There is a new political mood in Delhi. It is complex and hard to define but I shall give it my best shot. In this past week of grey skies and muggy, rainy days, I have wandered about talking to friends who have been in politics for long enough to have reliable opinions. Some are close friends to whom I turn when I am not sure whether I am reading the mood right or not. I went to meet them and said that I detected that something fundamental had changed in recent weeks. They agreed and said that the most crucial thing that had changed was that people seemed no longer scared.

Here I need to give you some context. I have never denied that when Narendra Modi first became prime minister, I was one of his most devoted devotees. But allow me to tell you why. My childhood and most of my growing years were spent in that ‘socialist’ India that was defined by shortages of everything from sugar and spice to bread and milk. I remember queues at ration shops of people waiting for sugar. It always disappeared just before festivals like Janmashtami and Diwali. As for things like cooking gas or a telephone, you needed political connections to get these.

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Modi arrived on the national political stage saying he believed in free markets and that it was ‘not the business of government to do business.’ Words that were music to my ears since it is my considered opinion that India would have been a rich country had our economic policymakers not been ‘socialist’. In the name of socialism, they built a huge, unwieldy, mostly unprofitable public sector instead of building schools and hospitals. When Modi took the same economic road, I was disappointed.

What disappointed me more was that he became a prime minister of the strongman kind and instilled fear into the polluted air we breathed. Almost the first victim of his strongman policies was the media. When people speak contemptuously of the ‘Godi Media’, they need to understand that it has been dangerous to displease the government. Delhi which has a tradition of people speaking about politics raucously in restaurants and cafes became, till just the other day, a city in which people looked nervously around before saying anything critical of government policies in a public place.

The Cockroach Janta Party may achieve nothing in the future, but it has already achieved a great deal by taking fear out of the Delhi air and kicking it into the dustbin. This has encouraged others to do the same. Last week two Muslim women journalists who were badly treated by the Delhi Police refused to accept this lying down and made videos of their injuries to put on social media.

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When a Hindutva thug came forward to boast on camera that he was responsible for causing serious head injuries to a Jantar Mantar protester’s father, he was quickly forced to backtrack. He had boasted that it was his connection to important BJP leaders that acted as his shield and kept him from being arrested. Then he quickly retracted this statement and made it more ambiguous. The cockroaches were by then back in protest mode marching to Parliament Street police station to force the Delhi Police to do its job and charge this Hindutva thug with attempted murder.

These may seem like small things. They are not. From the time that Modi became prime minister for a second term he has consciously cultivated the image of a strongman who tolerates neither dissent nor disagreement. Elderly Maoists ended up in jail for being ‘urban Naxals’. Some were treated so badly that they died. The message went home swiftly to future dissidents and most of them either retired into the shadows or learned to watch what they said. In Bollywood those who made films that seemed not to be patriotic enough also retired into the shadows. The fear that spread was not imaginary. It was backed up by the weaponisation of state agencies.

The prime minister on his foreign travels assures democratic leaders and his devotees in the diaspora that India is the ‘mother of democracy’ and so democratic practices came naturally to Indians. International democracy watchdogs were not convinced. Freedom House moved India from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’ five years ago and that is where we remain. Other watchdogs like Sweden’s V-Dem put India among ten countries in which liberal democracy has declined fastest in the past decade.

For someone like me who has seen Delhi change because of this diminishment of liberal democracy it has been depressing to see the city change. This is why it cheered me up enormously to discover last week from my conversations with old political friends that they agreed that something vital has begun to change. The Prime Minister himself has changed his mode of public discourse. When he first changed his platform to Instagram, he posted a reel in which he ‘forgave’ the young women who he said had insulted him and his late mother from Jantar Mantar.

He appeared soon to notice that this approach was not working. His recent reels have taken a more conciliatory tone. Does this mean that he has decided to ditch being a strongman and act more like an elected leader, a humble servant of the people? Perhaps not. But something does seem to have changed.