Strongmen

MODI The Vanity of the Tyrant ^{Danish Husain}

BABUR STANDS GUARD at dawn outside the newly constructed Taj Mahal in Agra. He dreams of flying palanquins, which he calls aeroplats. Babur is with his co-guard Humayun. They are characters in a play I directed in early 2017 called Guards at the Taj by Rajiv Joseph. At some point in the play, Babur and Humayun realize that they have a terrible task ahead of them. As menial guards, they must implement the fierce royal decree that says that after the Taj Mahal has been built all those who built it—the twenty thousand labourers, the masons, and even the architect—must have their hands chopped off. This Babur and Humayun do.

Babur dreams that his beloved aeroplats are weapons of destruction in the hands of the enemies of Hindustan. He imagines that they are used by the enemy to attack his country. When the aeroplats fly over Hindustan, they identify it by the shining Taj Mahal. They decide to destroy the mausoleum. The emperor, recognizing the enemy’s plan, tells his army to take hold of a large black cloth, run fast enough so that the cloth billows, and then cover the Taj Mahal beneath the cloth. The men—including Babur—run to the cloth, but when they reach it, they realize that most of them cannot hold the cloth. They have no hands. Thus, they stand mute, witnessing the destruction of the Taj Mahal.

“Development” is the Taj Mahal that was sold to the people of India in the 2014 elections. Hindutva is the sword that is now chopping off the hands of the people of this country. We now live en masse within this strange twist of fate in Babur’s dream. But this is a twist of fate that has a terrible history. The history requires a mirror. The citizens of our country will find that they are partly responsible for our present. We have been complacent. We have not held our representatives accountable. We have kept silent and happily lived on the blinkered dreams our leader threw over us for the past seventy years. We have no hands to hold the cloth. We are spectators to the destruction of our Taj Mahal.

Jumla

My story and acting career coincide with Narendra Modi’s ascendency to power. In fact, Modi had a head start on me. He already had a massacre under his watch before I started massacring characters on the stage. In 2002, we both arrived at our current avatars. I resigned from my bank job to become an actor. Modi, who had been party to the terrible state-sanctioned pogrom in Gujarat against Muslims in 2002, won an election to lead the government in Gujarat. Modi saw this victory as endorsement by the public of his deeds—including his misdeeds.

Modi is not the first political leader who has seen his electoral victory as redemption, as a referendum on his past. Even if the election victory was secured by manipulation or by rigging the discourse, it was still sufficient to whitewash—or in Modi’s case, saffron-wash—his actions. Modi, born in 1950, was just out of his teens when Indira Gandhi won a thumping election victory in 1971—which was seen as vindication of her unfavourable policies and of the reasons for her expulsion from the Congress Party in 1969. The delusion of her victory led us to suffer through the National Emergency for almost two years between 1975 and 1977. Dangerous misuse of tragic events would occur when the Congress Party won a conclusive victory at the polls in 1984 after the army had been sent into the Golden Temple in Amritsar, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi and after the murder of three thousand Sikhs. Modi—in a similarly twisted way—used his electoral victory in Gujarat in 2002 as a public approval of the massacre that took place under his watch. Modi understood that power could only be captured through an overpowering narrative and that often such narratives are built on the blood of the dispensable enemy—the “other.” He learned his lessons well during the years of his apprenticeship both in the fascistic Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and as a careful observer of Indian politics.

Today, both Modi and I are in the middle of our careers. I, as an artist, and he, as a man who attempts to become a myth. We both search for a lasting legacy. But, unlike me, he’s almost reached his goal.

