Description
In India, Narendra Modi’s political authority has come to stand for a distinctive convergence of charismatic leadership, majoritarian consolidation and far-right populist success. Yet the emergence of Hindu traditionalists, or ‘trad’ digital subcultures unsettles this account. Rather than positioning Modi as the realised embodiment of a Hindu civilisational project, trad actors increasingly recast him as a figure of betrayal. The article therefore interrogates how a far-right formation comes to direct its antagonism inwards, against its own most powerful political figure, under conditions of extraordinary majoritarian dominance. It argues that such intra-identitarian antagonism reveals a deeper ontological instability within hegemonic projects. Drawing on Lacanian understandings of the object-cause of desire (objet petit a), it shows how hegemonic success can expose rather than repair the anxieties that far-right projects promise to overcome. Through a multimodal critical discourse analysis of trad anti-Modi memes circulating between 2021 and 2022, the article shows how memes become a privileged vernacular form through which intra-identitarian ontological (in) security is staged, intensified and made affectively shareable.