Don’t expect Modi’s new India to be a friend to the West
Narendra Modi, who embraced the Sanskrit name for his country in the same week that he played lavish host to the G-20 summit in New Delhi, is trying hard to project India as a “vishwaguru" (guru to the world). It is time to examine his claims more closely, and also to see the present and the future of his “New India" without comforting illusions.
Take, for instance, the booklet, “Bharat, the Mother of Democracy," presented by Modi’s government to visiting dignitaries at the G-20. According to it, ancient Hindu sages and kings were partisans of equality, inclusivity, and harmony.
Even modern feminism was anticipated by the 5,000-year-old bronze statue of an “independent and liberated" dancing girl. Such claims are part of an elaborate narrative that is decisively shaping the outlook of many Indians today — one in which a once-dynamic Hindu civilization was ravaged by vicious Muslims and exploitative Westerners.
In Modi’s own account, Hindus were enslaved by Muslim invaders for 750 years and then for an additional 250 years by white British colonialists — a version of history used in India today to justify the degradation of Muslim and Christian minorities, the destruction of mosques and British-built buildings, the purging of textbooks, and now the unofficial renaming of India. Modi’s own popularity, unconnected to his party’s variable fortunes, stems from what is a potent promise in a country full of humiliated peoples: to destroy the corrupt old political order and, as he put it in his Independence Day speech last month, to ensure a fully modernized New India enjoys a “golden" period “for the next 1,000 years." Such millenarian bombast — also echoed in the speeches of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — belongs to a longer
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