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The Rise of Adolf Modi
1. There are several threads on this enigma which has suddenly emerged over SA. In this thread I hope we can study this man in depth. Who is he really?What does he propose to do? Although his appearance is not sudden but definitely not expected till recently.What is his politics? What does his appearance mean to Indian minorities? And to the neighbors of India? To China? To USA?
2.The world knows him as the Butcher of Gujarati Muslims. A self-proclaimed racist with extreme communal program, his rise has shocked all Muslims particularly. And Bangladeshis whom he has been singling out for eradication.That has brought hue and cry in P/bangla also.
3. Is there a a parallel to the rise of Adolf post-WW1? The European govts of that time were complacent allowing Adolf to build his political and military machines. His fascist ideology and the notion of racial superiority were seen merely as political jargon. Nobody bothered to understand that Adolf had been deeply hurt by the treatment at the rail-road Treaty of Versailles.
4.Behind all the talk of development (which all aspirants pledge) Modi's central electioneering theme was Hate Muslims. His true home RSS is built on this theme and has been propagating this message for decades now. Modi, like a true Sainik of RSS, is totally brain-washed to the notion that Muslims are the root of all problems in India and for Hindus.
Published on New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com)
Narendra Modi: man of the masses [1]
Modi, implicated in a massacre in 2002 while chief minister of Gujarat, is poised to become India’s next prime minister. Is he a dangerous neo-fascist, as some say, or the strongman reformer that this country of 1.2 billion people craves?
by William Dalrymple [2] Published 12 May, 2014 - 17:00
Saffron warriors: Modi waves to supporters on his way to file nomination papers in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 24 April 2014. Photo: Getty
In the intense afternoon heat, the streets of Delhi lay deserted. April is hot in northern India, but on this occasion it was not because the capital was befuddled by the sort of gasping summer temperatures that Truman Capote described as a “whitemidnight”. Instead the streets were empty because it was polling day in the Delhi leg of the largest and most complex election in human history.
By the time the results are announced on 16 May, 815 million voters – more than 12 times the population of the UK, or over two and a half times the population of the US – will have cast their vote at one of 900,000 polling stations. One-fifth of the electorate will be voting for the first time, adding to the sense of unpredictability. The polling is staggered over nine separate stages to allow the redeployment of more than eight million security and election personnel around the country. In a further effort to prevent trouble, and to encourage participation, the shops and the bars are closed at each stage and everyone gets a day off.
So it was on that afternoon that the normally cacophonous Delhi roads were strangely empty. The only sound was the whirr of discarded political flyers tumbling in the late-afternoon breeze along the deserted sidewalks. In a city usually bursting with humanity, the only faces on show were those on election hoardings. And they were everywhere: filling every frame attached to every lamp post and every bus shelter, glued to every wall – the same three faces repeated over and over, all the way down the tree-lined avenues, up the flyovers and down into the cavernous entrances of the gleaming new Metro stations.
Yet the tragedy is that in this great country bursting with youth, beauty and talent, none of the three front-runners inspires any great confidence in his ability to pull India together, to unite it and to lead it forward safely and equitably to its rightful place as the regional economic and cultural superpower that could balance the ever-accelerating rise of China. Instead, all three candidates for prime minister have considerable flaws, and it is perhaps partly this that has resulted in the unusual bitterness of this election, polarising opinion and bringing an unprecedented acrimony to the national debate, not least on the new political battleground of social media. Here, whole call centres have allegedly been hired to wage Twitter warfare on behalf of the individual combatants. There is, however, an undeniable energy and excitement in the air. Everything is up for grabs, and anything is possible.
The candidate to put in the fewest poster appearances that hot afternoon was Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the new anti-corruption Aam Aadmi (“common man”) Party. On his posters and handouts, Kejriwal does indeed appear as the aam aadmi, the man in the street. Physically, he is a slight, oddly anonymous figure whose narrow face is dominated by his toothbrush moustache and rimless spectacles. In winter he is enshrouded in a muffler, swathed right around his head as you might wear bandages after breaking your jaw; in summer he wears an incongruously jaunty white party hat bearing the legend “Aam Aadmi”, which sits top-heavily on his head in the manner of a snuffer atop a candle.
