Formula for Power in Modi’s India: Cash, Detentions and Luxe Resorts

The lawmakers had finished a routine assembly vote and were scattering into the Mumbai night.

Nitin Deshmukh, who represented a district 350 miles away, planned to take an overnight train. But first came an invitation to have dinner in the suburbs with a senior official from their party in the Indian state of Maharashtra. They would share a car ride, and Mr. Deshmukh could catch the train from there.

It was all a ruse.

As the car approached its destination, it kept speeding along, and eventually joined a caravan of other vehicles. That, Mr. Deshmukh said, is when he realized he was being kidnapped. The car was heading across state lines, where he would be held in a hotel behind locked gates and later restrained and drugged after trying to flee.

Mr. Deshmukh had become a pawn in what is known as “resort politics,” a longstanding practice unique to India’s rough-and-tumble democracy.

The senior party official in the car with Mr. Deshmukh that night in June 2022 had secretly recruited a group of governing-party lawmakers to try to bring down the state government in Maharashtra. To ensure that they would stick to the plan, the lawmakers were moved to other states and isolated in luxury resorts.

Mr. Deshmukh and at least two other Maharashtra lawmakers, according to their own accounts, were taken against their will. The leaders of the insurrection wanted to make certain that their breakaway faction had a sufficient number of lawmakers to deprive the government of a majority and force it to collapse.

The hidden hand behind the maneuvering, according to several lawmakers with knowledge of the events, was the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In a series of closely contested states, his Bharatiya Janata Party, after failing to win power through elections, has gained effective control through similar episodes in which lawmakers were sent to resort hotels until their government fell.