On my first day in Mumbai, I took a photograph of a proverb pasted inside a taxi door. IT IS EASIER TO FALL THAN RISE, it cautioned.

These days, the press regularly describes India as “upwardly mobile” or “a country of dreamers.” It has become a cliché to say that a street sweeper can become a rickshaw driver and then own a taxi, or maybe even become a Bollywood star. It’s true: The poverty rate is falling, the middle class is growing, and the nation is younger than ever. Or at least this was all the case before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second term, when rising nationalism and anti-Muslim