Kejriwal is a former tax inspector of celebrated integrity who has dedicated his life to fighting corruption. He gave a huge jolt to Indian politics just before New Year when he successfully rode the wave of disgust at the long succession of corruption scandals and stormed the Delhi state elections, becoming our second-youngest ever chief minister. But his resignation little more than a month later, after only 49 erratic and oddly accident-prone days in office, was a major setback. As chief minister, he seemed to see himself as a guerrilla-activist, still pulling protest-stunts such as sleeping out on the pavement in midwinter, rather than as a mature politician who had learned how to seize the administrative reins and change things from the inside.
As a result of his resignation, he is no longer regarded as a serious player nationally. Nevertheless, Kejriwal has a doggedly tenacious gleam in his eye and an insistent, determined set to his mouth. Although he is the underdog in this race, hugely outgunned by the resources of India’s two largest parties, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and the left-wing Congress, he shows every sign of fighting on. He is likely to do well in Delhi and a few other urban centres: a respectable showing for a new party, but a far cry from what seemed possible as recently as January.
Putting in far more frequent appearances on the Delhi bus stands is the more familiar and visually more memorable face of the ruggedly handsome Rahul Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru’s great-grandson, Indira’s grandson and Rajiv’s son: the heir to the dynasty that is India’s most striking example of sexually transmitted democracy. Sadly the good looks and family tree appear to be his only assets.
On his posters Rahul is shown standing in Congress Party homespun khadi, arms akimbo, with three days of stubble decorating his sculpted chin. To either side of him on the posters stands a line of random young Indian faces, presumably selected by some PR agency: a Sikh, a pretty nurse, a rustic farmer, a builder in a hard hat and so on, apparently in an attempt to place Rahul, somewhat unconvincingly, as one of the people. The overall effect is like one of those ill-advised Vogue shoots where a model is shot strutting in all her Fifth Avenue finery amid exotic tribals, as if air-dropped in from another planet. On some versions of the poster, Rahul’s hand is implausibly photoshopped clinging on to the shoulder of a smiling day labourer in an image that oozes improbability at every level. There is something about Rahul’s embarrassed smile that seems to acknowledge the stagey quality of the montage. If opinion polls are correct, he is likely to be even more embarrassed when the results are announced.
This is largely not his fault. Congress is as unpopular as it is partly because of its gross corruption while in office, and partly because of its deeply unimpressive economic performance during the past five years under the weak, uncharismatic and monosyllabic Sikh economist Dr Manmohan Singh. Since being voted back into office in 2009, Singh has in effect halted the economic reforms that had made him so popular and retreated into a vast programme of rural benefits and agricultural welfarism. This was exactly the sort of well-meant but wholly unaffordable budget-busting handout that has hobbled the Indian economy for much of its post-independence history and which Singh initially won so many plaudits for reversing at the beginning of his ministerial career.
The result has been that India’s annual growth rate has sunk from a peak of 9.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2010-2011 to under 5 per cent this year, making the country slip from the world’s second-fastest-growing economy to tenth place in this index. Other economic indicators have been equally alarming: public borrowing has quadrupled in the past five years, the national deficit grew substantially, inflation is high and the value of the rupee has plummeted by 20 per cent. Between 2004 and 2013, the wholesale price index for food went up by 157 per cent, vegetables by 350 per cent and onions by 521 per cent, amid accusations of both corruption and mismanagement.
A series of voter surveys has shown that concern over the collapse of the Indian economy is the single most important factor in this election for almost all voters, of all religions, whether urban and rural. If it is this gathering fury at the corruption and mismanagement of the present government that is responsible for generating the appetite for radical change, Rahul’s lacklustre performance on the campaign trail has not helped his cause, either. His political career got off to a good start when his backstage manoeuvrings were credited with helping Congress to win the 2009 election. But a lamentable performance in a nationally broadcast TV interview at the start of this campaign almost killed that career overnight. Rahul came across as conceited and dim, if not borderline messianic-delusional, as he talked about himself in the third person: “You’ve got to understand a little bit about who Rahul Gandhi is,” he began. “Everybody understands that this fellow here is not just a superficial chap who just talks. This fellow over here is thinking deeply and long term.”
When not praising his own profundity, he parroted the same pre-prepared answers, irrespective of the question he was asked.
What did he think about the Gujarat riots? “The real issue at hand here is empowering the women of this country.”
