Billionaires fell over themselves the following year to pronounce Modi the saviour of India. ‘I have to say that today there is no state like Gujarat,’ Ratan Tata declared in Gandhinagar. ‘Under Mr Modi’s leadership, Gujarat is head and shoulders above any state.’ India’s most respected industrialist spoke from personal experience: Modi had cleared lands for Tata’s car-manufacturing plant in a matter of three days.22 Anil Ambani, the billionaire businessman based in Bombay, invited Indians to ‘imagine what will happen to the country if [Modi] gets the opportunity to lead it’, and offered this wholesome endorsement: ‘A person like him should be the next leader of the country.’23 Three years later, Anil was surpassed by his estranged older brother, Mukesh, who gushed: ‘Gujarat is shining like a lamp of gold and the credit goes to the visionary, effective and passionate leadership provided by Narendra Modi. We have a leader here with vision and determination to translate this vision into reality.’24 Anil caught up with Mukesh the following year when he extolled Modi as the ‘king of kings’ and beckoned his friends to give him a standing ovation.25 Parallels for such pageants of obsequious praise by oligarchs cannot be located even in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey. One has to search diligently in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to find close competitors.
By 2013, the final obstacle to his ambitions within the BJP was his mentor, L.K. Advani. Modi ruthlessly put the old man out of his misery. And as he made the transition from provincial to national leadership in 2013, Modi’s effectiveness in detoxifying his brand confirmed him as the most consummate political salesman of his age. The myth that Modi had shed his Hindu-supremacist beliefs became so pervasive that even hardened sceptics were taken in. Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University, ‘hearing Narendra Modi’s campaign speeches quite regularly’, proclaimed weeks before the general elections in 2014 that ‘Hindu nationalism has been absent from his speeches’.26 The verdict was unsupported by facts—but fatalism had by then overtaken the votaries of secularism who, unable to stop Modi, were training themselves to see him as somebody he was not.
The beliefs of the RSS—to establish a Hindu state, to revenge the trauma of Islamic invasions and Partition on the bodies of Indian Muslims, to demote minorities to the status of second-class citizens—were never incidental to Modi’s politics. They are what animated Modi’s politics. He gave up his family for them. He wandered around India for three decades, living out of a suitcase, in their service. An interview he gave to Ashis Nandy, the distinguished social theorist and trained clinical psychologist, during his peripatetic phase reveals how thoroughly he is defined by them. ‘Modi,’ Nandy later wrote, ‘met virtually all the criteria that psychiatrists, psycho-analysts and psychologists had set up after years of empirical work on the authoritarian personality. He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, massive use of the ego defence of projection, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence—all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits. I still remember the cool, measured tone in which he elaborated a theory of cosmic conspiracy against India that painted every Muslim as a suspected traitor and a potential terrorist.’ Nandy emerged from the interview ‘shaken’: he ‘had met a textbook case of a fascist and a prospective killer, perhaps even a future mass murderer.’27
Modi’s bloated coterie of supporters, who pitched him as the saviour of India, appeared untroubled by any of this. If Modi ‘doesn’t come to power’, the Columbia professor Jagdish Bhagwati told the Financial Times, ‘I am not optimistic about [India]’. What about Modi’s reputation as an authoritarian? Well, said Bhagwati, who had long ago relinquished his Indian nationality for American citizenship, ‘if people don’t exercise authority, nothing gets done. You need someone who is providing a vision of somewhere where you can go’. Modi’s authoritarianism was not denied: it was recast as an asset.28 Gurcharan Das, a private sector executive who reinvented himself in the post-liberalisation years as a public intellectual, called on voters to concentrate on Modi’s ‘economic agenda’. He acknowledged matter-of-factly the risk inherent in electing Modi to high office, but followed it up with the warning that not voting for Modi would entail an even ‘greater risk’, before castigating all ‘those who place secularism’ above economic growth as ‘wrong and elitist’.29
The phrase ‘useful idiots’, suggesting unwitting dupes, doesn’t do justice to these cheerleaders. Das and Bhagwati numbered among the wilful enablers of the Hindu nationalist project: well-heeled intellectuals aware of the sectarian poison coursing through Modi’s veins but willing nonetheless to make, as Das candidly admitted, ‘a trade-off in values’. The mention of 2002, already fading from memory, provoked furious eye-rolling. The final humiliation for the survivors of the Gujarat violence, dispossessed and displaced as a result of Modi’s atrocious incompetence (if not complicity), was the lionisation of Modi as the competent and compassionate choice. The blood of Muslims spilled with impunity under Modi only a decade before was shrugged off as though it were ancient history by ideologues who never tired of complaining about the crimes committed by Muslim marauders centuries ago.
