Right Dominance: The Counter-Wave Begins?

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For more than a decade, the political weather across much of the democratic world seemed to blow in one direction. The nationalist, populist and authoritarian Right appeared to have found a formula that liberals and the Left could neither understand nor defeat. Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and a host of smaller imitators turned grievance into political capital. Immigration, national identity, globalisation, cultural liberalism, crime and the alleged arrogance of metropolitan elites became the raw materials of a new politics.

The old establishment looked exhausted. Liberal parties spoke the language of institutions while voters spoke the language of anxiety. The traditional Left seemed trapped between economic redistribution and ever more intricate questions of identity. Into the vacuum marched the new Right, carrying national flags, promising strong leadership and explaining every social problem through a conveniently available villain: immigrants, minorities, globalists, intellectuals, judges, journalists or the amorphous monster called "the elite".

But politics has an inconvenient habit of rediscovering what it has recently discarded. Between April and November 2026, voters in Hungary, Brazil, Serbia, Israel and the United States delivered setbacks to the populist Right in quick succession. The pattern suggests an ancient truth: it is far easier to campaign against a broken system than to govern one.

The American verdict

The American midterms of 3 November were the most dramatic instance. ABC News projected that Democrats would take both the Senate and the House. This was no ordinary midterm correction. Democrats flipped Senate seats in Texas, South Carolina and North Carolina, and in the House they flipped more than two dozen districts, some that Trump had carried by double digits in 2024. The campaign was fought largely on inflation, fuel and food prices, housing costs, healthcare, tariffs and the economic fallout of the conflict with Iran. The president himself conceded as much, saying that part of the result was down to Iran.

The lesson is not that America has become a socialist republic. The Democratic coalition remains ideologically diverse and politically fragile. The lesson is that populist anger is not immune to disappointment. Its rhetoric thrives on permanent crisis, but a movement in office owns the crisis it once exploited. Voters who cheered promises to punish the elites still have to pay for groceries, housing and fuel. They eventually notice when those who promised to drain the swamp have installed themselves in the penthouse above it.

The common thread is governing, not ideology

This is what links otherwise very different events: the defeated are not merely right-wing, they are incumbents who promised to fix everything. And the victors are not uniformly left-wing. Often they are not left-wing at all.

Hungary shows this most clearly. In April, Hungarian voters ousted Orbán after 16 years in power in favour of a pro-European challenger. That challenger, Péter Magyar, is a former insider of Orbán's Fidesz who broke with the party in 2024, and his Tisza party is a member of the centre-right European People's Party. He campaigned against corruption and on everyday issues such as healthcare and public transport. The scale of the result is striking: turnout reached a post-communist high of nearly 80%, and Tisza was on track for roughly 138 of 199 seats, a two-thirds supermajority. The obstacles Orbán had built were formidable. He controlled public media and much of the private market, and a redrawn electoral map meant Tisza needed an estimated 5% more votes than Fidesz to win a simple majority. Institutional dominance, it turns out, can delay political change but cannot abolish public dissatisfaction.

Serbia offers a similar lesson from below. The protests began in November 2024 after the collapse of a station canopy in Novi Sad killed 16 people, an event widely blamed on corruption. On 25 October the movement entered the ballot box. Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat, acknowledging that the students' list had won, and Ipsos/CeSID data put its vote at 52.9% against 38.8% for his Progressive Party. Turnout was the highest in more than three decades. The movement's agenda focuses on rooting out corruption and improving education, which is hardly a Left manifesto. Its success also carries a warning for its own leaders. Protest movements are good at identifying what must end; governments must answer the harder question of what comes next.

Brazil, Israel and the limits of the thesis

Brazil on 25 October shows both the strength and the limits of the counter-wave. Lula won a fourth term with 51.79% of the valid vote against 48.21% for Flávio Bolsonaro. It was a victory for coalition-building, and Lula won it on the ground of concerns about security and the cost of living and of national sovereignty: he told Trump that Brazil would not accept being "anyone's backyard". But it was close, and it was no rout. Bolsonaro had beaten Lula by more than 2.2 million votes in the first round, and Lula must now govern with the most right-wing Congress of Brazil's democratic era, in which the Liberal Party made the biggest gains. Jair Bolsonaro called the result "inexplicable" and said he would seek to annul the vote. The Right has lost an election in Brazil. It has not lost Brazil.