Why did his party protect corrupt MPs? “The issue at hand is bringing youngsters into the political system.”
Why had he not spoken up when his government had sold coal reserves and telecom rights to party cronies for a fraction of their true worth? “The real issue here is bringing youngsters into the political system.”
Why is Congress still fielding its most corrupt ministers at this election? “We need to bring in youngsters.”
In all, he mentioned empowerment 22 times and finding a way to mend the broken political system no fewer than 70 times in 45 minutes.
If the autocratic Indira Gandhi was a disappointment after Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s most brilliant freedom fighter and the uniquely articulate first prime minister of independent India, and if Rajiv was a sad disappointment after Indira, Rahul would appear to be the very bottom of the Nehru-Gandhi barrel, tongue-tied and uncharismatic on campaign, conceited and slow-witted in private: in short, the complete electoral prophylactic, as Congress must sadly now realise to its despair.
This leaves only one other candidate.
Rescuers remove victims of the Godhra train fire, February 2002. As rumours emerged that Muslims had caused the fire, a pogrom began. Photo: Reuters
***
Outnumbering the poster images of Gandhi and Kejriwal many times over in the Delhi streets is the face of this election’s overwhelming front-runner, Narendra Modi.
Modi is the Hindu nationalist son of a station chai-wallah, and as different a man as could be imagined from the shahzada, or “princeling”, as Modi mockingly refers to the heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. With Kejriwal reduced to a minor player, the election in most of the country has been an unequal contest between the Modi juggernaut and a beleaguered Rahul, who is in the process of taking the can for the failings of a government he didn’t lead and can do little to redeem.
The battle represents a whole world of contestations: left against right, insider against outsider, secular Nehruvian v sectarian nationalist, Brahminical dynastic princeling v lower-caste, working-class, self-made man. There is little doubt at this stage which of the two is going to come out on top. Certainly Modi’s face, with its neatly trimmed grey beard and fiercely unsmiling expression, firm and unwavering, is apparently all too convinced of its right to line the roads of the Indian capital, bringing to mind the old lines from Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
Modi is a strong speaker. In the past few months he has been transformed into a hugely popular, even cult figure for many around India and is now widely admired by many who do not share his Hindu nationalism. This is because he has come to embody the collective longing, especially among India’s middle class of 300 million, for an economic rebirth of the nation: after all, under his stewardship, the economy of the state of Gujarat, for which he has been chief minister since 2001, has nearly tripled in size. He also has a reputation for decisiveness, getting things done, rooting out corruption, stimulating investment and slashing through the bureaucratic red tape and outdated, cumbersome regulations.
It is easy to understand why so many Indians feel a need for bold change and why the thought of another five years of a dithering, divided and corrupt Congress government fills them with dismay. But it is less easy to understand why so many are willing to overlook Modi’s extremely dodgy record with India’s religious minorities.
In 2002, the year after Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, as many as 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed and about 200,000 more displaced in an intercommunal bloodbath. Large numbers of girls were raped; men were cut to pieces and burned alive with kerosene or burning tyres. Pregnant women had their womb slit open and the foetuses smashed in front of their eyes. Modi, who prides himself on his hands-on administrative skills, was accused of allowing the 2002 riots to happen, or even of ordering the police to let the rioters get on with their work – something he has denied.
A report by Human Rights Watch asserted that his administration was complicit in the massacres. “The attacks were planned in advance,” a senior researcher for the organisation said, “and organised with the extensive participation of the police and state government officials.”
Modi has survived several formal investigations by the courts without conviction, but he has never apologised for his government’s failure to protect the minority or shown the slightest remorse for what happened. He refuses to answer questions about the riots. In a rare comment on the subject last year, he said he regretted the Muslims’ suffering as he would a “puppy being run over by a car”. Once he seemed to half-justify the actions of the rioters: in the US, he said, “An innocent Sikh was murdered after 9/11. Why? Because he looked like the terrorists. If the educated in America can get provoked, why use a different yardstick to evaluate Gujaratis?” On another occasion, even more chillingly, he told the Washington Post: “Why even talk about 2002? . . . It’s the past. What does it matter?” His only regret, he told the New York Times, was his failure to handle the media fallout.