On the campaign, Modi conjured up a picture of a corruption-free India and a Congress-free India—the two had become interchangeable in voters’ minds—and promised ‘good days’: twenty million jobs every year, repatriation of trillions of rupees stashed illegally in the vaults of Swiss banks to be distributed equally among Indians, dozens of Singapore-like ‘smart cities’, a sparkling clean Ganga, a muscular foreign policy. His campaign became a capsule of the India he promised to bring into existence. His chief strategist, Amit Shah, used religion to mobilise voters.30 Modi himself made dog-whistles about ‘pink revolution’, a reference to the rising export of beef under Congress.31 But the mode of delivering religious incitement was high-tech: in villages without electricity or running water his team entranced voters by beaming his speeches live with 3D holographic projectors imported at astronomical cost from London. The total money spent on the election was US$ 5 billion, the second most expensive election in the world. When the votes were counted that summer, Modi and his party surpassed the most bullish predictions. The BJP won 282 seats in the 543-seat lower house of parliament. Congress scraped forty-four seats: an irrelevance in parliament.
Before Modi’s rise, supporters of Hindu nationalism in the media, civil service, academia and the professions, bereft of historical icons identifiable with their cause, were rather forlorn figures. Their plight was doubly hopeless because the characters venerated in the swamp of Hindutva were, with exceedingly rare exceptions, caitiffs who had collaborated with the British, eulogised Hitler, peddled race myths borrowed from the Nazis, rationalised the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe, baited Muslims and Christians at home, and done nothing to negligible towards the liberation of India. The national creed fostered by Congress did not in any case have room for non-Congress (and, later, non-Nehru–Gandhi) heroes.
Modi has sought to correct this imbalance since coming to power. He has showered posthumous honours on a raft of individuals overlooked, for good reason, by Congress. As the first Hindu nationalist to receive an absolute majority in parliament, he has decided to erect himself as the towering totem of the Hindu rashtra he has set about constructing on the ruins of the secular state. His ambition is to lodge himself in the national consciousness as a personage on a par with Nehru and even Gandhi, the twin emblems of secular nationalism. It was not by accident that Gandhi vanished in 2017 from the calendars published by the governmental commission that oversees the production of hand-spun cloth and Modi, posing beatifically beside the charkha, appeared in his place as the new father of the nation.32
It was this very need to supplant Gandhi—in whose honour Desmond Tutu and Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winners both, successfully lobbied the United Nations in 2007 to declare 2 October as the International Day of Non-Violence—that prompted Modi to press for a similar global day for yoga. The prime minister, hav
ing long promoted himself as a devoted practitioner of yoga, recognised that such a day, in addition to being a minor soft-power coup for India, would provide a platform for him to cast himself as a sagely figure on the international stage. Since 2015, when the UN, yielding to intense lobbying by India’s diplomatic missions across the world, set aside 21 June as the International Yoga Day, Modi has set himself up as the global mascot of yoga. The late-Oscar Wilde paunch undulating under the prime minister’s flamboyant ‘Modi jackets’—Hindu nationalism’s sartorial rejoinder to the muted Nehru jacket—has always been difficult to reconcile with Modi’s boasts about his pre-dawn workout routine. But nobody can deny the tremendous energy exerted by the government machinery in generating slick photo-ops for the prime minister every year on 21 June, when he, draped in white, performs a series of unchallenging asanas.
