News Analysis


Dr. Mohammad Manzoor Alam asks countrymen and women to give a moment’s thought to where the country is headed for as corporate media tomtoms Modi as next Prime Minister.

Narendra Modi of Gujarat 2002 infamy is on a roll. India’s corporate media is acting as if the silent majority spread over villages, talukas, mofassils, district towns, state capitals and NCR does not exist, as if it is not the “Little Citizen” who will decide the future of India with his precious vote, but the corporate boss sitting in his air-conditioned cabin and the moneybag manipulating things from behind the screen. People are still important, and urban middle class Modi fans are not the only people India has: Modiwadis are just a small fraction of the sea of humanity called Bharat.

What is bothersome is the inspiration behind Moditva, and the methodologies and modalities it employs. The inspiration, as the RSS stalwart Guru Golwalker clearly explained in his We, or Our Nationhood Defined decades back, is Hitler and his Nazi party. Golwalker approvingly talks about Hitler’s genocide of Jews to be replicated in India by a similar mass murder of Muslims. Since then the Sangh and its fronts like BJP, VHP, Bajrang Dal and others have been busy creating new opportunities for mass murder of Muslims through smaller “riots” (like 37 episodes under Akhilesh rule in UP) or bigger pogroms like Ayodhya 92 and Gujarat 2002.

The Sangh has been steadily doing it since as far back as 1947, when the ICS officer Madhav Godbole seized a trunk full of RSS maps and plans for ethnic cleansing of Muslims. They have not always succeeded in polarising and dividing people because of the primarily secular and plural nature of India. For reaching 102 seats in Parliament from a mere two they staged the mass killing of Muslims in 1992-93. Mr Modi took up the Sangh torch of hatred from LK Advani, who had emerged as a “hero” in their voters’ eyes just because of the anti-Muslim hysteria he had created.

Modi was protected from being sacked in 2002 by then Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Advani. His sacking would have been justified because of his dereliction of duty (to some, collusion with rioters) in the anti-Muslim pogrom. The Sangh has consistently been undermining the Constitution’s secular values. During NDA rule it even tried to change it.

What is happening today is ominously similar to what happened in the Germany of 1933 and the rise of Hitler with the help of German industry. Today, some of India’s major industrialists and their corporate media are openly backing Mr Modi as the future prime minster who will increase their profits by demolishing all the democratic and secular institutions of the state of India and by ensuring maximum profit on investments. What happens to people who are not industrialists, the preponderant majority of this country?

Mahabharata, the account of the greatest fratricidal war ever, fascinates both Mr Modi and Mr Advani. A Mahabharata against Muslims of India is the dream of the Sangh stalwarts. The choice between Mr Modi and Mr Advani is that between a rock and a hard place.

By and large, the choice today is between constitutional rule and fascist thuggery; between the common good of the masses, the farmers, the working classes in villages, towns and cities, the peace-loving people of goodwill everywhere on one side and corporate money and Hitler’s chelas on the other.

The choice is very clear, very unambiguous. It is a choice between the idea of India and chaos.