Riding on a wave of popular anger against political corruption, India’s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hoping to win the 2014 general election by projecting the “clean image” of Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate.
The rise of Modi, the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, can be attributed to the anti-corruption movement launched by social activist Anna Hazare in 2011, which tapped into the widespread disillusionment with the ruling Congress Party.
Until recently, the BJP was seen as a party with no prospects because of infighting and lingering indecision that followed its defeat in two consecutive general elections, in 2004 and 2009.
Some BJP leaders blamed the party’s electoral downfall on the emphasis on communal issues — mostly against Muslim and Christian minorities — in its agenda as opposed to development. However, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps, or the RSS), a Hindu nationalist group believed to be the BJP’s parent body, wanted the party’s ideology — establishment of a “Hindu nation” — to remain intact.
The conundrum of the BJP-RSS family was resolved in Modi, who has been able to revive hope of the party returning to power after a decade and at the same time prevent the BJP from forsaking its ideology.
Modi’s persona has two aspects. He is portrayed as having a “clean” image and credited with leading Gujarat to become an economically prosperous state. But he is widely accused of having played a role in the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002.
Therefore, Modi’s public-relations campaign includes projections of Gujarat as an economic success story and how he can replicate that at the national level, while also making subtle inferences to his Hindu identity. The emphasis is on the former. Since he has not expressed remorse or apologised for the 2002 violence, his campaign doesn’t need to speak a word to show his commitment toward his party’s ideology.
However, a majority of Modi’s supporters may not have any interest in minority bashing. They count only on his promise of economic progress, overlooking his alleged role in the violence that took the lives of more than 2,000 people. They are “pragmatic”, arguing that leaders of the Congress were also accused of playing a role in the 1984 anti-Sikh violence.
Hypothetically, if the Congress Party were to field Sajjan Kumar or Jagdish Tytler — who are believed to have played a role in the killing of Sikhs and have been sidelined in the party — and the two had the capacity to bring economic progress, many of those who are supporting Modi today wouldn’t mind supporting Kumar or Tytler either. These supporters would then make the excuse that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has offered a public apology for the 1984 violence.
It’s perhaps a wilful oversight pointing to a narrow view of corruption, which is identified only as abuse of public office for financial gain or profit by an individual or a political party. This manifestation of corruption certainly merits condemnation, because whether a public official fills his or her own pocket or that of a party, the act essentially amounts to robbing of citizens of resources that belong to them.
However, corruption has another manifestation, with no discernible financial benefit and where an official, fearing his or her own reputation, abuses his or her office by looking away when people of a particular community are hacked to death and/or raped. This is precisely what Modi’s administration has been accused of.
Global agencies working in the area of conflict, along with most political scientists, consider unequal treatment along ethnic or religious lines by public officials as an equally, if not more, corrupt act.
The heart of an official who robs people of their resources would surely require the numbing of conscience. But how much more so in the case of an official who is mandated to protect lives but chooses to allow mobs to kill and rape innocent people just to protect his or her own reputation.
“As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for more than two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration,” wrote Harsh Mander, a senior bureaucrat in the Modi administration after resigning from the service, in an article in Outlook magazine on March 19, 2002.
“The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged,” said Mander, just one of a few officials who criticised the role of the police.
“The police are known to have misguided people straight into the hands of rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to crowds bent on pillage, arson, rape and murder, and were deaf to the pleas of the desperate Muslim victims, many of them women and children.”
The Gujarat administration has also been accused of killing Muslim suspects in fake shootouts following the 2002 violence. “We, being field officers, have simply implemented the conscious policy of this government which was inspiring, guiding and monitoring our actions from very close quarters,” wrote DG Vanzara, former top police officer in Gujarat and who was at one time close to Modi, in his resignation letter last month following his arrest.
Whether the motivation is money or reputation, any abuse of public office must be condemned. In India, however, many evident acts of corruption are disregarded as “communalism” and seen as concerning only minorities.
In fact, even gang-rapes in communal violence are not seen as rapes. This is why the Dec 16, 2012 gang-rape of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi led to street protests, while there was no hue and cry, except by Muslim, over the gang-rapes during the 2002 violence in Gujarat.
“I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat,” Mander wrote in 2002.
“There are reports everywhere of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screwdriver.”
To call a spade a spade, Modi’s supporters are showing intolerance toward corrupt practices that affect the country’s and their own financial health, while condoning corrupt acts that have a direct bearing on people’s lives.