A new narrative about India is suddenly emerging. Until very recently, India appeared a great democracy as well as a rising economic power, a potential partner of the West in its policy of containing China. Writing in Time magazine in 2015, no less a moral and political authority than Barack Obama hailed Prime Minister Narendra Modi as India’s “reformer-in-chief” who “reflects the dynamism and potential of India’s rise.”
However, the latest, radically different narrative about India holds that the country is flailing, its politics and civil society captured by a Hindu supremacist movement, and its economy trapped in a potentially long slowdown.Evidence that India’s prime minister is not the smart economic moderniser he seemed to many in the West has become steadily incontrovertible, especially after he quixotically withdrew most currency notes in circulation in 2016.
This week, an exhaustively researched report in the New Yorker by Dexter Filkins provided spine-chilling evidence that India is ruled by cold-blooded ideological fanatics, who will use all means to achieve their aims. These can range from perversion of the media, judiciary and military to anti-Muslim pogroms, targeted assassinations of critics, and collective punishment of a minority (as in Kashmir, where a four-month-old lockdown continues).
Such a dramatic reversal of reputations — “from hero to zero,” as the Indian wisecrack goes — is not new in India’s case. For much of India’s seven decades, when it appeared to be on the wrong side of the Cold War, Western commentators regarded the country as a basket case.As Thomas Friedman put it in The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, India was “known as a country of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother Teresa” before it was abruptly re-branded, including by Friedman, as a “country of brainy people and computer wizards.”As India embraced market capitalism, moved away from its Russian friends, and came closer to the West....Read More
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