This theatre of delusion

In the dying days of the Weimar Republic, as Germany flailed in the quicksand of economic despair and national humiliation, a man with a clipped moustache and messianic fervour rose to prominence. He did not merely seize power; he seduced a nation.

Through the shrill cadence of lies, half-truths, and mythic nationalism, Adolf Hitler remade truth itself, casting himself as both saviour and sword. Today, as one watches the Indian media landscape and the cultic aura surrounding Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one cannot help but shudder at the eerie resonance of that dark chapter in European history.

To compare any modern democracy to Hitler’s Germany is not a gesture to be made lightly. But when state-sanctioned narratives transform the media into an instrument of ideological reinforcement, and when the line between journalism and jingoism dissolves entirely, the question is no longer whether the comparison is hyperbole – but whether it has already come too late.

In recent weeks, following deadly attacks on tourists in Pahalgam and the subsequent Indian airstrikes on Pakistani territory, Indian media channels have abandoned journalism altogether, reinventing themselves as overcaffeinated command centres of spectacle – masquerading as newsrooms and functioning as state-sanctioned cinema: loud, ludicrous, and fatally allergic to fact. Studio sets are decked with animated jets and exploding targets, anchors thump desks with theatrical rage and every headline screams of ‘surgical precision’ and ‘moral triumph’.

It’s one thing for a nation to posture quite another to lose itself in delusion. When a country begins mistaking televised fantasy for military triumph, reality, it seems, is the one battlefield it no longer wishes to engage. The meticulously choreographed masquerade of righteousness began with attacks on defenceless civilian targets presented with cinematic flair as precision strikes on shadowy terrorist enclaves, and rapidly plunged into a frenzy, with anchors declaring that major Pakistani cities had been attacked and neutralized, F-16s shot down, critical infrastructure destroyed, and even scriptwriting a failed Pakistani counterstrike.

The sheer absurdity of the coverage – utterly untethered from facts and breathlessly jingoistic – reveals just how deeply Indian media has plunged into a parallel reality. It seems that in India, truth is no longer pursued but instead manufactured, stylised and broadcast.

And this is not just the work of fringe actors. Some of India’s most prominent journalists – once regarded as intellectual torchbearers – have morphed into cheerleaders for the state, parroting official statements as gospel and offering no scrutiny, no scepticism, no sense of responsibility. It is not a tragedy when a government lies; that is to be expected. But it is a far greater tragedy when the press ceases to question those lies, and instead amplifies them with nationalistic zeal. This is not a war over borders. It is a war over reality.

What makes this all the more dangerous is the psychological architecture being built around Narendra Modi. Like Hitler in the 1930s, Modi is not simply a politician. He is now, for many, an object of near-mythic reverence. He is the man who will ‘restore Bharat’s pride’, the ascetic strongman who speaks for a billion, the embodiment of civilisational rebirth. This constructed divinity, forged in the furnace of media idolatry and social media hysteria, renders him immune to critique. To question Modi is to betray the nation; to doubt his claims is to doubt India itself. This is the essence of performative nationalism: not the mere telling of lies, but the transformation of lies into articles of faith.

But perhaps the most chilling effect of such leadership is not what it does to institutions, but what it does to people. In the shadow of a leader elevated to the status of infallibility, even pacifists can begin to speak like warriors. The frenzy of devotion, once unleashed, silences dissent and reshapes conscience. It corrodes doubt, sanctifies aggression and gradually renders an entire population complicit in the illusions it once merely consumed. This is the true genius of demagoguery: not that it deceives the people, but that it teaches them to deceive themselves.

The parallels to Germany in the Third Reich are not perfect – no analogy ever is. But the building blocks are hauntingly similar: the use of a wronged national identity to galvanise hatred, the demonisation of minorities and nonconformists, the celebration of military aggression as virtue, and the capture of mass media as a tool for political theatre. In both cases, truth is not an inconvenience to be tolerated, but an obstacle to be eliminated.

And just as Hitler’s Germany, carried aloft by a mythologised sense of national destiny, provoked external conflicts to reinforce its narrative of strength and survival, India today appears increasingly willing to do the same: manufacturing confrontation with Pakistan as a means of asserting what it perceives as its strategic prerogative.

One may argue that India remains a democracy, with elections and a constitution and a vibrant civil society. But democracy is not merely the act of voting but also the capacity to disagree, to question, to think freely. It is a society’s resistance to the seduction of false clarity. And when the national mood begins to resemble a rally rather than a debate, when citizens clap along to the rhythms of manufactured outrage, democracy becomes a hollow form, a body without a soul.

India’s economic ascent in recent years has drawn global admiration, much like Germany’s early resurgence under Hitler in the 1930s – a period marked by rapid industrial growth, restored national pride, and international attention. But history reminds us that material progress is not a shield against moral collapse. In Germany’s case, economic revival fed the illusion of infallibility, emboldening an ideology that ultimately consumed the state itself. Hitler’s charismatic absolutism did not lead his nation to greatness; it led it to ruin. His self-proclaimed ‘Thousand-Year Reich’ ended in just twelve, leaving behind devastation and infamy.

India is not Germany and Modi is not Hitler, but when a nation elevates its leader to the realm of a political deity, when dissent is cast as betrayal, and when spectacle displaces substance, the warning lights of history begin to flicker. National pride matters, but when it feeds on fantasy and is enforced by fear, it imperils more than it inspires. All the more so when that fantasy offers a seductive simplicity: a strongman who invokes the destiny of regional supremacy, a villain who explains every failure, and a spectacle that drowns out the slow, difficult work of self-correction.

In this universe, the media transforms into a national theatre of affirmation – where fiction masquerades as fact, and noise is confused with wisdom. In the hands of a leader who conflates the responsibility of serving the people with a divine civilisational mandate, even a border skirmish can become the spark that ignites a catastrophic war – one between two nuclear-armed nations, where the cost of delusion is not just pride but annihilation.

The writer is an entrepreneur living in the United States and the United Kingdom. He can be reached at: sar@aya.yale.edu