The 2014 parliamentary election saw one political party—for the first time since 1984—win an absolute majority. Modi, with his excellent PR campaign and a successful social media campaign like Barack Obama, convinced people that he is pro-development and pro-good governance; he also convinced the business elite that he is their close friend. It was not easy to prove that he was friendly to the business elites. They are his first constituency. The magic of his myth was that he was able to convince people that he was pro-development—a word that still carries enormous meaning for people who wither under poverty and indignity. Every person who has studied Modi closely has been wary of his “success” as the chief minister of Gujarat. The electorate, nonetheless, seemed exhausted by the corrupt incumbent Congress government and was generous towards Modi and his team. But, in the midst of his five-year term, Modi seems to be running out of steam. Most of his election promises have turned out to be empty talk—jumla—a rhetorical statement made for an immediate teetering effect with no intention to produce policy and then actual improvements in people’s lives. Many of his policy decisions—demonetization and the Goods and Services Tax (GST)—have been duds. Job creation is the slowest it has been in the past seven years. The economy slips downwards. Economists now predict that even massive government spending to boost demand would not help. Social divisions are sharp. Environmental disaster is before us as the air is unbreathable and the soil is polluted each day. The agrarian crisis escalates and food insecurity has allowed the epidemic of hunger to breed across the country. Civil liberties and the freedom of speech are being curtailed. A general sense of unrest prevails.

Modi cannot peddle fiction anymore. Nor can he throw statistics at us. Nor can his grandstanding and event management save him further. Modi is in a desperate search for his legacy.

Farid ud-din Attar’s poem “The Simurgh” (“The Conference of the Birds”) tells the story of a band of thirty birds who are in search of a king. They cannot find the king. The hoopoe leads them to a lake. They peer into its waters and find themselves—the thirty birds, the simurgh. They are what they have been seeking. Modi prances about like the king. But the people won’t see themselves in him. If they did for a moment, it was their delusion. They will eventually find themselves. Modi, who they had thought was the Simurgh, is an imposter. His legacy is jumla.

Origins

When Modi first appeared on the stage, I hardly noticed him. India, by the 1990s, was a great tragedy—Hamlet being played in a theater of tattered grandeur. Modi seemed like Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, brought in to distract India from the madness of poverty and religious violence that had torn apart our society. People do not take notice of stardom—or tragedy—until it looms large in their faces.

Modi was a minor figure in Gujarat who caught the attention of his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), when he organized party leader Lal Krishna Advani’s Rath Yatra through Gujarat in 1990. That Rath Yatra, pickled in hatred and saturated in blood, animated sections of India to assert bilious ideas that had been set aside by our freedom movement: ideas of Hindu assertion, of hatred towards Muslims, and of the normalcy of gender and caste hierarchy. Modi was the producer of the Gujarat version of his Bollywood-like tragedy.

Modi’s rise through the BJP in the 1990s was helped along by the deep respect he had earned in the RSS. He used the RSS and its methods to gallop to the front of the BJP’s ranks, to become, by 1988, the BJP general secretary in charge of the party’s organization. Modi, even by then, was clearly the paragon of the RSS ideology, with a dash of narcissism thrown in on the side. It is not for nothing that the psychologist and social scientist Ashis Nandy called Modi a “fascist” after he interviewed him in his nobody days. Nandy wrote that he did not use this term to abuse Modi, but it was used to describe the symptomatic manifesto of an authoritative mind that was seeped in fascist ideology.

Nothing about Modi is easy to take at face value. The myth has been created by fantasy and by money, more than by reality. It is fitting that Lance Price, the author of The Spin Doctor, wrote one of the biographies of Modi. Price said that he had never heard of Modi before the 2014 elections. An anonymous person gave him an undisclosed amount to write The Modi Effect, a book that cultivated the Modi myth. It was important to Modi’s spin-doctors that the “pen for hire” comes from the United Kingdom—their fascination with validation by the British is part of their legacy. It is what muddled their own ultra-nationalism, whose roots are not so much in our freedom movement as they are in collaboration with imperialism.

Savarkar

V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) was the architect of Hindutva (Hinduness), the ideology of the RSS and the BJP. This Hindutva was neither comfortable with Indian anti-colonial nationalism nor was it uncomfortable with British imperial rule. Savarkar’s own career began with anti-colonial actions, but ended with anti-national politics. He would set the groundwork for the RSS and the BJP and for Modi’s peculiar mix of ultra-nationalism in close fealty to the United States and to multinational corporations. In their world, this duality is not unusual. It is the essence of their ideology.

