This article is a preview from the Summer 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.

My first encounter with Narendra Modi, the man who is now India’s prime minister, was an odd one. It was back in 2009 at a forensic science conference in Ahmedabad, the main city in the state of Gujarat, where he was the chief minister. The possibility of national leadership was a long five years away, but Modi was already being celebrated for his economic successes. Tugging at his ambitions, though, were lingering accusations that he had failed to prevent horrific and bloody riots in Gujarat in 2002, in which thousands of Hindus destroyed a mosque.

He seemed to be emerging fairly cleanly from the tragedy. In fact, as I found at the conference, he had never been more popular. He announced the creation of India’s first forensic sciences university – an investment that he would continue to boast about years later when campaigning in India’s national elections.

Scientists are not often known for wild displays of public emotion, yet here Modi was cheered like a champion. This, however, wasn’t the odd bit. What was strange was another, smaller initiative unveiled at the same time: Gujarat would be rolling out a fleet of state-of-the-art mobile laboratories that would trawl the state in search of beef. Cows, holy as they are to Hindus, are treated with such reverence that many states have banned cow slaughter (you won’t find a Big Mac anywhere). Why though, I wondered, would Modi throw such sophisticated resources at a crime that pales in its impact next to murder, rape and robbery?

It was a cleverly calculated move. For Hindus, his heavy-handed war on beef was a clear sign that he was on their side. The law would largely impact Muslim cattle-traders. Since then, in March this year, the states of Maharashtra and Haryana have also passed legislation against cow slaughter.

More power hasn’t changed him. Modi and his government continue to make remarks and decisions that pander to India’s Hindu majority. On the surface, they can seem as silly as beef-testing vans, but scratch a little and they reveal an ugly religious agenda. In October, Modi told doctors at a hospital where he was giving a speech that ancient Indians must have invented plastic surgery thousands of years ago because how else could the elephant-headed Hindu god, Ganesh, have existed? At the same time he quoted a tale from the Hindu religious text, the Mahabharata, in which a character is said not to have been born from his mother’s womb. What could this be, he said, but proof of ancient genetic science?

It’s easy to snigger at this, and many have, but in a deeply religious country notions like these have traction, speaking to nationalists who believe that India can recapture the global greatness it enjoyed thousands of years ago. For them, India would be better off ditching secularism and reclaiming its glorious and uniquely Hindu past. In the service of this ideology, myth and legend become conflated with history. At the radical end, proponents of ideas like these are more than crackpots, they are dangerous zealots.

Despite the mockery Modi endured following his speech at the hospital, the comments keep on coming. At the country’s Annual Science Congress this year his Minister for Science and Technology claimed, to the incredulity of both historians and mathematicians, that “our scientists discovered the Pythagoras theorem but we very sophisticatedly gave its credit to the Greeks.”

Even more disturbing are signs that this brand of pseudoscience and false history is being imposed on children, too. The retired schoolteacher and controversial nationalist ideologue Dinanath Batra, whose books are already on the syllabus of Gujarat’s schools, has now been asked to revise textbooks in the state of Haryana.

Batra’s version of the past includes airplanes invented and flown by Hindus thousands of years before the Wright brothers. Throughout his works, he has been accused of editing away the truth if it conflicts with a vision of India as a great nation and Hinduism as the fountain of all knowledge.

Modi’s election as India’s Prime Minister came on a wave of admiration for how he had managed to transform Gujarat into an economic model for the rest of the country. A year into his leadership, though, it’s harder to ignore the possibility that he might also be out to undermine the secular ideals on which the nation was built. It seems that the darker side of his politics hasn’t been consigned to history.