None of these statements has done anything to reassure anxious Indian Muslims, or liberal Hindus who value the pluralistic mosaic of their society. Nor has his party’s ongoing hostility to Muslims: 50,000 of the riot victims of 2002 continue to languish in extreme poverty, displaced in 83 “relief colonies”. Although there is only one known instance of his visiting them, Modi has derisively described the camps as Muslim “baby-making factories”. He continues to refuse to wear a Muslim skullcap on the election trail, saying that the cap is a “symbol of appeasement of the minority”.
Moreover, on Modi’s watch there was not a single Muslim candidate in Gujarat for member of the legislative assembly on the ticket of his Bharatiya Janata Party; across India, if you exclude Kashmir, there are only two Muslim BJP candidates. Muslims make up 13 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion people, but of the 449 BJP candidates now running for the lower house of parliament, all but eight are Hindus. One of Modi’s closest associates, Amit Shah, has gone even further, and called on voters in Uttar Pradesh to reject parties that put up Muslim candidates. He also openly urged voters to use the ballot box to seek “revenge for the insult meted out to our community. This election will be a reply to those who have been ill-treating our mothers and sisters” – this in an area where dozens were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots last year.
This led to an almost unprecedented formal ban by the Electoral Commission of India on 11 April, stopping Shah from making any further public appearances in this campaign in Uttar Pradesh. He had previously been banned from entering his native Gujarat, where he stands accused of murder, using the local police as his proxies. Amid loud protests, the Uttar Pradesh ban was lifted on 18 April. Amit Shah is widely expected to become India’s home minister. If Modi is a frightening figure, it is properly terrifying to imagine Shah controlling the fate of 1.2 billion people.
On the campaign trail, whether from pragmatism or otherwise, Modi has largely kept his Hindu nationalism hidden and presented himself throughout as an able, technocratic administrator who can turn the country’s economy around and stimulate much-needed development. It could therefore be that the liberal elite are worrying needlessly and that India will get a leader who can kick-start the economy, who is incorruptible and who has left his sectarian past well behind him.
One can only hope so. Because, if the polls are right, Modi will win this election by some margin and we are likely to see many more images of the man plastered around the country over the next five years.
***
contd/---
1. There are several threads on this enigma which has suddenly emerged over SA. In this thread I hope we can study this man in depth. Who is he really?What does he propose to do? Although his appearance is not sudden but definitely not expected till recently.What is his politics? What does his appearance mean to Indian minorities? And to the neighbors of India? To China? To USA?
2.The world knows him as the Butcher of Gujarati Muslims. A self-proclaimed racist with extreme communal program, his rise has shocked all Muslims particularly. And Bangladeshis whom he has been singling out for eradication.That has brought hue and cry in P/bangla also.
3. Is there a a parallel to the rise of Adolf post-WW1? The European govts of that time were complacent allowing Adolf to build his political and military machines. His fascist ideology and the notion of racial superiority were seen merely as political jargon. Nobody bothered to understand that Adolf had been deeply hurt by the treatment at the rail-road Treaty of Versailles.
4.Behind all the talk of development (which all aspirants pledge) Modi's central electioneering theme was Hate Muslims. His true home RSS is built on this theme and has been propagating this message for decades now. Modi, like a true Sainik of RSS, is totally brain-washed to the notion that Muslims are the root of all problems in India and for Hindus.
Published on New Statesman (http://www.newstatesman.com)
Narendra Modi: man of the masses [1]
Modi, implicated in a massacre in 2002 while chief minister of Gujarat, is poised to become India’s next prime minister. Is he a dangerous neo-fascist, as some say, or the strongman reformer that this country of 1.2 billion people craves?
by William Dalrymple [2] Published 12 May, 2014 - 17:00
Saffron warriors: Modi waves to supporters on his way to file nomination papers in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 24 April 2014. Photo: Getty
In the intense afternoon heat, the streets of Delhi lay deserted. April is hot in northern India, but on this occasion it was not because the capital was befuddled by the sort of gasping summer temperatures that Truman Capote described as a “whitemidnight”. Instead the streets were empty because it was polling day in the Delhi leg of the largest and most complex election in human history.