Young Savarkar went to England to study law in 1906. In London, he founded the Free India Society with other Indian students. Three years later, Savarkar was arrested for being an accomplice in the assassination of the Collector of Nasik, A.M.T. Jackson. He was said to have supplied the pistol that killed Jackson. Savarkar was sent to the dreaded Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands for fifty years. Within the first month of his imprisonment, Savarkar wrote a mercy petition to the British, asking for forgiveness. This was rejected in 1911. He wrote many of these mercy petitions—each in the British archives—each more craven towards the British, each offering his unflinching loyalty to the British Raj. In one of his last mercy petitions, Savarkar wrote,

After much cajoling and pleading, Savarkar was transferred to a prison on the Indian mainland in 1921, and then he was released in 1924. In prison, Savarkar wrote Essentials of Hindutva (1923) and then, out of prison, he wrote his manifesto—Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1928). In this latter book, which is the foundation of the ideology of the RSS, the BJP, and of Modi, Savarkar expounded his theory of territorial nationalism. Unless a people’s beliefs, religion, and myths do not align with their territorial nationalism, their loyalty to the nation is suspect. Muslims and Christians, he declared, had other territorial loyalties, and were therefore not to be trusted. The loyalty of the Muslims, he writes, “must necessarily be divided between the land of their birth and the land of their Prophets… Mohammedans would naturally set the interests of their Holy land above those of their Motherland.” Nationalism, which in India had a broadly ecumenical social sensibility, was reduced to religion—to the feeling of Hinduness, namely Hindutva. To be a nationalist was not to fight against British rule and to free India from imperialism. That kind of nationalism would welcome all those who fought against the British Raj—whether Dalits or Adivasis or Parsis or Bohras or Gorkhas or Nagas or Kashmiris or indeed Muslims of the Gangetic Plain or Hindus of the Deccan Plateau. That form of anti-colonial nationalism was anathema to Savarkar. It is that nationalism that sent him to prison in the Andaman Islands. His new nationalism was not against the British Raj. It was against his fellow Indians. Which is why the British allowed him to freely propagate his ideas—to hold sabhas and religious gatherings, to divide society for the benefit of the British rulers.

Well before he articulated his theory of Hinduness, Savarkar revealed his bigoted streak. At the age of twelve, he led a mob to vandalize a mosque.

There is a thick line that unites Savarkar to Modi. When he was released from prison, Savarkar met a disgruntled ex-Congressman, K.B. Hedgewar, who found in Savarkar his ideological anchor. A month after they met, in September 1925, Hedgewar founded the RSS. This organization, with its long history of violence against Muslims, is Modi’s home.

To preach hate—as the RSS does—is not enough to draw in sufficient numbers of people to one’s side. Savarkar knew that people of good faith must be deceived in order to follow his movement He wrote his autobiography, Life of Barrister Savarkar (1926), under a false name—Chitragupta. It is an unabashed eulogy to Savarkar, with Savarkar as his own fanboy. The book is not easy to read because it glows so brightly for the subject, who is the author himself. Savarkar, Savarkar writes, “seemed to possess no few distinctive marks of character, such as an amazing presence of mind, indomitable courage, unconquerable confidence in his capability to achieve great things. Who could help admiring his courage and presence of mind?” (Ravindra Ramdas, the official publisher of Savarkar’s book, revealed in the 1987 edition that Chitragupta was none other than Savarkar himself).

Courage? After he escaped conviction in the trial regarding the assassination of Gandhi, Savarkar once more begged the government to allow him to escape unscathed. “I shall refrain from taking part in any communal or political activity for any period the government may require in case I am released on that condition,” he wrote. The author of Hindutva and the architect of the RSS drifted through history with this kind of cravenness.

RSS

The RSS is Modi’s home. Savarkar is his ideological grandfather. But there are fathers closer yet—RSS leaders Hedgewar and M.S. Golwalkar. Under Modi’s skin sits the scent of these men and their visions.

Hedgewar (1889-1940) was a young medic from Nagpur. We know little about his early years. As a Congress volunteer in 1920-21, he was arrested for a vitriolic speech on behalf of the Khilafat movement. But such wide nationalism would not appeal to him for long. He came under the wing of the radical Congress leader Dr. B.S. Moonje (1872-1948). Moonje is the link between European fascism and the RSS. On his way back to India after the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, Moonje stopped off in Italy. While in Rome from March 15 to 24, Moonje visited the Fascist Academy of Physical Education and the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the fascist youth organization. He was taken by the discipline and the fervor. Over two pages of his diary, Moonje writes of the Balilla’s role in indoctrinating the youth of Italy into the fascist system. RSS drills—developed by Moonje—have their roots in the Balilla’s weekly meetings, paramilitary trainings, and parades. Moonje delivered these elements of European fascism to the RSS through Hedgewar and Hedgewar’s successor, M.S. Golwalkar (1906-1973). It was Golwalkar who would offer the most direct link between the ideology of European fascism and the RSS. In his book We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939), Golwalkar wrote:

This was written before the full evidence of the Final Solution—the Holocaust—was clear. But, in the second edition of the book from 1944 and in the third edition from 1945—long after the full horror of the Nazi project was clear—Golwalkar retained this paragraph.

What of fascism appealed to these men? The fascist obsession with social homogeneity and uniformity echoes through the ideology of the RSS. Unlike the subcontinent’s general tradition of social inclusivity, the RSS drives a singular version of identity—Hindutva. The RSS opposes any version of Hinduism that challenges the obsessive singularity of Hindutva.

Perhaps the RSS would not have been able to drive its ideology into the mainstream if the bourgeois parties—supposedly secular—had not toyed with religious sentiment for political ends. For instance, the Congress Party used religious division to weaken the communist influence in the trade unions of Bombay, but it was the authentic party of religious division—the Shiv Sena—that earned the dividends. Or, the Congress would be afraid of confrontation against the RSS for fear of losing their hard-core Hindu voters, such as when Chief Minister Govind Ballabh Pant refused to arrest RSS functionaries—at the threshold of independence in 1947—who had been caught red-handed with a cache of inflammatory literature, maps, and weapons to use in sectarian riots in Uttar Pradesh. Or, the Congress refused to displease the hard-core Muslim clerics, such as when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi overturned the Supreme Court ruling to grant maintenance to Shah Bano. Gandhi pushed through the Muslim Women (Protection on Divorce) Act of 1986 that delighted the mullahs and conservative Muslim men. These were diversionary tactics by the Congress Party to fool the electorate and to maintain power. But it was not the Congress that was able to control this dynamic. The RSS and the BJP rode the wave of offensiveness.

Indian society could not withstand the pressure. It cracked during the Ramjanmabhoomi movement in the 1980s and 1990s, when the RSS and the BJP conducted a nationwide campaign to destroy a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya—the Babri Masjid—and build a temple to Ram on that very site. What began with stray protests increasingly amplified into violence, destruction, and even murder. The BJP and RSS, as a practice, always deny any link with violent incidents ex post facto and dismiss the miscreants as fringe elements. But the associations are stark, documented, palpable to all and sundry. And over the years the fringe elements have become mainstream and have gone on to hold important government offices. For example, current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath was once seen as no more than a rabble-rousing priest. The hooligans of the past are now the rulers of the country.

Anything that does not mirror their vision of Indian society is to be silenced. The list is long and painful. The paintings of the artist M.F. Husain were torn, his exhibitions desecrated. Husain had to flee from his beloved homeland and die—heartbroken—in London. Cinema halls are attacked if certain films do not meet the RSS test (although movie moguls are astute—they pay the organizations or cut their own films to get past the RSS censors). This is not always possible. Sanjay Leela Bhansali made a film based on the fictional character Padmavati created by the medieval poet Malik Muhammad Jayasi in 1540. A fringe group, Karni Sena, took umbrage at the film, and its members manhandled Bhansali and his team on the film set. They warned him that they would burn every cinema hall that screens the film. Despite being approved by the Censor Board for Film Certification, BJP governments in the states banned the film. So it goes.

Academics and writers who cross the RSS and the BJP face the same kind of wrath. Because the Hindutva groups did not like James Laine’s Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, they vandalized the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune in 2004. A.K. Ramanujan’s masterly essay Three Hundred Ramayanas—which documented the organic growth of a multi-narrative interpretation of the legend of Ram—was dropped from the English literature syllabus by the University of Delhi in 2012. Hindutva trolls attacked Audrey Truschke for her book Aurangzeb, while the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan was harassed for his fabulously inventive stories, and while the Adivasi writer Hansda Sowvendra lost his job for his book The Adivasi Will Not Dance.

