A Documentary Screening and a Stadium Event: Notes From Narendra Modi’s Australia Trip
by JAWHAR SIRCAR
Modi desperately needs some leader of the democratic world whose eyes do not remind him constantly of his human rights record – past, present or threatened.
What exactly is wrong or right about the BBC documentary India: The Modi Question that is causing such an endless storm, for different reasons, in the UK, in India and now in Australia?
The BBC’s telecast in January immediately triggered highly inflammable memories of communal riots in Gujarat in 2002, when Narendra Modi was the chief minister. These wounds were just too raw to be touched, even after Modi’s professionals had adroitly managed to cover them up, with the assistance of several legal eagles and the indulgence of judicial officials and those even higher up. Modi has been pronounced “not guilty” on certain specific narrow charges, for the present and to the extent possible, but many other questions continue to fly, all around, thick and fiery. This riot, in which over a thousand people – mainly Muslims – were slaughtered simply refuses to behave and lie still in its grave.
While many saw mischief in the timing of the release of the BBC documentary, a year or so before India heads for its decisive but surely nasty polls in 2024, others lauded the broadcaster for its boldness and persistently upholding human rights, come what may. The BBC claimed it had recently obtained access to a previously unseen and confidential UK government report produced after the riots that had blamed Modi unequivocally for the violent riots. According to Jack Straw, who was the UK’s foreign secretary in 2002, it bore the “hallmarks of ethnic cleansing”. The Indian government screamed at the BBC instantaneously and a very undiplomatic foreign office went the extra mile to heap its choicest of invectives on it. Then, the Indian government banned the documentary with its typically high-handed Modiesque brusqueness and twirled the knife in thereafter with a harassing raid on BBC offices in India. How utterly democratic!
The western world – which extends to Australia and New Zealand in its worldview sweep – was aghast at the brazen display of “oriental despotism” that had never been associated with India since 1947. To cap it all, a high court in India issued notice to the BBC for criminal defamation, just when Modi touched the soil of Australia. Uncanny timing, but why? One reason could be the decision of a large, influential section of Australia’s politics and civil society to screen this very BBC documentary in Parliament itself, which is quite a knockout message to Modi that all is not well. And Modi doesn’t take kindly to such messages.
The Wire for more
Narendra Modi in Australia: Down under bliss for Hindutva
by BINOY KAMPMARK
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on arriving in Australia in the third week of May, was greeted by an Indian diaspora who had left India decades ago: they came out in numbers.
The Indian PM has tried to give the impression of being a near lovable soft-toy character. But Modi is one of India’s most accomplished sectarians, who has done more than any other leader since independence to repudiate the complex tapestry of Indian life.
It was that very same tapestry famously acknowledged by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, as one that accepted all religions rather than one.
Now, forced conformism is the name of the game, and it is conformism with a generous, suffocating splash of Hinduism.
Others of different religious and cultural ilk need not bother: the “others” are many. Of India’s vast and growing population of 1.4 billion people, religious minorities account for about 20 percent – roughly 200 million Muslims and 28 million Christians.
During Modi’s tenure, they have become the subject of various regulations targeting the garments they don, the food they consume and their rites of worship.
Modi’s rule has also been accompanied by a rise of the perceived legitimacy of communal violence, much of it encouraged by the militant Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Given the Indian leader’s long association with the RSS, their influence in policy is assured.
His India is also a country that had become less than safe to be a protestor, activist or a critical scribbler: journalists have been murdered in acts orchestrated by extreme offshoots of the Hindutva cult. Thousands of non-government groups, notably those with a human rights brief, have been deprived of funding.
In June last year, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the fact-checking website Alt News, was arrested for apparently offending Hindu sensibilities in a tweet posted in 2018.
It came soon after the arrest of activist Teesta Setalvad, who was charged with “criminal conspiracy, forgery and placing false evidence in court to frame innocent people” in connection with the 2002 Gujarat riots which left more than 1000 people dead.
Setalvad’s keenness in pursuing the cause of Muslims in the wake of that brutal affair had obviously caught the attention of the authorities. Modi had been the Chief Minister of the state at the time, though he was subsequently cleared of any responsibility for the deadly events.
The dossier against the platitudes of Indian democracy continues to bulk. In a broader, structural sense, cronyism in the Indian state has become commonplace.
The Adani family members have ensconced themselves in the economic and political machinery. Questioning their standing is bound to land you in trouble, a point former Congress president Rahul Gandhi found in being sentenced and disqualified from the Lok Sabha.
Green Left for more