Exhibit A:
In 2021 the Swedish academic think tank V-Dem (varieties of democracy) ranked India as an “electoral autocracy”.
At the time, India was considered to be in the same league as Poland,
Hungary, Turkey and Brazil.[1]
Exhibit B:
24 ministers of a total of 78 (31%) in Prime Minister Modi’s cabinet, as of
July 2021, faced serious charges “including assault, murder, attempted murder,
and kidnapping”. [2]
Exhibit C:
As Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002, Modi was implicated in anti-Muslim riots
that resulted in deaths of more than a thousand people. The UK Foreign Office determined that he was
“directly responsible” for the events.[3]
In this light, Modi was barred from the USA and the European Union. It was not until President Obama came into
office when Modi’s reputational rehabilitation began in the West.
Exhibit D:
India’s early figures - for example Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru - preached religious tolerance and nonviolence.
Prime Minister Modi, however, does not necessarily abide by this. His Bharativa
Janata Party (BJP), is steeped in Hindutva
ideology as developed by Vinayak Savarkar at about the same time Gandhi
published his famous text Hind Swaraj (1908). Incidentally, both Gandhi’s and Savarkar’s
writings were banned by the British, but Savarkar was a theorist of violence who
preached Hindu supremacy and nationalism.[4] It may also be possible that Gandhi actually addressed
Savarkar in his work, Hind Swaraj, which is written in dialogue form, as
the two of them had met in London. In a
further twist, Savarkar was implicated in Gandhi’s death, for it was a Hindutva
follower with links to Savarkar who, in the end, assassinated Gandhi.
Exhibit E:
Not to be outdone by New York’s Statue of Liberty, India now has a Statue of
Unity in Gujurat (Modi’s home state), which was launched by the prime minister
while in his first term of office in 2014.
Standing at 182 metres, it is the world’s tallest; notably, it is of
Sardar Patel, India’s first deputy prime minister (the doer to Nehru, the
dreamer), whose watchword was “unity” [5] In an exercise of historical revisionism, this
former devotee of Gandhi and apostle of tolerance is now rebranded as a Hindutva
ideologue.[6]
[1]
Ashoka Mody, India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), pp. 395,396.
[2] Ibid.,
p. 19.
[3]
Pankaj Mishra, “The Big Con” in London Review of Books, Vol 45, No. 9 (4
May 2023), p. 10.
[4]
Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global
Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 92-95.
[5] Ibid.,
p. 261.
[6]
Mody, India is Broken, p. 369.
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