Banning is one thing, murder another. The list here is long and painful. Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two young sons were killed by the Bajrang Dal activist Dara Singh. Professor H.S. Sabharwal was beaten to death by activists from the BJP’s student wing (ABVP), while rationalists and leftists Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar, M.M. Kalburgi, and Gauri Lankesh were shot to death. Right-wing thugs did the killings, but there have been no arrests, no real investigation. This, of course, emboldens the right-wing thugs to pursue the underhanded work of their masters.

Matters are so ugly that in September 2017, NDTV anchor Ravish Kumar wrote an open letter to Modi, asking a provocative question. Troll armies on Twitter and WhatsApp—some followed by Modi’s Twitter handle—had attacked Ravish Kumar. They called for his head. Ravish Kumar wrote, “I am making this letter public and sending it to you by post. If you know Nikhil Dadhich, Neeraj Dave and Akash Soni then please ask them that are they or their group planning to kill me?” Matters have reached such an awful place that a major television news anchor must ask such a question of the country’s prime minister.

Savarkar, Hedgewar, Golwalkar—at one time marginal figures—are now in the mainstream. Three men who come from the RSS now hold the three highest positions in the Indian government—president (Ram Nath Kovind), vice president (Venkaiah Naidu), and prime minister (Narendra Modi).

Modi

Modi entered the world of the RSS when he was eight. His father came from a community that traditionally were pressers and sellers of vegetable oil. To support his family, the father ran a tea stall at the local railway station. Across the railway track was a Gujarati medium school where Modi went to school. His teachers remember him as an average student with a keen interest in theater and debate. Modi helped his father at the tea stall and spent his time at the RSS shakha (branch). It was the RSS shakha that took up most of Modi’s time. In his formative years, Modi was being soaked with the ideals of Savarkar and Golwalkar.

At thirteen, Modi was married. When it came time to formally welcome his wife to his house, Modi abandoned everything and vanished for two years. There is no record of these years. When Modi returned home, he said he was wandering in the Himalayas in response to a “higher calling.” The trope of abandonment of wife and children for a higher calling is deeply embedded in the Indian psyche. What may well be interpreted as the relinquishment of responsibility in other cultures could very well be a virtue in some circles.

The hero is always a gifted child, either misunderstood or a misfit. The calling comes at puberty, the rite of passage. The hero embarks on an adventure, a journey filled with insurmountable obstacles, hardship, even humiliation. Once he has made his conquest, the transformation happens. The hero, the individual, dies and what is reborn is the eternal man, the universal man whose solemn task and deed is to return to teach the world a lesson. The hero returns not merely to return, but to regenerate society, to transform it, to lead it into a social Nirvana.

After his return, Modi moved to Ahmedabad where he set up a tea stall near the RSS headquarters. In time, he moved into the RSS headquarters to work as the personal assistant to the chief. Modi entered the Gujarat RSS headquarters at a propitious time. The student agitation of 1974 and the National Emergency of 1975-76 provided the RSS with a new crop of activists, while the kings and princes—who lost their privy purses because Indira Gandhi snatched them away through a constitutional amendment in 1971—began to fund the RSS. This marginal group became socially acceptable. Modi’s responsibilities increased: he was soon taking secretarial roles, opening and reading mail coming to the headquarters. Modi, seen as trustworthy, was sent to Nagpur—the RSS national headquarters—for a one-month officer training camp. He was then made the RSS in-charge for the RSS student front (ABVP) in Gujarat. He was a mentor to the students, like a “vein hidden under the skin.” He was seen as too brash, as too public. But his work as an efficient organizer, getting RSS covert literature to its branches, saved him from repudiation.

When the Janata Party took power in 1977, many of Modi’s senior colleagues became ministers and went to Delhi. Modi saw the opening. He returned to the Nagpur national headquarters for more advanced training and by 1981 was the main liaison between the RSS and all the front organizations in Gujarat. Modi was at the fulcrum of power.

