IT’S a challenging proposition at the best of times to trust Narendra Modi by what he promises to do for anyone. A problem surfaced early in his career when, as prime ministerial hopeful, he promised to deposit a tidy sum in everyone’s bank account from the money he said he would retrieve from stolen cash hoarded abroad.

Nothing of the kind is expected to happen, even though he won an absolute majority. His own home minister dismissed it as a ‘jumla’, a Gujarati coinage for banter. Modi could thus, in a similar vein, take the oath of office one day promising to treat every citizen as equal, and then go on to tell the voters (who don’t always listen to him, luckily) that Indian Muslims were thieves and infiltrators.

The other day, he proclaimed that India had always been averse to war, and that it gave Buddha to the world as an icon of peace. Buddha not yuddha, he said at a meeting with Indians in Moscow during a recent visit to meet President Putin. He likes to rhyme things even if it doesn’t always work. “Hard work, not Harvard,” he hissed to fawning TV anchors in a moment of miffed disapproval of Amartya Sen’s views against Hindu chauvinism.

Modi’s was a familiar assertion to make about Indian aversion to war and violence. However, two of the popular religious legends in the Hindu belief system — the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — valourise war. In fact, the Mughals fondly translated the Mahabharata into Persian and called it Razm-nama (chronicle of war).

Celebrating violence has been part of a muscular nationalism promoted by Modi’s Hindutva forebears.

India didn’t, of course, just give Buddhism to the world in a platter. The creed was veritably banished, albeit in stages, from the country of its birth. It is another story that it continues to thrive in different forms abroad, as a Tamil-baiting creed in Sri Lanka, and Muslim-hating system in Myanmar. India thus hardly has any Buddhists from the old lineage, and it was Ambedkar who led the way out of the Hindu fold to convert his Dalit followers to Buddhism. They are sometimes called neo-Buddhists. When these Buddhists congregate annually to mark the day of their conversion under Ambedkar’s leadership, they repeat the chants he gave them.

Last year, a Buddhist minister in the Delhi government had to resign after one such meeting was slammed by bigots, and Delhi Police quizzed participants for allegedly fomenting bad blood.

It’s not true that this wouldn’t have happened to Ambedkar when he took the oath in which he swore never to believe in Hindu deities by name. To underscore the lingering love-hate with Buddhism, perhaps, India’s nuclear test in 1974 was codenamed Operation Smiling Buddha.

Let’s parse the claim Modi made in Moscow about India’s aversion to war and violence. Did he visit Putin to stop the war in Ukraine? If so, the Ukrainian president missed the point by a long chalk. In fact, Zelensky was upset and vocal about how ‘disappointed’ he was by Modi’s embrace of Putin. The Americans, on their part, issued a terse statement over the visit and their ambassador in New Delhi said the trip revealed that their ties couldn’t be taken for granted.

A likelier agenda for Modi was more business-like, about supplies of arms and equipment, their spare parts, etc, and their circuitous payments in non-dollar arrangements to circumvent the sanctions. Discounted Russian oil supplies to India would certainly have come up for mention, possibly including the feigned criticism of the embargoed commerce by the West, which has been hypocritically taking advantage of the Indian link by procuring refined products from the overtly barred commodity.

The windfall oil wealth thus generated was on display at the lavish, if gaudy wedding of a leading oil-refining tycoon’s son; a bizarre event attended by the entire political class for some reason, with the possible exception of the Gandhi family. The Russia-India oil nexus is widely seen as underpinning the hugely tragic conflict in Ukraine, devastating homes and families on both sides with unspeakable toll in human lives.

Returning to Modi’s claim of India’s aversion to war and violence in the footsteps of Buddha, The Wire carried a troubling report recently about Indian ammunition being allegedly exported to Israel, inevitably sustaining the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. How does the claim of peaceful intent tally with Modi’s dictum, which became popular with his right-wing admirers, a warning to real or imagined enemies ‘ghar mein ghus ke maroonga’ (I’ll raid your house to get you), after the so-called air raid on Balakot in Pakistan to ostensibly avenge the murder of 40 paramilitary men in a terror attack curiously before the 2019 elections? Had Modi been sincere about his admiration for Buddhist tenets, he would not have dodged the Shanghai group’s summit last week. Rather, he would have met the prime minister of Pakistan and the Chinese president to create the chances of peace.

Leave alone the need for talks at his level, he might at least have allowed the people of India and Pakistan to meet; in particular, groups that have always worked for peace between the two countries.

The fact is that celebrating violence has been part of a muscular nationalism promoted by Modi’s Hindutva forebears. And it pitted them directly against Gandhiji’s non-violent methods to fight colonialism. The RSS was not involved in Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination but was guilty of “distributing sweets” after the incident, said Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, revered as an iron man by Hindu nationalists. The Sardar accused the RSS of spreading “communal poison”, but also added that sections of Muslims were not “loyal” to India. He wrote to Nehru less than a month after Gandhi’s assassination: “…The RSS was not involved at all. It was a fanatical wing of the Hindu Mahasabha directly under Savarkar that hatched the conspiracy...” Today, however, it’s difficult to tell one from the other.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 16th, 2024