Not since the British barrister Cyril Radcliffe was flown to Delhi from London for forty-eight hours in 1947 to redraw the subcontinent’s map had India’s fate been thrust into the hands of a man so totally isolated from its people. And there was something of a reprise of 1947 in the way Singh’s stewardship was portrayed during his first term. Those who profited from his reforms praised him—as the British once praised the officials who oversaw the dissolution of the Indian empire—as wise, thoughtful, visionary, compassionate. An army of intellectuals rose up to defend him; the victims of his reforms were airbrushed.
It was an epoch of such discombobulating paradox that it could induce vertigo in anyone attempting to make sense of it. All around you was evidence of epic social upheaval: families wrenched apart, millions migrating from the decaying countryside into expanding slums in the cities, thousands of indebted farmers killing themselves every year, massacres of peaceful protesters demanding land, the torching of villages by government-sanctioned militias, the mass corralling of defenceless tribal populations into pens for refusing to cede their land to mining barons, extra-judicial killings, and rape, plunder, torture, mutilation, murder of the poor. But open the newspapers or switch on the television, and you saw a nation enjoying the best of times: stories of cricketers being auctioned for millions of dollars, blonde cheerleaders imported from the West shaking their hips at gaudy Indian Premier League events, Western politicians and investors streaming in and out of India, Hollywood celebrities dancing at opulent Indian weddings, Bollywood parties, billionaires’ beach soirees, dollar millionaires proliferating, Indian billionaires competing for top spots on the Forbes index of the global rich. It was an age of audacious gaslighting by the powers-that-be and their minions among the opinion-formers. India, under its first unelected and unaccountable technocrat prime minister, degenerated into what the Princeton economist Atul Kohli called a ‘two-track democracy’, where ‘common people are only needed at the time of elections, and then it is best that they all go home, forget politics, and let the “rational” elite quietly run a pro-business show’.35 ‘Growth’, accruing to the few, was the principal metric by which the government’s performance—and the nation’s worth—were judged: whether or not its proceeds percolated down to the many was an afterthought at best.
In his second term, abandoned by his flock of fickle worshippers, Singh took to amplifying his sycophancy—lavishing praise on Rahul Gandhi, pleading with him to join the cabinet, telling the press about the books recommended to him by the young backbencher. But Congress sidelined Singh just as briskly as it drafted him into service. Against Modi went up the latest scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
In his last press conference—his third in the decade that he was prime minister—Singh attempted to make a case for himself. It was not going to be easy. So he mumbled inaudibly: ‘History will judge me kindly.’ Substantial portions of the countryside were by then firmly in the grip of Maoist insurgents. Rural India remained a hellishly violent place. Urban India was a theatre of hideous inequality. In the east, the Chinese continued freely to encroach on Indian territory. To the West, the malign men who directed the assault on Mumbai were openly inciting terror against India. Even India’s relationship with the US, so highly prized by Singh, had suddenly deteriorated over a diplomatic spat. Hindu nationalists stood poised to seize the reins at home. The once glittering citadels of Congress power in the capital looked drained of colour and life in the summer of 2014. They were like the deserted palaces of Shah Reza Pehlavi just before the Ayatollah Khomeini glided into Tehran.
Part Two
INDIA UNDER MODI
5
Cult
Like all the moral pygmies, I praised in vain,
The ever greatest clown—The Leader, born-again.
And bending halfway down, I kissed his ass …
May long you live, Beloved Nicholas!
—Adrian Paunescu1
There wasn’t a shadow of resistance as Narendra Modi stormed Delhi in the summer of 2014. After six decades of faltering secularism, India yielded spectacularly to the Hindu nationalist insurgency. Congress was wiped out. The BJP had an absolute majority in parliament for the first time. Modi’s triumph shattered a thirty-year-long spell of rule by coalition: the last time a lone party was hoisted into power was in 1984, when most Indians alive in 2014 hadn’t attained voting age. Modi’s achievement was of an epoch-making magnitude. It heralded, in the words of a former adviser to Singh, the birth of a ‘second republic’.2 He meant that the India founded in 1947 by Congress was dead, and now Modi, who had drained his youth propagandising for the RSS, would wield the largest democratic mandate in more than a generation to recast the republic in the mould of his indurated ideology. Who was going to restrain him? Modi appeared invincible even before he entered office, the most powerful Indian politician since Indira Gandhi.
