Parliamentary elections in India: India's dazzling Mr. Modi

He is generous towards Big Business and openly islamophobic: Narendra Modi is the most popular right-winger in the world. As the Indian elections draw to a close, he is set to become the next prime minister.

Popular populist: Narendra Modi displays his inked finger to the crowd after voting.   Bild: ap

AHMEDABAD/VARANASI/VADNAGAR taz | Narendra Modi brings a sea of people with him. They fill even the broadest streets of Varanasi, a city that is already overrun by pilgrims and tourists, waving orange flags and wearing orange caps and masks with Modi's face printed on them. Nothing can move for hours. Modi's campaign office expected 200,000 people at the rally on this April afternoon, but almost half a million have showed up. Nobody knows their exact number.

The candidate stands on a truck decorated with Marigolds. He wears a white Kurta – a change from the saffron shirts he usually wears, his party's colours. Modi is in Varanasi for a formality: he wants to file his nomination as the parliamentary candidate of the Hindu nationalist Indian People's Party, the BJP. As his flowery ride slowly pushes through the masses, Modi waves to his supporters and clasps his hands in greeting. Weeks before the elections end opinion polls and the media have already forecast that he will be the next prime minister of India. „I have not been sent to Varanasi, nor have I myself come“, Modi intones slowly. „Mother Ganga has called me to her.“It takes him two hours to make the two kilometer journey to the nomination office.

Ganga is the Hindi name of the Ganges, the heart of Varanasi, an ancient city in the state of Uttar Pradesh with a population of 1.2 million. Hindus consider the river to be sacred, especially here. A bath in the Ganges at Varanasi is said to absolve from sins, dying in Varanasi is said to release a soul from the eternal cycle of rebirths. Every year a million pilgrims come here to walk through the alleys of the town down to the Ghats, the bathing steps by the river.

The holy river has called and the Messiah has come. In this year's campaign Modi and his party have combined fundamentalist Hinduism with megalomania. A perfect fit for their prime ministerial candidate who joined the Hindu nationalist movement as a child and is known for his vanity. For many Modi, who regularly brags about his impressive chest size, has become a saviour. They believe he can save India from mismanagement and corruption, from the apparent entitlement of India's largest minority, the Muslims, and from the country's old arch-enemy, Pakistan.

The election this year, the opinion polls predict, will remove the Congress party's government, which has ruled for the past two terms and for most of India's recent history. Many equate the party and its government with corruption and stagnation. The past years have brought one corruption scandal after the next to light, many causing tens of billions of Dollars in losses to the state. At the same time people jealously observe China's economic growth, which regularly outstrips India's.

Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the wealthy western Indian state Gujarat has given himself the image of being a „development man“. In Varanasi he promises things that Gujarat already has: roads, electricity and the freedom from corruption. He promises flawless asphalt and a riverside as beautiful as the one along the Sabarmati in Ahmedabad, Gujarat's largest city.

Narendra Modi is a hardline Hindu nationalist. Some call him a fascist.

But his perfectly trimmed white beard and rimless glasses give him a gentle touch. His words and gestures are carefully choreographed, he is managed by a PR firm and the BJP has concentrated the election campaign completely on him. Every poster bears his picture, dressed in saffron, he speaks to people simultaneously in different places as a 3D hologram and the party's slogan puts the future in his hands „Ab ki baar, Modi Sarkar“- „This time a Modi government.“

Giving to the rich

The sun beats down on the Sabarmati promenade in Ahmedabad, turning the grey concrete into a shimmering surface. The construction work is still going on, but the riverside already invites for walks and relaxation. Except that the temperature, which rises early in the morning and only drops late at night, makes it unbearable to stand here for longer than a few minutes. „It's usually empty here“, says a resident. „I've seldom seen a lot of people by the water.“

Modi has ruled Gujarat since 2002, this is the third term for the 63-year-old. Many of the projects of his administration have been ones that, like the Sabarmati promenade, are especially visible. He has paved hundreds of kilometers of roads, connected almost all villages and 80 percent of homes to the power grid. The infrastructure in Gujarat is reliable like nowhere else in India. This makes Gujarat attractive for Indians from all over the country, but also for Big Business.

„We concentrate on the industry here“, says Bhagyesh Jha, a secretary in Modi's government. „Industry brings jobs and jobs bring development.“Indeed, few states in India are as welcoming to industrialists as Gujarat is. They receive cheap land with road access, uninterrupted power and tax breaks that often compensate the investment costs within a few years. The rich easily become richer here, like Gautam Adani, a freight and power entrepreneur, who runs India's largest private port, coal fired power plants and a special economic zone in Gujarat.

