Modi’s crimes against humanity

One of the best novels I’ve ever read is The God of Small Things, the debut novel (and winner of the Booker Prize) by India’s Arundhati Roy. I haven’t read any of her other novels, but I have read two devastating opinion pieces by her. One was on the appalling (and continuing) suppression of the people of Kashmir by Modi’s government.

The other is this amazing piece published by The Guardian this week. It’s quite long, but I highly recommend that you read every word of it. It’s absolutely devastating. Of course, it’s mostly focused on the terrible destruction being caused by India’s second Covid wave and the government’s utter unpreparedness for it, despite the many warnings by the experts that this would come.

For example, early in the piece, Ms. Roy quotes Modi at the World Economic Forum in January:

“Friends, I have brought the message of confidence, positivity and hope from 1.3 billion Indians amid these times of apprehension … It was predicted that India would be the most affected country from corona all over the world. It was said that there would be a tsunami of corona infections in India, somebody said 700-800 million Indians would get infected while others said 2 million Indians would die.”

“Friends, it would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country. In a country which is home to 18% of the world population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”

Of course, he then went on to hold big political rallies ahead of an important election in West Bengal, and – probably most disastrously – to allow millions of pilgrims to attend the annual Hindu Kumbh Mela festival, which was this year held, as luck would have it, in the smallest and most confined location where it is held (it rotates annually) – the mountain city of Haridwar. Just take a look at the people crowded on the bathing ghats in Haridwar during the festival, to get an instant idea of the problem.

But the article is much more than an indictment of Modi for disastrously mishandling the pandemic. It puts this in an unbroken sequence of crimes against humanity by Modi, starting – of course – with the pogrom against Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, which resulted in well over 1,000 (the official figure, but unofficial figures are well into the thousands) Muslim men, women and children being slaughtered. The best that can be said about Modi, who was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time, is that he didn’t try very hard to stop the killing. The worst that can be said was that he encouraged it behind the scenes, especially with his good friends in the RSS, the Hindu nationalist movement – complete with militia – that can be best described as the KKK of India. BTW, he was banned from traveling to the US after that, but the guy who was US president for four years ending this January 20 (sorry, I'm blanking on his name) lifted that, and attended - what else - a huge rally with Modi last year in Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat and the nexus of the 2002 riots.

Ms. Roy doesn’t dwell on 2002, though (in fact, she doesn’t even mention it until later in the article). She also describes the most recent atrocities by Modi’s government, one of the worse being declaring two million Indians of East Bengali descent to be non-citizens, even though their families have lived in India for generations – and starting to build huge prisons to lock them all up (Ms. Roy points to this as one of the pressing matters that “excuse” Modi’s lack of focus on the pandemic. After all, you need to focus on your priorities! And Modi certainly did that…).

Note: East Bengal was known as East Pakistan, before it became the independent state of Bangladesh in a bloody war in 1971 – in which, true to form, Nixon and that great humanitarian Henry Kissinger sided with the West Pakistanis, who literally tried to eradicate the entire population of East Bengal, and would have done so if India, under Indira Gandhi, hadn’t intervened. But Nixon had a good excuse for his position. As he later said to Kissinger after meeting with Indira Gandhi, “Undoubtedly the most unattractive women in the world are the Indian women.” How could he have done otherwise than support the West Pakistanis in their genocide campaign, given that he found the leader of the country opposing that genocide to be unattractive?).

But there is actually some good news from India today: It looks like Modi’s party may be on the way to losing the elections in West Bengal, where Modi continued to hold his rallies even when India was experiencing more than 200,000 new Covid cases every day (probably a huge underestimate – now the official number is over 400,000 a day, but there’s not much doubt that this is also a huge underestimate, as is the daily death toll from Covid, which officially hit 3,300 yesterday).

And his party didn’t win elections in a few other states in South India, including one in Tamil Nadu state, where the winner is named…get ready for it…M.K. Stalin. That's all we need, two Stalins in India!

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

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