Word: modi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...understand India's politics today, and the highly combustible relationship between its Hindu majority and Muslim minority, you need to study, above all, the one man currently dominating one state. It was here, in the small Gujarati town of Godhra on Feb. 27 this year, that Chief Minister Modi was handed his mission statement when a mob set fire to a train, which resulted in 58 Hindu pilgrims being burned to death, sparking the worst religious riots the nation had seen for a decade. In the days and weeks that followed, Hindus armed with swords and barbed tridents rampaged through...
...live harmony has always been something of a lie. Muslim frustration at discrimination and Hindu resentment of governmental assistance to minorities explode every few years in violence. But as the March riots raged on for weeks in Gujarat, they provoked particular alarm. While human-rights groups demanded Modi be tried for genocide, Hindu political parties, cultural groups and hordes of street demonstrators celebrated him as India's great defender. From a political nobody, Modi was catapulted into the international limelight as the white-haired, bespectacled figurehead of Indian intolerance, a national Hindu hero. In headlines and debate, he instantly eclipsed...
...campaign trail, Modi's message is that India, Hindus and Gujarat are all under attack. The persecutors? Terrorists, criminals, all Pakistanis (and President Pervez Musharraf in particular, whom Modi declares to be his true electoral opponent), Osama bin Laden, intellectuals, the media, "pseudo secularists," communists and cow killers. He reserves particular venom for Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated Premier Rajiv Gandhi. Her entire party sees the world through "Italian glasses," he declares to loud laughs. But it's an odd slight for a man who himself looks out from behind a pair of frameless Bulgaris...
...Even if Modi is just acting the part of a Hindu fanatic, there's no doubt he is riding?and stoking?Hindu nationalism for political gain. The danger is that once Modi and the BJP hard-liners mount the tiger of hate politics, they cannot get off or, worse, cannot control it. BJP insiders admit that without any significant achievements for Modi to point to, either in Gujarat or across the country, his one hope lies in terrifying and cajoling Hindus into voting for the party that vows to jealously protect them, and them alone. Says childhood friend Jasud Pathan...
...Modi grew up in Vadnagar, a small town of 40,000 in the semiarid scrub about 200 kilometers from the Pakistani border. In many ways Vadnagar, like much of the rest of Gujarat, encapsulates the best of India. It is prosperous and progressive, a place where parents bring up their children as vegetarians and teetotalers and dreaming of being managers in the state's western industrial belt. In its bazaar, Hindus and Muslims mix freely as neighbors and friends. There is little here to nurture hate in a young Hindu. But the people of Vadnagar remember two things about their...