Modi’s zealous itch to upstage Nehru, whose birth anniversary is celebrated in India as Children’s Day, led him to usurp Teachers’ Day—commemorated on 5 September in remembrance of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, the formidably educated second president of India—and use it as an occasion to subject young students to prime ministerial prelections via satellite link. What kind of a teacher is Modi? The answer can be detected in the directive delivered by the government to schools across India: ‘Attendance is compulsory,’ it warned pupils, ‘and strict action will be taken against absentees.’33 The bearded, bespectacled demagogue, who once labelled the crowded refugee camps sheltering the Muslims driven out from their homes by his own murderous acolytes as ‘child producing centres’,34 has thus infiltrated the minds of millions of young people in the garb of an avuncular counsellor. In 2018, he published Exam Warriors, ‘an inspiring book for the youth’ marketed by Penguin Random House as ‘a friend not only in acing exams but also in facing life’.35
One of the troubles with this new avatar of Modi’s is that nobody has the slightest acquaintance with the prime minister’s higher educational record. A university degree is of course not a necessary condition of statesmanship. Lincoln, Washington, Truman did not graduate; Jim Callaghan and John Major were school-leavers. Unlike the many leaders who never saw the inside of a university, Modi goes to great lengths to conceal facts. The prime minister claims to have a distance-learning bachelor’s degree in political science from Delhi University. But the certificate he released after immense pressure was brought to bear on his office is riddled with discrepancies. Delhi University, rather than clarify facts, rushed to protect him.36 The information commissioner who directed the university to make the disclosures was sacked from his job.37 Modi’s degrees are immaterial to his job-performance, even if his party, which derided Sonia Gandhi as a graduate of a ‘language shop’ in Cambridge, has a different standard for opposition politicians. Yet the fact that he has not been forthcoming on this subject, has attempted to dodge it, bespeaks his deep need for validation ever since he became prime minister. He wants the very people he despises not only to kneel before his power but also to acknowledge him as a man of intellectual gravitas: a strongman and a savant. When Barack Obama visited India in 2015, Modi instructed his officials to publish a book of his dialogue with the American president—the Hindu-nationalist counterpart to the volumes of Nehru’s correspondence with foreign leaders.38
The prime minister has held meticulously choreographed public meetings with members of the Indian diaspora in almost every foreign capital he has visited since taking office. He even stole time from official business during a visit to London in the summer of 2018 to be interviewed by an ingratiating former copywriter in front of a handpicked group of worshippers. The audience at all such meetings is made up mostly of Hindus who, having long ago discarded their Indian passports, search for redemption from their diminished status as immigrant minorities in the shade of Modi’s strongman leadership. These rallies in the first world—London’s Wembley Stadium, New York’s Madison Square Gardens—are adduced as proof at home of the prime minister’s wild popularity abroad.
India, notoriously xenolatrous, has long had a habit of being swayed by the seal of first-world approval. Modi, despite being a nativist, yearns for acceptance in the West. This explains why, while most Indian journalists have been treated with contempt by the prime minister and his supporters—anybody insufficiently deferential to their leader is branded a ‘presstitute’—the two men to whom Modi has granted the deepest access to date, Andy Marino and Lance Price, are both foreigners. Marino, a little-known British author with a doctorate in English literature, produced a ‘political biography’ of Modi in 2014 after engaging in what he called ‘voluminous’ conversations with its subject.39 The objectiveness of Marino’s output can be judged from the fact that the BJP distributed copies of it to foreign reporters. Amy Kazmin of the Financial Times was characteristically charitable when she described the book as a ‘grown-up version of Bal Narendra … a comic book recently published to demonstrate how the BJP leader was displaying innate leadership skills even as a young boy’.40 Released just before the elections, the book did not find a foreign publisher and could not succeed in sanitising Modi.
So there followed a second attempt.
Lance Price’s interest in Modi was puzzling—not only to political mavens in India but also to journalists in England. The Modi Effect, Price’s 2015 pamphlet, assures readers that the Indian prime minister has cast off his ideological gear and portrays him as an inspired paladin committed to governing as an inclusive technocrat. The work was clearly intended for a foreign audience. But what had drawn its author, an erstwhile New Labour apparatchik who co-ordinated Tony Blair’s successful general election campaign in 2001, to the Indian prime minister—and how did he succeed in gaining admission to the impenetrably secretive inner world of Modi? Price, claiming he had been following the Indian elections from Europe, skirted such questions in interviews with Indian media. Then, several months after the book’s publication, Francis Elliott, the political editor of the Times of London, reported that Price was ‘paid an undisclosed sum’ for his effort. ‘Price has admitted he had never heard of Mr Modi,’ Elliott wrote, ‘until he was approached by one of the Indian prime minister’s associates.’ The pathetic defence offered by Price’s publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, to the Times’s expose—‘No one, including Narendra Modi, had any right of approval over the book’—far from exonerating the book’s author only confirmed the thoroughness of the book’s subject: The Modi Effect’s genesis appears so expertly to have been managed that approval of its final content was perhaps regarded as surplus to requirements.41
At home, following the precedent established by Indira Gandhi, Modi has deployed the state broadcaster to expand his reach. All India Radio hosts a monthly address by Modi in which the prime minister passes himself off as a profound philosopher and a gentle friend. The broadcast is translated and aired in multiple languages.42 Outside the studio, an organised digital army of volunteers and keyboard warriors on the ruling party’s payroll savages the prime minister’s critics and pushes lies about his accomplishments.43 It is not easy to discern the truth in Modi’s India. Even the official spokeswoman of the BJP was caught spreading the lie that India’s national anthem had been ‘adjudged’ by Unesco as the ‘best anthem in the world’. In 2015, the government’s Press Information Bureau published a doctored photo of Modi surveying post-flood damage in Tamil Nadu. Two years later, a report of the ministry of home affairs carried an arresting photo above the caption: ‘floodlighting along the border.’ Illuminating India’s borders is a supremely strenuous job: how did Modi do it in three years? On closer examination, the picture turned out to be of an island-border between Spain and Morocco. But the lie could not be recalled. It had already made its way into millions of WhatsApp accounts.
