The Unmasking of Narendra Modi: The violence, insecurity and rage behind the man

by Guest Sun May 15, 2016 1:37 am

https://newrepublic.com/article/133014/new-face-india-anti-gandhi

by Guest Sun May 15, 2016 1:43 am

In October 2001, Modi was appointed chief minister of Gujarat by the BJP leadership in Delhi. It was the first time an RSS pracharak had become chief executive of an Indian state. The impact was apparent soon afterward. In February 2002, 59 Hindus returning from the tenth-anniversary celebration of the destruction of Babri Masjid died in a fire that broke out in a train compartment. Investigations would later point to the fire originating inside the carriage, perhaps from a malfunctioning cooking-gas cylinder, but the Hindu right accused Muslims of storming the train and setting it on fire. Modi flew to the site. Orders were given for the corpses to be brought to Ahmedabad in a convoy of trucks. The corpses were then displayed in the open on the hospital grounds, apparently for the purpose of postmortem examinations, as agitated crowds watched the grisly spectacle.

A retaliatory campaign of extermination by Hindu mobs against Muslims began hours later and lasted for more than two months, resulting in the death of more than 1,000 people and the displacement of 150,000. Women and girls were raped before being mutilated and set on fire. Homes, shops, restaurants, and mosques were looted and burned. The attackers, reportedly guided by computer printouts that listed the addresses of Muslim families, were on many occasions aided by the police or led by legislators in Modi’s government. Many of the killers were identified as belonging to various Hindu right organizations. “Eighteen people from my family died,” a survivor of the onslaught said in “We Have No Orders to Save You,” a 2002 report from Human Rights Watch. “All the women died. My brother, my three sons, one girl, my wife’s mother, they all died. My boys were aged ten, eight, and six. My girl was twelve years old. The bodies were piled up. I recognized them from parts of their clothes used for identification.”

Even by the macabre standards of mass murder in India, there was something unusually disturbing about the Gujarat massacres. They had taken place in a relatively prosperous state, among people given to trade and business, rather than in a less-developed part of the country where a link might be made between deprivation and rage. But this connection in Gujarat, between economic prosperity and primal, sectarian violence, became one of the defining aspects of Modi’s image, in India and among the diaspora, one reaffirming the other, the pride of wealth meeting the pride of identity.

In the aftermath of the massacres, Modi demonstrated not a shred of remorse or regret. In fact, he decided early on to turn questions about the massacres and his role in them into an attack on Gujarat, and on India, especially when the Bush administration decided, in 2005, to deny Modi a diplomatic visa and revoked his tourist/business visa for the “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” that had taken place under him.

In 2007, when asked by Karan Thapar, the host of a show on the Indian television channel CNN-IBN, “Why can’t you say that you regret the killings that happened? Why can’t you say maybe the government should have done more to protect Muslims?” Modi walked out of the interview. In 2013, as he was emerging as a prime ministerial candidate, Modi responded to a similar question with a convoluted analogy. “If someone else is driving, and we are sitting in the back seat, and even then if a small kutte ka baccha comes under the wheel, do we feel pain or not? We do.” Reuters translated kutte ka baccha as “puppy,” which, while technically accurate, missed the point: Kutte ka baccha, or “progeny of a dog,” is an insult.

by Guest Sun May 15, 2016 1:49 am

Three police officers who gave the National Commission for Minorities a transcript of a public speech delivered by Modi seven months after the massacres, in which he called camps set up for displaced Muslims “baby-producing centers,” were summarily transferred. R.B. Sreekumar, a senior police officer who testified to a commission set up by the Gujarat government to investigate the train fire and the massacres, which was headed initially by a single retired judge considered to be a Modi loyalist, was denied promotion and charged by the government with giving out “classified information.” He had recorded a session during which a senior Modi official had coached him about how he should answer questions, including “tell[ing] the commission that no better steps could be taken” in terms of preventing the violence. Rahul Sharma, a police officer who gave the commission phone records allegedly proving that killers involved in the massacres had regularly been in touch with politicians and police officers, was charged by the Gujarat government with violating the state’s Official Secrets Act. Haren Pandya, a minister in the Gujarat government who became a bitter rival of Modi’s, and who testified in secret to an independent fact-finding panel about the riots, was murdered in March 2003, after he was publicly identified as a whistle-blower and forced to resign his ministerial post. A dozen men, supposedly Islamist terrorists, were arrested for Pandya’s murder; all of them were acquitted eight years later. Pandya’s father maintained that Modi had orchestrated the killing.

