Thought experiments Shiv Visvanathan | | Published 23.04.21, 01:11 AM The idea of India was once evoked quite often. People felt India as a nation, a civilization, and a democracy had a message for the world. The Nehruvian idea of democracy seemed effervescent and alive. Today, a few decades later, we have to confess that the idea of India is nostalgia, reduced to a lifeless flicker by the Bharatiya Janata Party regime. One cannot even say, ‘India is dead. Long live India’, with confidence in traditional norms because the idea of India has run dry. The literal combination of autocracy, mediocrity and incompetence that the BJP brought to the table has devastated us. Narendra Modi behaves like a Vladimir Putin or a Donald Trump without realizing that they too have destroyed the institutions that sustained their societies. The globalization of autocratic mediocrity is a style that India, Turkey, the United States of America, Brazil and Russia share.