The New Yorker has a recent article out entitled Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India. It is a very interesting read. Modi joined the R.S.S., an organization that promotes the idea of India as an Hindu nation, as a young man. The R.S.S. had a political wing, the B.J.P., at the time a minor political party. Modi has risen up the ranks to become head of the B.J.P., and finally became Prime Minister in 2014.
The B.J.P. has long been associated with Hindu nationalism, intolerance of India’s Muslim minority, and a tolerance of, if not encouragement of, violence. Communal conflicts between Muslims and Hindus in India are not new: millions of people died and were displaced during the partition of India in 1948. But throughout its history, the B.J.P. has pushed the idea that Muslims are a danger to India, and that Hinduism should be the pre-eminent religion in India.
In 1992, there was an incident in which, after a period of agitation, B.J.P. supporters demolished a mosque in the city of Ayodhya, claiming it had been built on the site of a Hindu temple. This precipitated widespread anti-Muslim riots.
While there was criticism of the B.J.P. even then, this incident got the party attention and increased support for it. There was a followup. In 2002, members of the B.J.P.’s religious wing (the R.S.S.) were travelling by train to visit Ayodhya and demonstrate there:
While the train sat at the station, Hindu travellers and Muslims on the platform began to heckle one another … At some point, someone—possibly a Muslim vender with a stove—threw something on fire into one of the cars ... Some fifty-eight people suffocated or burned to death. As word of the disaster spread, the state government allowed members of the V.H.P. to parade the burned corpses through Ahmedabad, the state’s largest city. Hindus, enraged by the display, began rampaging and attacking Muslims across the state.
Mobs of Hindus prowled the streets, yelling, “Take revenge and slaughter the Muslims!” …
There were again anti-Muslim riots, with widespread gruesome killings.
The most sinister aspect of the riots was that they appeared to have been largely planned and directed by the R.S.S. Teams of men, armed with clubs, guns, and swords, fanned out across the state’s Muslim enclaves, often carrying voter rolls and other official documents that led them to Muslim homes and shops.
At the time, the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat, in which the riots took place, was Narendra Modi. Modi has been suspected for a long time to have been personally involved in allowing the wanton killing to proceed. He didn’t express regret, didn’t apologize, and gave minimal aid to the victims. He was banned from travel to the U.S. and U.K., and his own party largely cut him off.
But like the 1992 incident with the mosque, the riots boosted Modi’s popularity with Hindu hard-liners. He had a political comeback and he and his faction acquired control of the B.J.P.
In power it has pursued policies that target Muslims. One of the most recent of these was revoking the decades-long special status of Kashmir, the only Indian state in which Muslims are a majority.
The R.S.S. has grown along with the B.J.P., which is still only the the political wing of a larger movement. The R.S.S. runs thousands of schools, runs hospitals, and is in control of trade unions and other organizations. “B.J.P. leaders have been rewriting school textbooks across the country, erasing much of its Islamic history, including that of the Mughals, Muslim emperors who ruled India for three centuries.”
There are continuing allegations that the party engages in political violence. A female Muslim reporter, Rana Ayyub, prominently featured in the article, was investigating extra-judicial killings by police, at least one of which, the killing of an alleged assassin targeting Modi, was reported to be organized by Amit Shah, a prominent B.J.P. leader. But the Indian court system has not made a case against him, and Modi has promoted Shah to be his deputy. Ayyub received numerous threats, and an alleged pornographic video of her was circulated by B.J.P. partisans.
The party has an extensive media presence, both in traditional and social media:
Modi’s supporters often get their news from Republic TV, which features shouting matches, public shamings, and scathing insults of all but the most slavish Modi partisans; next to it, Fox News resembles the BBC’s “Newshour.”
Modi’s re-election campaign in 2019 featured heavy use of “fake news:”
in a country where hundreds of millions of people are illiterate or nearly so, the big idea got through. Modi rose in the polls and coasted to victory. The B.J.P. won a majority in the lower house of parliament, making Modi the most powerful Prime Minister in decades. Amit Shah, Modi’s deputy, told a group of election workers that the Party’s social-media networks were an unstoppable force. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he said. “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public—whether sweet or sour, true or fake.”
Does this sound familiar? Because it does to me. There are unique features to India, the Indian government, and the B.J.P. But the B.J.P. government in India can also be seen as one more example of a burgeoning number of right-wing nationalistic governments: for example in Russia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, Turkey, and yes, the U.S. as well. These governments are majoritarian: they proclaim the right of their majority populations to have and retain political and economic power, and they promote that majority’s religious and cultural preferences. They disdain the rights of minorities. They have a cult of the party leader as a strongman, and expect loyalty to him. They attack the free press. They push their views through captive media that traffics in blatant falsehoods. They use social media to spread distortions and smears. They are ok with violence, although they try to distance themselves a little from the people actually meting it out. However, if it comes to that, they are willing to pervert the justice system to keep the powerful from accountability.
Because these are nationalistic governments, they aren’t really part of a movement, and there are differences among them. But I believe there is a reason Trump is drawn to leaders like Putin and Erdogan. They speak his language. They share his disdain for opponents, and for that matter, for democracy. Our government could become a government like Modi’s. Maybe we are already there.