By the time the results are announced on 16 May, 815 million voters – more than 12 times the population of the UK, or over two and a half times the population of the US – will have cast their vote at one of 900,000 polling stations. One-fifth of the electorate will be voting for the first time, adding to the sense of unpredictability. The polling is staggered over nine separate stages to allow the redeployment of more than eight million security and election personnel around the country. In a further effort to prevent trouble, and to encourage participation, the shops and the bars are closed at each stage and everyone gets a day off.
So it was on that afternoon that the normally cacophonous Delhi roads were strangely empty. The only sound was the whirr of discarded political flyers tumbling in the late-afternoon breeze along the deserted sidewalks. In a city usually bursting with humanity, the only faces on show were those on election hoardings. And they were everywhere: filling every frame attached to every lamp post and every bus shelter, glued to every wall – the same three faces repeated over and over, all the way down the tree-lined avenues, up the flyovers and down into the cavernous entrances of the gleaming new Metro stations.
Yet the tragedy is that in this great country bursting with youth, beauty and talent, none of the three front-runners inspires any great confidence in his ability to pull India together, to unite it and to lead it forward safely and equitably to its rightful place as the regional economic and cultural superpower that could balance the ever-accelerating rise of China. Instead, all three candidates for prime minister have considerable flaws, and it is perhaps partly this that has resulted in the unusual bitterness of this election, polarising opinion and bringing an unprecedented acrimony to the national debate, not least on the new political battleground of social media. Here, whole call centres have allegedly been hired to wage Twitter warfare on behalf of the individual combatants. There is, however, an undeniable energy and excitement in the air. Everything is up for grabs, and anything is possible.
The candidate to put in the fewest poster appearances that hot afternoon was Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the new anti-corruption Aam Aadmi (“common man”) Party. On his posters and handouts, Kejriwal does indeed appear as the aam aadmi, the man in the street. Physically, he is a slight, oddly anonymous figure whose narrow face is dominated by his toothbrush moustache and rimless spectacles. In winter he is enshrouded in a muffler, swathed right around his head as you might wear bandages after breaking your jaw; in summer he wears an incongruously jaunty white party hat bearing the legend “Aam Aadmi”, which sits top-heavily on his head in the manner of a snuffer atop a candle.
Kejriwal is a former tax inspector of celebrated integrity who has dedicated his life to fighting corruption. He gave a huge jolt to Indian politics just before New Year when he successfully rode the wave of disgust at the long succession of corruption scandals and stormed the Delhi state elections, becoming our second-youngest ever chief minister. But his resignation little more than a month later, after only 49 erratic and oddly accident-prone days in office, was a major setback. As chief minister, he seemed to see himself as a guerrilla-activist, still pulling protest-stunts such as sleeping out on the pavement in midwinter, rather than as a mature politician who had learned how to seize the administrative reins and change things from the inside.
As a result of his resignation, he is no longer regarded as a serious player nationally. Nevertheless, Kejriwal has a doggedly tenacious gleam in his eye and an insistent, determined set to his mouth. Although he is the underdog in this race, hugely outgunned by the resources of India’s two largest parties, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and the left-wing Congress, he shows every sign of fighting on. He is likely to do well in Delhi and a few other urban centres: a respectable showing for a new party, but a far cry from what seemed possible as recently as January.
Putting in far more frequent appearances on the Delhi bus stands is the more familiar and visually more memorable face of the ruggedly handsome Rahul Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru’s great-grandson, Indira’s grandson and Rajiv’s son: the heir to the dynasty that is India’s most striking example of sexually transmitted democracy. Sadly the good looks and family tree appear to be his only assets.
On his posters Rahul is shown standing in Congress Party homespun khadi, arms akimbo, with three days of stubble decorating his sculpted chin. To either side of him on the posters stands a line of random young Indian faces, presumably selected by some PR agency: a Sikh, a pretty nurse, a rustic farmer, a builder in a hard hat and so on, apparently in an attempt to place Rahul, somewhat unconvincingly, as one of the people. The overall effect is like one of those ill-advised Vogue shoots where a model is shot strutting in all her Fifth Avenue finery amid exotic tribals, as if air-dropped in from another planet. On some versions of the poster, Rahul’s hand is implausibly photoshopped clinging on to the shoulder of a smiling day labourer in an image that oozes improbability at every level. There is something about Rahul’s embarrassed smile that seems to acknowledge the stagey quality of the montage. If opinion polls are correct, he is likely to be even more embarrassed when the results are announced.
