by MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM
Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi puts a garland on Mahatma Gandhi’s statue, on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniver- sary.
Hindustan Times
At the end of March, the Indian state of Gujarat banned the printing and distribution of Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India. The ban was proposed by the state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, and it passed unanimously, as leaders of the Congress party vied to surpass Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in denouncing Lelyveld’s new book. The focus of the uproar was a claim made by Britain’s Daily Mail and, somewhat more subtly, by the Wall Street Journal, that Great Soul portrays Gandhi as a bisexual or homosexual. The headline in the Daily Mail blared: Gandhi “Left His Wife to Live With a Male Lover” New Book Claims. The “love of his life”—as the Journal put it—was a German-Jewish architect named Hermann Kallenbach, with whom Gandhi developed a deep friendship while trying out his ideas of nonviolent resistance in South Africa, where he lived from 1893 to 1914. Not to be outdone, Modi complained that Lelyveld’s book defames the Mahatma: “The writing is perverse in nature. It has hurt the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking.”
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What explains Narendra Modi’s crusade against Great Soul? Modi is a leading figure in the BJP and its allied network of social organizations. In 2002, after Muslim agitators were widely blamed for a fire on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims in Gujarat (though forensic evidence points, on balance, to a tragic accident caused by cookstoves carried on board the overcrowded train), Hindu mobs went on a rampage that resulted in the killing of more than 2,000 Muslims—most of whom were murdered far from the site of the train disaster—and in the rape of hundreds of women. (Because many of the victims’ bodies were torched by their assailants, a precise count of the number of fatalities is impossible to establish.) There is copious evidence that the rioting was planned by extremist Hindu groups that had stockpiled weapons in anticipation of a precipitating event. Propaganda was circulated during the pogrom expressing the wish to cleanse the state of Muslims. Police in Gujarat reported being told to sit on their hands, and some were even threatened with transfer or demotion if they did anything to put a lid on the violence.
At the time there was enough evidence of Modi’s involvement for him to be denied a diplomatic visa in March 2005 to enter the United States to address the Asian-American Hotel Owners Association in Florida. (Modi has a large following among Indian-Americans, approximately 40 percent of whom are Gujarati, and the creepy coexistence of religious hatred and pro-business policies is typical of his career.) The US officials who denied the visa referred to the State Department’s Religious Freedom Report, which found Modi complicit in the 2002 attacks and, more generally, to have promoted “the attitudes of racial supremacy, racial hatred and the legacy of Nazism through his government’s support of school textbooks in which Nazism is glorified.” Hitler’s role as a hero in Gujarati history books has been an international scandal for some time, but Gujarati officials have rebuffed all demands for change.
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