Israel is more complicated still. The election of 27 October produced an inconclusive result: with about 90% of ballots counted, Netanyahu's bloc held 53 seats against 48 for the bloc led by the former military chief Gadi Eisenkot and a record 19 for Arab-led parties, with 61 needed for a majority. Netanyahu's bloc held 68 seats in the outgoing Knesset and stood to lose 15. Turnout, at nearly 78%, was the highest since 1999. This is not a clean Left-versus-Right contest. The opposition spans a wide spectrum and is led by a centrist. But a politics built on existential threat can be extraordinarily powerful and can also exhaust a society. Citizens accept extraordinary measures in extraordinary times; eventually they ask whether emergency has become a method of government.

The probation electorate

Argentina completes the picture. Javier Milei arrived with the energy of a revolution, and the revolutionary glamour of dismantling the state is easier to sustain in speeches than in the lives of citizens who depend on public services. By May, his disapproval reached 63% against 35.5% approval, the worst reading of his term, as inflation rebounded and a corruption scandal broke. His standing has since recovered to roughly 40%, though still near the lowest of his presidency. The volatility is the point. Last year, his approval rose after his party's midterm victory. Voters are no longer signing long-term ideological contracts with any camp. Governments are being hired on probation.

That is a dangerous environment for every establishment, and especially for populists who promised miracles. A conventional politician can blame constraints, inherited problems and global conditions. A populist who promised to fix everything by smashing the old order has fewer excuses once the old order has been smashed and the bills keep arriving.

France: the test of the thesis

France is the clearest warning against premature celebration. The anger that has punished incumbents in Budapest, Belgrade and Washington may benefit the French far Right precisely because it has never governed France. In July, the Paris appeal court upheld Marine Le Pen's conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds but softened her electoral ban, leaving her legally able to contest the 2027 presidential election, while the National Rally weighs whether to field her or her 30-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella. Polls project both comfortably winning the first round and reaching the run-off, and a Le Monde poll found 42% of French voters now agree with the party's ideas, up from 29% in 2022.

France shows that voters are not necessarily turning Left. They are turning against those in power. If liberal and progressive parties fail to answer economic insecurity, housing, immigration and social cohesion, anger can just as easily travel back to the other side of the spectrum.

What the Right still has

The most misleading reading of this moment would be that the Left has returned and the Right is finished. The Right retains formidable advantages: a sophisticated digital culture, a powerful language of national identity and an instinctive grasp of political theatre. It knows how to make complicated problems look simple, and simple answers look courageous. The Left and liberals still have the better policy papers and the weaker stories. They can explain why a problem is complicated, while the populist promises to solve it before breakfast.

Here lies the most important feature of the moment. Opponents of the Right are beginning, unevenly, to learn that democracy cannot be defended by lecturing voters about democracy. A family struggling with rent, food prices and insecure work may agree that constitutional norms matter, but it will wonder why those norms have not produced an affordable home. The new Right won by connecting cultural resentment with economic insecurity. Its opponents succeed where they connect democratic values with material concerns. The politics of affordability, corruption and accountability is becoming the bridge between liberal institutions and everyday life.

The question the Right must now answer

The counter-wave is not a single phenomenon. Ideologies differ, histories differ, grievances differ. But they share one powerful sentiment: anger at the establishment is no longer the exclusive property of the Right. For years nationalist populists persuaded voters that liberals and leftists were an arrogant elite detached from ordinary life. The emerging counter-wave asks an equally uncomfortable question of them: after years of railing against the elite, have you simply become another elite?

That question may prove more dangerous than any academic critique or television debate. Political movements survive ideological attacks. They find it much harder to survive the discovery that they have become what they promised to overthrow.

The world may not be witnessing the triumphant return of the Left. It may be witnessing something more interesting: the end of the assumption that the Right owns the future. Political inevitability is usually an illusion manufactured by the winners of the previous election. But celebrating the defeat of the Right is not a programme for government. The parties that hope to occupy the space now opening will have to do more than defend the past. They will have to offer a believable future.

