Mad About Modi


In Sir Vidia’s Shadow, Paul Theroux recounts a moment in which his friend, the notorious misanthrope V.S. Naipaul, urges the Indian high commissioner in Nairobi to do more than just meekly protest Kenya’s harsh treatment of its Indian minority. “India is a big, powerful country,” Naipaul tells the diplomat, yet the Kenyan government had been treating its nationals as though it were “just another shabby little country.” The high commissioner insists that he has sent the Kenyan government a strongly worded letter, and Naipaul replies by calling on India to send a gunboat to shell Mombasa, Kenya’s port city. “When Mombasa is in flames they will think twice about persecuting Indians here. Aren’t there fuel depots in Mombasa? Yes, they will leave the Indians alone for some little time.”
Theroux was, of course, conveying that Naipaul could be a lunatic and a hothead—shelling Mombasa was a ludicrous idea. But this exchange tells us more than that. For one thing, it explains why Narendra Modi, India’s newly minted prime minister, has emerged as one of the world’s most popular and most polarizing political figures.

Many of Modi’s most loyal followers are indeed Indians and people of Indian origin living outside of India. This might strike you as contradictory: If these Modiphiles are such devoted Indian nationalists, why would they leave their native country to become cardiologists in Houston or financial engineers in Singapore? The reason is that until very recently, India has offered scant opportunities for its best and brightest. Many Indian émigrés are of the view that the best thing they can do for their country is to make something of themselves abroad, and to then spread their wealth and influence back home. By promising to make India a country they can be proud of, and a place where bright young Indians can make their fortunes, Modi tells these reluctant exiles exactly what they want to hear.

First, India was forced to open its economy in 1991 in the wake of a balance of payments crisis. The reforms that followed sparked sustained economic growth that in turn led to rising expectations, particularly among members of India’s growing urban middle class. But India’s economic growth has come disproportionately in high-tech services, a sector that draws on a pitifully small and relatively privileged swath of India’s population of 1.25 billion. The political coalition for economic reform thus wound up far smaller than it might have had its benefits spread more widely, as in the fast-growing East Asian economies. Nevertheless, this experience convinced at least some Indians that what the nation really needed was to deepen economic reform, not to abandon it.

Second, the decline of Nehru’s Congress Party coincided with the rise of dozens of communal and caste-based political parties that reflected India’s diversity and its disputatiousness. This political fragmentation led at least some Indians to look to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party as a unifying, truly national alternative to the badly discredited Congress Party. The BJP has traditionally been dominated by parochial Hindu chauvinists hailing from India’s Hindi-speaking heartland. But under Modi, the party shows signs of becoming something quite different.

If Modi succeeds, however, India will do more than alleviate poverty, important though that is. It will become the “big, powerful country” of Naipaul’s dreams—the kind of place that can afford to ignore Pakistan, its hostile, dysfunctional neighbor, and that won’t get pushed around by China. So you can see why Modi attracted support not just from India’s urban middle class, but also from hundreds of thousands of people of Indian descent in countries around the world, including the United States: He is promising that all of these people will be able to walk a little taller in a world that has long dismissed India as a land of “hunger and snakes.”

Propagandhi711 wrote:article written by? that's right: reihan salam. yawn

newly converted doing a bang up job as they say in india in finding obscure articles to salve butthurt.

Merlot Daruwala wrote:

Propagandhi711 wrote:article written by? that's right: reihan salam. yawn

newly converted doing a bang up job as they say in india in finding obscure articles to salve butthurt.

You have a better theory why 19000 folks would travel from across the nation to jam the stadium to hear from the leader of a country they left behind long ago? And who got provoked into a violent rage at a reporter asking them if they're planning to return to India??