The NYT has an op-ed titled 'Narendra Modi is the world's most popular leader. Beware.' This makes sense. America believes that after the British left, they had inherited control over the sub-continent. If India gets a popular leader- indeed, if it gets the world's most popular leader- then India will follow an independent foreign policy and America will feel very bitter and frustrated.
Nicholas Kristof, who cheered when a Republican legislator was expelled from the Oregon State House, writes-
All over the Indian capital these days loom posters of Narendra Modi, presenting him as the great modernizing prime minister pulling India forward. But those posters also hint at the opposite: an emerging personality cult and an authoritarian streak that is dragging India backward.
That may be the 'hint' they convey to Kristof because he is a foreigner. It could also be the case that this hint causes him to fist himself vigorously. What is bizarre is that Kristof thinks that 'modernization' is incompatible with 'authoritarianism' or 'personality cults'. Surely, the history of China, Taiwan, South Korea etc. show that the reverse is the case? Manmohan wasn't able to pursue any big ticket reform as Prime Minister. He had zero authority and zero personality- because Sonia didn't want any rival to Rahul to emerge. What was the result? India fell further behind China. As Edwin Lim of the World Bank, who had helped China in the eighties and hoped to do the same for India, observed- in India well funded 'activists' got a bigger reward for stalling development than any bureaucrat could receive for promoting it. Thus, instead of the World Bank funding infrastructure, the task fell to entrepreneurs like Adani whose financing must remain opaque.
This is not to say that Modi doesn't have a cult like following nor that he isn't authoritative. But that's because he is very good at his job. A cricketer who scores a lot of runs or an actor who always turns out a blockbusting movie might have similar cult-like followings because they are very good at their job.
In immediate political terms, the personality cult perhaps succeeds.
Modi has a good personality but everybody knows that he only wins elections on the basis of laborious booth management and efficient 'last mile delivery'. However, in a Westminster style democracy, personal popularity can't affect general election outcomes. Vajpayee was popular. His party lost in 2004 because, Gujarat aside, its record on governance was mediocre. On the other hand, if a particular party or leader of that party is widely considered to be shit, then his rival gains. That is what happened to Congress because of Rahul. That mooncalf is the gift which keeps giving to Modi, Kejriwal, Akhilesh, Vijayan, Mamta etc.
With approval ratings at home of about 78 percent, Modi is far and away the most popular major leader in the world today, according to Morning Consult.
Modi is very good at his job. Suppose Congress had put up Gehlot for 2024, they would be in with a chance. Currently, there is no rival to Modi. Thus, if you love India, you have to approve of Modi because he stands for National Unity and Development whereas Rahul is anti-national and mentally retarded.
With the opposition in disarray,
because Congress didn't get rid of Rahul. Instead it doubled down on him. Kharge insists there can be no other PM candidate. Worse yet, Rahul has become messianic and is babbling paranoid nonsense incessantly.
While Modi polls extremely well, many worldly Indians are aghast
because they are casteist cunts
that he has made India less secular and tolerant,
Nehru was so intolerant that the percentage of Muslims in Delhi went from 33 percent to 5 percent once he became Prime Minister. He stripped Muslims of every type of affirmative action and excluded those who had fled across the border from Citizenship. The Constitution has a Directive Principle re. cow protection. It also had American style freedom of expression, but Nehru put an end to that with the First Amendment. Congress, under Indira, became dynastic and even more intolerant. Sonia and Rajiv, however, must be credited with turning it into a corrupt, incompetent, kleptocracy. The finishing touch, supplied by Rahul, is to make it utterly paranoid and moronic.
creating what some argue is a Jim Crow Hindu nationalism
That happened in 1947 when millions of Muslims were chased out. Indira revived pogroms against Muslims when they showed signs of voting for other parties. The Nellie massacre caused her to agree to expel Bangladeshi Muslims from Assam. Her son, however, presided over the massacre of Sikhs. This got him the Hindu vote.
that marginalizes religious minorities, particularly Muslims.
They were marginalized by Nehru. He kept a couple of Muslim chums in the Cabinet but members of their families, more often than not, had to cross the border.
And it’s not just marginalization: Muslims are periodically accused of slaughtering cows, which are sacred to Hindus, and lynched.