Because the real contest now taking shape is not whether the Right has been defeated, but whether its opponents have learned enough from its success to ensure that the next wave of public anger belongs to them.

#LiberalBacklash #Trump #MAGA #Authoritarianism  #Hungary #Serbia  #LeftWingResurgence #RightWingPolitics #PopulismDecline #MidtermElections2026 #OrbanDefeated #LulaWins #SerbiaStudentMovement #IsraelElection2026 #WorldPolitics #DemocracyUnderPressure #PoliticalAnalysis #GeopoliticsExplained #CounterWave

In Search Of A Perfect Government And The Evolution Of Political Ideologies

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With the Democrats making a strong comeback in America, France in turmoil and the Left parties coming alive in India and elsewhere the question on ideologies resurrects naturally.

For more than three centuries, societies have experimented with political ideologies in the hope of discovering the perfect form of government. Liberalism promised individual liberty and protection from arbitrary power. Socialism and the broader left promised equality, economic justice, and dignity for the vulnerable. Conservatism defended continuity, inherited wisdom, and social stability, while the political right emphasised national identity, cultural cohesion, security, and strong leadership.

Each ideology attracted passionate believers. Each claimed to understand what society needed. And each, at different moments in history, appeared to offer an answer to the failures of the others.

Yet here we are.

Politics remains bitterly divided. Inequality persists. Institutions weaken. Citizens increasingly distrust governments, political parties, courts, the media, and sometimes even democracy itself.

Perhaps, then, it is time to confront an uncomfortable truth: no ideology has ever produced a perfect government. Every major political tradition contains a genuine insight into human society, but every one of them also contains serious blind spots. When one partial truth is elevated into the whole truth, those blind spots can become dangerous.

So let us step away, for a moment, from the endless shouting match between left and right and ask a more fundamental question. If no ideology is complete on its own, what kind of government should we actually be trying to build?

Liberalism began with an essential insight: the individual must stand at the centre of political life. Thinkers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill helped establish principles that now seem almost self-evident—freedom of speech, equality before the law, constitutional government, liberty of conscience, protection of minorities, and limits on the power of the state.

At its best, liberalism insists that the citizen does not belong to the government; the government belongs to the citizen.

That principle remains indispensable. Without liberal safeguards, democracy can easily become little more than majority rule without restraint. A government may win an election and still violate rights, silence critics, intimidate minorities, or weaken the very institutions meant to hold it accountable. Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the tyranny of the majority—the possibility that a numerical majority could become as oppressive as any monarch.

But liberalism also has a blind spot. It often assumes that formal equality is enough. Everyone may possess the same legal rights on paper, but human beings do not begin life from the same position.

One child is born into wealth, security, excellent schooling, and powerful connections. Another is born into hunger, discrimination, poor healthcare, and a failing school. Both may technically be free, but their ability to use that freedom is profoundly unequal.

When markets operate without sufficient restraint, wealth also tends to concentrate. Economic power then begins influencing elections, legislation, courts, media organisations, and public policy. A country may remain democratic in appearance while gradually becoming oligarchic in practice.

Freedom is essential, but freedom alone does not guarantee fairness.

That is where the left made its most important contribution. It recognised that political liberty means very little to someone who is hungry, homeless, uneducated, or unable to obtain medical care. What does equality before the law mean if only one side can afford a good lawyer? What does freedom of opportunity mean if a child is malnourished, excluded from school, or forced into labour?

From this tradition came some of the most significant advances of modern civilisation: labour protections, public education, minimum wages, pensions, public healthcare, social insurance, and the recognition that workers are human beings rather than disposable units of production.

The Nordic experience, despite variations among individual countries, demonstrated that dynamic markets could coexist with strong public services, organised labour, and substantial social protection. It showed that economic enterprise and social responsibility need not be mortal enemies.

But the left, too, has its dangers. When the pursuit of equality becomes hostility towards liberty, dissent, pluralism, or private initiative, the state can grow powerful enough to control nearly every aspect of life.

