The confidence Modi took from the RSS almost certainly contributed to the most singular episode of his young life, when he left home in his late teens after a family row. As a toddler he was designated to marry a girl called Jashodaben from a nearby village, part of a local tradition of child marriage. As adulthood approached, the time came to formalize and consummate the union. The couple undertook a ceremony when Modi was eighteen and she one year younger, apparently against his wishes.14 One day not long afterwards he abandoned his young wife, beginning a two-year pilgrimage. “I loitered a lot in the Himalayas,” he told his biographer. “I had some influences of spiritualism at that time along with the sentiment of patriotism—it was all mixed. It is not possible to delineate the two ideas—I was also unclear at that stage about what I wanted to do.”15 Eventually he returned home carrying just a small bag of clothes. The joy of his mother at her son’s return was short-lived: he stayed for a single night, before packing up his bag again and leaving for good.16 Of his marriage he said nothing for decades, declining to disclose it even to the RSS and admitting to his wife’s existence only in 2014, just before he ran for national office.17
Back in Ahmedabad I met Modi’s younger brother Prahlad, now a successful businessman, who lived in a leafy suburb on the edge of the city. Garlanded images of Hindu deities decorated the walls of his living room, as he and his wife sipped coffee sitting on plush cream-colored sofas. Prahlad wore a light brown kurta, with gold-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose. He looked strikingly like his brother, with the same slightly puffy lips and closely trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, although he was both welcoming and avuncular, where his elder sibling was said to be withdrawn and distant. Having left home, Prahlad explained, his brother moved to Ahmedabad, where he worked briefly at a second tea stall, owned by one of their uncles. “Narendra did not like it, which is why he quit,” he told me. Instead, Modi joined the RSS as a full-time volunteer. “He went very deep into the RSS and its works on nation building and patriotism…And then he decided to dedicate his life to that.”
Modi lived in the group’s Ahmedabad headquarters, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, running errands for senior members, and leading a modest life as a teetotal, vegetarian, celibate bachelor. He rose quickly, becoming a pracharak, or propagandist, and falling deeper into the group’s lifestyle of discipline and abstinence. Visits from women were strictly forbidden. His three brothers saw him rarely. He returned to Vadnagar “for a few hours” when his father died in 1999, but beyond that almost never went back to his childhood home.18 Prahlad referred respectfully to his elder sibling as bhai, meaning “brother,” even as he explained that Modi had cut off ties with almost all relatives, except their mother. At one point as we talked, Prahlad’s gangly teenage son walked in to say hello, dressed in relaxed Western-style sports clothes. His son had barely met his famous uncle, Prahlad explained. No family member attended Modi’s swearing-in as prime minister in New Delhi. “The last time we saw him was back in 2007,” he said. “Narendra bhai had won reelection, and was being sworn in as chief minister, and we came to watch.”
As a pracharak, Modi traveled from town to town, sometimes on foot and sometimes by scooter, spreading the RSS message and developing the mesmerizing speaking style that would in time become his trademark. Yamal Vyas, an accountant and now a BJP spokesman, recalled Modi visiting his family’s home in the 1980s, to seek a meal and proselytize on the issues of the day. “He was a canvasser…a kind of marketing man,” he told me, sitting in a cramped office in Ahmedabad. Modi and other organizers were forced into hiding when the RSS was banned once again during the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian period of rule by decree between 1975 and 1977, in which liberties were suspended and opponents jailed. Sometimes he was forced to travel incognito from city to city; a rare black and white photograph from the period shows the young Modi disguised as a Sikh, complete with a dark black beard, sunglasses and a white turban.19 Throughout this period he managed the printing and distribution of anti-Emergency pamphlets, becoming an important cog in the RSS’s political resistance, and in the process fomenting a lifelong hatred of Indira Gandhi’s Congress party.
With democracy restored in the spring of 1977, Modi’s profile within the RSS began to rise further. He authored a pamphlet about the Emergency, and spent time both at RSS headquarters in Nagpur in central India and then in New Delhi, at the heart of its political operation. Even back then, those who knew Modi say he stood out for his confidence: a man who could be at once argumentative and charming, belligerent and persuasive. He dressed sharply too, wearing a neatly trimmed beard in contravention of strict RSS rules on personal dress. “Other people used to come, but I don’t remember their names,” Vyas said, recalling the times Modi would turn up to talk at his parents’ house. “He used to be a little different, even then, in the way he carried himself.”