At a meeting of Congress weeks before the vote, a senior leader of the party, a Cambridge-educated Brahmin and standard-bearer of Indian secularism, had declared with a touch of hubris: ‘Narendra Modi will never become the prime minister. But if he wants to serve tea here, we will find a place for him.’3 Modi was the hand grenade hurled by all those who had been sneered at, stamped upon, marginalised, subjected to cultural condescension and objectified for anthropological amusement by the preening cast of English-speaking elites fostered by India’s venal secular establishment. The mood in Delhi was euphoric as he took the oath of office. People victimised by Old India saw him as one of their own: for some, an agent of their hopes; for others, an embodiment of their rage.
Modi was born in 1950 in a family of lower-caste Gujaratis who traditionally extracted oil from seeds for a living. His mother cleaned dishes. His father hawked tea at the local railway station. It was in the training camps of the RSS—which introduced volunteers to the vast pantheon of villains who had plundered and emasculated India down the ages and exhorted them to shed their Hindu impotence—that Modi’s political and spiritual awakening occurred. The effect on his young mind was so overpowering that, by his early twenties, having attempted nothing else in life, Modi adopted the RSS as his family, abandoned his wife and mother, and wandered through India as a catechist of the Hindu nationalist cause.
His glacial progression up the ranks of the RSS paralleled the gradual collapse of the edifice bequeathed by Nehru. By 2001, he had spent close to a decade in Delhi. His impressive titles and heavy responsibilities—general secretary of the party, the link between the BJP and the RSS, in charge of campaigns in a clutch of northern states—were only partly a reflection of his outstanding skills as an organiser. The principal reason for keeping him in Delhi was to keep him out of Gujarat. The BJP’s hold on that state, a reliable bastion of middle-class Hindu nationalism, began slipping in the 1990s under the strain of internal factionalism. Modi, pitting one side against the other, was seen to be aggravating the schisms. So he was brought to the capital and distracted with other duties.4 In 2001, a massive earthquake in Gujarat opened up the path for his return. He borrowed a plane from an industrialist and landed on the scene of devastation before the state’s chief minister, Keshubhai Patel, could make it. It was a finely calibrated move. Modi did not appear insubordinate; Patel looked incompetent, which he was.5
In early October, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee summoned Modi to his residence and offered him Patel’s job. Modi—according to his version of events—turned down the offer. ‘That is not my work. I’ve been away from Gujarat for six long years,’ he claims to have protested to Vajpayee. In reality, Modi had spent the preceding months traducing his rival.6 L.K. Advani, the deputy prime minister who represented Gujarat’s capital in parliament, supported Modi. The RSS wanted him in Gujarat. Days later, he was sworn in as the state’s chief minister. It was his first job in elective politics. He was not expected to last long. Then, four months after his arrival, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims from the site of the demolished Babri mosque to Gujarat was set on fire. F
ifty-eight charred bodies of Hindu passengers were recovered.