This is largely not his fault. Congress is as unpopular as it is partly because of its gross corruption while in office, and partly because of its deeply unimpressive economic performance during the past five years under the weak, uncharismatic and monosyllabic Sikh economist Dr Manmohan Singh. Since being voted back into office in 2009, Singh has in effect halted the economic reforms that had made him so popular and retreated into a vast programme of rural benefits and agricultural welfarism. This was exactly the sort of well-meant but wholly unaffordable budget-busting handout that has hobbled the Indian economy for much of its post-independence history and which Singh initially won so many plaudits for reversing at the beginning of his ministerial career.
The result has been that India’s annual growth rate has sunk from a peak of 9.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2010-2011 to under 5 per cent this year, making the country slip from the world’s second-fastest-growing economy to tenth place in this index. Other economic indicators have been equally alarming: public borrowing has quadrupled in the past five years, the national deficit grew substantially, inflation is high and the value of the rupee has plummeted by 20 per cent. Between 2004 and 2013, the wholesale price index for food went up by 157 per cent, vegetables by 350 per cent and onions by 521 per cent, amid accusations of both corruption and mismanagement.
A series of voter surveys has shown that concern over the collapse of the Indian economy is the single most important factor in this election for almost all voters, of all religions, whether urban and rural. If it is this gathering fury at the corruption and mismanagement of the present government that is responsible for generating the appetite for radical change, Rahul’s lacklustre performance on the campaign trail has not helped his cause, either. His political career got off to a good start when his backstage manoeuvrings were credited with helping Congress to win the 2009 election. But a lamentable performance in a nationally broadcast TV interview at the start of this campaign almost killed that career overnight. Rahul came across as conceited and dim, if not borderline messianic-delusional, as he talked about himself in the third person: “You’ve got to understand a little bit about who Rahul Gandhi is,” he began. “Everybody understands that this fellow here is not just a superficial chap who just talks. This fellow over here is thinking deeply and long term.”
When not praising his own profundity, he parroted the same pre-prepared answers, irrespective of the question he was asked.
What did he think about the Gujarat riots? “The real issue at hand here is empowering the women of this country.”
Why did his party protect corrupt MPs? “The issue at hand is bringing youngsters into the political system.”
Why had he not spoken up when his government had sold coal reserves and telecom rights to party cronies for a fraction of their true worth? “The real issue here is bringing youngsters into the political system.”
Why is Congress still fielding its most corrupt ministers at this election? “We need to bring in youngsters.”
In all, he mentioned empowerment 22 times and finding a way to mend the broken political system no fewer than 70 times in 45 minutes.
If the autocratic Indira Gandhi was a disappointment after Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s most brilliant freedom fighter and the uniquely articulate first prime minister of independent India, and if Rajiv was a sad disappointment after Indira, Rahul would appear to be the very bottom of the Nehru-Gandhi barrel, tongue-tied and uncharismatic on campaign, conceited and slow-witted in private: in short, the complete electoral prophylactic, as Congress must sadly now realise to its despair.
This leaves only one other candidate.
Rescuers remove victims of the Godhra train fire, February 2002. As rumours emerged that Muslims had caused the fire, a pogrom began. Photo: Reuters
***
Outnumbering the poster images of Gandhi and Kejriwal many times over in the Delhi streets is the face of this election’s overwhelming front-runner, Narendra Modi.
Modi is the Hindu nationalist son of a station chai-wallah, and as different a man as could be imagined from the shahzada, or “princeling”, as Modi mockingly refers to the heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. With Kejriwal reduced to a minor player, the election in most of the country has been an unequal contest between the Modi juggernaut and a beleaguered Rahul, who is in the process of taking the can for the failings of a government he didn’t lead and can do little to redeem.
The battle represents a whole world of contestations: left against right, insider against outsider, secular Nehruvian v sectarian nationalist, Brahminical dynastic princeling v lower-caste, working-class, self-made man. There is little doubt at this stage which of the two is going to come out on top. Certainly Modi’s face, with its neatly trimmed grey beard and fiercely unsmiling expression, firm and unwavering, is apparently all too convinced of its right to line the roads of the Indian capital, bringing to mind the old lines from Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
Modi is a strong speaker. In the past few months he has been transformed into a hugely popular, even cult figure for many around India and is now widely admired by many who do not share his Hindu nationalism. This is because he has come to embody the collective longing, especially among India’s middle class of 300 million, for an economic rebirth of the nation: after all, under his stewardship, the economy of the state of Gujarat, for which he has been chief minister since 2001, has nearly tripled in size. He also has a reputation for decisiveness, getting things done, rooting out corruption, stimulating investment and slashing through the bureaucratic red tape and outdated, cumbersome regulations.
