Modi Blues

10 years ago | Posted in: Articles | 1749 Views

Modi : tea-boy to Prime Minister of India. The tea-stall at a railway station was the family business , at the age of 7 he helped sell tea whenever a train rolled in. There was nothing remarkable about Modi’s childhood except that he was attracted to the RSS ,  an extremist Hindutva outfit , and he had no scruples , this later helped him grow politically.

He joined the RSS formally after 1971 and was adept at creating a network of contacts, he would do risky underground work during the 1975-77 Emergency,  in disguise and on a motorcycle. He was one of the first from RSS to begin working formally in the BJP , his rise in the BJP was fast as he increased his networking and played his rivals and leaders against each other.

In 2001, the tea-boy became chief minister of Gujrat – and then one of India’s worst carnages happened under his watch. These killings give Modi a brutal mystique – “a label which he has displayed brazenly ever since”. He also loves to wear suits and be in authority, though with very limited English diction or grammar .

Modi believes that if minorities wish to feel safe in the state he governs, they have to abide by value systems of the Hindu community. This is the Hindutva brand Modi represents with great intensity . There is something akin to fascism in the new India .

Muslims in Gujarat have been scared into silence , if they speak out against the horrors of 2002, they may be attacked and ostracized . In the whole of India Muslims are over 200 million of the total population and are solidly against Modi except for a paltry few. Modi,s ruthless efficiency makes his convictions even more effective. 

Modi’s supporters evaluate the Gujarat pogrom as a ‘spontaneous’ reaction of Hindus to the Godhra train incident in which 58 Hindus were killed. It is a mystery what happened in Godhra, and who were the perpetrators. A train carrying Hindu pilgrims caught fire in Godhra station in Gujarat and 58 people died. Within hours and without evidence, Modi declared that the ISI , Pakistan,s premier intelligence agency was to blame. The charred bodies were paraded in Ahmedabad and his own party announced a three day strike , then mass bloodshed took place .There was no need to blame it on Muslims , he just twisted it to his political advantage. 

There was no justification for the attack on the entire Muslim community in Gujarat, Muslims are only nine per cent of the total population of Gujarat and the majority is Hindu. If they were attacked because they were felt to be responsible for Godhra then it is a very flimsy base to justify a massacre of 2000 in which many were burnt alive , limbs chopped off and pregnant women’s stomachs were cut open to tear out fetuses. Many Muslims were dragged out and killed , then their houses were burnt , women were dragged out and raped, then burnt alive. The police never came , and later the courts of justice delayed the cases which are pending to this day.  There is no clean chit for Modi even today as courts still hear allegations against him.

Tehelka.com really shocked the world in its broadcast on 24th October 2007. Tehelka.com conducted meetings with leaders of Indian political parties BJP, RSS, VHP, and Bajrang Dal. They used spy cam and succeeded in issuing a comprehensive report. According to the report Muslims in Gujrat were massacred with a heinous plan. Modi and other ministers allowed the massacre of Muslims, this operation was named Jay Shri Ram.

Police supplied extremist Hindus with automatic weapons, dynamite , petrol in government vehicles and sent them to massacre as many Muslims as they could for 3 days. Before staging the drama of the train on fire at Godhra , thousands of Hindu rioters were called to Gujrat from other states, they were assured that no action would be taken against them .  If Tehelka.com is to believed a Bajrang Dal leader revealed that on 29th October 2002 a high ranking police officer reported that  “in a secondary school located in Gujrat city hundreds of Muslim women and children had taken refuge. To murder them the number of Hindu rioters was less so Policemen in Civil clothes accompanied them, murdered Muslims on guard mercilessly and attacked school. Muslim women were mutilated/raped by Hindus and afterwards they poured petrol on them and burnt them alive”.

The Chief Minister of Gujrat and higher officials gave 3 days for the massacre but it continued for 6 days. Even if the Tehelka report is set aside, these unspeakable atrocities did take place under Modi’s watch .  He was the Chief Minister of Gujarat at that time, and the horrible events were surely in his knowledge. Recently , he is on record having said he felt the same pain over the bloodshed as a passenger in a car that has just run over a puppy. He also said refugee camps set up for the 200,000 Muslims who lost their homes were just “baby-making factories” 

Can it at all be possible that he had no hand in the brutal events of 2002 , it was his way of putting ‘Muslims in their place’. This hate is probably because the Mughals , who were Muslims , ruled un-divided India for a thousand years. The Muslims were being treated as the Nazis treated the Jews once upon a time in Germany , the Nazi factor is Modi,s all time inspiration .

Modi says he ‘developed ‘ Gujarat as a model state , development means raising the standard of living of the masses and this never happened. Concessions were given to industries, offering them cheap land and electricity and that’s about it . 48 per cent of Gujarati children are malnourished, which is much higher than the national average ,and a poverty rate 57 per cent in tribal and scheduled/backward castes. Modi recently remarked that middle class girls had become ‘beauty -conscious ‘ when questioned about the severe malnutrition in Gujarat. 

A 2010 UNDP report has placed Gujarat after eight other Indian states in multiple dimensions of development e.g. health, education, income levels, etc. So it definitely wasn’t a model state. As Atul Sood, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, says “The governance model of Gujarat is all about aggressive implementation of development on behalf of the big private investor. It is a model that works for the rich and against the poor.”

So finally Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India, this time the world’s biggest democracy has disenfranchised Muslims. Lok Sabha will have the lowest number in history with 20 Muslim parliamentarians. There are nearly -300 MPs from the BJP but not a single Muslim : representation of four per cent in a country where Muslims are four times as many. This month a Muslim software professional was bludgeoned to death in Pune by seven persons with suspected links to a Hindu outfit, the Hindu Rashtra Sena, this incident in itself highlights the growing intolerance of Muslims.

Modi’s India has Pakistan for neighbor, the proverbial thorn in their side,  Modi has always had hawkish, aggressive views about Pakistan. Narendra Modi will prove no different from his predecessors , despite the veiled threats he issued to Pakistan during his election campaign. There is hardly anything worse he can add to his previous views , he has said it all . If Gujarat’s Muslims were unbearable for him, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan: sole Muslim nuclear power is probably something he cannot digest .

There is not much he can deny Pakistan that his country hasn’t always done, the only thing he could possibly do is remove India’s No first use policy in its nuclear doctrine. Even that wouldn’t make much difference in Pakistan’s nuclear strategy and we never believed they wouldn’t use it first.

India had already stolen our water and refused to talk on the Kashmir issue and our demand for a plebiscite, so Modi can only make cosmetic changes. Pakistan is prepared for a Hindutva-run India and its repercussions.

Indian rulers always had the Brahmin mindset, it was cleverly camouflaged in secular garb.
Now India has come of age and has emerged as a true Hindutva inspired country. With the advent of Modi the polished veneer of sophistication has been abandoned and probably India has come into true Hindu form after centuries. The myth of secular India has ended with a Hindu party in power which sees to it that Muslims ‘stay in their place’. It is easy to imagine what treatment will be meted out to other minorities as well . 

Modi,s India is a retrogressive country pushed back into intolerance and fascism, his popularity will not last long as there is no way he can provide half a million jobs every year or a very good economy with the fastest growing population in the world.

But there is no doubt that this was  Modi’s  victory year.

Sabena Siddiqi
Note:  Al-Rasub is not responsible for writer personal opinion.

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