may she rest in peace

The Rising Tide of Intolerance in Narendra Modi’s India

Kennedy School Review - July 27, 2016

The Modi “wave” that swept India cannot be chalked up to his political platform alone. It was the result of artful public relations and dogged hard work, which gave the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the biggest majority for any single party in thirty years.

One of the advertising gurus who played an instrumental part in the BJP’s media strategy told me in an interview in July 2014 that Prime Minister Modi’s election campaign was modeled along the lines of a U.S. presidential one. “This was a situation where Narendra Modi equaled the BJP,” he said.

But his past casts a shadow over his will to quell religious violence. Over one thousand people (mostly Muslims) were killed in religious riots in 2002 during his tenure as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat.[v]

Some critics say he did not do enough to stop the violence; others believe he strategically engineered the massacre of Muslims. Modi, in a New York Times interview he gave in 2002—his last one—offered no consolation to the state’s Muslims and expressed satisfaction with his government’s performance. The only regret he voiced about the carnage was that he did not handle the news media well.

India is one of the globe’s most diverse countries, with a historical commitment to secularism tracing as far back as 270 BC, when Buddhist emperor Ashoka ruled a largely Hindu country.

The Hindu right in more recent times has worked to thwart this history of plurality. With Modi at the helm today, senior politicians make bigoted remarks with distressing frequency, stoking perpetually simmering embers of a fear that India’s government prescribes to a bigoted brand of Hindu nationalism.

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