The image was a protest against the visit of Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of India. The stunt was executed by the anti-Modi group Awaaz-UK.org, the projection lasted a few minutes, enough time to take pictures and skedaddle. Much of the British coverage focused on the fact that the projection contained a Swastika, and that too on the day the UK sets aside to commemorate World War II (Armistice day originally commemorated WW-I). The Svastika has symbolized auspiciousness in India and parts of Asia for millenia and the Nazi co-option is largely ignored in the country. This was in London though, and the projection had the letter Om (ॐ) morphing into a Nazi Swastika alongside a picture of Mr. Modi holding a sword aloft and the words “Modi Not Welcome”:
The image was a creation of the Awaaz Network whose aim is to monitor and combat religious hatred in South Asia and the UK. Pulling off visual protest took weeks of planning said Suresh Grover, director of The Monitoring Group that is part of the network. The protest was timed to coincide with the Bihar election results, UK’s Remembrance Day that commemorates the fight against facism and the Second World War, and Modi’s visit. The banner that was finally projected from halfway across Westminster Bridge went up right next to the Remembrance Day poppies on the Big Ben.
The Awaaz Network also had its reasons for choosing the British parliament building. "[Mr Modi] has always tried to get legitimacy on the world stage by speaking at parliament. Although he is not speaking at parliament, he has been invited to be in parliament by the Speaker of the House and Mr Cameron," said Grover. “I think it sends a clear message that a large part of the Indian community here reject the politics of hate and intolerance, wherever it takes place – in India, Pakistan, any country in south Asia or this country,”
So the reference was clearly to the Nazi Swastika, and the protest was a comment on the Hindutva movement, which Mr. Modi has been a part of from an early age. The RSS organization, which Mr. Modi joined at the age of eight, was explicitly modeled on European fascist movements. The RSS’s early leaders, Vinayak Savarkar (who created the term Hindutva) and especially Madhav Golwalkar expressed deep admiration for the Nazis, Hitler and their program for dealing with minorities and “purifying” the Aryan nations (which in their mind included India). So the protest was both a reference to the RSS’s deeply controversial past, but also aspects of Mr. Modi’s governing style and attitude towards minorities.
More about “Modimania”, lynchings and elections, and the harassment of human-rights organizations below the orange rangoli.
Modimania among the Indian diaspora
Mr. Modi’s visit to the UK has sparked both protest and “Modimania” among the UK’s large South Asia immigrant community. Hundreds of protesters gathered near Downing Street to chant “Modi Go Home”, protesting Mr. Modi’s visit. Mr. Modi had been restricted from the US and UK for about a decade, as a response to his government’s perceived inaction and suspected complicity in a pogrom in the state of Gujarat which resulted in thousands of killings, mostly of Muslims.
Many of the several hundred protesters in Whitehall cited the 2002 riots as the reason they were demonstrating, but others raised issues of human rights, protection for women in India and accusations of injustice against Tamils, Dalits and other religious and ethnic minorities.
Writing in the FT, Anjli Raval believes the Gujarati community has many reasons for its raucous support of Modi, chief among them Gujarati pride, but also an appreciation for his “toughness”:
Despite being cleared by the Indian Supreme Court, he has been widely blamed for inciting — or at least tolerating — anti-Muslim violence which led to thousands of killings in Gujarat in 2002. He has also yet to distance himself from rightwing groups that have put a dampener on free speech and religious freedom as well as tarnishing his own focus on development campaigns. But the internet is crawling with supporters, even in the UK, for exactly these reasons. They say Modi’s greatest strength is his tough and uncompromising stance against Muslims and his promotion of Hindu values. Many Gujaratis in the UK have also been prepared to overlook human rights abuses as they laud ‘progress’ and economic growth and have turned a blind eye to political indiscretions, even if this means ineffective ministers, crippling bureaucracy and drift in policy.
Many of Mr. Modi’s most ardent supporters packed Wembley stadium for a 60,000 strong rally. Similar crowds have attended rallies on the East and West Coast during Mr. Modi’s visits to the US.
Meanwhile, Pankaj Mishra writing in the Guardian makes the case for the protesters in Narendra Modi: the divisive manipulator who charmed the world:
In 2005, when Narendra Modi was the chief minister of the wealthy Indian state of Gujarat, local police murdered a criminal called Sheikh Sohrabuddin in cold blood. At an election rally in 2007 for the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP, Modi assured his citizens that Sohrabuddin “got what he deserved”. What should be done, he asked, to a man found possessing illegal arms? The pumped-up crowd shouted back: “Mari nakho-mari nakho!” (Kill him, kill him!)
Can you WIn electionS by winking at Lynch Mobs?
Mishra goes on to discuss the manner in which Modi’s party, the BJP, has attempted to turn beef into a political issue, sparking violence in many cases. I discussed one lynching in an earlier diary. Mr. Modi’s silence and assumed coddling of hardline elements within the Hindutva movement who have harassed and in some cases murdered writers also led to dozens of Indian authors returning literary awards. Many suspect the resurgent Hindutva chauvinism was meant to spur the BJP’s electoral campaign in an important election in the northern state of Bihar.
The BJP was roundly trounced by an alliance between two left-wing regional parties and the national center-left Congress. Along with its allies, the BJP won 53 out of 243 seats in the assembly. The standard post-election analysis is that voters in Bihar rejected the BJP for offering a national platform in a state-level election (it was unclear who the BJP’s proposed Chief Minister would be). In addition, the BJP’s platform was read as being biased towards upper-caste Hindus, disregarding the lower-caste and non-Hindu populations of what is a large and diverse state. “Reservations” became a major issue in the final days, India has an elaborate system which allocates seats in universities and public-sector jobs to applicants from specific disadvantaged backgrounds. Many within and outside India believe the reservation system is rife with abuse, but as the Bihar election demonstrates, even the appearance that a candidate is less than enthusiastic about reservations can lead to a loss. So the BJP was at pains to stress it supported reservations, but no match for the center-left regional politicians (especially Lallu Prasad Yadav) in their defense of it.