During Modi's tenure Adani has turned his millions into billions, but has also enraged farmers and fishermen, who are suing for the loss of grazing lands and the pollution of the sea. Modi also brought India's largest car maker, Tata, to Gujarat in 2008 with a single SMS. When the company announced in 2008 that its plans for a factory in West Bengal had failed because of the resistance of the farmers, it is reported that Modi sent company head Ratan Tata a three word message: „Welcome to Gujarat“, it said. Three days later his government had finalized the deal. Tata was followed by Ford, Peugeot and Bombardier.

Modi has since been celebrated by India's big business: Telecom tycoon Sunil Mittal said in 2009 „he can lead the country“, Billionaire Mukesh Ambani called him a „visionary“ and his estranged brother, Anil Ambani, even called him the „king of kings“.

This year one of Modi's long held dreams could become reality: to become prime minister. If it does it would be an impressive rags-to-riches story: The transformation of a tea seller into the most powerful man in the country.

Rising through the ranks

Narendra Modi's story begins in the medieval town of Vadnagar, in the north of Gujarat, guarded by a dilapidated gate and two replica cannons. Behind the entrance small alleys lined by narrow houses wind up a hill overlooking an almost perfectly circular lake. The two-room home in which Modi grew up with his parents, three brothers and two sisters has been sold off and made way for a two-storied building.

While Narendra's mother worked in the neighbours' oil press and managed the household, his father ran a small tea stand at the town's one-track train station. Classmates and neighbours describe him as an athletic boy and an average student, who enjoyed playing the Indian sports Kabaddi and Kho Kho, in which two teams face each other and try to tag or catch their opponents.

His political career too begins early and athletically: At the age of six Narendra begins to regularly visit the evening gatherings of the Hindu nationalist National Volunteer Organization, RSS, a mixture of militia and charity. „Every day when school ended, we would run over to the meetings“, remembers Sudhir Joshi a childhood friend of Modi's. The gatherings, called „Shakhas“ in Hindi, have a militarist touch: Members line up in uniforms – black cap, white shirt, khaki shorts – and sing and exercise to the commands of a leader.

Later as a young adult, Modi moves to Ahmedabad and joins the RSS' rank and file. He cleans, cooks tea and prepares breakfast. After a while he is put in charge of reading and answering letters and finally is given the responsibility of organizing activists at the grassroots level. „He worked hard“, remembers one of his seniors in the RSS. „He spent the whole day visiting villages on a bike. He would come home late and sometimes slept without eating.“ Modi rises through the ranks and becomes known as a talented organizer, but also as a troublemaker who finds it hard to follow orders and tolerates no dissent against his own.

In 1988 Modi is directed to enter the BJP, the parliamentary arm of the Hindu nationalists that was founded earlier in that decade. He is tasked with furthering the influence of the RSS by being the contact person between party and militia. It is a time in which the BJP begins to consolidate its position in the political scene; and it is the time of some of the worst pogroms against Muslims since the founding of India. The riots begin in Ayodhya, where the Hindu nationalists dream of building a temple for their hero Rama and demand the demolition of the Babri mosque.

On December 6, 1992, the BJP and the RSS organize a massive rally in Ayodhya. The demonstrators break through police chains around the mosque and begin knocking it to the ground. Riots break out all over India, as well as in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and thousands lose their lives – in India the majority of the victims are Muslims. But the BJP manages to profit: at the next elections in 1996 the party is the largest in parliament, but fails to organize a majority to form the government.

At the time Modi is hardly an influential member of the party, but a staunch supporter of Hindu nationalism. The sociologist Ashis Nandy interviews him in the early nineties, and recalled the conversation in an article ten years later: Modi had coolly spoken of a „cosmic conspiracy against India“ and seen a „suspected traitor and potential terrorist“ in every Muslim. The conversation „left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist“, Nandy wrote.

In the 1990s Narendra Modi works his way up the hierarchy of the BJP, first in Gujarat and later – after being transferred for intrigue against party colleagues – in Delhi. Then in January 2001 Gujarat is hit by an earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale, 20,000 people are killed and half a million lose their homes. Gujarat's BJP-led government fails to provide adequate relief and loses several smaller elections. Modi seizes the opportunity and on October 7th 2001 is appointed chief minister of Gujarat by the BJP leadership in Delhi.