Governments that claim to speak for workers and the poor may eventually silence those very people. A bureaucracy established to abolish privilege may create an entirely new privileged class. George Orwell captured this hypocrisy with brutal simplicity in *Animal Farm*: all animals were equal, but some were more equal than others.

A government strong enough to provide everything may also become strong enough to take everything away.

Equality without freedom becomes another form of oppression.

Conservatism, meanwhile, is often dismissed as little more than resistance to change. Yet serious conservatism contains an insight that reformers ignore at their peril: society is far more complicated than any theory.

Institutions, customs, communities, and traditions often contain accumulated knowledge that no single generation fully understands. Edmund Burke warned against destroying institutions merely because they were imperfect. Reformers intoxicated by grand theories may tear down structures that took centuries to develop, only to discover that those structures were holding society together in ways they had never noticed.

Not every old institution is useless, just as not every new idea represents progress. Families, local communities, professional codes, constitutional conventions, and cultural traditions can provide stability and meaning. They connect generations and prevent society from becoming little more than a collection of isolated individuals.

But conservatism also carries a serious weakness. It can defend institutions simply because they are old. It may preserve inherited privilege, hierarchy, discrimination, or exclusion in the name of stability.

There is a profound difference between respecting traditions that sustain a society and protecting traditions that oppress people. Some institutions deserve preservation. Others deserve reform. A few deserve abolition.

Caution may prevent reckless destruction, but caution without reform preserves injustice.

The modern political right also speaks to concerns that established parties have sometimes ignored. Many citizens genuinely feel governed by distant elites who neither understand their lives nor respect their values. They worry about insecurity, cultural displacement, uncontrolled migration, economic decline, bureaucratic arrogance, and the erosion of national confidence.

Such concerns cannot simply be dismissed as ignorance or prejudice. When expressed within constitutional limits, they can provide an important democratic correction. A nation does need social cohesion. Citizens need some sense of belonging to a shared political community. Governments must be capable of maintaining order, protecting borders, enforcing laws, and defending the country.

But danger arises when patriotism hardens into exclusionary nationalism.

Critics are then branded enemies. Journalists become traitors. Minorities are treated as permanently suspect. Courts are accused of obstructing the will of the people. Civil servants are expected to serve a party rather than the constitution.

Eventually, one leader or one movement claims to be the only authentic voice of the nation. At that point, unity becomes an excuse for obedience, and patriotism becomes a weapon against dissent.

National identity can strengthen democracy. Nationalism without constitutional restraint can destroy it.

Every major ideology, then, begins with a partial truth. Liberalism understands freedom. The left understands inequality. Conservatism understands continuity. The right understands identity, belonging, and order.

The danger begins when a partial truth is mistaken for the whole truth.

But the deepest obstacle to ideal government is not ideology alone. It is human nature.

Human beings are capable of compassion, courage, cooperation, imagination, and sacrifice. We are also capable of greed, fear, vanity, cruelty, tribalism, and the hunger for control. No constitution can eliminate these impulses.

Lord Acton’s warning remains relevant: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

A sound political system, therefore, cannot assume that rulers will always be wise, honest, competent, or benevolent. It must be designed around the possibility that they will not be.

The true test of a constitution is not how it functions under a good leader. Almost any system can appear successful when governed by someone restrained, capable, and respectful of institutions. The real test comes when a corrupt, reckless, incompetent, or authoritarian leader takes office.

Can the courts stop illegal actions? Can journalists investigate without fear? Can legislators challenge their own government? Can civil servants refuse unlawful instructions? Can citizens protest peacefully? Can a government be removed through an election? And, most importantly, will it surrender power if it loses?

If the answer to these questions is no, then the system is already in danger, however democratic it may appear on paper.

Instead of searching for a perfect ideology, perhaps we should aim for something more realistic and more valuable: a self-correcting government.

Such a government would not pretend that mistakes could be eliminated. It would build mechanisms through which mistakes could be exposed, challenged, and reversed before they became permanent.

The essential questions would then become very practical. Can criticism be heard without being branded disloyalty? Can a bad law be challenged in court? Can a corrupt official be investigated? Can experts contradict ministers without losing their careers? Can inconvenient facts survive political pressure? Can a government acknowledge failure and change direction?