Before the cause of the arson could be ascertained, Modi called it the work of Islamist terrorists. A pogrom of Muslims—one of the worst episodes of communal bloodletting—ensued. In one mixed neighbourhood, a mob of 5,000 Hindus meticulously worked its way through a slum: ninety-seven Muslims were hacked to death and a mosque was blown up with liquefied petroleum gas before they called it a day. Across the road from the scene of carnage stood a reserve police quarters. No one lifted a finger.7 And nobody was immune from the terror. When former Member of Parliament Ehsan Jafri was found to be sheltering 250 members of his community, he was dragged out of his house by a mob of Hindus and sliced open with swords and torched alive. Jafri had spent the day making desperate calls to Modi’s office. The deputy prime minister, the most extreme face of Hindu nationalism before Modi appeared on the scene, reached out to his protégé on Jafri’s behalf. No help was sent. Sixty-nine people seeking refuge inside Jafri’s house were killed over seven hours.8
The lives of at least a thousand Muslims, by a conservative estimate, were taken on Modi’s watch in 2002. Vajpayee, at the head of a coalition of nearly two dozen parties, came under intense pressure to sack him. The RSS, overjoyed by Modi’s refusal to express contrition, overruled the prime minister. (Vajpayee is today remembered as a ‘moderate’ by Indian liberals. Their minds have already expunged the inconvenient memory of his first major public address after the worst anti-Muslim violence in decades, in which, instead of rebuking Modi, he lashed out at the victims, telling a crowd in Goa that Muslims ‘are not interested in living in peace’.)9 A special investigative team constituted by the Supreme Court did not find adequate evidence of Modi’s complicity in the violence. But of incompetence there could be no question: Modi failed in every respect. Was he remorseful? Yes, he told a foreign reporter: he wished he had managed the media better.10
The riots made Modi a reviled figure outside Gujarat: liberal Indians likened him to Hitler, the United States denied him a visa, and Britain and the European Union boycotted him. They galvanised the opposition and drew a phalanx of anti-BJP activists to Gujarat. Modi survived. ‘Skilfully wading his way through the onslaught of a massive slander campaign,’ he ‘dealt a convincing and crushing defeat to the principal opposition party, the magnitude of which stunned friends and foes alike.’ So says his official profile published by the Gujarat government after the state elections following the bloodshed that returned him to power.11 Effaced from that effusive panegyric is the labour of the thousands of RSS volunteers, party workers and veteran leaders who toiled for Modi. The austere martinets of the RSS could not have anticipated, when they deployed the sinews of Hindutva in the service of Modi, that their notoriously collectivist movement was incubating the most potent personality cult since Indira Gandhi.
‘Popular and progressive’, ‘tech-savvy and a true democrat in every sense of the word’, Modi was venerated by the government’s copywriters as a ‘youthful and energetic leader with innovative thoughts’, ‘able and visionary’, a ‘deft negotiator’ engaged ‘effectively, substantially, significantly, transparently and convincingly’ in improving the lives of Gujaratis, and receiving, in return, ‘the love and affection’ of ‘people from villages and cities … belonging to every faith and religion and every economic strata of the society’. These claims were the product not so much of a leap of the imagination as a flight of fancy. Support for Modi was concentrated in two constituencies: religious fanatics itching for the overthrow of the secular state, and free-marketeers hankering for a powerful pro-business leader.
Modi, in many ways, personified the stock provincial yokel India’s metropolitan elites both feared and belittled. They were accustomed to crushing people like him. But Modi’s faith made him unassailable. He was not intimidated by those who looked down on him. He knew they were hollow poseurs. In 2003, leaders of the Confederation of Indian Industry, the pre-eminent lobbying arm of the nation’s proliferating plutocrats, invited him to Delhi and subjected him to hours of invective for his handling of the violence in Gujarat. Modi was unfazed. He dismissed them as a pack of ‘pseudo-secularists’, went back to his state and blessed the formation of a rival pro-Modi body of Gujarati industrialists. The CII scrambled to deliver an ‘unconditional apology’ to Modi for ‘hurting’ his feelings. Modi did not apologise for his beliefs. He exposed the moral vacuity of those who had denounced his beliefs. And having chastened the super-rich, he proceeded to forge a symbiotic relationship with them. Big business thereafter received a personalised service from the chief minister of Gujarat: permissions were expedited, lands cleared, bureaucratic hurdles eliminated and taxes waived off. Modi was recompensed for his favours with lavish praise from captains of what the press adoringly called ‘India Inc.’, as the beneficiaries of economic liberalisation—a measure advanced partly as an antidote to religious extremism—lined up to deodorise the reputation of a man who had come to be seen by wide sections of the society as an unbending trafficker of religious extremism.
