India's New Prime Minister: Does He Belong To The Times? By Graham Peebles

India's New Prime Minister: Does He Belong To The Times?

By Graham Peebles  

23 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org

London: The landslide election earlier this month of Narendra Modi does not bode well for the 800 million or so Indians living in destitution, or the 120 million minority Muslims in the country, or the Adivasi (indigenous) people and Dalit groups sitting on resource-rich land in Orissa, Jharkhand and elsewhere. He may well come from a humble background, but Mr. Modi's loyalties lie firmly with the corporations of India, not the chai wallahs working the train station at Vadnagar in Gujarat State like his father once did. And certainly not the Adivasi families being forced from their homes to make way for multi national bulldozers, or the marginalized millions on the fringes of India's cities living in tin shacks with no sanitation or health care, where children play alongside open sewers, and women work on mountains of refuse collecting Chinese plastics for a few rupees a day.

Modi is a far right Hindu Nationalist whose election suggests India is “ entering its most sinister period since independence.”[ The Guardian ] Hindu nationalism is an exclusive club made up of upper-caste Hindus who form the ruling elite; it is of course closed to the devout worshipers from the lower castes. The Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP) openly promotes the ideal of an India run by and for Hindus. It is "quite open about its belief in the Hindu India...where everybody else lives…as second-class citizens.” Modi's rise to electoral stardom is a “terribly sad thing and something to be ashamed of.” [ Arundhati Roy ]

His election campaign was the most expensive ever staged in India, funded as all these political games are by the men with the money. The billionaires and millionaires, the rupee resplendent corporations that own India; her sacred putrid rivers; the forests and bauxite rich mountains; the media – print, radio, Television, the schools, hospitals and water ways. Everything of value, catalogued within the business portfolios of a tiny few, whilst the majority starve, defecate in public, are violated, exploited, ignored.

Nobody knows the precise cost of the new PM's campaign: it is estimated to have exceeded Rs. 5,000 crore – that's about $840 million. The man and his message was polished, packaged and sold like any other fizzy brand, with advertised promises of economic revival and goodies galore. “Can a massively funded and aggressive media campaign make people choose a particular leader?” asked Jayati Ghosh (Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru university, New Delhi); the answer, she says, “Sadly, seems to be yes.” [The Guardian ]

No limits are placed on spending by political parties, except what's in their bank accounts. The BJP staged a media blitz, saturating the television and press with images and sound bites from their charismatic candidate. He ‘received' “nearly 7.5 times more coverage [2,575 minutes] than Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi [his leading opponent] during prime time” viewing. [ The Hindu ] Massive exposure facilitated by the corporate media that avoided asking probing questions, or “ pointing to some of the clear dishonesty in the claims made about his success in Gujarat.” [ The Guardian ] Such are the benefits of being in bed with the corporations. Big business rightly saw in Modi someone who would deliver all the benefits they have become used to.

Divisive, violent, prejudicial

Revealing the Prime Minister's extreme prejudicial leanings is the disturbing fact that Mr. Modi is a lifelong member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( RSS ). “ A paramilitary Hindu nationalist organisation inspired by the fascist movements of Europe, whose founders believed that Nazi Germany had manifested ‘race pride at its highest' by purging the Jews.” [ The Guardian ] Set up in 1927, the far right group admires Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, whom they openly praise. Outlawed by the British Raj, the RSS has been banned three times since independence. It was a former member of the RSS [Nathuram Godse] who murdered Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 for being too soft on Muslims. Traditionally dominated by upper-caste Hindus, the extreme group has led many vicious assaults on minorities, especially Muslims. Assaults threatened in the later stages of the Modi election campaign. Speaking in West Bengal, “Modi declared that only Hindu migrants from Bangladesh were welcome; the others would be repatriated.” And in Uttar Pradesh his ‘henchmen' made it clear “that anyone who did not support Modi should go back to Pakistan, where they belonged.” [ The Guardian ]

As chief Minister of Gurjarat, Modi presided over a brutal Hindu pogrom against the State's Muslim community in 2002. Over 1,000 (many put the figure much higher) lost their lives, and many women were raped, in riots that “began after a train with Hindu pilgrims was set on fire in Godhra, killing 59 people. Hindu mobs then turned on Muslims in Gujarat.” [Ibid] Since then Muslims and other minorities in the State have been marginalized and silenced, terrorized into submission. “Muslim families and individuals areincreasingly ghettoised , finding it impossible to buy or rent accommodation in dominantly Hindu areas.”[ The Guardian ] Young Muslim men cannot find work and suffer police intimidation and violence. They are denied bank loans and “intercommunity social mingling, particularly between young men and women, is frowned upon.” It is picture of social division, prejudice and injustice ;it is a picture painted by India's new Prime Minister.

Whilst it's unclear what part Modi played in the pogrom of 2002, what is apparent is that when Hindu mobs roamed the streets looking for Muslims to kill and rape, he did very little to stop them. In 2005 the American government felt the evidence against him was strong enough to deny him a US diplomatic visa: “ former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton embarked on a ‘get Modi' policy while in office, funding European NGOs on a quest to find mass [Muslim] graves.” And to cast further suspicion, in 2011 a “senior police officer's sworn statement to India's Supreme Court alleges that…Modi deliberately allowed” the slaughter. [ BBC ] Modi of course denies this, but his divisive prejudicial approach remains clear.

