Narendra Modi: the divisive manipulator who charmed
the world
This
week the Indian prime minister makes a triumphant visit to the UK after cosying
up to everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to Rupert Murdoch. What’s behind the
uncritical embrace of a man who has presided over a rising tide of
assassinations and religious zealotry, and driven the country’s writers and
artists into revolt?
Modi’s
speeches about his country’s cruelly postponed and now imminent glory have
packed stadiums around the world with ecstatic Indians. Photograph: Javed
Dar/Xinhua Press/Corbis
Monday
9 November 2015 17.37 GMTLast modified on Tuesday 10
November 201509.49 GMT
In 2005, when Narendra Modi was
the chief minister of the wealthy Indian state of Gujarat, local police
murdered a criminal called Sheikh Sohrabuddin in cold blood. At an election
rally in 2007 for the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP, Modi assured his citizens
that Sohrabuddin “got what he deserved”. What should be done, he asked, to a
man found possessing illegal arms? The pumped-up crowd shouted back: “Mari nakho-mari nakho!” (Kill him, kill him!)
The
lynch mob’s cry was repeated in a village near Delhi last month as zealotsbeat to death a Muslim farmer they
suspected – wrongly – of keeping beef in his house. While Modi makes a
triumphant visit to the UK after more than a year as India’s prime minister,
the Hindu supremacists are, as the novelist Mukul Kesavan wrote
last month, in “full hunting mode, head up and howling”. In recent weeks,
activists and scholars have been shot dead amid a nationwide campaign against
“Hindu-baiters” that targets secular intellectuals and “westernised” women as
well as public figures with Muslim and Christian names, and western NGOs such
as Greenpeace. The assassinations follow months of violence and intimidating
rhetoric by Hindu supremacists. A range of public figures, from Shah Rukh Khan,
Bollywood’s biggest star, to India’s respected central banker, Raghuram Rajan,
have spoken out against the rising tide of sectarian hatred. More than 40 of
India’s most distinguished writers havereturned their awards to
the Sahitya Academy, the national literature academy. Many others, including
artists, scholars, filmmakers and scientists, have since joined the protests,
which reached boiling point after Hindu fanatics lynched at least four people
in connection with beef-eating.
Modi
with David Cameron in Australia last year. Photograph: LUKAS COCH / POOL/EPA
Modi
turned beef into an incendiary issue during his run for India’s highest
political office; he and his party colleagues reinfused it with anti-minorities
venom during recent local elections in the state of Bihar. The chief minister
of one of India’s richest states declared last month that Muslims could only
live in the country if they stopped eating beef. The house magazine of the RSS,
the parent outfit of Hindu nationalists, cited ancient scriptures to justify
the killing of “sinners” who slaughter cows. The culture minister Mahesh Sharma
said of protesting authors: “If they say they are unable to write, let them
first stop writing. We will then see.” On Saturday, Modi hinted at his own
views on the subject by posing for pictures with organisers of a Delhi
demonstration against protesting writers, where slogans such as: “Hit the
fraudulent literati with boots” and, “Presstitutes suck up to Europeans” had
echoed.
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On
the day of Modi’s election last May, I wrote in the Guardian that India was entering its most sinister
phase since independence. Those who had monitored Modi’s words and
deeds, noted their consistency, and feared that Hindu supremacism could deliver
a mortal blow to India’s already enfeebled democratic institutions and
pluralist traditions had come to much the same conclusion. Modi is a stalwart
member of the RSS, a paramilitary organisation explicitly modelled on European
fascist parties, whose members have been found routinely guilty of violence
against Indian minorities. A pogrom in Modi-ruled Gujarat in 2002 killed more
than 1,000 Muslims and displaced tens of thousands. (It was what prompted the
US and UK governments to impose a visa ban on Modi). Whether or not Modi was
personally complicit in the murder and gang rapes, they had clearly
been “planned in advance”, as Human Rights Watch said in the first of countless
reports on the violence, “and organised with the extensive participation of the
police and state government officials”. Among the few people convicted was Maya
Kodnani, Modi’s ministerial colleague, and a fanatic called Babu Bajrangi, who
crowed to a journalist that he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a
heavily pregnant woman, and claimed that Modi sheltered him after the riots and
even changed three judges in order for him to be released on bail (Modi has not
responded to these allegations).
Modi turned beef into an incendiary issue during
his run for India’s highest political office
Though
sentenced to dozens of years in prison, Kodnani and Bajrangi are frequently
granted bail and allowed to roam free in Modi’s India. India’s foremost investigative body,
the CBI, had accused Modi’s consigliere, Amit Shah, who is now president of the
BJP, of ordering the execution of Sohrabuddin (among others), but withdrew its
case against him last year, citing lack of evidence. Meanwhile, Teesta
Setalvad, a human rights activist and one of Modi’s most persistent critics, is
saved from arrest only by the interventions of the supreme court.
