Meet Narender Modi...

This is a very important article by a renowned British writer on Narender Modi. Pakistanis must read it to know the real snake Modi is and what is coming for Muslims of India now. 

just one quote from this article will give you shivers for the Muslims in India. Their fate is now in Allah's hands. 

"Like the Phalange in Lebanon, the RSS was founded in direct imitation of European fascist movements, and like its 1930s fascist models it still makes much of daily parading in khaki drill and the giving of militaristic salutes: the RSS salute differs from that of the Nazis only in the angle of the arm, which is held horizontally over the chest.

The RSS sees this as an attempt to create a corps of dedicated paramilitary zealots who, so the theory goes, will form the basis of a revival of a golden age of national strength and racial purity. The BJP was founded as the political wing of the RSS and most senior BJP figures have an RSS background, holding posts in both organisations.

The RSS and the BJP both believe, as the centre-piece of their ideology, that India is in essence a Hindu nation and that minorities, especially Muslims, may live in India only if they acknowledge this.
Madhav Golwalkar, the early RSS leader still known simply as “the Guru”, was the man who formulated the outlines of the RSS world-view and looked directly to the Nazi thinkers of 1930s Germany.

He took particular inspiration from Hitler’s treatment of German religious minorities.

“To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of its Semitic Race, the Jews,” Golwalkar wrote admiringly in 1938.

“Race pride at its highest has been manifested there. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures having differences going to the root to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by . . .

The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . .

or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights.”

During Partition, the RSS was responsible for many of the worst atrocities against Muslims, and it was a former RSS swayamsevak, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 for “pandering to the minorities”.

Narendra Modi: man of the masses

Modi, implicated in a massacre in 2002 while chief minister of Gujarat, has been elected as India’s new prime minister. Is he a dangerous neo-fascist, as some say, or the strongman reformer that this country of 1.2 billion people craves?

BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE PUBLISHED 12 MAY, 2014 - 17:00

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Saffron warriors: Modi waves to supporters on his way to file nomination papers in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 24 April 2014. Photo: Getty

In the intense afternoon heat, the streets of Delhi lay deserted. April is hot in northern India, but on this occasion it was not because the capital was befuddled by the sort of gasping summer temperatures that Truman Capote described as a “white midnight”. Instead the streets were empty because it was polling day in the Delhi leg of the largest and most complex election in human history.

By the time the results are announced on 16 May, 815 million voters – more than 12 times the population of the UK, or over two and a half times the population of the US – will have cast their vote at one of 900,000 polling stations. One-fifth of the electorate will be voting for the first time, adding to the sense of unpredictability. The polling is staggered over nine separate stages to allow the redeployment of more than eight million security and election personnel around the country. In a further effort to prevent trouble, and to encourage participation, the shops and the bars are closed at each stage and everyone gets a day off.

So it was on that afternoon that the normally cacophonous Delhi roads were strangely empty. The only sound was the whirr of discarded political flyers tumbling in the late-afternoon breeze along the deserted sidewalks. In a city usually bursting with humanity, the only faces on show were those on election hoardings. And they were everywhere: filling every frame attached to every lamp post and every bus shelter, glued to every wall – the same three faces repeated over and over, all the way down the tree-lined avenues, up the flyovers and down into the cavernous entrances of the gleaming new Metro stations.

Yet the tragedy is that in this great country bursting with youth, beauty and talent, none of the three front-runners inspires any great confidence in his ability to pull India together, to unite it and to lead it forward safely and equitably to its rightful place as the regional economic and cultural superpower that could balance the ever-accelerating rise of China. Instead, all three candidates for prime minister have considerable flaws, and it is perhaps partly this that has resulted in the unusual bitterness of this election, polarising opinion and bringing an unprecedented acrimony to the national debate, not least on the new political battleground of social media. Here, whole call centres have allegedly been hired to wage Twitter warfare on behalf of the individual combatants. There is, however, an undeniable energy and excitement in the air. Everything is up for grabs, and anything is possible.

The candidate to put in the fewest poster appearances that hot afternoon was Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of the new anti-corruption Aam Aadmi (“common man”) Party. On his posters and handouts, Kejriwal does indeed appear as the aam aadmi, the man in the street. Physically, he is a slight, oddly anonymous figure whose narrow face is dominated by his toothbrush moustache and rimless spectacles. In winter he is enshrouded in a muffler, swathed right around his head as you might wear bandages after breaking your jaw; in summer he wears an incongruously jaunty white party hat bearing the legend “Aam Aadmi”, which sits top-heavily on his head in the manner of a snuffer atop a candle.

Kejriwal is a former tax inspector of celebrated integrity who has dedicated his life to fighting corruption. He gave a huge jolt to Indian politics just before New Year when he successfully rode the wave of disgust at the long succession of corruption scandals and stormed the Delhi state elections, becoming our second-youngest ever chief minister. But his resignation little more than a month later, after only 49 erratic and oddly accident-prone days in office, was a major setback. As chief minister, he seemed to see himself as a guerrilla-activist, still pulling protest-stunts such as sleeping out on the pavement in midwinter, rather than as a mature politician who had learned how to seize the administrative reins and change things from the inside.