It is easy to understand why so many Indians feel a need for bold change and why the thought of another five years of a dithering, divided and corrupt Congress government fills them with dismay. But it is less easy to understand why so many are willing to overlook Modi’s extremely dodgy record with India’s religious minorities.
In 2002, the year after Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, as many as 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed and about 200,000 more displaced in an intercommunal bloodbath. Large numbers of girls were raped; men were cut to pieces and burned alive with kerosene or burning tyres. Pregnant women had their womb slit open and the foetuses smashed in front of their eyes. Modi, who prides himself on his hands-on administrative skills, was accused of allowing the 2002 riots to happen, or even of ordering the police to let the rioters get on with their work – something he has denied.
A report by Human Rights Watch asserted that his administration was complicit in the massacres. “The attacks were planned in advance,” a senior researcher for the organisation said, “and organised with the extensive participation of the police and state government officials.”
Modi has survived several formal investigations by the courts without conviction, but he has never apologised for his government’s failure to protect the minority or shown the slightest remorse for what happened. He refuses to answer questions about the riots. In a rare comment on the subject last year, he said he regretted the Muslims’ suffering as he would a “puppy being run over by a car”. Once he seemed to half-justify the actions of the rioters: in the US, he said, “An innocent Sikh was murdered after 9/11. Why? Because he looked like the terrorists. If the educated in America can get provoked, why use a different yardstick to evaluate Gujaratis?” On another occasion, even more chillingly, he told the Washington Post: “Why even talk about 2002? . . . It’s the past. What does it matter?” His only regret, he told the New York Times, was his failure to handle the media fallout.
None of these statements has done anything to reassure anxious Indian Muslims, or liberal Hindus who value the pluralistic mosaic of their society. Nor has his party’s ongoing hostility to Muslims: 50,000 of the riot victims of 2002 continue to languish in extreme poverty, displaced in 83 “relief colonies”. Although there is only one known instance of his visiting them, Modi has derisively described the camps as Muslim “baby-making factories”. He continues to refuse to wear a Muslim skullcap on the election trail, saying that the cap is a “symbol of appeasement of the minority”.
Moreover, on Modi’s watch there was not a single Muslim candidate in Gujarat for member of the legislative assembly on the ticket of his Bharatiya Janata Party; across India, if you exclude Kashmir, there are only two Muslim BJP candidates. Muslims make up 13 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion people, but of the 449 BJP candidates now running for the lower house of parliament, all but eight are Hindus. One of Modi’s closest associates, Amit Shah, has gone even further, and called on voters in Uttar Pradesh to reject parties that put up Muslim candidates. He also openly urged voters to use the ballot box to seek “revenge for the insult meted out to our community. This election will be a reply to those who have been ill-treating our mothers and sisters” – this in an area where dozens were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots last year.
This led to an almost unprecedented formal ban by the Electoral Commission of India on 11 April, stopping Shah from making any further public appearances in this campaign in Uttar Pradesh. He had previously been banned from entering his native Gujarat, where he stands accused of murder, using the local police as his proxies. Amid loud protests, the Uttar Pradesh ban was lifted on 18 April. Amit Shah is widely expected to become India’s home minister. If Modi is a frightening figure, it is properly terrifying to imagine Shah controlling the fate of 1.2 billion people.
On the campaign trail, whether from pragmatism or otherwise, Modi has largely kept his Hindu nationalism hidden and presented himself throughout as an able, technocratic administrator who can turn the country’s economy around and stimulate much-needed development. It could therefore be that the liberal elite are worrying needlessly and that India will get a leader who can kick-start the economy, who is incorruptible and who has left his sectarian past well behind him.
One can only hope so. Because, if the polls are right, Modi will win this election by some margin and we are likely to see many more images of the man plastered around the country over the next five years.
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contd/---
at its highest level
