Inside a sprawling golf resort south of New Delhi, diplomats have been busy making remaining preparations for a fast-approaching international summit assembly. The street outdoors was freshly smoothed and dotted with cops. Posters emblazoned with the picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi bore the slogan he had chosen for the event: One Earth, One Family, One Future.

Not distant, nevertheless, have been the remnants of bitter division: grieving households, charred automobiles and the rubble of bulldozed outlets and houses. Weeks earlier than, lethal non secular violence had erupted within the Nuh district, the positioning of the resort. The web was shut down, and 1000’s of troops have been rushed in. Clashes rapidly unfold to the gates of Gurugram, a tech start-up hub simply outdoors New Delhi that India payments as a metropolis of the longer term.

These scenes sum up India’s contradictions because it basks in its second this weekend as host of the Group of 20: Its momentum towards an even bigger function in a chaotic world order is constructed on more and more flamable and unequal floor at house.

Mr. Modi, India’s strongest chief in a long time, is making an attempt nothing lower than a legacy-defining transformation of this nation of 1.4 billion folks.

On the one hand, he’s making an attempt to show India right into a developed nation and a guiding mild for the unvoiced in a Western-dominated world. The nation, now the world’s most populous, is the fastest-growing main financial system, adept digitally and awash in keen younger staff. It can also be a rising diplomatic energy that’s searching for to capitalize on the frictions of the superpower competitors between the United States and China.

On the opposite hand, Mr. Modi is deepening fault traces in Indian society with an intensifying marketing campaign to reshape a vastly various nation, held collectively delicately by a secular structure, right into a Hindu state. His occasion’s efforts to rally and elevate Hindus — each a lifelong ideological challenge and a potent lure for votes — have marginalized a whole lot of tens of millions of Muslims and different minorities as second-class residents.

The query for India, as Mr. Modi appears poised to increase his decade-long rule in an election early subsequent yr, is how a lot the instability attributable to his non secular nationalism will hinder his financial ambitions.

The sectarian clashes in Muslim-majority Nuh have been sparked by a spiritual march held by a right-wing Hindu group that falls below the identical Hindu-nationalist umbrella as Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.

They have been solely the most recent flare-up in what has develop into a seemingly fixed state of tensions.

Emboldened right-wing vigilantes and the aggressively Hindu-first messaging of B.J.P. politicians have left the nation’s Muslims and Christians in a perpetual state of concern and alienation.

The northeastern state of Manipur, the place its prime chief has employed the B.J.P.’s majoritarian playbook, has been burning in ethnic battle for months, with about 200 folks killed and areas successfully partitioned alongside ethnic traces.

In the restive Muslim-majority area of Kashmir, the federal government has suspended democracy for 4 years and is responding to any grievance with a tightening crackdown.

Asked whether or not his authorities had discriminated towards non secular minorities, Mr. Modi mentioned throughout a state go to to Washington in June that there was no discrimination in India below its democratic values.

“We have always proved that democracy can deliver,” he mentioned throughout a information convention with President Biden. “And when I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There’s absolutely no space for discrimination.”

Yet B.J.P. politicians proceed their divisive rhetoric even when Mr. Modi is on the worldwide stage. In 2020, for instance, as Mr. Modi and President Donald J. Trump have been addressing a stadium within the prime minister’s house state of Gujarat, massive swaths of New Delhi have been engulfed in lethal violence that had been incited partially by B.J.P. leaders.

Gurcharan Das, an mental who supported Mr. Modi throughout his first time period for his promise to concentrate on improvement, mentioned he had grown disenchanted because the injury of the ruling occasion’s Hindu nationalism overshadowed its financial progress.

In a public lecture this week, he mentioned that though Mr. Modi’s authorities had didn’t ship the roles he had promised, it had nonetheless taken up key reforms, from streamlining taxes to assist unify the Indian market, to ushering in a digital revolution that has introduced extra folks into the formal financial system.

But he mentioned he noticed hazard because the B.J.P. rejected pluralism because the appeasement of minorities. He repeated a warning that has develop into frequent: that India is on a path of non secular fundamentalism just like what has plunged neighboring Pakistan into disaster.

“While dreaming of a grand civilizational state, Hindu nationalists are in fact trying to create a narrow-minded, identity-based, 19th-century European nation-state — a sort of Hindu Pakistan,” he mentioned.

As India’s financial progress largely enriches these on the prime, the plenty are nonetheless ready for his or her promised prosperity. While India is now the world’s fifth-largest financial system, forward of Britain and France, its common revenue — a key indicator of dwelling commonplace — stays on this planet’s backside third, subsequent to nations like Congo.

Mr. Modi, in a current interview with the Press Trust of India, mentioned that the nation could be a developed nation when it marks 100 years of independence in 2047. But with that promise nonetheless distant, he has stuffed the hole with the politics of polarization.

Ajai Sahni, the director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, mentioned that what distinguished the current violence in India from its lengthy historical past of far bloodier sectarian clashes was the perspective of the federal government.

“The state always notionally distanced itself from such violence. There was always a reaffirmation, at least verbally, of the constitutional order and the secular order,” Mr. Sahni mentioned. Under Mr. Modi, “there is clear, shall we say, evidence of state support or endorsement for extremist positions.”

“The violence is still episodic,” he added. “One killing here, two killings there, then a certain flare-up,” he mentioned. “But the threat is sustained.” He attributed a lot of that to the “virality” round violence now — social media is “harnessed” to unfold a neighborhood episode nationally, to chilling impact.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s state minister for electronics and expertise, mentioned the federal government was making an attempt to deal with potential “misinformation and incitement” on-line because it intensifies its digital efforts.

In the case of the Nuh violence, on-line threats and counter-threats within the days earlier than the march made clear the potential for an imminent spiral, which residents mentioned the police ignored. The Muslim facet was additionally armed and able to conflict when the Hindu marchers arrived.

Five of the six folks killed have been Hindus, a mixture of day laborers who appeared caught within the violence and members of the right-wing group. The minority Hindu residents at the moment are susceptible in a district the place they mentioned they’d survived with out hassle by means of even the worst phases of India’s earlier sectarian tensions.

The authorities, after its preliminary lax response, responded to the clashes with full pressure, in what has develop into an extrajudicial sample of punishment. Bulldozers have been wheeled in to raze houses and outlets — principally these of Muslims — with out due course of and with the visuals transmitted throughout the nation.

The financial ramifications of the clashes have been instant, and palpable even a month later.

As the violence unfold to Gurugram, many places of work rapidly had staff earn a living from home. Executives at corporations within the metropolis informed of a fearfulness they’d by no means skilled earlier than.

About 500 households, each Hindus and Muslims, had settled within the shadow of the Gurugram skyscrapers searching for a greater life. Now, a majority of the Muslims have left.

“It’s fear,” mentioned Sourav Kumar, who works as a safety guard.

Other households had piled their belongings — a tied-up mattress, a few tin containers, a single mattress — outdoors as they contemplated their choices.

Just days earlier than the diplomats arrived on the resort in Nuh for remaining G20 preparations, the Hindu outfit that had carried out the march in late July threatened to stage one other one, despite the fact that the state’s B.J.P. authorities had denied it permission.

As the group pressed on, the federal government got here up with a attribute compromise: It escorted the group’s leaders in vans so they might supply a prayer at a temple, avoiding one other conflict for now so the G20 parade might keep on.

Suhasini Raj contributed reporting.