime minister appears equally determined as his Indian counterpart to govern in the interests of one section of the population – even if, as in his case, that amounts to the bare majority of voters. Johnson’s recent cabinet reshuffle pretended that the Remainer 48 per cent did not exist; not for nothing have both the Indian and British governments been labelled “majoritarian”.

There are also parallels between the senior aides to both PMs – though Dominic Cummings is not yet president of the ruling party or home secretary, unlike his equivalent in Delhi. That is Amit Shah, Modi’s chief propagandist, who called Muslims “termites” and once boasted: “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet, sour, true or fake.” Nor does Cummings’s reputation as an enforcer, however fearsome, encompass charges of kidnapping, extortion and conspiracy to murder (Shah was acquitted after the BJP came to power).

Then again, the sycophancy now compulsory for anyone aspiring to serve in Johnson’s cabinet has been commonplace in Delhi for years. Indians would also find familiar our ministers’ increasingly grandiose rhetoric about the shining opportunities to come. The whacky idea of building a bridge from Scotland to Northern Ireland, for example, has echoes in Modi’s “100 smart cities”, a vision of retrofitting India’s teeming conurbations with digital technology at vast expense, when what is needed is physical infrastructure, such as reliable water and sewage systems.

Eye-catching announcements with minimal follow-up? Common to both countries. But the BJP has been in power long enough to have a track record, and on the economic front, the results are mediocre. India is suffering its worst slump in more than a decade, with inflation and unemployment rising, and business investment at a standstill. It’s a long way from the acche din (good times) Modi promised when first elected.

Much of the stagnation is blamed on the Modi’s snap decision three years ago to take all of India’s large-denomination banknotes out of circulation. While the move was ostensibly to curb tax evasion and the black economy, many small and medium enterprises which ran on cash were wiped out, and the effects are still being felt. Almost as arbitrary is the Conservative government’s decision to impose a radically new immigration policy just over 10 months from now, on an economy already hobbled by Brexit. Will it prove equally careless? We will have to wait to find out.

What is likely to interest Tory strategists is how, despite such feeble economic performance, Modi not only managed to retain power in last year’s election, but increased the BJP vote to the extent that it won an overall majority, the first for any party in over three decades. As in Britain, the Indian leader benefited from a chaotic opposition. But Hindu identity politics, or Hindutva, played the largest part, with Modi cast as a strongman against threats portrayed as coming principally from Islam.

Since the election, Modi's government has cracked down on Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, in a manner that emulates China’s treatment of the Uighurs. It is instituting measures that could deprive many of the country’s 180 million Muslims of citizenship, and possibly exclude millions more from the franchise – precisely because the BJP realises that driving a sectarian wedge through India’s secular constitution could entrench the party in power for years to come.

Priti Patel, Amit Shah’s opposite number, appears to be doing what she can to create a hostile environment of her own for ethnic minorities. Expelling a planeload of offenders to Jamaica (though many fewer than would have been deported had the courts not intervened), ignoring their tenuous connections to that country, did just that.

Johnson and Cummings will never be able to go as far as Modi and Shah in suppressing dissent, demonising minorities and subverting the rule of law. Yet it’s worth remembering that Donald Trump is not the only right-wing populist the pair may be emulating.

Raymond Whitaker is a former Asia editor at The Independent.