Suddenly, everybody loves India. But it’s an affair, not a wedding. Whether it lasts is determined by the implications of this week’s watershed election. At stake are the credibility of Indian democracy and, probably, the nation’s future as a cohesive unitary state.

Courting India as a counterweight to China, the US is ardently pursuing a deeper safety relationship. The EU hankers after a free commerce pact. Countries starting from Australia to Norway to the UAE have already cast bespoke deals.

France greedily eyes a rising marketplace for its weapons manufacturers. For Germany, India is an $18bn land of export alternative. Britain, the previous colonial energy, is a eager suitor too – although frustratingly for Raj romantics, a post-Brexit tryst is on ice.

The western democracies should not alone in wooing Delhi. Russia supplied a sweetheart deal on cut-price oil when Ukraine sanctions bit in 2022. The feeling is mutual. India’s government cheered when Vladimir Putin received final month’s bogus presidential “election”.

India sits awkwardly on the Ukraine fence. It treasures its post-independence, non-aligned legacy, and has not forgotten chilly war-era Soviet hyperlinks. Through the G20 and an enlarged Brics – the organisation comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and UAE – it retains near the worldwide south, which it aspires to guide.

India’s 1.4 billion inhabitants – the world’s largest – youthful age profile and increasing economic system – the fifth largest – are turning it into a contemporary Klondike. Gold-diggers flock. All stake a declare for Delhi’s consideration, affect, markets, expertise and tech. At least, that’s how the prime minister, Narendra Modi, sees it. His Hindu nationalist devotees consider India, a “civilisational state”, is embarked on a benign world mission as a vishwaguru (trainer to the world) beneath Modi Baba’s sage, cult-like tutelage.

Up to 960 million individuals will vote in the course of the six-week election, with Modi searching for a 3rd consecutive time period. The citizens of impoverished Uttar Pradesh state alone is larger than that of Brazil. Modi’s ruling hard-right BJP faces a multi-party opposition alliance that features the once-dominant Congress, however is predicted to win simply.

Yet let’s pause proper there. Amid all this gushing and fawning, awkward questions come up. Is the Modi miracle for actual – or an phantasm that would disappear into skinny air? For Modi’s infatuated followers, he’s an inspirational, divinely anointed determine main the reunited Hindu nation to long-denied glory. For opponents, he’s a narcissistic authoritarian bent on extinguishing India’s democracy and pluralist, secular constitutional traditions.

Modi’s divisive insurance policies might cut up the nation. And for an importunate west, one other fundamental query nags: can he be trusted? India is the important thing swing state in a world wrestle to find out the brand new world order. Whose facet is he actually on?

The danger of India turning into a democracy in identify solely – an “electoral autocracy” – is simple. Opposition politicians are in jail or face abusive official intimidation. The courts, police and newspapers largely toe the federal government line. The unbiddable BBC is blatantly targeted.

“Modi has centralised power in his office to an astonishing degree, undermined the independence of public institutions such as the judiciary and the media, [and] built a cult of personality around himself,” wrote Krea college’s Ramachandra Guha in an excoriating essay. “The facade of triumph and power that Modi has erected obscures a more fundamental truth: that a principal source of India’s survival as a democratic country, and of its recent economic success, has been its political and cultural pluralism, precisely those qualities that the prime minister and his party now seek to extinguish.”

Modi’s power, as embodiment and chief beneficiary of Hindu majoritarianism, can be weak spot. Intolerance feeding violence in opposition to non secular minorities is a BJP hallmark. Human Rights Watch accuses it of “systematic discrimination and stigmatisation” of Muslims and others. Echoing his time as Gujarat’s chief minister, when lots of died in anti-Muslim riots in 2002, Modi initially ignored Hindu attacks on Christians in Manipur final yr. Kashmir is one other blackspot.

“The prime minister’s central ideological project is the creation of a Hindu nationalist country where non-Hindu people are, at best, second-class citizens,” wrote Yale’s Sushant Singh. “It is an exclusionary agenda that alienates hundreds of millions of Indians.” This, it’s argued, is fatally weakening the bonds holding India collectively.

Centrally directed partisan insurance policies that worsen India’s north-south divide, drawback opposition-run states comparable to Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and undercut the federal system contribute to this means of disaggregation. Yet southern votes are inadequate to forestall a Modi victory – main some officers there to speak of a “separate nation”.

If Indians determine to danger nationwide unity and the evisceration of their democracy, that’s their affair. But the west’s conditional love could curdle. Western governments need India of their nook within the standoff with China and Russia. They need India’s enterprise. But in addition they desire a real democratic accomplice, not one other dictator with a superiority complicated. They is not going to proceed to look away if, for instance, Indian brokers persist in assassinating political opponents on their turf.

The hubris of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Modi’s exterior affairs minister and shut confidant, is instructive. He writes that India’s priorities must be to “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw neighbours in, extend the neighbourhood and expand traditional constituencies of support”. Jaishankar calls this “multi-alignment”. In brief, Modi’s over-confident India, a nouveau riche superpower more and more ruled by arbitrary fiat, believes it may be all issues to all individuals. It desires to have its galub jamun and eat it.

That’s an enormous mistake. In geopolitics, as in life, first ideas are necessary. Leaders and nations should finally stand and be counted – or else find yourself unloved and despised by everybody.

• Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s overseas affairs commentator