Political power is elusive in the shadows. One needs to come to the surface to enjoy its benefits. Modi’s transition out of the shadows began in 1987, when he was appointed to be the RSS organizational secretary for the Gujarat BJP. Communal friction sparked political gain for the BJP. More tension meant more insecurity meant greater numbers of people flocking to the behemoth for protection and for strength. The BJP organized a series of road shows to strike at the friction—the Nyay Yatra (1987), the Lok Shakti Rath Yatra (1989), and the Gujarat sector of the Ayodhya Rath Yatra (1991). Modi excelled as the organizer of these travelling theaters of hatred and insecurity. He was promoted to run the BJP President Murli Manohar Joshi’s Ekta Yatra (1992) that ran from India’s southern tip at Kanyakumari to Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir. These road shows—and the blood left in their wake—raised the profile of the BJP, winning it, in Gujarat, 121 of 182 seats in 1995 (as opposed to eleven seats in 1985).

Power can do all kinds of things. It can create ambitions that are easily thwarted by internal rivalries. BJP leaders Shankarsinh Vaghela and Keshubhai Patel first clashed, and then later Vaghela rebelled, and then Patel slipped. Modi was always in the shadows, whispering about their inadequacies and disloyalties. Patel became the chief minister in 1995, which sparked Vaghela’s rebellion. The BJP high command sensed Modi’s hand in these intrigues and shifted him to Delhi. It did not help. Modi had the pulse of his party. Vaghela formed a government in 1996 with Congress Party support, which allowed Modi to tell everyone in Delhi that he—Modi—was the first to sniff disloyalty in Vaghela. He would do the same to Patel after his government ran into problems with setbacks in local elections and two by-elections—an indictment of the inadequate relief work done in the aftermath of the 2001 Kutch earthquake. Modi whispered about Patel’s failures, just as he had done about Vaghela.

Intrigue had always paid off for Modi. The campaign against Vaghela earned Modi the post of RSS organizational secretary in 1998. This allowed Modi to be the main liaison between the RSS and the BJP as well as the other Sangh Parivar organizations. Modi took to that job with gusto. He enjoyed the limelight, coming on television and offering his harsh views on world affairs. In a television debate about provocations from Pakistan, Modi said, “Chicken biryani nahi, bullet ka jawab bomb se diya jayega” (We won’t give them chicken biryani, we will respond to a bullet with a bomb). This attitude of the hammer pleased the BJP base and the RSS brains. When Patel fell, Modi replaced him as chief minister of Gujarat.

Modi took charge of Gujarat in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the start of the War on Terror. Two months later, there was an attack on the Indian Parliament and a military buildup at the India-Pakistan border, with Gujarat as one of the flashpoints. Modi was prepared. He had his metaphoric bombs in hand. Older attitudes against Muslims—articulated by the founders of the RSS and cultivated by their followers—came to a head. They were sanctified by the United States, whose War on Terror had a decidedly anti-Muslim flavor. The Gujarat pogrom that followed the Godhra incident was part of this atmosphere. It is by now clear that the Gujarat government—with Modi at its head—was complicit in the riots. Inquiries that took place, which exonerated the government, were undermined by political pressure. These riots changed India’s political landscape, as well as Modi’s relationship to the Indian polity, forever. It was a watershed moment—and Modi understood that.

Modi never apologized for the pogrom. He remained unapologetic, even belligerent. This was something new. Politicians typically apologized for serious breaches, took some kind of responsibility and either resigned or were forgiven. Here was a leader with a massacre under his watch who remains brazen about it. Modi became a hero to the radical Right, the section that wanted this kind of bravura to be the mood of their leader. Modi cemented the loyalty of that growing section of the populace, and of the RSS and BJP cadre.

But he needed more to extend the reach of his power. He needed the backing of industrialists and financiers, of the big bourgeoisie. In 2003, the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) hosted a special session between Modi and the top business elites. Adi Godrej (Godrej Industries) and Rahul Bajaj (Bajaj Industries) publicly censured Modi. Modi sat quietly, stewing, went to the podium and said, “Others have a vested interest in maligning Gujarat. What is your interest?” In a bout of Gujarati sub-nationalism, Modi surrounded himself with Gujarat’s industrialists—Gautam Adani (Adani Group), Indravadan Modi (Cadila Pharmaceuticals), Karsan Patel (Nirma Group), and Anil Bakeri (Bakeri Engineers). They formed the Resurgent Group of Gujarat and publicly forced CII director-general Tarun Das to apologize and censure Godrej and Bajaj. Modi smirked in the wings. Modi came up for re-election in 2007. He wanted to cement the backing of the business elites. A glittering investment camp—Vibrant Gujarat Summit—became a campaign event for Modi. Ratan Tata (Tata Sons) endorsed him at this summit. It was enough. Modi won re-election. He morphed from the RSS man to a development-friendly business leader. The RSS man became the businessman’s man.

