Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (17 page)

And yet Gujarat’s religious tensions have a more specific source than merely the rigors of economic development. They stem from “2002,” as everybody in Gujarat and the rest of India simply refers to it. That year in the local lexicon has attained a symbolism perhaps as resilient as the word “9/11” has to Americans. It connotes an atrocity that will not die, that has been etched deeply into the collective memory, becoming a myth in its own right that constitutes a hideous rebuke to Gandhi’s Salt March. The notoriousness of these events is all the more shocking given that India regularly experiences spectacular violence among religious groups, castes, and tribes, yet these somehow all dissolve into the larger, messy stew that is this country’s admired democracy.

What human rights groups here label the “pogrom” had its origin in the incineration of fifty-eight Hindu train passengers on February 27, 2002, in Godhra, a town with a large Muslim population that is a stop on the rail journey from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. The Muslims who started the fire were apparently the victims of taunts by other Hindus from Gujarat, who had previously passed through the station, en route to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, to demonstrate for a Hindu temple to be built on the site of a demolished Mughal-era mosque. It was at this juncture that the recently installed chief minister of Gujarat, the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, immediately decreed February 28 a day of mourning, so that the funerals of the passengers could be held in the streets of Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city. “It was a clear invitation to violence,” writes the
Financial Times
correspondent in India, Edward Luce, in his book,
In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India.
¹
“The Muslim quarters of Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat subsequently turned into death traps as thousands of Hindu militants converged on them.” In the midst of the riots, Chief Minister Modi quoted Newton’s third law: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
The statement removed all restraint from the killers. Mobs coalesced and raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, who were then set on fire. The males were forced to watch the ritualistic killings before they, too, were put to death. The figures and some of the details of what happened are subject to great controversy. Some reports claim that as many as 400 women were raped, 2000 Muslims murdered, and 200,000 more made homeless throughout the state.

The killers—again, according to some reports—were dressed in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the uniform of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Organization of National Volunteers), the umbrella group of the Hindu nationalist movement, and came armed with swords and gas cylinders. The rioters were also equipped with electoral registers and computer printouts to identify Muslim homes. They even had the addresses of Muslim-owned businesses that had hidden behind Hindu business partners. Luce, the influential writer Pankaj Mishra, and many others have observed that the high degree of planning and efficiency to the murders indicated official culpability. “Surveys were done some weeks before indicating where Muslims lived,” said Prasad Chacko, who runs a human rights nongovernmental organization (NGO), in Ahmedabad. “The police were complicit. There was the attitude of waiting for a pretext to let people vent their feelings. The quality of the killings, if not the numbers, indicate a state-sponsored genocide.”

Indeed, the police stood by and observed the killings, and in some cases, according to Human Rights Watch, helped the rioters locate Muslim addresses. As for the 200,000 made homeless, the Gujarati state government provided little or nothing in the way of relief, or compensation for the loss of life and businesses. Many secular NGOs stayed on the sidelines, afraid to incur the wrath of the central authorities. Muslim charities—Jamaat-e-Islami, Tabliqe Jamaat, and Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind
—
provided for the shelters, and these organizations subsequently became a vehicle for the radicalization of young Muslims in the wake of the carnage. Modi, whom the riots had made a household word throughout India, later called the Muslim relief camps “baby-making factories.”
²

“The events of 2002 have reverberated years later because of the involvement of the Gujarati state authorities in the killings, and the fact that until this day there has been no public remorse,” Sofia Khan, the head of a local Muslim NGO, told me. “There has been no moral reckoning,”
declared Ramesh Mehta, a retired judge. As one Hindu activist coldly rationalized to me, “If the train in Godhra had not been burnt, the riots would not have happened.” His was an attitude I heard particularly from educated Hindus throughout Gujarat. While it is true that Indian political parties have for decades played the communal card—one could argue that the Congress Party stoked anti-Sikh violence after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984—there was a particular blatancy and transparency in the way that the Gujarati authorities helped orchestrate anti-Muslim violence. And afterwards, as Johanna Lokhande, an activist who helps victims of the massacre, told me, the local government was “averse to the whole idea of providing justice.”

More tellingly, 2002 continues to echo precisely because of Chief Minister Modi’s very success as a politician in the intervening years. He has never apologized, never demonstrated regret of any sort for 2002, and has thus become a hero to the Hindu nationalist movement, reelected several times as chief minister. Furthermore, his seeming incorruptibility, his machine-like efficiency, and his penchant for dynamic leadership of the government bureaucracy have lately made Gujarat a mecca for development, garnering more internal investment than any other state in India. To travel to Sindh and then to Gujarat is to comprehend at a very tangible level how Pakistan is a failed state and India a very successful one, with the ability to project economic and military power throughout the Indian Ocean region. And this impression, as imperfect as it may be, is to a significant extent due to the way Modi has governed.

Migrants, both Hindus and Muslims, from throughout India have been streaming into Gujarat in recent years to find work at its expanding factories. There is an element of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore in Modi’s Gujarat. What’s more, his hypnotic oratory, helped by a background in the theater, has led some to compare him to Adolf Hitler. Modi is not only the most dangerously charismatic politician in India today, he may be the only charismatic one, and the first to emerge in decades since Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.

Of course, Narendra Modi is neither Lee Kuan Yew nor Hitler. He is what he is, a new kind of hybrid politician—part CEO with incredible management abilities, part rabble-rouser with a fierce ideological following—who is both impressive and disturbing in his own right. Developments in mass communications have led to an evolution in leadership styles, and just as Barack Obama gives hope to millions in the new
century, a leader like Modi demonstrates how the century can also go wrong: with unbreachable psychological divisions between religious groups masked by a veneer of cold bureaucratic efficiency. And that is why he is so important. Representing a spirit very different from that of Gandhi, he is very much part of the Indian Ocean story.

