The hunting of defenceless minorities has become so normalised under Modi that often there is no spark for violence. The victimisation of Muslims lay simply in the thrill of being vicious. Consider the events over the course of a single month in 2017. On 9 June, a mob of ‘educated’ Hindus in Delhi nearly lynched a young reporter when they discovered that he was a Muslim from Kashmir. He was so badly bruised that he couldn’t move for days.26 On 19 June, more than a dozen Muslims in central and southern India were arrested and charged with sedition—one of the gravest offences on India’s statute books—following complaints from their Hindu neighbours that they had been celebrating Pakistan’s win against India in the cricket World Cup the previous night.27 On 22 June, Hindu passengers on a train picked on a group of Muslims, shrieked ‘anti-national’—the favourite phrase of Hindu supremacists—into their faces, pulled their beards and then stabbed to death Junaid, a sixteen-year-old Muslim boy returning home after shopping for Eid in Delhi.28 The Great Leader, touring the United States, took no notice. On the day that Junaid was knifed, Modi tweeted a snippet from his speech to expatriate admirers in the United States: ‘India is a youthful nation with youthful dreams and aspirations. It is our constant endeavour to turn these aspirations into achievements.’29 Not a word about the youthful dreams snuffed out by the mob in that stream of banalities.
The arid hate of Modi’s India has desiccated what is perhaps the most potent remedy for the curse of religious schism: romantic love that transcends the bounds of religion. Inter-faith couples have been exposed to the furies of Hindu men yelling ‘Love Jihad’—a phrase that captures all the psychological dysmorphia of its believers, who say that Muslim men are buying flashy clothes with cash channelled to them by Islamic governments, seducing impressionable Hindu women and then converting them to Islam. It is an old bugbear, forged in envy and spite, that has become monstrously invigorated in Modi’s New India. In 2018, a Bangalore-based sales manager doxxed inter-religious couples, posting on Facebook what he called ‘a list of girls who have become victims of love jihad’.30 Muslim men spotted with Hindu women have been brutally mauled. Muslim–Hindu weddings have been disrupted and attacked by Hindu gangs and leaders of the ruling party.31 In 2017, in Yogi’s state, when a groom was pulled from a court building where he was to be married and horrifically beaten up, the police attempted to intervene.32 The following year, when a woman in Yogi’s bailiwick suspected of having a relationship with a Muslim man was ‘rescued’ by Hindu men and handed over to the authorities, the police filmed themselves physically assaulting her for choosing a ‘mullah’ over Hindu men.33 The video of the assault joined the library of murder reels whose most chilling entry was made by a man in Rajasthan, in 2017, who had his nephew shoot the entire episode. It shows its star, Shambhulal Regar, sliding up to a Muslim labourer going about his work and plunging a pickaxe in his back. The Muslim man, unaware he is being filmed, falls to the ground, faintly mouthing the words ‘I am dead’, at which point Regar addresses the camera: ‘Jihadis—this is what will happen to you if you spread love jihad in our country.’ He then showers his victim with kerosene, throws a match on him and walks away as flames consume the body.
When Regar was arrested, more than 500 people from across the country donated Rs 300,000 to a fund launched in his name.34 The government’s rush to freeze the bank account could scarcely conceal its complicity in licensing the bigotry that created an enabling climate for Regar’s work. Earlier in the year, the BJP-run government of Rajasthan had instructed schools in the state to take their pupils to a ‘spiritual fair’ where they could learn about the evil of ‘love jihad’.35
The hideousness of a society stigmatising Muslim men as agents of terror and slaughtering them, the full extent of the depletion of empathy in the age of Modi, was revealed only weeks after Regar’s video was posted when the crumpled body of a child—an eight-year-old girl—from a Muslim nomadic family was found in Jammu. Asifa Bano was grazing horses when a pair of Hindu men lured her into the woods. There, according to police reports, they drugged her, then carried her to a temple. Locked inside the temple for three days, she was starved, beaten, repeatedly raped, before being strangled to death. Her bloodied body, draped in the purple dress flecked with yellow roses she wore when she was abducted, was then discarded in a nearby forest. The men accused of the crime were entitled to presumption of innocence, the keystone of any civilised criminal justice system; what followed was akin to a posthumous smearing of a dead child, who was cast as an agent of Muslim separatists in neighbouring Kashmir. Lawyers physically blocked the entrance of a courthouse to stop the authorities from filing charges. There was no discernible outrage at the fact that a Hindu place of worship had been desecrated. What troubled BJP leaders was that the officers investigating the crime were Muslim.36 The Hindu capacity for depraved savagery in Modi’s India is exceeded only by the Hindu capacity for diabolical self-pity.