More than anything Modi became Modi’s man. He hastily isolated all his rivals—party elders were retired off to be part of the Margdarshak Mandal (Guiding Team), his peers were shifted away so Modi’s henchmen could gather around, and his challengers felt the wrath of his diehard fans, the Bhakts and trolls who keep Modi’s response after the Gujarat pogrom close to their hearts. The media owned by friendly corporate houses began to project Modi as a savior, as a larger than life figure. It was no surprise when Modi declared that he had a fifty-six-inch chest—the scale of his ambitions could not be contained in anything less than that. Modi’s closest ally, Amit Shah, helped run the ground game, which included making the role of Muslims in elections marginal (this was the actual Gujarat Model, which was exported to the rest of the country after 2014). Between seduction and intimidation, Modi coasted to the prime ministership in 2014. His party won less than a third of the votes, and benefitted from the first past the post system. You wouldn’t know that. The celebrations suggested that Modi had won in a landslide. How could this behemoth, this savior, win anything less than the hearts of all Indians?

Modi’s Political Grammar

An old Persian fable—“The Devil’s Syrup”—highlights the purpose of the Devil: to disrupt, create chaos, and gain power through anarchy. An honest man enters a confectioner’s shop. The Devil quietly drips a bit of sugar syrup on the confectioner’s balding head. A fly sits on his head and begins to suck the syrup. The honest man sees the fly, takes off his shoe and whacks the fly on the confectioner’s head. The confectioner is angry. He doesn’t believe that the honest man was merely hitting the fly. The honest man says that was the only reason, but the confectioner does not believe him. A fight ensues. Others arrive. The shop is destroyed.

“The Devil’s Syrup” is a story about the universality of deception. The syrup of propaganda produces disaffection, which erupts in an alternative narrative, points to enemies, disorients people, and delivers power to the deceivers. Truth is suppressed, incomplete information is provided, and lies are dressed up to look like “facts.” An emotional not a rational response is evoked by the deceiver.

Deception is one part of the grammar of Modi’s politics. Another is the production of division and of fear. These are the pieces of Modi’s strategy, what has enabled Modi to come to power.

There is a classic tale of the Umayad Caliph Muawiya who wanted to discredit the house of Abdul Muttalib, Muhammad’s patriarch. He asked his counsel Amr bin al-Aas to find a man from the house of Abdul Muttalib who had a character flaw. Amr recommended Aqeel bin Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin. When Aqeel visits Muawiya’s court, the Caliph had the Surah al-Masad (from the Quran) recited in the court:

Then Muawiya mocks Aqeel by saying, “Don’t you know Aqeel that the Abu Lahab mentioned in these verses is your paternal uncle?” Aqeel immediately quips, “Why don’t you disclose that the carrier of firewood, the woman mentioned in these verses is your paternal aunt?”

This whole display of dialogue between Muawiya and Aqeel is farcical. The idea is not to invoke an ethical debate but to suppress information, present it as banter, create an emotional upheaval through humiliation, and win legitimacy by creating a false sense of victory.

William Gibson, the science fiction writer, says perceptively, “Fascism first causes, then thrives on the chaos for which it presents itself as the sole cure.”

Modi arrives in the cow belt in Bihar during the election campaign of 2014. He invokes the “pink revolution” that will overtake the country. India, Modi says, is the largest meat exporter and he accuses meat exporters of colluding with the butchers—who are mainly Muslims. Modi didn’t say that one of the largest meat exporters is an active member of the BJP and that the other largest meat exporter is a very loud public supporter of the BJP. All the classic tropes are at play. A farcical premise is set up, a debate ensues to distract the public, information is suppressed, an element of fear is introduced, and the only savior is the perpetrator of this fear. And then there is the chilling dynamic that gets set up—six months after this speech, a man was falsely accused of storing beef in his house, then he was lynched and murdered in broad daylight.

