Modi’s shadow looms large over nation

Narendra Modi, the longest serving Chief Minister of Gujarat, has achieved the rare distinction of being one of most divisive figures in India’s recent history. Not even Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathu Ram Godse, generated such an amount of sustained hatred.

 Godse was quickly got rid of and the nation moved on. He never became a totem pole — his supporters were a mere lunatic fringe. Not so with Modi. His supporters are on the increase.

And it is not just his party faithfuls who hero-worship him, Modi’s achievements are real and his admirers range from the urbane and sophisticated Ratan Tata to Deepak Parekh, a true captain of the industry. Yet Modi‘s shadow looms large over the nation, his party the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] and the Supreme Court. Intriguingly he has not been convicted despite years of investigation and a sustained media campaign against him.

It is easy enough to demonise him, but a larger question needs to be asked and in pursuing this line of enquiry some frightening and bizarre developments come to light. What does it say of India’s judicial process and is there a deep-seated fascist underbelly to India’s rising middle class? For Modi is indeed a study in tyranny but he is also a maverick and not easily pigeonholed.

Ironically, the RSS — the Hindu movement — and its political offspring BJP are wary of Modi. Why? Because he does not always toe their line and unlike most of the political class in today’s India, Modi is not chasing filthy lucre, but something far more valuable and sinister — power.

His alleged lethal assault against his one-time friend and Home Minister Haren Pandya is reminiscent of the Nazis rise to power — a throwback to Hitler’s cold-blooded murder of Rohm, the Nazi storm trooper.

There are many other instances of his supposed style of neutralising his opponents, but all of this pale into insignificance when he took on the great Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself. The then prime minister of India folded in and accepted the Modi line — the tallest leader of the BJP retracting his statement to appease Modi.

Such is the power of Modi. Is this then the new face of a changing India? Will Modi make India the super-power that its middle class craves for? Membership to the high table needs a muscular leader like Modi who brooks no opposition and has no compunction in throwing the landless out on their ears if it means a new airport or a new upscale land development.

Modi has made visits to Shanghai and there are first-hand reports of how enamoured he is of the Chinese ways of doing things. He is a man in a hurry and he is driven. His ambition is to make India proud.

One of the more ominous and scary street talk on Modi’s alleged rationale at ethnic cleansing would have made the Mahatma cry in pain and anguish. It is said that he wanted to teach the Muslim population of Gujarat a lesson — the state, after all, shares a long border with Pakistan and lest a section of its Muslim society harbour illusions of becoming fifth columnists, he felt he needed to send them a brutal message. Beware every action has an equivalent reaction — a Newtonian truth that has been soiled in the hands of criminal apparatchiks of the Hindu right.

Flip this over, however. There have been no riots in Gujarat after Modi came to power. Muslims have enjoyed comparative peace — peace of the grave, many may say, but the man has brought in stability after the ghastly riots in 2001. The doyens of industry who initially joined the chorus demonising him have since flocked back and sing the man’s praises.

And Modi is first and foremost a Gujarati and the world knows the Gujarati‘s predilection for creating wealth. Modi is doing exactly that — building a prosperous Gujarat. His Vikas Gujarat is a mission to make it a model state. He is in awe of Shanghai and wants to not replicate it but dwarf it. He wants 124 skyscrapers nestled into an 886 acre plot with more than 75 million square feet of office space and this is his GIFT city, a fitting moniker for Gujarat International Finance Tech City.

The middle classes lap this up because this what they want for the whole of India not just Gujarat. They travel to Dubai and Singapore and come back crestfallen asking why can’t we do the same here. They are disconnected with Gandhi’s India and are in sync with Modi’s India.

The irony in this comparison between the two Gujaratis is completely lost on them. They bemoan the slow lumbering pace of democracy and combined with a shallow reading of history cry loud for elevating Modi to prime ministership.

And this is exactly what Modi wants. He is going for broke. The top job or nothing and if it means trampling on octogenarians like Lal Krishna Advani, so be it. The question is will Gandhi’s India trip him up?

Ravi Menon is a Dubai-based writer working on a series of essays on India and on a public service initiative called India Talks.