The best political systems do not eliminate conflict. Conflict is inevitable in any free society. People possess different interests, beliefs, identities, and visions of the future. No constitution can make those disagreements disappear.

What good political systems do is civilise conflict. They transform struggles for power into elections, parliamentary debate, judicial review, public scrutiny, peaceful protest, negotiation, and constitutional compromise.

The alternative is not harmony. The alternative is fear, repression, instability, or violence.

An ideal government may be impossible, but a better government is not.

Such a government would begin with a genuine rule of law—one in which no citizen, minister, billionaire, police officer, military commander, or political leader stood above the law. Justice would not depend upon proximity to power, wealth, caste, class, religion, or political connection.

Power would be divided rather than concentrated. The executive, legislature, and judiciary would not merely perform constitutional rituals while one institution dominated the others. They would possess the independence and authority necessary to check one another.

Elections would be free, fair, and meaningful. Democracy would involve more than placing a vote in a machine once every few years. It would require genuine competition, access to reliable information, transparent political funding, impartial election administration, and a realistic possibility that the ruling party could lose.

Fundamental rights would be protected regardless of which party happened to be in office. Rights that disappear after an election are not really rights. They are temporary permissions granted by those in power.

Public spending and government decisions would remain open to scrutiny. Transparency would be the default and secrecy the exception. Citizens would have the right to know how public money was being spent, why major decisions were being taken, and who benefited from them.

An independent press would also be essential—not because journalists are always correct, impartial, or wise, but because governments must never be allowed to decide which questions may be asked. A press that occasionally irritates, exaggerates, or makes mistakes is still less dangerous than a press frightened into obedience.

A competent government would require a professional civil service selected for ability rather than personal loyalty. Ministers need officials capable of telling them what they need to hear, not merely what they wish to hear. When loyalty to an individual replaces loyalty to the constitution, administration becomes propaganda and governance becomes patronage.

Power would also need to be decentralised. Decisions should be taken as close as reasonably possible to the people affected by them. Local governments often understand local problems better than distant capitals. A village, city, district, or state should not have to wait endlessly for a remote authority to solve problems that could be addressed locally.

At the same time, an ideal system would create a social floor beneath which no citizen would be allowed to fall. That floor would include access to food, education, healthcare, shelter, legal protection, and a genuine opportunity to improve one’s life.

But a social floor need not mean an economic ceiling.

Enterprise, creativity, investment, ambition, and innovation should be encouraged. People should be free to build businesses, create wealth, take risks, and benefit from their efforts. Yet monopoly, exploitation, cronyism, and the purchase of political influence would have to be restrained.

Markets are powerful tools, but they are not moral beings. They can generate prosperity, encourage efficiency, and reward innovation. They can also concentrate wealth, exploit weakness, and convert economic power into political control. A mature society uses markets without allowing itself to be ruled by them.

Amartya Sen argued in Development as Freedom that development should not be judged merely by income or economic output, but by the real freedoms people possess—the capacity to live healthy, educated, secure, and meaningful lives.

That is a far richer measure of progress than economic growth alone.

What, then, might such a government finally look like?

It would be liberal in its protection of individual rights, social-democratic in its guarantee of basic dignity, conservative in its respect for institutions that had proved their worth, democratic in deriving authority from the people, federal and decentralised in distributing power, and market-friendly in encouraging enterprise and innovation.

Above all, it would remain constitutionally suspicious of concentrated power, regardless of who held it.

This is not ideological confusion. It is political maturity.

Complex societies cannot be governed by one slogan, one doctrine, or one sacred political text. Countries that function reasonably well do not purify one ideology until nothing else remains. They combine competing insights and force them to restrain one another.

Markets generate wealth, but public institutions prevent exploitation and exclusion. Majorities govern, but constitutions protect minorities. Traditions provide continuity, but reform corrects injustice. Governments require enough strength to act, but independent institutions ensure that strength does not become tyranny.

None of this produces perfection.

But balance is safer than purity.

And that brings us to the real conclusion. Perhaps the search for a perfect government is itself misguided.