To gaslight is a devious project—to make someone doubt what they know, play with their memory, make them feel like what they are being accused of is what they have done. The forces of Hindutva have made gaslighting part of their arsenal over the past several decades.

In the first year of independence, Rajendra Prasad—India’s first president—who sympathized with the right wing and even with Hindutva, wrote (on March 14, 1948) to India’s Home Minister Sardar Patel, who also sympathized with these forces:

The idea is to create suspicion, doubt, and a particular perception that establishes a stereotypical image of the other. Manufacture the image if need be even through unethical and illegitimate means because the end justifies the process. Once the stereotype is established, once people’s beliefs are firmed up then no amount of refusal, rebuttal, or corroboration by facts will matter. The narrative necessarily would transform into one of pride and feelings, glory and humiliation, and all one would care is to restore the same. The WhatsApp messages, fake news websites, tilted debates by biased news anchors, and visual depictions of a particular narrative in advertisements and billboards, serve the same purpose of stoking the manufactured perception. Once the divisiveness cleaves through the society then even genocide and homicide become legitimate. Ultimately, the ethnic cleansing will ensure a pure race, an unsullied culture, a golden age, and an Elysium where everything will be in harmony. The enemy with its filth—culture, language, stories, cuisine, symbols, and architecture—would have been flushed away.

In the epic tale of Tilism-e-Hoshruba, Amir Hamza, the lord of conjunction, is fighting the false god Laqa. When besieged, Laqa makes one of his followers, King Suleiman Amber-Hair, write a letter to Suleiman’s neighboring kingdoms,

Either you are with Lord Laqa or you are against him. This is George W. Bush’s logic after 9/11—either you are with us or you are against us. It is Modi’s choice now, either you are with him or against him. If you do not stand with Lord Laqa or Bush or Modi, then the world will fall on your head. You are compelled to stand with the Lord, with Bush, with Modi. Modi’s trolls twist every debate into a binary—either support Modi and display one’s patriotism or be an anti-national and be seen as seditious. Modi is India, India is Modi. The enemy is the enemy: it must be defeated and Modi must be applauded.

Farce

Modi is the savior. He is silent. He does not denounce. He does not step into the fray.

The landscape of India is littered with horrendous lynching events, killings by “fringe” supporters of the Sangh Parivar. Littered with nonsense blabberings of Modi’s cabinet ministers and party members. Littered with threats against writers and actors. Modi says nothing. He remains silent. This litter is not to be cleaned up by his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission).

Junaid Khan was lynched on a train for allegedly carrying beef. Protests took place across India—#NotInMyName. Modi issued a statement, “No one spoke about protecting cows more than Mahatma Gandhi and Acharya Vinoba Bhave. Yes. It should be done. But, killing people in the name of Gau Bhakti is not acceptable. This is not something Mahatma Gandhi would approve.” That is it. Cows should be protected. Gandhi would not approve of the killing of Junaid. But does Modi approve?

When dominant caste vigilantes mercilessly flogged Dalits for transporting dead cows in Gujarat, Modi offered his enigmatic views. He said that miscreants who bring disrepute to society commit seventy to eighty percent of the acts of violence. Does that mean that twenty to thirty percent of the acts of violence committed by the vigilantes are acceptable?

When asked about the victims of the Gujarat pogrom, Modi said that when one is riding in the backseat of a car and if the car hits a puppy, the passenger feels bad about it. The pogrom becomes an accident, the victim is a stray animal and Modi is the bystander.

India trundles towards the land of farce. The signs are visible now. A man in Meerut said that he would build a temple for his god—Modi—with a hundred-foot statue of his idol. This is not the first temple to Modi. That was built in Gujarat in 2014. Modi disapproved of it at that time. Now he is silent. The first time it was an embarrassment; the second time it is a farce.

Grabbing hold of this farce, this distraction, is the insidiousness of the RSS. It wishes to change the Constitution of India and to alter the fundamental social fabric of the land. Plutarch writes of a ship whose parts are all altered. If the ship is no longer made of its original parts, is it the same ship? Is India fated to be like Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus? What will the apologists of Modi say when they wake one day and find that the republic that they lived in is no longer recognizable?

In this new land, Modi will be its principal deity. In his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the vanity of the tyrant,

Somewhere, Ghalib is singing his old poem,