That happened in 1917 in Bihar while Mahatma Gandhi was distracting everybody's attention with his antics in Champaran. Incidentally, A.O Hume, the founder of the INC, believed in cow protection for agronomic reasons. He later became an Advaitin.
In a typical case this month, a mob in Bihar state accused a Muslim of carrying beef and beat him to death.
While Muslims slaughtered plenty of people for insulting the Prophet. The plain fact is that people of different faiths hold different things sacred and, in some parts of the world, this can lead to violence.
Modi has presided over a crackdown on news organizations,
No he hasn't. News organizations are shit. Always have been, always will be. Social Media, on the other hand, does seem to matter.
and Indians have been repeatedly arrested for their tweets.
But non-BJP Governments do this too. The fact is India has had anti-hate speech laws for many decades. The American First Amendment goes in the opposite direction to India's.
Sweden’s V-Dem Institute,
which doesn't have a single expert on India
in a new report, listed India not as a democracy but as an “electoral autocracy” ranking 108th among 179 countries in its electoral democracy index.
Those stupid cunts didn't notice that one Dynasty had been controlling the country for 80 percent of the time prior to 2014. Indira was an actual autocrat who jailed her opponents. Thus India under Congress was a dynastic autocracy which, however, was tempered by assassination.
“It’s very scary what’s happening,” said Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College, one of India’s most celebrated rural development initiatives.
It is completely useless. Still, back in the Seventies, that sort of shite had a certain romantic appeal. Then China began its rise and it was obvious that teaching peasants how to scratch their own arses without the use of expensive American battery operated arse-scratchers was no recipe for Development.
“I think we’re going into authoritarianism.”
Did Bunker or Aruna protest against the Emergency? Were they jailed? Plenty of Gandhians were during the Emergency. After Indira returned to power, Buta Singh charged some of them with being CIA agents and took away their funding. Since the Roys were fellow travelers of the Dynasty, Zail Singh gave Aruna a Padma Shri while Rajiv took the useless Bunker into the equally useless Planning Commission. Bunker resigned over corruption re. Bofors. I'm kidding. The guy sucked up to the Dynasty and got to pose as the successor to Vinobha (who had backed the Emergency).
The Roys hate the RSS because educational and development work done by the RSS is of good quality. Still, they were kinda cool back in the early Seventies coz at least they weren't Naxals- which is also why they weren't killed.
India used to be a correspondent’s dream, echoing with the sound and fury of strongly held opinions.
Maybe in the Fifties. By the Sixties it had become obvious that Indian politicians didn't have any strong opinions other than that they should get to be CM or PM unless they could get richer without bothering to hold office.
But today people often clam up when I ask about Modi.
Is it because you whip out your dick and start stroking yourself off as you ask about Modi?
Reporters Without Borders now ranks India a dismal 150th in press freedom among 180 countries worldwide.
But everybody else ranks them at zero.
“We work under a cloud of fear,” Anuradha Bhasin, the editor of The Kashmir Times, wrote in a brave essay in The New York Times this month.
She is Hindu but based in Jammu and thus safe enough for the moment from terrorist bullets. Like Bunker Roy, the Bhasin family received Congress largesse. Why is Kristol talking only to people known to be obligated to the Dynasty? Ved Bhasin (Anuradha's dad) received free land from Congress for his paper. There is still plenty of Soros type money for these sycophants.
One lesson of Asia is that economies can thrive under authoritarianism — see the history of South Korea, Taiwan and China — but that religious extremism is more perilous because it can gain momentum, create fissures and suck oxygen from education and economic management.
Which is why India is wary of its Muslim population. However, Socialist or Gandhian shite has the same enstooopidifying effect. It was the Left which turned the Indian Academy into shit. But that is equally true of a lot of non-STEM subjects in the West.
Pakistan went through its own drift to religious zealotry and offers a cautionary tale.
No it doesn't. Growth was rapid under Zia. It was the Bhuttos who fucked up the country- back when they were Left wing. The plain fact is that only the female participation rate matters. Bangladesh has high female participation (this started in Ershad's time when Privatization was introduced) and thus has risen above Pakistan.
Getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories is the obvious solution which, however, the Left is not cool with.
