Thursday, July 23, 2015

The terror of Modi...

On May 26, 2014, Narendra Modi became the 15th Prime Minster of India. Within the past year, the Western media has hailed his government and he has been a prominent figure in the international pages of the New York Times, garnering accolades for streamlining the bureaucracy and helping to grow the economy. Just a few weeks ago he was encouraging Vladimir Putin to take up yoga, now he’s strengthening ties with America and the West, it would appear that he is a genuine wunderkind and the sky is the limit for the Modi government.

But beneath the glitz and glam is a deeply disturbing individual at the center of a reactionary and theocratically-minded social movement that makes the worst of our Evangelical Christian Tea Partiers seem secularized. Modi in fact has been described by a clinical psychologist as a textbook case of fascism and capable of mass murder. He was denied a visa and prevented from entering the United States in 2005 by the Bush administration due to his support of a 2002 riot in the state of Gujarat that left up to 2,000 members of the Muslim community dead.

Modi hails from an ideological movement called The Sangh Parivar, translated as Family of Associations, a right wing nationalist movement called Hindutva. There is the para-military Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, RSS, founded in 1925 with blatant links to European fascism. Vishva Hindu Parishad, VHP, the religious wing, promotes a brand of Hindu fundamentalism that is tremendously bigoted and especially targets the Muslim minority of India as a species worst than vermin and has promoted hatred of Christians also. And then there is the Bharatiya Janata Party, a major opposition party in the country that has succeeded in taking power and deepening the ethnic and cultural divides that have already led to mass carnage during the 1948 partition, the various wars and border skirmishes with Pakistan, and the tragedies involving Bangladesh and Kashmir. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Narendra Modi's first year as prime minister of India: good for business or...
  2. Modi’s scandals: a Delhi diary...
  3. Criminalizing dissent and attacking freedom of expression in India...
  4. The dangerous Mr Modi...
  5. Why 2002 Gujarat riots still matter...
  6. India and the globalization of servitude...
  7. Modi's popularity in rural India punctured by discontent, suicides...
  8. Monsanto’s man in India...
  9. Arundhati Roy: Beware the ‘gush-up gospel’ behind India’s billionaires...
  10. India "up for sale" to western corporate capital...
  11. Feeding the vultures while agriculture starves: capitalism’s great Indian con-tric

No comments:

Post a Comment