Unless cushioned by wealth or political connections, criticising him is an extremely hazardous undertaking. For a man who boasts about the size of his chest, Modi is, unsurprisingly, very thin-skinned. Since his election, teachers have lost their jobs, students have landed in prison, a police officer was suspended and a rickshaw driver had criminal charges slapped against him—all for saying unflattering things about the prime minister.37 Even well-heeled agnostics are mercilessly bullied into submission by Modi’s digital mobs. The people operating the pro-Modi Twitter and Facebook accounts are not freelancers but members of an organised online army. According to a repentant former propagandist for Modi, interviewed by the journalist Swati Charturvedi, the shady ‘social media unit’ of the BJP administers ‘a never-ending drip-feed of hate and bigotry against the minorities, the Gandhi family, journalists on the hit list, liberals, anyone perceived as anti-Modi’.38 Even a man as wildly popular as the film star Aamir Khan could not evade the wrath of the ‘social media unit’. In 2016, Khan shared his (Hindu) wife’s apprehensions about rising ‘intolerance’ in Modi’s India. No sooner had he made the remark than a ferocious online campaign was launched against an e-commerce giant that had hired Khan to advertise its brand.39 The company was coerced into severing ties with him. Khan, proved right, never revisited the subject. The message for other celebrities was as unmistakable as it was chilling.
Unlike Muslims who deviate from Muslim fundamentalists, the editor Vir Sanghvi wrote in the Hindustan Times in 2007, Hindus who ‘condemn the worst excesses’ of Hindu nationalists ‘face no real danger’.40 For all the noise they made about the dangers of Hindu nationalism, affluent Hindus seldom radiated fear of saffron-clad supremacists. They saw their own faith as a form of terror indemnity against the savagery of men who slaughtered Muslims and Christians. This secret sense of security bred a smug complacency that blinded them to the danger staring them in the face. But, in September 2017—almost ten years to the date after Sanghvi’s assertion about the innocuousness of Hindu nationalists appeared in print—Gauri Lankesh, a Hindu journalist who did just that, was shot dead in an ambush outside her house.
The decade in between was the decade in which Modi became the undisputed leader of the Hindu-nationalist cause. If his election to the premiership energised Hindu supremacists, his silence as prime minister emboldened them. Lankesh, the scion of a distinguished family, edited a tabloid in Kannada that hardly anybody outside Karnataka read. She struggled to make ends meet and paid the bills by writing occasionally for English newspapers.41 But not for her the preening platitudes about the relative harmlessness of extremists who happened to be her co-religionists: in her work and her life, she was an unrelenting critic of Hindu supremacism and Modi’s project to recast India as a Hindu nation. Seemingly well-to-do and ‘progressive’, she was the archetypal ‘presstitute’ despised by Modi’s myrmidons. Her killing, and the shock it induced, was an exhilarating spectacle for them. ‘A bitch died a dog’s death and now all the puppies are wailing in the same tune,’ a businessman in Gujarat tweeted after she was pro
nounced dead. Another Twitter user rejoiced: ‘So, Commy Gauri Lankesh has been murdered mercilessly … Amen.’ Such ravings would probably not matter—were it not for the fact that the accounts that published them were among those followed by the prime minister.42
This was not an aberration.