Government is not a machine that can be designed once, switched on, and left to operate forever. It is an ongoing negotiation among millions of people with different interests, identities, fears, values, memories, and ambitions.

New challenges will continue to test every political system—artificial intelligence, climate change, demographic pressures, economic disruption, mass surveillance, misinformation, and technologies we have not yet imagined.

The strongest democracies will not be those that never make mistakes. No such democracy exists.

The strongest democracies will be those capable of surviving their mistakes.

They will be able to endure bad leaders without becoming dictatorships. They will experience public anger without collapsing into civil conflict. They will change governments without destroying constitutions. They will correct direction without tearing down the state itself.

The goal, therefore, should not be the final victory of the left over the right, or the right over the left. It should be the creation of institutions strong enough to ensure that no temporary majority can convert temporary power into permanent domination.

A good government restrains authority, protects dignity, rewards competence, encourages initiative, and preserves a peaceful path through which citizens can change direction.

It does not promise utopia. It promises accountability.

It does not claim that rulers will always be wise. It ensures that their foolishness can be challenged.

It does not guarantee that injustice will never occur. It ensures that injustice can be exposed and corrected.

And it does not demand blind faith in those who govern. It gives citizens lawful ways to question them, restrain them, and, when necessary, remove them.

Perhaps that is the ideal we should seek—not a government that never fails, but one that does not make failure permanent; not a system dependent on the virtue of its rulers, but one protected against their weaknesses; not the triumph of one ideology over all others, but a constitutional order wise enough to borrow from each and surrender completely to none.

In an imperfect world governed by imperfect human beings, that may be the most practical and humane ideal available to us.

So, what do you think? Can any single ideology contain all the answers? Or is the wiser path a balanced, self-correcting system that draws from different traditions while allowing none of them to become absolute?

Share your thoughts in the comments. I genuinely enjoy reading them.

And if this conversation made you pause and reflect, please like and share it with someone who cares about politics and governance, and subscribe for more calm, clear-eyed discussions about the forces shaping our world.

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The Government That Rarely Retreats, Until It Has To

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There is a familiar image of the Narendra Modi government: decisive, muscular and unafraid to take difficult decisions. It is an image carefully cultivated since 2014. India, the argument goes, had suffered for decades from coalition compulsions, hesitant prime ministers and governments that consulted everybody until they succeeded in doing nothing. The Modi era promised the opposite: a government that would decide first and explain later, preferably in a televised address.

There is, of course, something to be said for decisiveness. A government elected with a mandate cannot govern by perpetual seminar. But the record of the past twelve years raises an uncomfortable question: what happens when decisiveness becomes a substitute for consultation?

The answer, increasingly, has been a curious cycle. Announce a transformative reform. Present opposition as obstructionism. Assure the nation that the government knows what it is doing. Discover that farmers, allies, industry, parliamentary committees, courts or voters have inconvenient opinions. Then retreat, modify, postpone or quietly allow the proposal to disappear into the great Indian filing cabinet of unfinished reforms.

The Modi government has certainly not reversed everything controversial. Nor should every policy modification be described as a humiliating climbdown. But several important episodes reveal a distinctive pattern: **the government is often willing to listen, provided the listening begins only after the shouting becomes impossible to ignore.**

The Land Bill: The First Warning the Government Ignored

The first major retreat came remarkably early.

In 2015, the government sought to amend the 2013 land acquisition law, principally by relaxing consent and social-impact assessment requirements for certain categories of projects. The government argued that infrastructure, defence and industrial development were being strangled by procedural obstacles. Its critics saw something more ominous: the dilution of protections for farmers and landowners.

The government issued and reissued ordinances, apparently convinced that parliamentary resistance could be overcome by administrative persistence. But the politics proved more stubborn than the ordinance route. Opposition parties mobilised, farmer organisations objected and even voices within the broader ideological ecosystem expressed reservations.

Eventually, Prime Minister Modi announced that the ordinance would not be renewed.

It was an instructive moment. The government had not suddenly discovered that land acquisition was a sensitive issue in a predominantly rural democracy. That fact had existed for rather longer than the Ministry of Rural Development. What it discovered was the political cost of learning that lesson too late.