Modi
conveyed early the audacity – and tawdriness – of power when in May 2014 he
flew from Gujarat to the oath-taking ceremony on a private corporate jet
emblazoned with the name of his closest corporate chum. In January this year he
turned out in a $15,000 Savile Row suit with
personalised pinstripes to hug Barack Obama. Launching Digital India (a
programme to connect thousands of villages to the internet) in Silicon Valley
last month, the eager new international player seemingly shoved Mark Zuckerburg
aside to clear space for a photo-op for himself (the video has gone viral). One
of his most fervent cheerleaders in India now complains that the prime minister
is like a new bride remaking herself for her powerful and wealthy in-laws.
Narendra Modi calls for unity in wake of Muslim
man’s murder for eating beef
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Consequently,
many in his own neglected family are turning against him. On Sunday, his
party’s vicious and lavishly funded campaign in elections in Bihar, one of
India’s largest and poorest states, ended in humiliating defeat. But Modi’s
glossy makeover seems to have seduced many in the west; Rupert Murdoch tweeted
after a recent meeting that Modi is India’s “best leader with best policies
since independence”. Sheryl Sandberg declared she was changing her
Facebook profile in honour of Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley in September. His
libertarian hosts did not seem to know or care that, just as Modi was arriving
in California to promote Digital India, his factotums were shutting down the
internet in Kashmir, or that earlier this year his government advocated a
draconian law that the Indian police used repeatedly to arrest people posting
opinions on Facebook and Twitter. Nor did the Bay area’s single-minded
data-monetisers fuss about the fact that Modi had launched Digital India in
India itself with a private party for his most fanatical troll-troopers –
people who are, as the magazine Caravan put it, “a byword in online terror,
hate and misogyny”. In a dog-eat-dog world primarily organised around lucrative
deal-making, the only value seems to be economic growth – albeit, for a small
minority.
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Modi’s
speeches about his country’s cruelly postponed and now imminent glory have
packed stadiums around the world with ecstatic Indians. At Wembley this
weekend, some more grownup men and women chanting “Modi, Modi!” will embarrass
themselves in history. The seemingly unembarrassable Tory government discovered
new muscles while kowtowing to Xi Jinping, and will no doubt find them useful
for some Indian style-prostration, sashtanga pranam, before Modi.
Modi
was always an odd choice to lead India into the 21st century. Meeting him early
in his career, the distinguished social psychologist Ashis Nandy assessed Modi
as a “classic, clinical case” of the “authoritarian personality”, with its “mix
of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life” and “fantasies of
violence”. Such a figure could describe refugee camps with tens of thousands of
Muslim survivors of the 2002 pogrom as “child-breeding centres”. Asked
repeatedly about his culpability in the killings, Modi insisted that his only
mistake was bad media management. Pressed repeatedly over a decade about such
extraordinary lack of remorse, he finally said that he regretted the killings as
he would a “puppy being run over by a car”.
With
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
More
importantly, Modi was a symptom, easily identified through his many European
and Asian predecessors, of capitalism’s periodic and inevitable dysfunction: he
was plainly the opportune manipulator of mass disaffection with uneven and
unstable growth, who distracts a fearful and atomised citizenry with the
demonisation of minorities, scapegoating of ostensibly liberal, cosmopolitan
and “rootless” people, and promises of “development”, while facilitating crony
capitalism. To aspiring but thwarted young Indians Modi presented himself as a
social revolutionary, the son of a humble tea-seller challenging entrenched
dynasties, as well as an economic moderniser. He promised to overturn an old
social and political order that they saw, correctly, as dominated by a venal
and unresponsive ruling class. His self-packaging as a pious and virtuous man
of the people seemed especially persuasive as corruption scandals tainted the
media as well as politicians and businessmen in the years leading up to 2014.
Modi’s
earliest supporters in his bid for supreme power, however, were India’s richest
people, lured by special favours of cheap land and tax concessions. Ratan Tata,
the steel and car-making tycoon, was one of the first big industrialists to
embrace him in the wake of the anti-Muslim pogrom. Mukesh Ambani,
another business magnate and owner of a 27-storey home in the city of slums,
Mumbai, soon hailed his “grand vision”. His brother declared Modi “king among
kings”. Even the Economist, reporting on Modi-mania among “private-equity
types, blue-chip executives and the chiefs of India’s big conglomerates” was
startled by the “creepy sycophancy”. It shouldn’t have been: in Modi’s India
the Ambanis are fast heading towards a Berlusconi-style domination of both news
and entertainment content and delivery mechanisms.
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Media
management has ceased to be a problem for Modi; the television channels and
press owned by loyal supporters hectically build him up as India’s saviour.
Modi also attracted academics, writers and journalists who had failed to
flourish in the old regime – the embittered pedantocrats and wannabes who
traditionally serve in the intellectual rearguard of illiberal movements.
