The New Yorker: Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India
On August 11th, two weeks after Prime
Minister Narendra Modi sent soldiers in to pacify the Indian state of Kashmir,
a reporter appeared on the news channel Republic TV, riding a motor scooter
through the city of Srinagar. She was there to assure viewers that, whatever
else they might be hearing, the situation was remarkably calm. “You can see
banks here and commercial complexes,” the reporter, Sweta Srivastava, said, as
she wound her way past local landmarks. “The situation makes you feel good,
because the situation is returning to normal, and the locals are ready to live
their lives normally again.” She conducted no interviews; there was no one on
the streets to talk to.
Other coverage on Republic
TV showed people dancing ecstatically, along with the words “Jubilant Indians
celebrate Modi’s Kashmir masterstroke.” A week earlier, Modi’s government had
announced that it was suspending Article 370 of the constitution, which grants
autonomy to Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. The provision, written
to help preserve the state’s religious and ethnic identity, largely prohibits
members of India’s Hindu majority from settling there. Modi, who rose to power
trailed by allegations of encouraging anti-Muslim bigotry, said that the
decision would help Kashmiris, by spurring development and discouraging a
long-standing guerrilla insurgency. To insure a smooth reception, Modi had
flooded Kashmir with troops and detained hundreds of prominent Muslims—a move
that Republic TV described by saying that “the leaders who would have created
trouble” had been placed in “government guesthouses.”
The change in Kashmir
upended more than half a century of careful politics, but the Indian press
reacted with nearly uniform approval. Ever since Modi was first elected Prime
Minister, in 2014, he has been recasting the story of India, from that of a
secular democracy accommodating a uniquely diverse population to that of a
Hindu nation that dominates its minorities, especially the country’s two
hundred million Muslims. Modi and his allies have squeezed, bullied, and
smothered the press into endorsing what they call the “New India.”
Kashmiris greeted Modi’s
decision with protests, claiming that his real goal was to inundate the state
with Hindu settlers. After the initial tumult subsided, though, the Times of
India and other major newspapers began claiming that a majority of
Kashmiris quietly supported Modi—they were just too frightened of militants to
say so aloud. Television reporters, newly arrived from Delhi, set up cameras on
the picturesque shoreline of Dal Lake and dutifully repeated the government’s
line.
As the reports cycled
through the news, the journalist Rana Ayyub told me over the phone that she was
heading to Kashmir. Ayyub, thirty-six years old, is one of India’s best-known
investigative reporters, famous for relentlessly pursuing Modi and his aides.
As a Muslim from Mumbai, she has lived on the country’s sectarian divide her
whole life. She suspected that the government’s story about Kashmir was
self-serving propaganda. “I think the repression is probably worse than it’s
ever been,” she said. She didn’t know what she might find, but, she told me, “I
want to speak to those unheard voices.”
In both Hindi and English,
Ayyub speaks with disorienting speed and infectious warmth; it is difficult to
resist answering her questions, but she might have another one before you
finish responding to the first. On the phone, she invited me to meet her in
Mumbai and try to get into Kashmir, even though foreign correspondents were banned
there during the crackdown. When I arrived, she handed me a pair of scarves and
told me to buy a kurta, the
typical Indian tunic. “I am
ninety-nine per cent sure you will be caught, but you should come anyway,” she
said, laughing. “Just don’t open your mouth.”
Ayyub and I landed at the
Srinagar airport two weeks after Modi’s decree. In the terminal was a desk
labelled “Registration for Foreigners,” which she hustled me past, making sure
I kept my head down. The crowd was filled with police and soldiers, but we made
it to the curb without being spotted, climbed into a taxi, and sped off into
Srinagar.
Even from
a moving car, it was clear that the reality in Kashmir veered starkly from the
picture in the mainstream Indian press. Soldiers stood on every street corner.