Possibly the most social-media savvy politician on earth, Modi follows dozens of accounts on social media that routinely dispense threats of rape against journalists and incite violence against Muslims and ideological dissenters.43 Modi did not disavow the handles that greeted Lankesh’s death with glee by pressing the Unfollow button on Twitter. Nor did he condemn Lankesh’s murder, which, according to investigators, was in all likelihood the work of a Hindu terrorist organisation that had assassinated two other left-leaning intellectuals the previous year.44
Railing against Modi’s silence is perhaps beside the point because the assumptions of Indians outraged by it may already have become obsolete. Modi may have elected to seal his lips because opening them may only expose his inability to contain and control with speech the monster he catalysed and condoned with silence. In December 2018, in Uttar Pradesh, a senior police officer was run to ground and killed by members of an armed mob of cow protectors he had tried to pacify. The passions supplicated and legitimised by Modi to seize the state have begun, under Yogi, to devour the enforcers of the state’s will. All the confusion of a country that deferred the task of dealing sincerely with its wounded past is ripe for exploitation by Yogi. All the grievances piled up over decades of misrule by Congress for which Modi did not, could not, create a productive ventilation are waiting to be converted into an even more explosive anger by his protégé. We may yet look back on Modi as a moderate.
8
Vanity
Great causes and little men go ill together.
—Nehru
‘[T]he world,’ Narendra Modi said six months into his term, ‘is looking at India with renewed respect.’1 For once, it wasn’t bluster. Modi galvanised stagnant foreign relations from the moment he was elected. He promised a ‘neighbourhood first’ foreign policy. And his decision to invite the leaders of India’s adjoining states, including Pakistan, to his inauguration in Delhi semaphored the magnitude of his ambition. His speedy conclusion in the summer of 2015 of a historic land swap with Bangladesh was a refreshingly energetic departure from the languid old days when difficult issues were clumsily shelved away. Modi’s decisiveness, even his critics had to concede in the early months of his premiership, was the jolt India needed after Manmohan Singh had reduced the country to a nonentity in its own backyard. But the cost of turning to a strongman to revive the country’s flagging image and fortunes soon became apparent.
Foreign policy fell prey to the prime minister’s vanity, and national interest became indistinguishable from narcissism. Since becoming prime minister, Narendra Modi has travelled to more than eighty countries, and he has used every tour to stage extravagant public events with the diaspora. The cost to the exchequer of the prime minister’s event management: Rs 2,000 crores.2 The upshot of his exertions on the global stage: a historic run from India by overseas institutional investors (who withdrew more than US$ 5 billion in October 2018 alone);3 the slowest growth in foreign direct investment in five years (3 per cent between 2017 and 2018);4 a country despised by its once-dear neighbours; a virtual war with Pakistan; eruption of conflict with China; alienation of old friends; uncertain new partnerships.
Determined to concentrate power in his own office, Modi has dismantled the already feeble structures of debate, deliberation and accountability on which India’s notoriously makeshift foreign policy has always rested. India’s foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj, has been demoted to the role of a minor bureaucrat: there has never been a more enervated occupant of her office. The platform on which Swaraj is most visible—when she is not bidding Modi farewell or receiving him at the airport—is Twitter, where she personally responds to expatriate Indians’ pleas for repatriation or expedited passport clearances from citizens at home. Modi, meanwhile, functions as the de facto foreign minister. Never before has India’s engagement with the world been informed so totally by the caprices of one man. Momentous decisions that will affect India long after Modi is gone have been made with barely any debate. Visiting Paris in 2015, Modi placed an order for three dozen fighter aircraft that superseded an existing arrangement for no apparent reason than that he was pleased with French hospitality: his own defence minister learnt about the decision from news reports.5 Travelling to Beijing the same year, he announced the rollout of electronic visas for Chinese tourists to India: his foreign secretary, in the audience, had no advance knowledge of what was coming.6 Even Nehru, who retained the foreign ministry for the entirety of his premiership, subjected his actions to parliamentary scrutiny.
The content of republican India’s foreign policy was supplied by an idealistic resolution passed by the Congress Party in 1938 that committed India to an internationalism centred on disarmament, peaceful coexistence and the abolition of imperialism. India’s behaviour in the aftermath of Independence, while largely consonant with that resolution, was filtered through Nehruvian imperatives: an admixture of utopianism and self-interest. It was a worldview made untenable by its own inconsistency. India, constrained by the lofty ideals it espoused, opened itself to accusations of hypocrisy whenever it breached them in order to advance its own interests. The result: India was able neither to realise those ideals nor properly to protect its interests. Nehru’s impatience with Western imperialism was braided together with a self-wounding tolerance of Chinese revanchism. When Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship refused to vacate its Indian possessions in Goa, Nehru, ignoring America’s pleas to remain true to his own sermons on non-violence to the Western world, annexed the territory by force. Yet, on the eastern front, he remained serene despite accumulating advice from colleagues on the rising cost of inaction. Not only did he neglect warnings about China. He recommended Mao’s pariah state for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council that had first been proffered to India.7 But this perforated idealism, always hazardous in the foreign arena, cracked when communist China, restless to assert itself as the predominant power in Asia, invaded India in 1962. The Non-Aligned Movement, co-founded and led by India, was of no assistance.