WhatsApp, the free smartphone messaging application owned by Facebook, is now the principal medium of political propaganda in India—and the innumerable groups on it are clogged with countless memes, composed almost entirely of lies, glorifying the prime minister an
d demonising minorities.44 One meme, for instance, shows Barack Obama and his aides riveted to a television screen in the White House playing Modi’s speech. ‘Congratulations to all of us’, the text of another viral meme, under a picture of Modi at his desk, reads: ‘Our PM Narendra D. Modi is now declared as the BEST PM OF THE WORLD by Unesco. Kindly share this. Very proud to be an Indian’. It made its way into my own phone, sent by a friendly acquaintance who supports Modi. Since then I have seen numerous such memes and videos which claim to expose the Muslim roots of the Nehru dynasty. There was a time when it was possible to say, So what if the Nehrus are Muslim? In the age of Modi, such lies function as a means to make secularists part from their own faith. To argue that the Nehrus are Hindu is to meet the Hindu bigot halfway. And to wrestle in the morass of Hindutva is to surrender, without even knowing it, to its terms of combat: that membership of the majority faith is the non-negotiable criterion for high office in India.
Unlike most Indian political parties, the BJP has traditionally been a democratic institution. There is nepotism, but the party is not owned by a dynasty. In theory, anyone, so long as he or she subscribed to the sectarian ideology of the party, could rise to the very top of the organisation. Modi’s most spectacular achievement has been the Congressisation of the BJP. Obeisance to him has become the norm in a party that, for all its repugnance, hoisted the son of a lower-caste tea-seller from provincial India into the country’s highest political office.
Cabinet functions as a sycophantic court. Leaders across the country have been reduced to fawning courtiers. Sushma Swaraj, the minister for foreign affairs, once viewed as a future prime minister, declaimed in parliament in 2017 that Modi, unlike that self-serving Nehru, had ‘brought respect to the whole of India’ with his jamborees in foreign capitals.45 Swaraj was being modest compared to her cabinet colleague (and, since 2017, India’s vice-president) Venkiah Naidu who, in March 2016, moved a resolution exalting Modi as ‘god’s gift for India’ and ‘the messiah of the poor’ whose greatness was recognised with a place on Time magazine’s list of the world’s most influential leaders and a wax statue at ‘London’s Madame Tussauds’.46 Naidu’s encomium, illustrating yet again the extent to which Hindu nativists crave Western approval, was a mere echo of Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who, a few weeks before Naidu’s resolution, told a crowd: ‘Wherever in the world he goes, people chant “Modi! Modi!” He is the god’s divine gift to India.’ Neither, however, could compete with Kiren Rijiju, the cherubic junior minister for home affairs from eastern India, who hailed the ‘Modi Era’ as the glorious consummation of a 500-year-old prophecy. ‘French prophet Nostradamus wrote that from 2014 to 2026, a man will lead India, whom initially, people will hate but after that people will love him so much that he will be engaged in changing the country’s plight and direction,’ Rijiju wrote in a Facebook post on 17 March 2016. ‘This was predicted in the year 1555. A middle aged superpower administrator will bring golden age not only in India but on the entire world. Under his leadership India will not only just become the Global Master, but many countries will also come into the shelter of India.’47
Malevolent Republic Page 11