Machine-gun nests guarded intersections, and shops were shuttered on each
block. Apart from the military presence, the streets were lifeless. At
Khanqah-e-Moula, the city’s magnificent eighteenth-century mosque, Friday
prayers were banned. Schools were closed. Cell-phone and Internet service was
cut off.
Indian intelligence agents
are widely understood to monitor the rosters of local hotels, so Ayyub and I,
along with an Indian photographer named Avani Rai, had arranged to stay with a
friend. When we got there, a Kashmiri doctor who was visiting the house told us
to check the main hospital, where young men were being treated after security
forces fired on them. The police and soldiers were using small-gauge
shotguns—called pellet guns by the locals—and some of the victims had been
blinded. “Go to the ophthalmology ward,” the doctor said.
At the hospital, we found a
scene of barely restrained chaos, with security officers standing guard and
families mixing with the sick in corridors. While I stood in a corner, trying
to make myself inconspicuous, Ayyub ran to the fourth floor to speak to an eye
doctor. After a few minutes, she returned and motioned for me and Rai to
follow. “Ward eight,” she said. Thirty gunshot victims were inside.
As the three of us
approached, a smartly dressed man with a close-cropped beard stepped into our
path and placed his hand on Ayyub’s shoulder. “What are you doing here?” he
said. Rai looked at me and quietly said, “Run.” I turned and dashed into the
crowd. The bearded man took Ayyub and Rai by the arm and led them away.
Ayyub grew up in Sahar, a
middle-class neighborhood of Mumbai. Her father, Waquif, wrote for a left-wing
newspaper called Blitz; later, he was a high-school principal and a
scholar of Urdu, the language of north India’s Muslims. Rana remembers midnight
poetry readings, when her father’s friends crowded into the living room to
recite their verses. The Ayyubs were the only Muslim family on the block, but
they weren’t isolated. They went into the streets with their neighbors to
celebrate Hindu festivals like Holi and Diwali, and twice a year they opened
their home for Muslim feasts. “The sectarian issue was always there, but we
were insulated from all that,” Ayyub said. “All of my friends growing up were
Hindu.”
Muslim-Hindu
harmony was central to the vision of India’s founders, Mohandas Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular state. India is home to
all the world’s major religions; Muslims constitute about fourteen per cent of
the population. As the British Empire prepared to withdraw, in 1947, Muslims
were so fearful of Hindu domination that they clamored for a separate state,
which became Pakistan. The division of the subcontinent, known as Partition,
inspired the largest migration in history, with tens of millions of Hindus and
Muslims crossing the new borders. In the accompanying violence, as many as two
million people died. Afterward, both Pakistanis and Indians harbored enduring
grievances over the killings and the loss of ancestral land. Kashmir, on the
border, became the site of a long-running proxy war.
India’s remaining Muslims
protected themselves by forging an alliance with the Congress Party—Gandhi and
Nehru’s group, which monopolized national politics for fifty years. But the
founders’ vision of the secular state was not universally shared. In 1925,
K. B. Hedgewar, a physician from central India, founded the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization dedicated to the idea that India was a Hindu
nation, and that Hinduism’s followers were entitled to reign over minorities.
Members of the R.S.S. believed that many Muslims were descended from Hindus who
had been converted by force, and so their faith was of questionable
authenticity. (The same thinking applied to Christians, who make up about two
per cent of India’s population. Other major religions, including Buddhism and
Sikhism, were considered more authentically Indian.)
Hedgewar was convinced that
Hindu men had been emasculated by colonial domination, and he prescribed paramilitary
training as an antidote. An admirer of European fascists, he borrowed their
predilection for khaki uniforms, and, more important, their conviction that a
group of highly disciplined men could transform a nation. He thought that
Gandhi and Nehru, who had made efforts to protect the Muslim minority, were
dangerous appeasers; the R.S.S. largely sat out the freedom struggle.
