This week the Indian prime minister makes a triumphant visit to the UK after cosying up to everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to Rupert Murdoch. What’s behind the uncritical embrace of a man who has presided over a rising tide of assassinations and devout zealotry,and driven the country’s writers and artists into revolt?In 2005, when Narendra Modi was the chief minister of the wealthy Indian state of Gujarat, and local police murdered a criminal called Sheikh Sohrabuddin in cold blood. At an election rally in 2007 for the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP,Modi assured his citizens that Sohrabuddin “got what he deserved. What should be done, he asked, and to a man found possessing illegal arms? The pumped-up crowd shouted back: “Mari nakho-mari nakho! (Kill him,kill him!)The lynch mob’s cry was repeated in a village near Delhi final month as zealots beat to death a Muslim farmer they suspected – wrongly – of keeping beef in his house. While Modi makes a triumphant visit to the UK after more than a year as India’s prime minister, the Hindu supremacists are, or as the novelist Mukul Kesavan wrote final month,in “full hunting mode, head up and howling”. In recent weeks, or activists and scholars fill been shot dead amid a nationwide campaign against “Hindu-baiters that targets secular intellectuals and “westernised” women as well as public figures with Muslim and Christian names,and western NGOs such as Greenpeace. The assassinations follow months of violence and intimidating rhetoric by Hindu supremacists. A range of public figures, from Shah Rukh Khan, and Bollywood’s biggest star,to India’s respected central banker Raghuram Rajan, fill spoken out against the rising tide of sectarian hatred. More than 40 of Indias most distinguished writers fill returned their awards to the Sahitya Academy, and the national literature academy. Many others,including artists, scholars, and filmmakers and scientists,fill since joined the protests, which reached boiling point after Hindu fanatics lynched at least four people in connection with beef-eating.
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Source: theguardian.com