by Guest Sun May 15, 2016 1:50 am

In contrast, those who were indicted and sentenced to imprisonment for taking part in the massacres seemed to have a benevolent, gentle state looking out for their well-being. Maya Kodnani, an RSS member and BJP legislator, named by Modi as the Gujarat Minister for Women and Child Development in 2007, was in 2012 sentenced to 28 years in prison for leading a mob that killed 95 people, including 32 women and 33 children. In 2014, she was let out on furlough due to poor health, and she has since been spotted taking selfies at a yoga retreat on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Babu Bajrangi, a leader in the Bajrang Dal, a militant faction, who was also convicted for his role in the Gujarat massacres, told the investigative magazine Tehelka in 2007 that Modi was “a real man” who had changed judges on his behalf on a number of occasions to get him out of jail. Given a life sentence in 2012, Bajrangi is frequently out of prison on furlough, for reasons ranging from attending his niece’s wedding to getting his eyes checked.

The circumstances, when laid down clearly, are so damning that it is astonishing that they can be airbrushed from Modi’s record. But they show how, in Gujarat, Modi engineered a hybrid vigilante-police state, one in which the righteous were punished and perpetrators rewarded.

by Guest Sun May 15, 2016 1:52 am

The truth about the Gujarat model was more complex. What had been achieved, in a state that was already more developed than many other parts of India, was a layer of infrastructure and globalized trade—roads, power, exports—topped off with a thick, treacly layer of hype. The state poverty figures under Modi remained unimpressive and employment levels stalled, while the quality of available jobs went down, with lower wages in both rural and urban areas compared to the national average. Almost half of Gujarat’s children under the age of five were undernourished, in keeping with the shameful national average. (Panagariya, the Modi loyalist, argued that Indian children were stunted, even when compared to impoverished sub-Saharan African populations, not because of malnutrition, which was a “myth,” but because of genetic limitations to their height.) The number of girls born in Gujarat compared to boys remains low, suggesting a continued bias for male children in a country known for its grotesquely patriarchal norms; and yet the state is in the forefront of providing surrogate mothers for wealthy Western populations.

by Guest Sun May 15, 2016 1:52 am

Much was made of Modi’s decision in 2008 to allow the Indian automobile manufacturer Tata to open a car factory in Gujarat, in particular after an attempt to do so in the traditionally left-leaning state of West Bengal had resulted in a violent farmers’ uprising. Less was said, however, about the low-cost cars made at the Tata plant, which were in the habit of catching fire. As for the rhetoric about creating a new Singapore, Shanghai, or South Korea—Modi’s metaphors of growth reveal a preference for authoritarian, homogeneous social systems—it has still remained rhetoric. A new city on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, constructed by architects brought in from Shanghai and touted, in 2012, as “the largest urbanization project in Indian history,” turned out, three years later, as The Wall Street Journal reported, to consist of mostly empty office buildings.

by Guest Sun May 15, 2016 2:02 am

In February, Kanhaiya Kumar, a student leader at Jawaharlal Nehru University, a public university in Delhi portrayed as an elite left bastion by the Hindu right, was arrested by the Delhi police on the orders of a BJP minister for sedition. During two of Kumar’s court appearances, lawyers (or men who claimed to be lawyers) assaulted students and faculty who had come to show their solidarity with Kumar. For good measure, they also beat up journalists who attempted to record the violence.

As in the 2002 massacres and their aftermath, the degree of violence under Modi’s rule differs depending on the target. In the case of Mohammad Akhlaq, a Muslim man lynched in September on the suspicion of eating beef, it was a mob at the door with swords and pistols. When a group of writers returned the national awards they had received in protest of the Modi government’s sectarianism, a Bollywood actor led a march against these writers for having “hurt the spirit of India,” ending with a much-publicized meeting with Modi.

Against this backdrop, with violence piling up almost faster than can be recorded, Modi has functioned as a talking mask. Despite his ubiquity on social media, with two Twitter feeds, one personal and one official, and despite being constantly photographed in expensive clothes—he wore a reportedly $16,000 suit made on Savile Row when meeting Obama in Delhi last January, a gift to him from a businessman, which was auctioned off later—he is perhaps the most closed-off head of state India has seen. He rarely gives interviews to the media, and never to journalists who might be critical of him. But he is always making pronouncements, sometimes providing free internet for rural India with the assistance of Mark Zuckerberg, sometimes solving climate change for the world in a Twitter conversation with @potus, tweeting an endless stream of banalities.

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The Unmasking of Narendra Modi: The violence, insecurity and rage behind the man

The Unmasking of Narendra Modi: The violence, insecurity and rage behind the man

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