In January, 1948, soon
after independence, Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Vinayak Godse, a former
R.S.S. member and an avowed Hindu nationalist. The R.S.S. was temporarily
banned and shunted to the fringes of public life, but the group gradually reestablished
itself. In 1975, amid civic disorder and economic stagnation, Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi suspended parliament and imposed emergency rule. The R.S.S.
vigorously opposed her and her Congress Party allies. Many of its members were
arrested, which helped legitimize the group as it reentered the political
mainstream.
The R.S.S.’s original base
was higher-caste men, but, in order to grow, it had to widen its membership.
Among the lower-caste recruits was an eight-year-old named Narendra Modi, from
Vadnagar, a town in the state of Gujarat. Modi belonged to the low-ranking
Ghanchi caste, whose members traditionally sell vegetable oil; Modi’s father
ran a small tea shop near the train station, where his young son helped. When
Modi was thirteen, his parents arranged for him to marry a local girl, but they
cohabited only briefly, and he did not publicly acknowledge the relationship for
many years. Modi soon left the marriage entirely and dedicated himself to the
R.S.S. As a pracharak—the group’s term for its young, chaste foot
soldiers—Modi started by cleaning the living quarters of senior members, but he
rose quickly. In 1987, he moved to the R.S.S.’s political branch, the Bharatiya
Janata Party, or B.J.P.
When Modi joined, the Party
had only two seats in parliament. It needed an issue to attract sympathizers,
and it found one in an obscure religious dispute. In the northern city of Ayodhya
was a mosque, called Babri Masjid, built by the Mughal emperor Babur in 1528.
After independence, locals placed Hindu idols inside the mosque and became
convinced that it had been built on the former site of a Hindu temple. A legend
grew that the god Ram—an avatar of Vishnu, often depicted with blue skin—had
been born there.
In September, 1990, a
senior B.J.P. member named L. K. Advani began calling for Babri
Masjid to be destroyed and for a Hindu temple to take its place. To build
support for the idea, he undertook a two-month pilgrimage, called the Ram Rath
Yatra, across the Indian heartland. Travelling aboard a Nissan jeep refitted to
look like a chariot, he sometimes gave several speeches a day, inflaming crowds
about what he saw as the government’s favoritism toward Muslims; sectarian
riots followed in his wake, leaving hundreds dead. Advani was arrested before
he reached Ayodhya, but other B.J.P. members carried on, gathering supporters
and donations along the way. On December 6, 1992, a crowd led by R.S.S.
partisans swarmed Babri Masjid and, using axes and hammers, began tearing the
building down. By nightfall, it had been completely razed.
The destruction of the
mosque incited Hindu-Muslim riots across the country, with the biggest and
bloodiest of them in Mumbai. At first, Ayyub’s family felt safe; they were
surrounded by friends. But, after several days of mayhem, a Sikh friend, whom
the family called Uncle Bagga, came to tell Waquif that a group of neighborhood
men were coming for his daughters. Waquif was frightened; Rana, who was then
nine years old, had been stricken by polio and, though she was largely
recovered, the illness had weakened the left side of her body. That night, she
and her older sister Iffat fled with Bagga. They stayed with some relatives of
his for three months, before the family reunited in Deonar, a Muslim ghetto a
few miles away. “I felt helpless,” Rana told me. “We were like toys, moved from
one place to another by someone else.”
Deonar is an impoverished
neighborhood of fetid sewers and tin shacks. The Ayyubs, accustomed to a
middle-class existence, found their lives transformed. “We were living in a
very small place, very dirty, on a very crowded and dirty street,” Rana said.
Mumbai had been transformed, too. When she enrolled in a predominantly Hindu
school nearby, her classmates called her landya, an anti-Muslim slur.
“That is the first time I ever really thought about my identity,” she said.
“Our entire neighborhood—our friends—were going to kill us.”