Predictably, these victims of ressentiment – who languished, as Nietzsche
wrote, in “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge” – are now taking
over Indian institutions, and filling the airwaves with their “rabid
mendaciousness and rage”.
Many
non-resident Indians, denied full dignity in the white man’s world, also
hitched their low self-esteem to Modi’s hot-air balloons about the coming
Indian Century. The Modi Toadies, as they are widely referred to on social
media, have turned out to be an intriguingly diverse lot: they range from
small-town zealots campaigning against romantic love between Muslim and Hindus
to a publicist called Swapan Dasgupta, a former Trotskyite and self-proclaimed
“anglophile”. But it should not be forgotten that a variety of global elite
networks went to work strenuously on Modi’s behalf: the slick public-relations
firm APCO that works with Central Asian despots and suave technocrats as much
as the rented armies of cyberthugs rampaging through social media and the
comment sections of online articles.
Protestors
after the murder of a Muslim who was beaten to death for allegedly eating beef.
Photograph: Rupak de Chowdhuri/Reuters/Corbis
A
former special adviser to Tony Blair authored a hagiography for
English-speaking readers. The Labour peer Meghnad Desai helped alchemise Modi’s
record of assisting big corporations into an electorally potent myth of
“efficiency” and “rapid development”. Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya –
two Ivy League Indian economists charged with “poverty-denialism” by the recent
Nobel laureate Angus Deaton – said in a letter to the Economist that the
anti-Muslim pogrom in Modi’s Gujarat was actually a “riot”. As Modi appeared
likely to become prime minister, the intellectual grunts at American thinktanks
churned out op-eds hailing Modi as the man to accelerate India’s
neoliberalisation, and reorient its foreign policy towards America and Israel.
Many foreign correspondents and “India hands” lost their intellectual
confidence and judgement before such diligently manufactured consensus.
Thus,
Modi rose frictionlessly and swiftly from disgrace to respectability in a world
where money, power and status are the measure of everything, and where human
beings, as Balzac bitterly wrote, are reduced to being either fools or knaves.
He may be very far from fulfilling his electoral promise of creating adequate
jobs for the one million Indians who enter the workforce every month. He still
deals mostly in fantasy, gushing about “smart cities” and “bullet trains”, and
a digital India in which fibre-optic cables will bring remote villages online.
But among global elites who see India as a fast-growing economy and
counterweight to China, poverty-denialism shades easily into pogrom-denialism.
A tweet by a New-York-based venture capitalist responding to protests by Indian
writers sums up the prevailing morality: “The icons of new India are the wealth
creators. Nobody gives a rat’s ass anymore about the writers.”
He still deals mostly in fantasy, gushing about
“smart cities” and “bullet trains”
Modi’s
ascent through a variety of enablers, whitewashers and wealth-creators invites
us to probe our own complicity as fools and knaves in increasingly everyday
forms of violence and dispossession. For Modi’s ruthless economism is a
commonplace phenomenon, marked everywhere by greed, sophistry and a contempt
for human life and dignity – symptoms, as GN Devy, one of India’s most bracing
thinkers, put it last month, of a worldwide transition into a “post-human”
existence.
In
India itself, the prostration before Mammon, bellicose nationalism, boorish
anti-intellectualism, and fear and hatred of the weak predates Modi. It did not
seem so brazen previously because the now supplanted Indian elite disguised
their hegemony with what Edmund Burke called “pleasing illusions”: in this
case, reverential invocations of Gandhi and Nehru, and of the noble “idea of
India”. Thus, the Congress party, which first summoned the malign ghosts of
Hindu supremacism in the 1980s and presided over the massacre of more than
3,000 Sikhs in 1984, could claim to represent secularism. And liberal
intellectuals patronised by the regime could remain silent when Indian security
forces in Kashmir filled up mass graves with dissenters to the idea of India,
gang-raped with impunity, and stuck live wires into the penises of suspected
militants. The rare protestor among Indian writers was scorned for straying
from literature into political activism. TV anchors and columnists competed
with each other in whipping up patriotic rage and hatred against various
internal and external enemies of the idea of India. The “secular” nationalists
of the ancient regime are now trying to disown their own legitimate children
when they recoil fastidiously from the Hindu supremacists foaming at the mouth.
One
can only hope that the barefaced viciousness of Hindu supremacists will jolt
the old elites out of their shattered dogmas and pieties while politicising a
cheated young generation. It is true that Modi and his Toadies embody without
shame, ambivalence or euphemism the brutality of power; they don’t give a rat’s
ass about pleasing illusions. Yet their assaults on the authorised idea of
India are creating a fissure in the unfeeling monolith through which a humane
politics and culture might flow. The alternative, as recent weeks show, is a
post-human India, where lynch mobs roused by their great leader shout: “Kill
him! Kill him!”
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