The dismal election results led to a rebuke by former senior BJP leaders to Modi. Their open letter claimed the party had under Mr. Modi and claiming the party had been “emasculated” to follow the agenda of a “handful”, destroying its “consensual character”. As a final twist of the knife, the authors said it seemed no “lesson had been learnt from the fiasco in Delhi”, referring to the February 2015 election in the capital where the BJP lost dramatically to the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man’s Party) created in 2012 by anti-corruption activists. In that election, the AAP won 67 of 70 seats.
Mishra recaps the dissatisfactions of many in India:
On the day of Modi’s election last May, I wrote in the Guardian that India was entering its most sinister phase since independence. Those who had monitored Modi’s words and deeds, noted their consistency, and feared that Hindu supremacism could deliver a mortal blow to India’s already enfeebled democratic institutions and pluralist traditions had come to much the same conclusion. Modi is a stalwart member of the RSS, a paramilitary organisation explicitly modelled on European fascist parties, whose members have been found routinely guilty of violence against Indian minorities. A pogrom in Modi-ruled Gujarat in 2002 killed more than 1,000 Muslims and displaced tens of thousands. (It was what prompted the US and UK governments to impose a visa ban on Modi). Whether or not Modi was personally complicit in the murder and gang rapes, they had clearly been “planned in advance”, as Human Rights Watch said in the first of countless reports on the violence, “and organised with the extensive participation of the police and state government officials”. Among the few people convicted was Maya Kodnani, Modi’s ministerial colleague, and a fanatic called Babu Bajrangi, who crowed to a journalist that he had slashed open with his sword the womb of a heavily pregnant woman, and claimed that Modi sheltered him after the riots and even changed three judges in order for him to be released on bail (Modi has not responded to these allegations).
Part of the reason many Indians continue to suspect Modi’s actions in 2002 were less than benign is his repeatedly professed admiration for the early RSS leaders Vinayak Savarakar and Madhav Golwalkar. Savarkar led a mob in vandalizing a local mosque when he was twelve, and recalled the episode fondly throughout his life. Golwalkar had drawn up an elaborate plan for a pogrom targeting Muslims in 1947/48. He was arrested, the plan foiled and the RSS was banned for a year partly over suspicions that the organization was involved in the Gandhi’s assassination, which was carried out by a RSS member. The BJP’s ideological supporters mimic Savarkar when they say Muslims (and non-Hindus) are aliens and complain about “minority appeasement”. These views find an echo in Mr. Modi’s rhetoric, for example his assertion that India suffered 1,200 years of slavery. Mishra alludes to some of this history and then questions whether some of Mr. Modi’s Silicon Valley supporters are aware of his authoritarian tendencies:
Sheryl Sandberg declared she was changing her Facebook profile in honour of Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley in September. His libertarian hosts did not seem to know or care that, just as Modi was arriving in California to promote Digital India, his factotums were shutting down the internet in Kashmir, or that earlier this year his government advocated a draconian law that the Indian police used repeatedly to arrest people posting opinions on Facebook and Twitter.
In the analog world, Mr. Modi’s allies have been working to change textbooks across India to present a more “Hindutva” history, sprinkled with claims that Vedic masters invented television and cars.
Harassing Human Rights organizations
The Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor writes about the persecution of environmental and human rights activists under Mr. Modi’s government:
Modi’s latest move has been the strangulation of Greenpeace India, culminating last Friday with the organisation’s licence to operate being removed. Respect for human rights and environmental organisations is so often a litmus test for the democratic state of a country. Worryingly, the Indian government has been cracking down on all “foreign-funded” charities for the past year, claiming that the national economy is threatened by environmental restrictions and other “un-Indian” activities. Nine thousand NGOs have been “de-registered” in a concerted effort to force out these “nuisance” groups and cast them as foreign enemies.
Of late, many Indian journalists and human rights activists have been harassed and threatened with “sedition” charges: for example, Teesta Setalvad, who still seeks justice for the victims of communal violence in the state of Gujarat in 2002, when Modi was the state’s chief minister; and Santosh Yadav, arrested in September in the state of Chhattisgarh on what Amnesty International believes are fabricated charges resulting from his investigatory journalism exposing police brutality against Adivasis (indigenous people). A few weeks ago, even a musician who sang a satirical song criticising the state governor of Tamil Nadu over alcohol sales was charged with “anti-Indian activity”.
Suspicion of “western” organizations is by no means new in India, but the severity with which Mr. Modi’s government have treated them is. The harassment of NGOs has included placing the Ford Foundation and Sierra Club on “watch lists” to investigate their funding. Brandishing allegations about the funding and objectives of international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Doctors without Borders is of course a tactic right out of Vladimir Putin’s playbook. Some commentators conclude that these organizations are being targeted for supporting the work of Teesta Setalvad. Ms. Setalvad is the most prominent activist agitating for the prosecution of those responsible for the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Others believe environmental organizations are being targeted for their opposition to the manner in which India’s largest industrial firms have dispossessed tribal peoples to establish mines, and generally disregarded environmental regulation under successive governments.
Anish Kapoor concludes that Mr. Modi is leading a “Hindu Taliban”