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Readings Reviews from Syed Badrul Ahsan

A calm about him...

Syed Badrul Ahsan
A plenitude of books is out there this season. In an unusual age when Baishakh takes its own sweet time to free its traditional showers to soothe the earth, when the temperature goes up to clearly intolerable levels, it is only reading that you can go back to, reasonably safely.
You begin with Andy Marino's biography of Narendra Modi. The work is a rather friendly portrait of the man who has just taken over as India's new leader but whose reputation, in the eyes of many, remains suspect. When you consider that men as eminent as Amartya Sen have publicly made it clear they have no reason to voice support for Modi, it is the Gujarat riots of 2002 that you must go back to. To what extent was Modi responsible for the carnage that followed the killing of 59 Hindu pilgrims in Godhra is a question that may never be answered. A few weeks before the results of India's general elections were made known, the British weekly journal The Economist made it clear in one of its editorials how Modi was exonerated of all culpability vis-a-vis Gujarat 2002 through his administration ensuring that all evidence relating to the troubles be removed, a reality which clearly had the courts in a bind. The judges found no evidence of Modi's involvement in criminal conduct. The evidence was not there. Not many people were satisfied with the explanation.
That apart, Marino's story of the emergence of Narendra Modi as a national figure in India is a necessary read, for it traces the gradual, well-calculated rise of a politician who has had little reason to feel embarrassed about his beginnings. Modi's fascination for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) goes back a long way, when he was a mere eight year-old. One would have thought, given the principle that individuals change with time, that they slowly discard the radical beliefs of youth and go for
the pragmatism of middle age, Modi would go beyond his fundamental Hinduism insofar as his politics was concerned. That he has not is a remarkable circumstance. He has simply moved on from the RSS to the larger network that is the BJP in, one might suggest, a pretty unobtrusive manner. Shrewdness has helped. He believed, with millions of other Hindus, that the Babri Mosque needed to be removed. But he was careful to stay away from the actual moment of fanaticism when that moment came.
Marino, who has had access to Modi over a long period — spending hours talking to him, travelling with him as he toured Gujarat — does not stay confined to dealing with Modi's political Hinduism. He traces the roots of Modi's rise to the chief ministership of the state, of the diligence that he brought into his work for Hindutva. Lal Krishna Advani was impressed. And it was on Atal Behari Vajpayee’s instructions that he took charge of Gujarat as chief minister. Thereafter he went on winning elections, to a point where the road to Delhi opened up for him. It did not matter that his former mentor Advani and leading BJP personalities like Sushma Swaraj were not well disposed to the idea of a Modi government at the national level. What did matter was the so-called Gujarat model of development that Modi and his acolytes were carefully placing before the rest of the country. If Gujarat could make progress under Modi, all of India might do the same. That has been an argument implicit in Modi's politics. Andy Marino brings it all into focus: "What he has attempted to do over the past twelve years in Gujarat is remove government from people's lives and replace it with governance."
It was just as well, then, that Narendra Modi was officially presented to Indians as the prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party in September 2012. The writer remarks on the complex as also simple nature of the man. "He can be decisive, firm, unyielding. And yet he has a calm about him that enables him to surmount crises with dispassionate meticulousness, even detachment."
There are, as you may well imagine, a fairly good number of reasons to read this biography.