ON the eve of the G7 summit in Japan last week, there was a sudden outburst of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth in Australia. Just hours after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had confirmed that Joe Biden would be visiting the country for the chiefly anti-China Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) summit in Sydney, the US president announced that, sorry, he wouldn’t be able to make it.
Biden said he would be obliged to rush back from Japan to deal with his country’s debt crisis. Several commentators lamented that his absence would play into China’s narrative that the US is insufficiently engaged with the Indo-Pacific to remain the regional hegemon. Others reassured the public that America remains dedicated to its Asia-Pacific role.
Japan’s prime minister followed Biden’s example, but the fourth component of the Quad decided to carry on. Narendra Modi arrived in Australia late on Monday, and last night was scheduled to address a 20,000-strong crowd — mostly of Indian origin — at the Olympic stadium. There has been resistance, including posters in Sydney — mostly torn down — calling for a citizen’s arrest of the ‘Hindu terrorist Modi’.
The terrorist charge largely harks back to the anti-Muslim pogroms in Ahmedabad in 2002 when Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, decided that the state’s police and firefighters would do nothing to protect the victims. At least 2,000 people were murdered. Modi predictably denied all responsibility for the violence.
Modi’s Western friends turn a blind eye to India’s trajectory.
Back then, the international response was at least superficially more robust than it is today. Modi was effectively banned from travelling to the US or the European Union. However, the West rapidly backtracked as soon as he became prime minister. If anyone had any illusions that he would modify the extremism honed since his youth as a devotee of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), they have steadily been divested of this vain hope.
And if anyone were to wonder why a neofascist pundit might be hailed as the leader of the world’s largest democracy, just look at the new Cold War — which, much like the old one, primarily targets Russia and China. Whatever its motivations may be, the latter appears to be the only power that is keen to end the appalling war in Ukraine. The West is bent upon fuelling the flames. India has refused to disengage from Russia, a source of cut-price oil and gas, but can hardly be categorised any longer as non-aligned. Far more alarming is the West’s consequent insouciance — or cultivated ignorance — about the Modi regime’s proto-fascistic tendencies.
It is not shy of demonstrating them. A report published earlier this year by the North America-based Justice for All organisation, titled The Nazification of India, compares what has been happening with the circumstances in Germany in the 1930s, and many of the parallels are striking — not least that Adolf Hitler struck influential people in Western democracies as an attractive proposition. Until it was too late.
India’s course towards what would have been anathema to Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi was set two decades ago when the then chief minister of Gujarat state facilitated a pogrom that claimed at least 2,000 lives in the aftermath of the Godhra tragedy. A recent documentary about the events of 2002 inspired a backlash against the BBC that still carries on. Sadly, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s point of view in the documentary consists of idiotic interventions by Swapan Dasgupta, an old Oxford acquaintance who drifted seamlessly from the left to the far right — a depressing but hardly uncommon phenomenon.
Much more worrying is the Hindutva jihad against the domestic media, supplemented by efforts to rewrite history — as well as other subjects — by trying to erase, inter alia, the Mughal past and Darwinian evolutionary theory. There are numerous other instances of the absurdities being drummed into innocent minds at the behest of the RSS — founded almost a century ago, with its still evident Nazi tendencies honed in the 1930s — and its various offshoots.
With all its hypocritical gibberish about ‘values’, the West sees nothing wrong with India’s trajectory, and its blinkered leaders will trot along to hug Modi when the G20 beckons in September. If India’s drift towards fascism is to be halted, the resistance will have to come from within. The Indian trend is similar to what has been seen elsewhere — not least Pakistan, but also the US, Brazil, Hungary and Israel — of political leaders acquiring a cult following among populations disillusioned by the centrist business-as-usual. That’s understandable but the consequences can be atrocious. One can only hope that the majority of Indians will see the light before it’s too late. The election result in Karnataka was somewhat encouraging, but there’s a long way to go.
Published in Dawn, May 24th, 2023
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.