For the R.S.S., the
initiative in Ayodhya paid off spectacularly. Membership soared, and by 1996
the B.J.P. had become the largest party in parliament. During the dispute over
Babri Masjid, Ashis Nandy, a prominent Indian intellectual, began a series of
interviews with R.S.S. members. A trained psychologist, he wanted to study the
mentality of the rising Hindu nationalists. One of those he met was Narendra
Modi, who was then a little-known B.J.P. functionary. Nandy interviewed Modi
for several hours, and came away shaken. His subject, Nandy told me, exhibited
all the traits of an authoritarian personality: puritanical rigidity, a
constricted emotional life, fear of his own passions, and an enormous ego that
protected a gnawing insecurity. During the interview, Modi elaborated a
fantastical theory of how India was the target of a global conspiracy, in which
every Muslim in the country was likely complicit. “Modi was a fascist in every
sense,” Nandy said. “I don’t mean this as a term of abuse. It’s a diagnostic
category.”
On February 27, 2002, a
passenger train stopped in Godhra, a city in Gujarat. It was coming from
Ayodhya, where many of the passengers had gone to visit the site where Babri
Masjid was destroyed, ten years earlier, and to advocate for building a temple
there. Most of them belonged to the religious wing of the R.S.S., called the
V.H.P.
While the train sat at the
station, Hindu travellers and Muslims on the platform began to heckle one
another. As the train pulled away, it stalled, and the taunting escalated. At
some point, someone—possibly a Muslim vender with a stove—threw something on
fire into one of the cars. The flame spread, and the passengers were trapped
inside; when the door was finally pushed open, the rush of oxygen sparked a
fireball. Some fifty-eight people suffocated or burned to death. As word of the
disaster spread, the state government allowed members of the V.H.P. to parade
the burned corpses through Ahmedabad, the state’s largest city. Hindus, enraged
by the display, began rampaging and attacking Muslims across the state.
Mobs of Hindus prowled the
streets, yelling, “Take revenge and slaughter the Muslims!” According to
eyewitnesses, rioters cut open the bellies of pregnant women and killed their
babies; others gang-raped women and girls. In at least one instance, a Muslim
boy was forced to drink kerosene and swallow a lighted match. Ehsan Jafri, an
elderly Congress Party politician, was paraded naked and then dismembered and
burned.
The most sinister aspect of
the riots was that they appeared to have been largely planned and directed by
the R.S.S. Teams of men, armed with clubs, guns, and swords, fanned out across
the state’s Muslim enclaves, often carrying voter rolls and other official
documents that led them to Muslim homes and shops.
The Chief Minister of the
Gujarati government was Narendra Modi, who had been appointed to the position
five months before. As the riots accelerated, Modi became invisible; he
summoned the Indian Army but held the soldiers in their barracks as the violence
spun out of control. In many areas of Gujarat, the police not only stood by
but, according to numerous human-rights groups, even took part.
When the riots began, Rahul
Sharma was the senior police officer in charge of Bhavnagar, a district with a
Muslim population of more than seventy thousand. In sworn testimony, Sharma
later said that he received no direction from his superiors about how to
control the riots. On the fourth day, a crowd of thousands gathered around the
Akwada Madrassa, a Muslim school, which had about four hundred children inside.
The vigilantes were brandishing swords and torches. “They were acting in an
organized way,” Sharma said. “They were going to kill the children.” Sharma
ordered his men to use lethal force to prevent an attack; when warning shots
had no effect, they fired, killing two men and injuring several more. The crowd
scattered, and Sharma escorted the children to safety.
In nearly every other
district, though, the violence carried on unchecked. Sharma, instead of being
celebrated as a hero, was transferred out of the district to a make-work desk
job. L. K. Advani—the advocate of destroying the mosque in Ayodhya, who
had risen to be India’s Home Minister—called Sharma and suggested that he had
let too many Hindus die.
The riots dragged on for
nearly three months; when they were over, as many as two thousand people were
dead and nearly a hundred and fifty thousand had been driven from their homes.
