When Modi Invokes Mahatma Gandhi's Name

Mahatma Gandhi, the foremost symbol of India's freedom struggle, has died several deaths. He has met his martyrdom again, every time India and Indians departed from the path of peace and equitable progress. The most painful illustration, perhaps, came when the country was proclaimed a nuclear-weapon power in 1998. Not a very distant second, to many, would be Narendra Modi's declaration the other day that he was a devout disciple of Gandhi.

The comical absurdity of the claim should be obvious. The Mahatma fell to a fanatic's bullet in 1948 while fighting for interreligious harmony, while Modi rose to his full stature after presiding over a grisly pogrom against the Muslim minority in the State of Gujarat in 2002. Obvious, too, to Indian observers, was the motive behind Modi's metamorphosis. All were quick to see an electoral compulsion in his attempted new avatar.

Gujarat is going to only State-level polls, scheduled for December 11 and 16. But the elections, which will decide Gujarat's political dispensation for the next five years, are of much wider interest - national and regional. It is Modi's involvement that invests the event with such extra-Gujarat significance.

The carnage of about 3,000, carried out six years ago under the watchful and winking eyes of Modi's police, also attracted attention far beyond the State's borders - in places including the columns of Truthout, as our long-time readers will recall. So did the State-level elections held in December 2001, eight months after the massacre, which gave Modi another five years of far-right power.

He and his political camp left little doubt about the meaning and message of the months-long orgy of violence. They claimed that that this Indian variant of "ethnic cleansing" was an experiment in the "laboratory of Hindutva (as they called a horrendously misrepresented faith of the common Indian majority)." While blood flowed in Gujarat's streets, with the police acting as benign onlookers if not active accomplices of the far-right bands, Modi hailed it all as a holy vendetta. He talked of it as "an equal and opposite reaction" to an incident of arson (which, at least one inquiry based on a forensic report suggests, was imaginary).

Even as the violence raged again, Modi issued orders to his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its full electoral use. By thus manufacturing and manipulating mass hatred, he returned to power with a considerably increased majority. The party and the "parivar" (the far-right "family") created fears across the country, especially in the north where the BJP had a traditional base, by talking of "repeating Gujarat everywhere."

They might not have been able to repeat the holocaust elsewhere, but Modi's Gujarat has continued to serve as a model of Indian fascism and a moral booster for the far right in other states. Modi has proceeded to reinforce the antiminority sectarianism in the state with a campaign equating terrorism with Muslims.

Justice has been delayed to the point of being denied in most of the well-documented cases of the pogrom. Courts have continued to pass strictures on the Modi regime in this regard without eliciting anything but a contemptuously indifferent response. Meanwhile, the state police have gone on with their "fake encounters," as the media felicitously describe incidents in which "suspected terrorists" are just shot dead and busybodies like rights activists are told not to ask bothersome questions.

Modi's has never been a message of merely domestic significance. The carnage took place at the same time as a massive deployment of Indian and Pakistani troops across the border in Kashmir, when the subcontinent was taken to the brink of nuclear war.

Modi's public defense of the pogrom during those months of murder and mayhem and after always included mocking references to "Mian Musharraf" (the epithet added to emphasize the religious identity to Pakistan and its president). Barbed-wire fences were put up around Muslim areas with sign boards calling them "Pakistan."

The message was carried further following the train blasts of July 11, 2006, in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Speaking at a public rally in the city still reeling from the shock of the blasts, Modi proclaimed: "All Muslims are not terrorists. But all terrorists are Muslims." He thus supplied a new war cry to the far right and its friends, for whom terrorism of the kind witnessed in Gujarat and India's northeast did not exist.

It is this ideological and political package that has endeared Modi to sections of the "parivar" that want the party to "return to its roots." It is an open secret that they would like to see Modi at the helm of the BJP at the all-India level. His success in the coming elections, they calculate, will spell a significant stride towards a position that will help him decide the country's political discourse much more than the pogrom did.

Strangely, however, religious sectarianism or antiminorityism would seem to be no electoral issue at all in the state, or at best a marginal one. Modi has done his job so well that no political party would seem to be standing up for the minority. Modi claims to have discovered Gandhi, but he does not associate the Mahatma with the cause of interreligious harmony to which he died a martyr. He identifies Gandhi only with village self-rule, which, according to the chief minister, can be achieved only by scrapping village-level elections!

Modi faces no serious opposition in Gujarat from the Congress, heading the coalition government in New Delhi. Manmohan Singh has strongly criticized the BJP for calling him a "weak prime minister," but his party in the state depends only on dissidents in Modi's party for their electoral campaign. And the dissidents, in turn, while talking of "democracy" in New Delhi, assail Modi in Gujarat only for not being antiminority enough.

The people of Gujarat, however, have not spoken up, and people can spring surprises. Does Modi's invocation of Gandhi, perhaps, indicate a politician's instinctive perception of a change in the popular mood? We must hope that the ballot box will at least help to restore the backbone of forces that have been fighting extremely shy of a frontal engagement with the far right.

We must hope so, because peace in South Asia itself may be among the stakes in these otherwise petty-looking polls.

A freelance journalist and a peace activist in India, J. Sri Raman is the author of "Flashpoint" (Common Courage Press, USA). He is a regular contributor to Truthout.

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