Leaders often sum up the geographical, political, and social landscapes out of which they specifically arise, so before I delve further into the character of Narendra Modi and describe my long conversation with him, let me provide a picture of Gujarat, a microcosm in more intense form of twenty-first-century India and the Indian Ocean world itself.

Gujarat has “tremendous locational advantage,” explains historian Dwijendra Tripathi. It is near the Indian Ocean’s midpoint, yet still close enough to Iran and the Arabian Peninsula to refine oil from there, and reexport it. With two great gulfs—those of Kutch and Cambay—Gujarat has the longest coastline and best natural harbors in India. This immense seaboard fronts westward toward the Middle East and Africa, so throughout history Gujarat has been a land of trade and the broad-based movement of peoples.
³
Camões writes in
The Lusíads:

Indeed, Gujaratis, who were excellent sailors, made the Gulf of Cambay the easternmost point for trade in the western Indian Ocean and the westernmost point for trade with the East Indies.
⁵
Both Levantine rigs and Chinese junks could be found here and along the coast of western India.
⁶
Thus, Gujarat was at the confluence of several trading systems.
⁷
Moreover, Gujarat’s prodigious textile production has given it a market from the Arabian Peninsula to the Southeast Asian archipelago, making its ports since the medieval centuries international trading hubs. During the age of British imperialism, Gujarati businessmen sold cloth to Yemen
and were paid in silver, which they then lent to English merchants to buy Yemeni coffee, so merchants here made a double profit after they were repaid.
⁸
This business acumen and penchant for innovation were supplanted by a spirit of adventure and risk taking. In the early nineteenth century large Gujarati communities, made up to a large extent of Shiite Ismailis, sprang up in Muscat, Aden, East Africa, and Java, with a heavy concentration especially on Malacca and Zanzibar.
⁹
The fact that Gandhi began his career as a lawyer and political activist in South Africa rather than in India itself was very much part of this Gujarati tradition of planting roots throughout the Indian Ocean. Later, when the United States beckoned on the horizon and visa restrictions were loosened, Gujaratis flooded to its shores, becoming, among other things, motel proprietors and Silicon Valley software tycoons. It is estimated that 40 percent of the Indian immigrants in New York City are Gujaratis. In particular there are the Patels, village officials who in the nineteenth century amassed property and became landed gentry, and following that traveled to Africa and later the United States in search of commercial opportunities.

Faith—both Hindu and Muslim—became a tool of this business networking, providing a social and cultural framework for advantageous interactions. Thus, in Gujarat, devout, highly distinct ethnic and religious communities have been operating easily within a cosmopolitan framework. Even as the state leads India in the use of computer governance and indexes of economic freedom, it also has the strictest dietary restrictions, with alcohol publicly prohibited in this land of Gandhi, and vegetarianism (partly the result of the religious influence of the Jains) more widespread here than elsewhere in India. Hindus in Gujarat negatively associate meat eating with the tradition of the late-medieval Mughals, Muslim conquerors from Central Asia.

The Gujarati historical experience has been shaped not only by the Arabian Sea and the wider Indian Ocean, but also by Gujarat’s situation on a frontier zone of the Subcontinent. Thus it has sustained repeated Muslim invasions from the north and northwest, which have been documented here more excruciatingly than in other Indian states. The worst of the depredations came at the hands of the Turko-Persian ruler Mahmud of Ghazna, who swept down into Gujarat from eastern Afghanistan, and in 1026 utterly destroyed the seaside Hindu temple of Somnath. Whenever I mentioned the events of 2002 to Hindu nationalists, I was lectured about the crimes of Mahmud of Ghazna and those of the Mughals. For
these Hindus this is living history, as if it happened yesterday. Indeed, the Islamic architectural genius that created the Taj Mahal and brought a luxurious civilization, blending the material cultures of Persia and Central Asia with that of northern India, is considered a regrettable historical episode in the minds of Hindu nationalists, one of whom, Vijay Chauthai-wale, a molecular biologist, told me, “Muslims in India must de-link themselves from the memory of [Mughal kings] Babur and Akbar, and from terrorism, and should become purely of India.”

Purely of India
. This is a significant statement, which telegraphs a deliberate revision of history that the Indian media and school textbooks are partly responsible for propagating. The very Islamic migrations that make for today’s dazzlingly multicultural India, with many Arabic and Persian loanwords embedded in Hindi and Gujarati, are wholly repudiated because of the undeniably awful sufferings and plunder of cities and religious sites that they brought upon Hindus (although armed conflicts between Muslim rulers probably outnumbered those fought between Muslims and Hindus in Indian history).
¹⁰
Even the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great, so named because of the religious pluralism he practiced (though a Muslim, he was accepting of Hinduism and spent his later life in search of a cosmic deity that spanned religious divides), is considered by Hindu nationalists just another Muslim subjugator.

Gone in significant measure in this worldview is the all-inclusive secular Indian version of history, originally subscribed to by the Congress Party during the Nehruvian era of the 1950s and 1960s, which emanated ultimately from Mahatma Gandhi’s gentle humanistic vision of excluding no one from the national project, and which sought to bridge the historical differences between religious groups. The aura of legitimacy and romance that invested the Congress Party—the party of independence, after all—was shattered during the dictatorial emergency decrees enacted by Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s. Following that, a new logic was required to mobilize the Indian masses and particularly the emerging middle class, a segment of the population that arose in Gujarat sooner than in many other Indian states, supported by its history of successful trading.