The ethnic geography of Gujarat was transformed, with most of its Muslims crowded
into slums. One slum formed inside the Ahmedabad dump, a vast landscape of
trash and sewage that towered hundreds of feet in the air. (That ghetto, dubbed
Citizens’ Village by its inhabitants, is still home to a thousand people, who
live in shacks and breathe the noxious air; when the monsoons come, filth from
the dump floods the streets and shanties.)
As the riots festered,
Ayyub, who was then nineteen, decided to help. After telling her mother that
she was going trekking with a friend in the Himalayas, she put herself on a
train to the Gujarati city of Vadodara. Because the unrest was still flaring,
she disguised herself with a bright-red bindi—the dot of paint that Hindu women
wear on their forehead.
She spent three weeks in
relief camps, helping rape victims file police reports. The camps were
surrounded by open-pit latrines, and the smell of sewage was overpowering;
children lay around with flies on them. At times, mobs armed with swords and
Molotov cocktails came looking for Muslims. During one incursion, Ayyub hid in
a house and peered out as a crowd of some sixty men jostled outside. “I was
palpitating,” she said. “Gujarat made me realize that what happened in Mumbai
was not an aberration.”
After the riots, Modi’s
government did almost nothing to provide for the tens of thousands of Muslims
forced from their homes; aid was supplied almost entirely by volunteers. Asked
about this, Modi said, “Relief camps are actually child-making factories. Those
who keep on multiplying the population should be taught a lesson.” Although
some Hindu rioters were arrested, just a few dozen were ultimately convicted.
Mayaben Kodnani, a B.J.P. minister, was the only official to be punished
significantly; she was convicted of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy.
When Modi’s government later came to power in Delhi, she was cleared of all
charges.
In the following months,
there were indications of substantial government complicity. According to
independent investigations, the Hindu mobs had moved decisively, following leaders
who appeared to have received explicit instructions. “These instructions were
blatantly disseminated by the government, and in most cases, barring a few
sterling exceptions, methodically carried out by the police and Indian
Administrative Service,” concluded a citizen-led inquiry that included former
Supreme Court justices and a former senior police official.
During the violence, a
senior federal official named Harsh Mander travelled to Gujarat and was stunned
by the official negligence. Seeing that many of his colleagues were colluding
in the bloodbath, he retired early from his job to work in the makeshift camps
where Muslim refugees were gathering. He has dedicated much of the rest of his
life to reminding the public what happened and who was responsible. “No
sectarian riot ever happens in India unless the government wants it to,” Mander
told me. “This was a state-sponsored massacre.”
A few officials claimed
that the decision to encourage the riots came from Modi himself. Haren Pandya,
a Modi rival and Cabinet minister, gave sworn testimony about the riots, and
also spoke to the newsweekly Outlook. He said that, on the night the
unrest began, he had attended a meeting at Modi’s bungalow, at which Modi
ordered senior police officials to allow “people to vent their frustration and
not come in the way of the Hindu backlash.” A police official named Sanjiv
Bhatt recalled that, at another meeting that night, Modi had expressed his hope
that “the Muslims be taught a lesson to ensure that such incidents do not recur.”
But there was not much
political will to pursue the evidence against Modi, and his accusers did not
stay in the public eye for long. After Bhatt made his accusation, he was
charged in the death of a suspect in police custody—a case that had sat dormant
for more than two decades—and sentenced to life in prison. In 2003, the Cabinet
minister Haren Pandya was found dead in his car in Ahmedabad. His wife left
little doubt about who she believed was behind it. “My husband’s assassination
was a political murder,” she said.
For Modi, the riots had a
remarkable effect. The U.S. and the United Kingdom banned him for nearly a
decade, and he was shunned by senior leaders of his party. (In 2004, the B.J.P.
Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was voted out. He blamed Modi for the
loss.)