Riots without regrets

Less than half a year later, on February 27 2002, a train carriage catches fire under controversial circumstances in the small town of Godhra in Gujarat. 58 people die, many of them pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. After the fire riots break out again, the worst since the demolition of the Babri Mosque. Mobs of RSS cadres and other Hindu nationalist groups run through the towns of Gujarat attacking Muslim neighbourhoods. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are killed.

The military intervenes three days later, when the worst is over. Since then many people believe that Modi's government supported and instigated the riots, or at least tolerated them. Two months later a Human Rights Watch report described how policemen and BJP politicians led and supported many of the mobs and that the rioters carried government lists to identify Muslim properties. Later Journalists secretly filmed some of the mob leaders, who boasted that Narendra Modi himself had given them free rein and a high ranking BJP politician reported of a meeting, at which Modi is said to have ordered the police to hold back during the „reaction of the Hindus“.

Modi's involvement has never been proven and the BJP politician who testified against him was murdered a few months later under mysterious circumstances. In 2010 an investigation team of India's Supreme Court published a report saying there was no evidence of wrongdoing on Modi's part. The report also noted that this was because many documents, including the minutes of security meetings and police wireless communication were destroyed. Modi and the BJP celebrate the news as an acquittal, a „clean chit“.

Over the years Modi has clearly shown how little he is bothered about the Muslim victims. After the riots he mostly visited Hindu areas, his government opposed efforts to rebuild many mosques and shrines after the riots and he even appointed one of the Hindu riot leaders as a minister until she was formally charged in court in 2009. For years he has refused to show regret for the events under his tenure or even sympathy for the victims. When he was interviewed by Reuters last year, he remained clinical: It is natural to be sad after such events, he said, just as one is sad when sitting in a car and the driver runs over a puppy. A strange analogy: the riots as an accident, the chief minister as a passive passenger and the victims as dogs.

In Modi's Gujarat not everyone has profited from his development work. Despite the high per capita income in the state hunger levels are relatively high and almost half of the children under five are malnourished. In rates of poverty reduction, too, Gujarat has performed worse than many other states. But Muslims are arguably the group that has profited the least from Gujarat's growth: the rate of poverty is eight times as high among Muslims as among high-caste Hindus and developed Gujarat often ends where Muslim areas begin. In Juhapura, Ahmedabad, for example, almost all public roads are unpaved. Villas stand next to apartment buildings and none have running water.

Asifkhan Pathan, who founded a private school for students of the area, complains about the lacking initiative on part of the city's BJP government to provide the neighbourhood with basic amenities. „We recently drilled the third deep well for the school, because the other two have dried up“, he says. In the northeast of Juhapura a high wall, topped with barbed wire, separates it Hindu areas. The wall has been there since the 1990s, but since the 2002 riots segregation in Ahmedabad has become worse, says Pathan.

Hope for a spectacular victory

A few kilometers south of Modi's nomination rally, one of Varanasi's few high rise buildings stands at one of the city's larger crossings. It is empty, except for the BJP's local campaign headquarters, which has rented three floors. The rooms are spartan, equipped with tables, chairs and laptops. Posters and banners showing a smiling Modi demanding an end to corruption lean against the walls.

„We have no doubt, Modi will win by a record margin“, says Kailash Kesari, the former president of the local BJP. The BJP's election alliance requires 272 seats for a majority in the Indian parliament. „Our party alone will get more than 300 seats. It's guaranteed.“ However, not even the boldest opinion polls promise such a landslide. They see the BJP and it's allies together reaching close to the 272 seat mark, a feat that in itself would already be impressive.

In it's manifesto the BJP has promised paved roads for all villages, easier proceedings for investors, a harder stance towards Pakistan and the building of the Rama temple. The promises have been successful: street vendors in Delhi, farmers in Bihar and taxi drivers in Pune all say their vote for the BJP was because of Modi not the local candidate in the constituency. Millions have voted for Modi personally, he is the most popular right-winger in the world.

Modi has toned down his rhetoric in the election campaign, but again and again his Islamophobia has come to the fore. He calls Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi „Shehzada“, a word meaning „Prince“ with Islamic connotations, and calls the party's government the „Delhi Sultanate“. He has accused other opponents of supporting Pakistan and terrorism, the hidden message being that they are the lackeys of Muslims.

On Monday, when the Indian elections end with polling in Varanasi and 40 other constituencies, Modi's BJP is set to become the largest party. But to fulfill his dream of becoming Prime Minister, he will need a spectacular result. Many of the smaller parties have announced that while they are open to allying with the BJP in a government they would not support Modi.

Narendra Modi must now hope that the larger than life image that he has created becomes reality.