After Nehru, Delhi was driven by a cold national interest flavoured with the third-worldism of its secular elite. India was a democracy that rejected the overtures of the United States and secured the protection of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, deplored nuclear proliferation while pursuing its own nuclear programme, extracted military assistance from Israel even as it publicly censured the Jewish state, and maintained its standing in the Arab world even after it enhanced its relations with Israel. It did all this with the aid of an exceedingly resourceful diplomatic corps roughly the size of Singapore’s.
India’s global ambitions over the past quarter century have grown with its wealth. But where once its foreign relations were governed by a realistic appraisal of India’s interests in the world as it existed, they are now an expression primarily of uncontainable vanities—the vanities of a Hindu supremacist boosted by the vanities of a solipsistic elite clamouring for ‘superpower’ status for a country that, for all its new riches and hard military strength, is still home to the largest number of the world’s poorest people.
Modi, addled by this vain agitation for the recognition and respect that his supporters believe is their due, conducted himself with smaller states in ways that no self-respecting nation could abide. His neighbourhood-first policy, floated with so much promise, is now in the same league of disasters as the ‘zero problems with neighbours’ policy advanced by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, another strongman in thrall to his own atavistic fantasy of exhuming the Ottoman Empire.
Nepal, bound to India by an umbilical relationship, was the unlikeliest place for its unravelling. The treaty of friendship signed by the two nations in 1950 eliminated virtually every barrier between them. G
oods moved freely, people travelled without documents, bought property, acquired citizenship and married across the border. For many Indians, Nepal might as well have been another state of the country. It was an attitude destined to provoke resentment in Kathmandu, which gradually began warming to China. Yet, despite deepening differences, so close to indestructible was the affection between the two countries that only an extraordinarily sustained effort could destroy it.
It took Modi just over a year to do it. He managed to arouse what once seemed nearly impossible to achieve: a near-universal hatred of India in Nepal. It was the summer of 2015 and Nepal had just endured one of the worst earthquakes in its known existence. The constituent assembly convened against the backdrop of this devastation to give the battered country—functioning without a Constitution after its monarchy was abolished in 2008 following years of civil war—a new charter of governance. It was a poignant occasion that would have justified the dispatch of a high-level delegation from India to offer solidarity. Modi, instead, dispatched his foreign secretary with instructions, reportedly, to delay the promulgation of the new Constitution. According to Ameet Dhakal, one of Nepal’s most distinguished journalists who was privy to the discussions, Modi’s emissary ‘didn’t have a message; he only had a threat’, and his ‘stiff body language and the harsh tone matched the arrogance of British Viceroy Lord Curzon’. The Nepalis were outraged that the ‘largest democracy in the world, and Nepal’s steadfast friend’ was demanding that Nepal ‘call off her momentous day’.8 The apparent reason for the showdown was that the Constitution—an evolving document—had not granted adequate representation to ethnic Indian minorities in the Nepalese plains. The irony of a nakedly majoritarian strongman arguing for the rights of a minority in a foreign land was not lost on the Nepalis. But even the real reasons for Modi’s intervention in the affairs of Nepal were indefensibly wretched. Bihar, the Indian state that shares a long border with Nepal, was about to hold an election—and, by squeezing Nepal, Modi was hoping to win the votes of Biharis with relatives among the ethnic minorities across the border. When Nepal ignored Modi and voted for the Constitution, not even a dry of note of congratulation went from the prime minister’s office. Nepali representatives’ ratification of the Constitution’s conversion of the formerly Hindu kingdom into a secular republic, affirmed by rejecting the entreaties of Hindu nationalists across the border, evidently dismayed Modi.
Malevolent Republic Page 14
