When India’s ultra-nationalist prime minister Narendra Modi visited Washington last week, he represented a country fast severing its links to secularism and pluralism that once made it an exemplary democracy.
A series of reports and articles in the media have been warning the world of the dangers that Modi’s agenda of advancing ‘Hindutva’ ideology – of Hindu population’s dominance over all other minorities- poses to the country’s secular character.
Reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post rebuked Modi – who for years was denied a U.S. visa for his not so covert role in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat – for his silence over lynchings of Muslims at public places.
A day after his return to New Delhi Modi for the first time publicly spoke out against violence. But critics remind that Modi’s statement – which came in the wake of Amnesty International’s strong condemnation, and Indian civil society protests – is not enough to dissuade cow vigilante groups from perpetrating violence against Muslims.
This weekend an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal says India of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru has vanished under Modi’s rule as mob violence against Muslims becomes more frequent.
Writer Aathish Taseer explains to American readers how Modi’s rise to power in India is different from Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House since America retains its democratic traditions and institutional voices, while India is fast losing its secular character.
“Yet these symmetries unfold in fundamentally different contexts. America has experienced a political upheaval, but it retains that supreme achievement of a mature democracy: It has two credible sides, left and right; the two sides have held, more or less; and the pendulum may swing again before long.
“India has experienced something quite different in the three years since Mr. Modi took power. The ‘other side’—liberal India, secular India, the India of Nehru and Gandhi—hasn’t merely been decimated electorally; it has ceased to exist as a cultural and moral force. In area after area of life—from politics to media to cinema—there is now Mr. Modi’s India, and then a great void. The India of my childhood, with its fond notions of Hindu-Muslim unity, has gone under. It is as complete and comprehensive a defeat as one can imagine.”
Taseer recounts his recent travel to Gorakhpur, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where Modi’s choice of chief minister was Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest in saffron robes and longtime parliamentarian. “His anti-Muslim rhetoric has been so hateful—he has told his followers that if Muslims “kill one Hindu man, then we will kill 100 Muslim men”—that he was once beyond the pale. Today, his popularity threatens to eclipse Mr. Modi’s,” he wrote.
The author observes that Modi’s India has “scant room for romantic ideas about Muslims or their place in Indian society.”
A spate of gruesome cow and beef-related murders is rattling India under the current anti-Muslim environment, inflamed by years of rhetoric by BJP politicians including Modi.
“Since he took power, India has seen more than 60 incidents of cow-related mob violence, in which the overwhelming bulk of the 23 reported fatalities were Muslim.”
