Under Narendra Modi’s decade-long tenure as Prime Minister of India, the country has made worldwide headlines for putting in place a majoritarian infrastructure that has seen a crackdown on press freedom, a ruthless evisceration of civil liberties, religious polarization, caste bigotry, institutional debilitation and demagoguery-and an overall democratic downslide. The world’s largest democracy, it would seem, is hurtling towards disarray and chaos. Is the political legitimacy accorded to authoritarian populists because of, ironically enough, their popular mandates, the biggest threat to democracy itself?