As a result of his resignation, he is no longer regarded as a serious player nationally. Nevertheless, Kejriwal has a doggedly tenacious gleam in his eye and an insistent, determined set to his mouth. Although he is the underdog in this race, hugely outgunned by the resources of India’s two largest parties, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party and the left-wing Congress, he shows every sign of fighting on. He is likely to do well in Delhi and a few other urban centres: a respectable showing for a new party, but a far cry from what seemed possible as recently as January.

Putting in far more frequent appearances on the Delhi bus stands is the more familiar and visually more memorable face of the ruggedly handsome Rahul Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru’s great-grandson, Indira’s grandson and Rajiv’s son: the heir to the dynasty that is India’s most striking example of sexually transmitted democracy. Sadly the good looks and family tree appear to be his only assets.

On his posters Rahul is shown standing in Congress Party homespun khadi, arms akimbo, with three days of stubble decorating his sculpted chin. To either side of him on the posters stands a line of random young Indian faces, presumably selected by some PR agency: a Sikh, a pretty nurse, a rustic farmer, a builder in a hard hat and so on, apparently in an attempt to place Rahul, somewhat unconvincingly, as one of the people. The overall effect is like one of those ill-advised Vogue shoots where a model is shot strutting in all her Fifth Avenue finery amid exotic tribals, as if air-dropped in from another planet. On some versions of the poster, Rahul’s hand is implausibly photoshopped clinging on to the shoulder of a smiling day labourer in an image that oozes improbability at every level. There is something about Rahul’s embarrassed smile that seems to acknowledge the stagey quality of the montage. If opinion polls are correct, he is likely to be even more embarrassed when the results are announced.

This is largely not his fault. Congress is as unpopular as it is partly because of its gross corruption while in office, and partly because of its deeply unimpressive economic performance during the past five years under the weak, uncharismatic and monosyllabic Sikh economist Dr Manmohan Singh. Since being voted back into office in 2009, Singh has in effect halted the economic reforms that had made him so popular and retreated into a vast programme of rural benefits and agricultural welfarism. This was exactly the sort of well-meant but wholly unaffordable budget-busting handout that has hobbled the Indian economy for much of its post-independence history and which Singh initially won so many plaudits for reversing at the beginning of his ministerial career.

The result has been that India’s annual growth rate has sunk from a peak of 9.3 per cent in the last quarter of 2010-2011 to under 5 per cent this year, making the country slip from the world’s second-fastest-growing economy to tenth place in this index. Other economic indicators have been equally alarming: public borrowing has quadrupled in the past five years, the national deficit grew substantially, inflation is high and the value of the rupee has plummeted by 20 per cent. Between 2004 and 2013, the wholesale price index for food went up by 157 per cent, vegetables by 350 per cent and onions by 521 per cent, amid accusations of both corruption and mismanagement.

A series of voter surveys has shown that concern over the collapse of the Indian economy is the single most important factor in this election for almost all voters, of all religions, whether urban and rural. If it is this gathering fury at the corruption and mismanagement of the present government that is responsible for generating the appetite for radical change, Rahul’s lacklustre performance on the campaign trail has not helped his cause, either. His political career got off to a good start when his backstage manoeuvrings were credited with helping Congress to win the 2009 election. But a lamentable performance in a nationally broadcast TV interview at the start of this campaign almost killed that career overnight. Rahul came across as conceited and dim, if not borderline messianic-delusional, as he talked about himself in the third person: “You’ve got to understand a little bit about who Rahul Gandhi is,” he began. “Everybody understands that this fellow here is not just a superficial chap who just talks. This fellow over here is thinking deeply and long term.”

When not praising his own profundity, he parroted the same pre-prepared answers, irrespective of the question he was asked.

What did he think about the Gujarat riots? “The real issue at hand here is empowering the women of this country.”

Why did his party protect corrupt MPs? “The issue at hand is bringing youngsters into the political system.”

Why had he not spoken up when his government had sold coal reserves and telecom rights to party cronies for a fraction of their true worth? “The real issue here is bringing youngsters into the political system.”

Why is Congress still fielding its most corrupt ministers at this election? “We need to bring in youngsters.”

In all, he mentioned empowerment 22 times and finding a way to mend the broken political system no fewer than 70 times in 45 minutes.

If the autocratic Indira Gandhi was a disappointment after Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s most brilliant freedom fighter and the uniquely articulate first prime minister of independent India, and if Rajiv was a sad disappointment after Indira, Rahul would appear to be the very bottom of the Nehru-Gandhi barrel, tongue-tied and uncharismatic on campaign, conceited and slow-witted in private: in short, the complete electoral prophylactic, as Congress must sadly now realise to its despair.

This leaves only one other candidate.