Modi’s growing profile saw him drafted into the BJP in the mid-1980s, not long after it had been founded. Established as a broadly center-right alternative to the Congress, the party drew support from conservative upper-caste groups and small business owners, as well as Hindu ideologues. Modi proved adept at organizing, with a particular talent for elections, where he kept tabs on party candidates dotted around his home state. “Between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. he used to sit at the BJP office and tell four or five young boys to sit on different telephone lines,” Vyas told me, describing Modi’s role in the early 1990s. “Most of the candidates would be sleeping when they called, so it would take four or five minutes to get on the line. So when they were waking them up, he would talk to one or two others.” Such efforts helped Modi build ties with other national leaders. The most significant of these came in 1990, when Modi helped to organize the Ram Rath Yatra, a rabble-rousing procession led by L. K. Advani, a prominent BJP politician. Advani traveled across India in a Toyota truck redecorated to resemble the chariots described in Hindu myths and legends, agitating for the construction of a temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of the ancient Babri Masjid mosque in the holy city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. The journey would have profound and violent consequences, culminating two years later when rampaging Hindu activists destroyed the mosque, throwing India into one of its bloodiest periods of communal strife.
By that time Modi had already developed a firebrand reputation of his own as an enforcer and hard-liner; a man capable of whipping up a crowd. He prospered as the BJP itself grew stronger, taking power first in the state of Gujarat, then briefly at the national level in 1996, and again two years later under Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Gujarat itself became a kind of laboratory for the spread of Hindu nationalism, a place where Modi could find other Hindutva ideologues, fearful about the weakening of Hindu civilization and the risks of being overrun by Christians and Muslims. Ashis Nandy, a left-wing social theorist, interviewed him around this time during his years as a pracharak. In an essay published in 2002, Nandy claimed to have identified an unbending “authoritarian personality,” driven by hard-line convictions. “He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity…combined with fantasies of violence,” he wrote. “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. I came out of the interview shaken…for the first time, I had met a textbook case of a fascist.”20
No Apologies
Just before 8 a.m. on February 27, 2002, a packed train pulled into the town of Godhra in the east of Gujarat, about 120 kilometers from Ahmedabad. On board were hundreds of Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, the holy city whose Babri Masjid mosque had been destroyed ten years earlier. Other trains packed with worshippers and activists had gone along the same line in the days beforehand, returning from demonstrations in favor of building a new Ram temple on the mosque’s ruined site. This procession caused tension with local Muslims, who lived and worked near the station. On that morning th
ose tensions boiled over as the train was set alight, either deliberately or accidentally, depending on which account you believe.21 Hours later, rescuers removed fifty-nine charred bodies from the carriages.22
News of the deaths reached Modi in the chief minister’s office later that day. In the evening he agreed to an official 24-hour period of mourning, a decision critics would later paint as an invitation to street protests.23 Community tensions in India were already heightened, as Hindus worried about the rise of a newly militant breed of global Islam in the aftermath of America’s September 11th attacks. Angry mobs took to the streets of Ahmedabad, convinced that Godhra had been a bloody act of mass murder against pious Hindu pilgrims, beginning a three-day orgy of violence. Around the city, Muslim homes were looted, shops burned, and mosques destroyed. Armed men roamed Muslim neighborhoods performing acts of medieval brutality: mass killings, mutilations of corpses, and the rape of women and girls. The riots were the first in India to play out live on television, horrifying viewers with their savagery. Twenty thousand Muslim homes and businesses were destroyed, along with 360 places of worship. Some 150,000 people were displaced as violence spread around the state. An official report later said that 1,044 died in the carnage, although estimates from human rights groups and others suggested a death toll more than twice as high.24
What many referred to as a pogrom—an orchestrated massacre with official support, rather than simply disorganized rioting—left a lasting stain on Modi’s reputation. His supporters gave excuses: he was inexperienced, having been appointed as chief minister only a few months before; he brought the killing under control within three days, where previous Indian riots raged for far longer; he himself bore no direct responsibility. Yet critics still blamed him for doing too little to stop the bloodshed, much of which was orchestrated by members of his own Hindu nationalist movement,25 accusing the chief minister of negligence at best and even complicity at worst. Two months after the violence the charity Human Rights Watch produced “We Have No Orders to Save You,” a detailed report laying out how extreme Hindu groups with ties to the BJP helped to organize the killing.26 The rioters “came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears associated with Hindu mythology), sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders,” it said. “They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their properties, information obtained from the Ahmedabad municipal corporation among other sources, and embarked on a murderous rampage confident that the police was with them.”
Many find it hard to credit that Modi, a leader renowned for his exacting organization, had no idea who was behind the violence and could not have done more to bring it quickly under control. Instead, Modi’s accusers say his actions permitted the killing to proceed in order to placate furious Hindus and also to teach the state’s restive Muslims a lesson. A decade later, Sanjiv Bhatt, a senior police officer who served during the riots, told a court that Modi instructed security chiefs to let Hindus “vent their anger,” although Modi very strongly denied this and Bhatt himself was later fired.27 Human Rights Watch suggested that Modi only intervened directly once the killing had escalated out of control. “The most disturbing feature was the complicity of officers of the law at all levels,” Harvard University’s Martha Nussbaum, a fierce Modi critic, went so far as to claim a year after the riots.28
There has never been a full independent investigation into the events of 2002, so Modi’s personal role has never been conclusively determined. It probably never will be. For his critics, his guilt is unquestioned. That view had been shared until relatively recently by many foreign governments. Modi’s presumed actions during the violence led him to be banned from visiting America in 2005. He was also discouraged from visiting Britain and other countries, restrictions that were lifted only around the time he became prime minister.29 For his supporters, Modi’s innocence is also beyond doubt. In 2011, the Supreme Court found no evidence of his direct involvement, as part of a case brought by the widow of a Congress politician who had been brutally murdered during the mayhem. Two years later Modi was cleared by a second court. “God is great,” he tweeted after the verdict, before organizing a three-day public fast, an event supposedly in support of communal harmony that looked suspiciously like a victory celebration.