In Gujarat, though, his
prestige grew. Rather than seeking reconciliation, Modi led a defiant
Hindu-pride march across the state, which was met with an outpouring of
support. Modi often spoke in barely coded language that signalled to his
followers that he shared their bigotry. In one speech, during the march, he
suggested that the state’s Muslims were a hindrance to be overcome. “If we
raise the self-respect and morale of fifty million Gujaratis,” he said, “the
schemes of Alis, Malis, and Jamalis will not be able to do us any harm.” The
crowd let out a cheer. That December, after a campaign in which he made several
incendiary anti-Muslim speeches, he led the B.J.P. to a huge electoral victory
in Gujarat.
Elsewhere in India, the B.J.P.’s
fortunes were sinking; as a result, Modi’s hard-line faction was able to seize
the Party leadership. He also began to build a national reputation as a
pro-business leader who presided over rapid economic development. “The B.J.P.
was a dead party,” Ayyub told me. “The only chance they had to power was Modi,
because he had all these followers—all these big businessmen—and so the riots
were all forgotten.”
Eventually, a Supreme Court
investigative team declared that there was not enough evidence to charge Modi
in the riots—a finding that human-rights groups dismissed as politically
motivated. A few persistent advocates tried to keep the issue alive. In 2007,
when Modi appeared on the Indian network CNN-IBN, the journalist Karan Thapar
asked him, “Why can’t you say that you regret the killings?”
“What I have to say I have
said at that time,” Modi replied, his face hardening. As Thapar kept pressing,
Modi grew agitated. “I have to rest,” he said. “I need some water.” Then he
removed his microphone and walked away.
In 2013, when another
reporter asked if he felt sorry about the deaths of so many Muslims, he
suggested that he had been a helpless bystander. “If someone else is driving a
car and we’re sitting behind—even then, if a puppy comes under the wheel, will
it be painful?” Modi said. “Of course it is.”
To many observers, Modi’s
success stemmed from his willingness to play on profound resentments, which for
decades had been considered offensive to voice in polite society. Even though
India’s Muslims were typically poorer than their fellow-citizens, many Hindus
felt that they had been unjustly favored by the central government. In private,
Hindus sniped that the Muslims had too many children and that they supported
terrorism. The Gandhi-Nehru experiment had made Muslims feel unusually secure
in India, and partly as a result there has been very little radicalization,
outside Kashmir; still, many Hindus considered them a constant threat. “Modi
became a hero for all the Hindus of India,” Nirjhari Sinha, a scientist in
Gujarat who investigated the riots, told me. “That is what people tell me, at
parties, at dinners. People genuinely feel that Muslims are terrorists—and it
is because of Modi that Muslims are finally under control.”
In 1993, Ayyub’s father
wrote a book about the riots in Mumbai. He titled it “I Am Alive”—his habitual
response to friends who wrote to him during the unrest to see how he was. When
Rana Ayyub began considering a career in journalism, she showed some of the
same pugnacious self-assertion. “In my childhood, everybody said, ‘She’s a weak
child,’ ” she told me. “It’s like you have to prove a point to everybody
that, no, I’m not a weak child.”
At first, she wanted to
effect change by joining the civil service. But, she said, “people told me, ‘There’s
no way you will be able to do anything as a police officer, because you still
have to be answerable to cops and corrupt politicians.’ ” After graduating
from Sophia College in Mumbai with a degree in English literature, Ayyub
bounced around from Web sites to a television station before landing at a
magazine called Tehelka. Published in English, Tehelka had a
small circulation but an outsized reputation for tough investigations. Ayyub
took to the work, producing pieces on killings by the police and a smuggling
racket run by officials in Mumbai. “I was trying to help people,” she told me.
“I was trying to figure out what was happening, and it made me feel better
about myself.”
In 2010, in a series of
cover stories for Tehelka, Ayyub tied Modi’s closest adviser, Amit Shah,
to a sensational crime. The scion of a high-caste family, Shah had trained as a
biochemist but excelled as a political tactician. A onetime president of the
Gujarat Chess Association, he had twice helped engineer Modi’s election as the
top official in Gujarat; afterward, he was made the Minister of State for Home
Affairs.
