Let us introduce just one of the more than 1000 victims of the anti-Muslim pogrom that Narendra Modi, India’s new prime minister, presided over in 2002. Ehsan Jafri was a 73-year-old member of Parliament who lived in a prosperous Muslim neighborhood in Ahmedabad, the capital of the state of Gujarat. On February 28, an angry Hindu mob started to gather. Jafri desperately called the police commissioner and the office of Modi, the state’s chief minister. No one answered.
Here’s what happened next: “Five or six people held [Jafri], then someone struck him with a sword. . .chopped off his hand, then his legs. . .then everything else. . . after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they’d piled up and set it on fire. . . burnt him alive.”
Let us translate this event into American. Let us say a governor of Texas allowed the state and local police to stand by in 2002 as angry mobs tortured and murdered 1000 Mexican-Americans, including a member of the House of Representatives from San Antonio. Would such a governor be excused just a decade later because he was now regarded as a “pragmatic, pro-business leader?”
Narendra Modi has never shown any remorse for his actions in 2002. As the Economic and Political Weekly, the distinguished Mumbai publication, noted, “not once in his campaign did Modi reach out to the minorities to assuage any misgivings they may have had about him as prime minister.”
The Obama administration policy toward Modi continues to be a combination of immoral and stupid. The votes were hardly counted before Obama invited Modi to the White House. Diplomacy may require perfunctory congratulations, but certainly Washington should have waited to see what Modi says and does before rewarding him with a state visit.
The New York Times editorial page also whitewashed the new leader. The paper did note that “many Indian Muslims blame him for failing to stop bloody riots in his home state in 2002. . .” This statement is both foolish and wrong. Of course not only “Muslims” are critical; India’s leading intellectual, the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, is among many who said Modi should not be prime minister. Nor were the killings aimless “riots,” but instead an organized campaign of slaughter, with police connivance.
The business community, in both India and internationally, is ecstatic at Modi and his BJP party’s big win; after all, it contributed as much as $1 billion to his campaign. (No one knows for sure, because despite promising open government Modi is keeping the huge donations a secret.) India’s 138 million Muslims, some 13 percent of the population, are certainly living with a sense of foreboding. Not a single Muslim is part of the BJP’s 272-member parliamentary delegation.
Thanks for writing about these situations in Africa and Asia, that deserve our attention and action too.
Your bias is showing. Why single out India when there are countries with far worse human rights records, like Israel?
James North says that the US continues to appease Modi, which is true, and James North continues to live in an alternative universe.
Modi just won a huge landslide, like that of LBJ in ’64 or Reagan in ’84.
In his previous article he called for boycotting Modi.
This type of argument is symptomatic of an older kind of white liberal who was formed in a world where the West could impose on others a different kind of order from the outside as it saw fit. That world is long gone, and it was the world in which North grew up in, but he hasn’t kept up with the times. He still thinks it exists, because he argues along those lines. This article is a bit more level-headed than his last one, which was borderline delusional in his appraisails of American influence and power over non-Western countries. Maybe it has, even for him, finally begun to sink in just how ignorant that notion was as reality is crashing his world view as the post-election results are clear.
As bad as the business community and the American media is, where is North on holding the Indian electorate accountable? The NDA won a clear majority, around 60% of the Lok Sabha seats. And if you’d look at only the non-muslim vote, they probably won upwards of 70+%. That means that the Hindus of India overwhelmingly voted for a man who was absolutely responsible for gruesome sectarian attacks(by allowing them to transpire) and has essentially issued zero regrets.
Yet he barely talks about these people, why? North prefers to talk about the Western responses, but the fault primarily lies with the people who elected him.
This again is an amusing portrait into the older, white liberal generation which is stuck in time. It’s a form of eurocentrism. Non-whites don’t matter, only as victims. But what happens when PoC become the oppressors of other PoC? North’s generation of white liberals are unable to deal with this, so they instead try to turn the conversation to the American media.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think most Indian muslims are shaking in fear of NYT editorials. I think they are much more concerned over how the Hindus in their country overwhelmingly voted for a man who could be accurately described as presiding over a pogrom. Yet North prefers to write about the NYT editorials, the business community and the Obama administration’s statements.
In effect ignoring the people on the ground in India and instead focusing on mainly Western elites.
A lot of PoC talk about the latent ethnocentrism among white liberals and this is a good example of that.
For the same reason why “white feminism” has become a term with a lot of baggage from women of color.
North doesn’t see it. He is myopic. He is shaped in that world view. He considers himself a universalist, yet his writings reveals he is less interested in non-Westerners other than as a jump-off to get to Western reactions. He should focus a lot more on what happened inside India itself to faciliate Modi’s rise, but that would unfortunately necessitate actually reading more about the country, of course.
All my doctors and dentists have been of Indian background for many years now; here, in America, they never chat about politics.
RE: The New York Times editorial page also whitewashed the new leader. The paper did note that “many Indian Muslims blame him for failing to stop bloody riots in his home state in 2002. . .” ~ North
MY COMMENT: On the PBS News Hour they talked about all the excitement in India over Modi’s win thereby making him almost appear saintly, and giving the uninformed viewer not the slightest indication that he might have anything less than unblemished reputation. Of course, they might have been reluctant to say anything negative about him because they are aware of the potential for Modi’s shortly being seen as Israel’s new best friend.
As to the U.S. Govt., their giving Modi a warm reception after years of keeping their distance from him (having once even denied him a visa to visit the U.S.) is the kind of hypocrisy that results from the pragmatism necessitated by an empire. The U.S. empire has too many big plans for that part of the world to risk being standoffish to the new prime minister of India, no matter how responsible he may have been for a little, old massacre way, way back in 2002.