The land bill episode established a pattern that would become familiar: consultation after confrontation is a far more expensive form of governance than consultation before legislation.

The Farm Laws: When the State Blinked

If the land bill was the first warning, the repeal of the three farm laws in 2021 was the defining reversal of the Modi era.

The government presented the laws as historic agricultural reforms. They promised greater marketing freedom, private investment and new contractual opportunities. Yet the manner of their introduction, through ordinances followed by hurried parliamentary passage, created precisely the suspicion that accompanies reforms delivered with a bulldozer.

The farmers' agitation that followed was extraordinary in its duration, discipline and political significance. For nearly a year, thousands of farmers remained mobilised at Delhi's borders. The government initially appeared convinced that it could outlast them. It held negotiations, offered amendments and repeatedly insisted that the laws were beneficial.

But the protesters were asking for repeal, not a government-sponsored editing session.

On 19 November 2021, Prime Minister Modi announced that the three laws would be repealed. Parliament subsequently enacted the repeal.

This was not merely a policy adjustment. It was an acknowledgement that a government with a formidable parliamentary majority had failed to build sufficient social legitimacy for one of its most ambitious reform packages. The episode demonstrated something fundamental about democracy: a majority in Parliament is powerful, but it is not a substitute for consent in society.

Data Protection: Withdrawal as Legislative Recycling

The original Personal Data Protection Bill represents a different kind of retreat.

Introduced after extensive discussion of privacy and data governance, the bill went through parliamentary scrutiny and attracted substantial criticism and suggested changes. In August 2022, the government withdrew it, arguing that a more comprehensive legal framework was required. A revised Digital Personal Data Protection Act eventually emerged in 2023.

This case is less dramatic than the farm laws and should not be treated as identical. Governments are entitled to withdraw flawed legislation and introduce better versions. Indeed, that is what parliamentary scrutiny is supposed to achieve.

But the episode nevertheless exposed a recurring weakness in the government's legislative style. Grand bills are sometimes introduced as near-finished products and subjected to meaningful reconsideration only after committees and stakeholders point out the holes. The parliamentary process becomes the quality-control department for policies that should have been better tested before launch.

Lateral Entry: Social Justice Arrives After the Advertisement

The withdrawal of the UPSC's 2024 lateral-entry recruitment advertisement offered an especially sharp illustration of political reflex.

The government sought to recruit professionals into senior and middle levels of the bureaucracy. Lateral entry itself was not a new or inherently unreasonable idea. Modern governments often require specialised expertise that traditional recruitment systems may not always provide.

The controversy concerned reservation.

After opposition parties and, significantly, NDA allies raised objections that the recruitment process bypassed established reservation principles, the government moved rapidly. The UPSC withdrew the advertisement.

The speed of the reversal was almost impressive. It suggested that the government had suddenly discovered social justice between issuing the advertisement and reading the newspapers.

The real question was not whether lateral entry was desirable. It was why a government that routinely presents itself as deeply attentive to social representation had apparently failed to settle the reservation issue before advertising the posts.

Indexation: The Budget Proposal That Met the Property Owner

Budget proposals are usually presented as products of careful economic calculation, preferably accompanied by charts that make taxation look like a public service.

In 2024, the government proposed changes to the taxation of long-term capital gains on property, removing indexation benefits while lowering the tax rate. The measure generated significant concern among property owners and others who argued that inflation-adjusted gains were being treated unfairly.

The government subsequently modified the proposal, allowing certain taxpayers to choose between the older system with indexation and the newer lower-rate regime.

This was not a revolution or a surrender. It was, however, another example of policy discovering the real world after the Finance Minister had finished reading the Budget speech.

The Laptop Import U-Turn: Make in India Meets Global Supply Chains

The 2023 restrictions on imports of laptops, tablets and certain other IT hardware provided another lesson in the dangers of sudden policymaking.

The government announced a licensing requirement with little warning, generating immediate alarm among technology companies and industry bodies. The deadline was subsequently pushed back and the policy was modified into a different import-management framework.

The objective of encouraging domestic manufacturing was understandable. The execution was less so.