Pakistan was founded by a not particularly observant Muslim, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who drank alcohol and appointed a member of the (now persecuted) Ahmadi religious minority to be the country’s first foreign minister.
Bhutto passed a law declaring Ahmadis to be non-Muslim. He also fucked up the Economy. BTW, Bhutto was the main culprit behind both the '65 war and the '71 genocide and military defeat. It was he who tore the country apart.
But then in 1977, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq seized power and engineered a wave of conservative Muslim nationalism that still tears Pakistan apart.
No. Pakistanis are cool with Islam. Even Zia's sponsorship of the anti-Shia 'Sipah e Sahaban' was understandable given Iran's antics in the region. BTW, Nawaz Sharif was trying to get himself declared Amir-ul-Momineen when Musharaff toppled him. But then it was Benazir and her Uncle Babar who first sponsored the Taliban.
What Kristol, cretin that he is, doesn't get is that Muslims like Islam. If the Government cracks down on un-Islamic activity it improves everybody's chances to get to Heaven. Moreover, if you get rid of stupid Socialist economic policies (which give rise to rent dissipation) and have proper Islamic morality, then thrift and enterprise flourish. Get Muslim girls into big factories and safeguard their virtue. Within five years, all the top Tech companies will want to get in on the action. Look at Malaysia from the Seventies onward.
That would be my nightmare for India,
But India took an ultra-religious turn in 1920 itself when a Mahatma (the title of a Hindu Saint) took command of the Congress-Khilafat combine. But Khilafat, like Gandhi's own program, was purely religious.
Kristol's nightmare for India became a reality two or three decades before he was born!
because the fires of religious extremism and grievance are easier to ignite than extinguish.
Which is why the country was partitioned. Why does Kristol not understand this?
But I honestly don’t think India will tumble that far.
Because it had tumbled much further down before this cunt was born.
I agree with Urmi Basu,
who will have her head kicked in by Mamta's goons if she says anything nice about Modi
a civil society leader from Kolkata, that Indian democracy will get through this, just as it survived a retreat from democracy under Indira Gandhi.
Urmi might even say that Mamta will become PM in 2024. Not getting your head kicked in is a great motivator.
India still has a federal system
No it doesn't. America has a federal system and 'dual sovereignty'. India is unitary. The Center can create or demote States and Union Territories.
that gives power to the states, and that constrains Modi.
What constrains Modi is the need to win elections. His party is gaining power- either on its own or as part of a coalition- in more and more states. But where the BJP's performance is lackluster- e.g. Himachal- it loses power. That's a good thing. It is fear of losing elections which keeps a Party meritocratic and focused on 'last mile delivery'. Mamta has gained from having competition from Modi.
To my eye, Modi’s extraordinary popularity rests not just on demagogy
He is not a demagogue. He speaks plainly and has a positive message. Rahul rants and raves but not in connected sentences.
but also on real accomplishments (plus, he’s very good at claiming credit for accomplishments that are less real).
So, he is a politician. Shocker!
Let’s talk toilets.
Modi initiated that conversation- scarcely the act of a demagogue.
Millions of Indians still practice open defecation, which spreads disease and parasites. A national survey in 2020-21 was released this month and found that 21 percent of rural households still had no access to any toilet — but that’s a significant improvement from almost 60 percent having no access in 2012. Modi has championed an end to open defecation, which may seem undignified for a politician, but it saves lives.
Modi emphasized the hazard of rape and abduction faced by women in the countryside. This showed he understood the human dimension of the problem.
There is an old joke about Nehru welcoming Kennedy to India. Delhi had been spruced up and so Kennedy was disappointed that he had not got to glimpse India's fabled squalor. So, he got up early and told his driver to take him into the countryside. There he saw a line of people walking into the fields so as to defecate in the open air. Kennedy was delighted and he mentioned this to Nehru who was much discomfited. Thus, on his own trip to Washington, Nehru got up early and asked his driver to take him into the countryside. He saw a line of people walking into the fields. Sadly, they were Indian diplomats or academics who preferred open air defecation because, what to do?, Indians are like that only.
Modi has also promoted the use of gas cylinders for cooking, rather than burning sticks and cow dung, which smoke up kitchens to dangerous levels. This hugely affects impoverished women, for some 600,000 Indians die annually from this indoor air pollution.