An economic recipe for disaster

India has witnessed GDP growth of up to 9% per annum since the economic reforms of 1991; it now sits at around 3%. Liberalization, globalization and privatization are the cornerstones of this process, which has involved the transfer of support from the poor to India's corporations, triggering, amongst other calamities, a plague of farmer suicides – 19,000 according to The Lancet killed themselves in 2010 alone. It has been resource-led growth, based mainly on the extraction of natural resources, cheap labour (including children) and foreign investment. Whilst a small number (15% of the population perhaps) have slipped into the ranks of the middle class, the chief benefactors have been the corporations and the already wealthy who have become extremely rich. India boasts 60 rupee resplendent $ billionaires plus 153,000 millionaires, and 800 million – 60% of the population – living on less than $2 a day. Over half the population has no sanitation and defecates in public and 43% of children are malnourished. It is an unjust and shameful economic system that facilitates such inequality, in India and throughout the world.

An internal armed conflict from the Northeast of the country to Karnataka state in the South West, along with the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Adivasi and Dalit people have been the major consequence of the race for resources; together with an enormous dam building programme and the construction of ‘Special Economic Zones' (SEZ). Since Independence it is estimated that as many as 65 million people (excluding those displaced through armed conflict) have been displaced in India, mostly due to ‘development' projects.

Modi's approach in Gujarat showed him to be in line – in many ways way over the line – with the government's divisive development policies: Promote and incentivize big business “through all sorts of explicit and implicit subsidies, keeping wages low and suppressing any workers' action, repression of popular movements and cracking down on dissent.” [ The Guardian ] At the same time crucify the poor, exclude them and deny them; bury them in the filthy past, as New India embraces the defunct western model of modernity, sanctifies temples to consumerism large and small, enflaming materialism and poisoning the Indian psyche. This is the economic recipe.

Consumer Nirvana

The desire for material delights has been sown firmly into the minds of India's young population (two-thirds are under the age of 35), and Modi has scratched away at the itchy insatiable surface promising consumer heaven. ‘The good days are coming' was his theme tune, with a ‘B' side of ‘we need a Corrupt Congress free India', and ‘give me a massive mandate'. Sounds like the predictable rallying call of politicians worldwide – no wonder nobody trusts them.

Hundreds of millions of Indians (not the 800 million who can barely eat) have seen no benefits from market liberalization and are denied the chance to shop. They have been seduced by Modi's saccharin-laced images of a consumerist future, where “skyscrapers, expressways, bullet trains and shopping malls proliferate,” [ The Guardian ] and the Army of Poor are hidden away in the slums and rural India, to quietly die. Along with the Bollywood brigade, the young voted for Modi, seeing him as the one to package and deliver their designer trainers, i-phones and essential cosmetics – the “long-awaited fruits of the globalised economy.” However, because the adopted development model is undemocratic and fundamentally flawed, based as it is on an unwavering belief in the market economy, rewarding the rich, excluding the poor and victimizing minorities, “he actually embodies its inevitable dysfunction.” [ Ibid ] It is a model that aggravates desire, creating discontent and fear – the essential ingredients of social upheaval and conflict. True democracy, which is based on participation, equality, freedom and the rule of law, is denied. But then India is far from being a democratic nation: "there isn't a single institution anymore which an ordinary person can approach for justice: not the judiciary, not the local political representative…. all the institutions have been hollowed out and just the shell has been put back.” [ Arundhati Roy ] The comical catchphrase, ‘the world's largest democracy', has little meaning when the voice of the people is consistently and brutally suppressed; the caste system dominates all areas of life – particularly in rural areas where most people live, while the country is run by a group of elite Hindu men. “We're a country whose elite is capable of an immense amount of self-deception.” [Ibid]

As millions worldwide respond to the tone of the times and demand freedom, justice and a new, fairer civilsation, we ask: is Modi of the time? Is he the kind of man who will be able to empathise with the people; does he possess the vision and imagination needed to create a new way of living; is he kind and inclusive? In a detailed document published by Wikileaks , Michael S. Owen of the US consulate in Mumbai said, “in public appearances Modi can be charming and likeable. By all accounts, however, he is an insular, distrustful person……….He reigns by fear and intimidation,” not “inclusiveness and consensus, and is rude, condescending and often derogatory. He hoards power… and has an abrasive leadership style.”

At a time when the world needs new ideas, politicians who can listen, are inclusive and tolerant, who long to cooperate and understand others and themselves, at such a time India has a man at the helm rooted in the ideological Stone Age, who “resembles the European and Japanese demagogues of the early 20th century.” [ The Guardian ]

Graham Peebles is Director of The Create Trust, www.thecreatetrust.org A UK registered charity (1115157). Running education and social development programmes, supporting fundamental Social change and the human rights of individuals in acute need. Contact , E: graham@thecreatetrust.org