Global supply chains are not light switches. One cannot announce industrial self-reliance on Thursday and expect the world's electronics manufacturers to rearrange their factories by Monday morning.

The later modifications reflected a practical recognition that industrial policy requires preparation, capacity and consultation, rather than merely patriotic enthusiasm and a notification number.

CAA and the NRC: Delay as a Political Strategy

The Citizenship Amendment Act presents a more complicated case. It was not repealed. The government ultimately notified its rules in March 2024, more than four years after the law was passed.

Therefore, it would be inaccurate to describe the CAA as a formal reversal.

But delay itself can be politically meaningful. The prolonged gap between legislation and implementation reflected the extraordinary controversy surrounding the measure and the nationwide protests that followed its passage.

The proposed nationwide National Register of Citizens followed a similar political trajectory. Although no nationwide exercise was formally notified, the rhetoric surrounding it was subsequently softened and the proposal effectively receded from immediate political action.

This is the art of the non-reversal reversal: do not abandon the idea, merely place it in a sufficiently quiet room until the political temperature falls.

Agnipath: The Latest and Most Significant Modification

The most recent example deserves particular attention because it occurred only days ago.

When the Agnipath scheme was introduced in 2022, its central feature was a four-year engagement, with approximately 25 per cent of Agniveers eligible for subsequent regular service based on merit and organisational requirements. The remaining 75 per cent were expected to leave after four years.

On 4 November 2026, the Union Cabinet approved a significant new pathway. The remaining 75 per cent of Agniveers may receive a further two-year engagement based on willingness and eligibility. After that period, they are to be offered a pathway to enrolment as regular soldiers, subject to willingness and selection criteria. The government insists that the core scheme continues and describes the change as a refinement based on four years of experience.

That is technically defensible. But politically, it is difficult to ignore the scale of the change.

A scheme originally designed around four-year service and limited regular absorption has now created a route through which the cohort originally expected to exit can remain for two additional years and subsequently seek regular enrolment. Calling this a mere adjustment is rather like calling the demolition of a wall an improvement in ventilation.

The change does not constitute the complete withdrawal of Agnipath. New recruits still enter under the scheme's basic structure. Yet it represents a substantial concession to one of the scheme's central criticisms: the insecurity created by the prospect of three-quarters of recruits leaving military service after only four years.

The government has every right to improve a policy after experience. Indeed, that is preferable to defending a defective policy merely to protect political prestige. But the question remains: if four years of experience revealed the need for such a major modification, how complete was the original assessment before the scheme was imposed?

The Larger Pattern: Power Listens to Pressure More Easily Than Argument

There is an important distinction here. The Modi government has also undertaken a deliberate programme of repealing obsolete and colonial-era laws. That should not be confused with reversing its own policies. Clearing dead legislation from the statute book is administrative housekeeping; withdrawing one's freshly launched flagship reform is a rather different activity.

Nor should every change be treated as evidence of failure. Sensible governments revise policies. The problem arises when revision follows a predictable sequence of insufficient consultation, aggressive defence, mounting protest and belated accommodation.

The government's strongest reforms have often been those where political preparation accompanied policy change. Its weakest moments have frequently occurred when a large majority created the illusion that legislation itself was the same thing as consensus.

The deeper irony is that the government has often portrayed itself as uniquely decisive while repeatedly demonstrating the limitations of decision-making insulated from serious dissent. A government does not become weak because it consults farmers before rewriting agricultural laws, industry before disrupting imports, or affected communities before altering recruitment systems.

On the contrary, consultation is how a strong government avoids the embarrassment of discovering, after months of protest, that the people outside the conference room were not merely background noise.

The Modi government's record since 2014 is therefore not a story of constant U-turns. Major reversals remain relatively uncommon. It is a more interesting story than that.

It is the story of a powerful government that usually moves in a straight line, often at considerable speed, until Indian democracy places something immovable in its path: a mass movement, an election, a coalition ally, an agitated social constituency, a parliamentary committee or the inconvenient persistence of public opinion.

Then the government demonstrates another, less advertised talent.

It knows how to reverse. It simply prefers to call the manoeuvre a course correction.

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