evidence: Is there a cult of personality in the democratic world to rival Narendra Modi’s? Consider the pageantry of veneration consecrated to the Indian prime minister just last month. On Feb. 24, the world’s largest cricket stadium — built at a cost of more than $100 million and bearing the name of one of India’s most revered founding fathers — was unblushingly re-christened the Narendra Modi Stadium by the Modi government. (Comparisons are inexact, but imagine if Donald Trump had renamed Lincoln Center after himself.) Four days later, the country’s space agency catapulted a satellite bearing a photo of Modi into the heavens. In one week, Modi had his name monumentalized on Earth and his face exalted in the stars. [...] An army of volunteers and keyboard warriors on the ruling party’s payroll, devoted to pumping out lies about the prime minister’s accomplishments, savaged those who disagreed, while digital evangelists deluged WhatsApp — the most effective propaganda medium in Modi’s New India — with countless memes composed of doctored images portraying the prime minister as the weightiest of international statesmen. One showed Barack Obama and his aides watching a Modi speech, riveted, on a television in the White House. "Congratulation to all of us," said another under a picture of Modi at his desk: "Our PM ‘Narendra D. Modi’ is now declared as the best PM of the world by UNESCO."