Fascist bastard!
Construction of ports and roads has improved, and Modi has pushed a digital identification and payment system that brings villagers into the banking system. Modi isn’t the primary reason for this technological marvel, but he presided over its expansion.
Fuck you Modi! You are making the Americans look bad. People like Tyler Cowan are constantly asking why India is so much ahead of the US in this respect.
“Even his detractors admit he is very good at economic development and infrastructure projects,” said Alyssa Ayres, an India scholar and dean at George Washington University. Ayres said that during Modi’s first years as prime minister, he was less polarizing and leaned in on development.
Modi is not polarizing. A PM who becomes more and more popular is uniting, not dividing, the country.
More recently, the authoritarian streak has become more prominent.
In the opinion of a cretin. Modi is becoming more flexible because he has learnt from experience- e.g. the farmers' agitation- that big-ticket reform has to start at the State level so lessons are learned and mimetic effects can drive their spread. Essentially, India needs to reverse centralization and allow competing 'Tiebout models' with different fiscal mixes.
Modi is now to all of India what he was for many years as the boss of the state of Gujarat. There he was a pro-business leader
He refused to hand over agricultural land when farmers changed their mind. Modi put the voter first, second and last. Enterprise must be beneficial to the people or find a home for itself elsewhere.
who oversaw strong economic growth, but his record was badly damaged by a pogrom against Muslims on his watch in 2002
This is utterly false. Modi gained by the incident. Killing Muslims, if they kill Hindus, is very popular with Hindus. Similarly, Americans were perfectly happy to kill 1.3 million Muslims- and displace tens of millions more, so as to take revenge for 9/11.
On the other hand, it is true that Modi had no hand in the violence. He had only been CM for a few months and his Home Minister was untried and, as it turned out, completely useless. Modi quietly dropped him. However the real problem was the nexus between the landshark, the bootlegger and the Police SHO. Delhi helped by sending in a top-cop to clean the Augean stables but I don't know how successful that exercise was.
— there is disagreement about his degree of complicity, but he certainly mismanaged it.
He says he mishandled the optics but made up for it by the way he got on top of the Akshardam revenge attack. Gujarati voters knew the truth and rewarded him for ending the politically instrumentalized cycle of communal riots which began in 1969.
He also undermined pillars of civil society like the Self-Employed Women’s Association.
When? Twenty years ago, Government auditors reported irregularities in a Government scheme named 'Jeevika' run by SEWA. Ela Bhatt attacked Modi saying she was helping Muslims whereas Modi wants to kill them. The upshot was that SEWA withdrew from all Government schemes. However SEWA hadn't criticized Modi in 2002 and so there was no real bad blood between him and Ela Bhatt- whose recent death he condoled with. The fact is, auditors are always going to find irregularities. If you depend on foreign contributions you have to pretend that the thing is politically motivated.
Looking ahead, what I fear is that the authoritarian, Hindu nationalist Modi is eclipsing the economy-boosting, toilet-building Modi.
Modi- like every other head of Government wants to boost the economy so that tax revenue increases. But, being an energetic sort of cove, he will continue to back populist schemes- some misguided like demonetization- as will Chief Ministers belonging to other parties.
The big question is whether Yogi can turn U.P into a trillion dollar economy. If so, he will be in line to succeed Modi in 2029.
To imagine a worst case, just look next door at the sad shambles of today’s Pakistan.
Why not look next door at Bangladesh? Sheikh Hasina took a firm line with the Islamists. Biden didn't invite her to his Democracy summit. He did invite Imran Khan who turned him down at the last moment, preferring to go cuddle with Putin. But Bangladesh overtook Pakistan economically a while back. Americans remain obsessed with Pakistan which, however, will always take their money and then stick a knife in their back.
The West needs to beware of a China led Eurasian power- block which includes Pakistan and Iran. China has brokered a rapprochement between Teheran and Riyadh. America is getting frozen out of larger and larger swathes of the globe. This delights the NYT. They won't be happy till Biden Magnitskies Indian officials the way he has Magnitskied Bangladeshi and Burmese officials. India must be prevented from becoming a member of Quad. Sadly, France and Australia and Japan will work with India even if Biden succeeds in turning America back to the path of splendid isolation.
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