Modi has never truly escaped the controversies of 2002, although he worked diligently to rehabilitate his image. Inspired by the examples of Singapore and South Korea, he began to downplay the fervent views of his youth and converted instead to the cause of economic development. Bringing a taste of autocratic east Asia to India, he dedicated himself to the cause of manufacturing facilities, highways, and power stations. He launched a glitzy new “Vibrant Gujarat” investor jamboree, in which India’s tycoons trooped into the Mahatma Mandir convention center, paying homage to Modi and unveiling billions of dollars in pledges for his state. He improved his faltering English too, the better to strike deals with visiting foreign chief executives. His was a no-nonsense, no-dissent style of rule. “His lovers and haters share an essentially identical impression of the man,” as essayist Vinod Jose once observed. “Both believe Modi possesses an almost absolute authority and a willingness to defy institutions and rules, as a strong and charismatic leader who ‘gets things done’ without concern for protocol or established hierarchies.”30
Modi’s record as chief minister was not a one simple one, however. For all its pristine highways and new fiber-optic cables, his state ranked less impressively when judged by its numbers of malnourished or undereducated children, a point often made by critics like Amartya Sen.31 Modi was known for his personal probity, but his record was still tainted by scandals involving the abuse of state power, from deploying security services to harass opponents, to police involvement in waves of extrajudicial killings. Modi also did precious little to promote reconciliation with Muslims in the aftermath of 2002, as he built one of India’s most economically powerful but socially segregated states, its cities dotted with fearful Muslim-only enclaves. Modi’s own tailor was struck by the fact that the chief minister, who so often gave speeches dressed in brightly colored outfits, would never wear green, a color deeply associated with Islam.32
The Modi who ran for national office in 2014 was nonetheless a changed man from the forceful religious figure of old. Having won reelection as Gujarat’s chief minister for a third time in 2012, he moved quickly to consolidate power within his own party. Many of the elderly politicians who traditionally dominated the BJP were skeptical about Modi, viewing him as too divisive to win a national election in which he would have to gain support far outside the party’s traditional base. Yet these grandees proved surprisingly easy to dismiss, as Modi drew on his image as a hero to the party’s Hindu nationalist base to push his opponents aside. Modi then drew on his record as an honest technocrat in Gujarat to present himself as the solution to India’s problems of corruption and economic underperformance. His election manifesto barely mentioned the tropes of Hindu nationalism, from the construction of Ram temples to the protection of cows, which many Hindus consider sacred. Instead the document was packed with populist slogans about development. As political scientist Ashutosh Varshney noted, this was a conscious attempt to create “Modi the moderate,” a leader whose earlier divisive rhetoric was now absent.33
That moderate turn never did extend to 2002, however, a topic about which Modi remained firmly defensive. As he positioned himself for national office, many predicted he would be forced to make some kind of a symbolic statement of apology, if only to soften his image and prevent his opponents using the riots to attack him. Occasionally he did express a mild form of regret. “I was shaken to the core,” he wrote in 2013. “Grief, sadness, misery, pain, anguish, agony, mere words could not capture the absolute emptiness one felt on witnessing such inhumanity.”34 Previously he had compared his feelings during the riots to those of a passenger in a car that accidentally runs down a dog, an analogy many in In
dia found offensive. “If someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is,” he told an interviewer.35 But on no occasion did he take personal responsibility or offer a broader show of contrition. The BJP appeared to calculate that any apology would lose as much support as it gained. Such was Modi’s confidence in his own appeal that he guessed India would vote for him anyway. He did not want to say sorry. In the end, he did not have to.
The Last Man
Modi was sworn in as prime minister at a grand ceremony in New Delhi a few weeks after his election victory. It was a baking afternoon in late May and half a century to the day after the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. This was an irony not lost on the more liberal quarters of India’s political establishment, many of whom feared their latest prime minister would soon begin to demolish the secular edifice built by its first. Yet while the magnitude of Modi’s victory settled definitively the question of his electability, it introduced a new mystery about the kind of national leader he would become: a reform-minded Indian variant of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, focused solely on economic development and committed to communal harmony, or a more extreme figure whose earlier antipathy toward minorities would reemerge once he opened the door to the nation’s highest office?
The Billionaire Raj Page 13