The interests of big business and bigotry fused and became indistinguishable in the ‘decisive’ personality of Modi. It was at a meeting organised by the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry that Modi tested his most sinister sectarian dog-whistle in the run-up to the 2007 state elections. Responding to the outcry generated in India by the extra-judicial execution of a Muslim man in police custody in Gujarat, Modi asked his wealthy hosts: ‘If AK-57 rifles are found at the residence of a person … you tell me what I should do: should I not kill them?’ The audience shrieked: ‘Kill them! Kill them!’12 This was the New India, where possession of big cars, higher incomes, modern gadgets did not bury latent murderous impulses; it disinterred them.
Newspapers joined in the act, assailing readers in earnest tones with fables about Modi’s childhood. One story in the Times of India revealed how, as a boy, Modi swam in waters infested with crocodiles and even brought home a baby crocodile. Another published, without a hint of scepticism or irony, Modi’s claim that he could ‘digest any kind of poison’.13 The RSS, alarmed by the personalisation of power, stayed away from the 2007 election. This suited Modi well. He had no opponents left in Gujarat. The one man who challenged him was Haren Pandya. A charismatic Brahmin with a storied RSS pedigree, Pandya dissented from the chief minister in 2002 as Gujarat burned, and deposed before a fact-finding mission. Modi’s office ordered the state’s intelligence director to keep an eye on the renegade. Pandya was shot dead one morning in 2003.14 A group of Muslims was later picked up, charged with Pandya’s murder and thrown in jail. Nearly a decade later, the High Court of Gujarat acquitted all of them.15 But the question of who killed Pandya remains unresolved to this day. It is difficult to brush aside the impression that Modi’s Gujarat, like Putin’s Russia, was a place where circumstances fell into the habit of becoming mysterious when it came to the departure of the leader’s enemies.
Amit Shah, Modi’s closest confidant and dreaded enforcer, was in 2010 charged with involvement in an extortion racket and prohibited from entering Gujarat.16 As Modi’s home minister, responsible for the state’s security, Shah was taped instructing the police repeatedly to stalk a woman with whom his boss, ‘Sahib’, had apparently become besotted.17 Shah was appointed manager of Modi’s prime ministerial campaign and is now the national president of the BJP, and the Supreme Court justice who exonerated Shah was made governor of Kerala on retirement—the first time in India’s history that a retired chief justice was offered a sinecure of such constitutional significance.18
None of this seemed to trouble the tycoons being toasted in Delhi and Davos. They chanted the virtues of democracy abroad while abetting the subversion of democracy at home. Their embrace of Gujarat’s chief minister tightened after Modi’s victory in 2007. Barred from entering the United States, Modi hired an American PR firm, APCO Worldwide, to deterge his image.19 The number of investors, diplomats, politicians and public intellectuals making the hegira t
o Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat where Modi held a biannual business summit, multiplied over the next five years. By 2012, Gujarat received almost a trillion dollars in investment pledges. Only a fraction of this figure trickled into the state, but the legend of Modi was now firmly in place, burnished by the boundless adulation heaped on him by business leaders. In actuality, Gujarat was not very different from the rest of India. It was, as a joint study by the World Bank and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it, ‘a state with very high economic growth but relatively low mobility’.20 People in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala enjoyed a superior standard of life from birth to death than their Gujarati counterparts. If you were a non-Hindu, if you happened to be a Muslim, Gujarat was a pit of horror and humiliation.
Yet, in the minds of many Indians, Gujarat came to be imagined as a subcontinental Shangri La, a land of plenty where roads had no potholes, people enjoyed uninterrupted supply of electricity and clean water and the government attentively served its citizens. The internet became replete with doctored photos that passed off sparkling foreign ports and roads as Gujarati. Whenever scepticism was expressed about the claims made for Gujarat, Modi complained that Gujaratis were being belittled and insulted. Nobody asked why anyone was obliged to respect the people of a state that sustained in power a man of Modi’s malodorous record with repeated plebiscitary ratification. Instead, men of influence prayed impatiently for the day when the rest of India would come to resemble Gujarat. If only ‘India has just five Narendra Modis’, proclaimed the editorial pages of the Financial Express, the house journal of India Inc., in 2008, ‘we would be a great country’.21
Malevolent Republic Page 10