Ayyub was investigating a
case that had begun five years before, when police in Gujarat announced that
they had fatally shot a suspected terrorist dispatched by Pakistan to
assassinate Modi. In political and journalistic circles, the announcement
inspired skepticism; rumors had been circulating that the police killed
criminals and then pretended that they were Muslim assassins, heroically
thwarted just before they could get to Modi. Wised-up Indians derided the
police claims as “fake encounters,” but, among Gujaratis who were alarmed by
the riots, they helped boost Modi’s reputation as a defender of Hindus.
It turned out that the
alleged assassin, a local extortionist named Sohrabuddin Sheikh, had no history
of Islamist militancy. Before long, federal investigators established that he
had been murdered by the police. There were witnesses, including Sheikh’s wife
and a criminal associate of his. But, a couple of days after the killing, his
wife was murdered and her body burned; the associate was killed in police
custody a year later.
Ayyub didn’t believe that
the ultimate responsibility lay with the police. “I never looked at the arrests
that were made, the people who shoot,” she told me. “I looked for the
kingpins.” One source, a police officer, suggested that Amit Shah had been
involved. Ayyub first met the officer at a secluded house in the countryside.
“He could see that my hands were shaking,” she told me. “He said, ‘If you’re
going to do this story, then you have to stop shaking.’ ” The next time
they met—in a graveyard, at 3 A.M., with Ayyub disguised in a
burqa—he gave her a CD, hidden in a bouquet of flowers. It contained six years
of Shah’s telephone records, including the times and locations of his calls.
Using the records, Ayyub
showed that Shah and the three officers suspected of murdering Sheikh’s
associate had been in extensive contact, before and after the killing. Her
reporting also offered an explanation of Shah’s motive: a police official told
her that the murdered criminals “knew something that could have been damning
for the minister.”
Ayyub was not the first
journalist to expose official misconduct in the case, but the evidence around
Shah was explosive. Federal agents asked her for a copy of Shah’s phone
records, and she obliged. Within weeks, Shah was arrested on charges of murder
and extortion; he had allegedly been involved in the same illicit business as
Sheikh. (A spokesman for Shah denied his complicity, saying, “Shah was
implicated in the said criminal offence purely on political considerations.”)
Federal police eventually charged thirty-eight other people, including
Gujarat’s top police official, the former Home Minister for the state of
Rajasthan, and more than twenty officers suspected of being involved in the
murders.
The morning of Shah’s
arrest, Ayyub awoke to find that her reporting was the top of the news. A
popular television anchor read the entirety of one of her pieces on the air. “I
was just a twenty-six-year-old Muslim girl,” she said. “I felt people would
finally see what I can do.” Her stories, along with others, set off a series of
official investigations into the Gujarati police, who were suspected of killing
more than twenty people in “fake encounters.” But, she thought, even Shah was
not the ultimate kingpin. Her source had told her that the police were under
intense pressure to stall the investigation and to hide records from federal
investigators—suggesting that someone powerful was trying to squelch the case.
The headline of one of her stories was “So
Why Is Narendra Modi Protecting Amit Shah?”
Despite the evidence piling
up around Modi, he only grew stronger. Increasingly, he was mentioned as a
candidate for national office. In 2007, while running for reelection as Chief
Minister, Modi taunted members of the Congress Party to come after him.
“Congress people say that Modi is indulging in ‘encounters’—saying that Modi
killed Sohrabuddin,” he told a crowd of supporters. “You tell me—what should I
do with Sohrabuddin?” he asked.
“Kill him!” the crowd
roared. “Kill him!”
Within a few weeks of
Shah’s arrest, Ayyub hit on an idea for a new article: “If I can go after Shah,
why not Modi?” She told her editors at Tehelka that she suspected Modi
of far graver crimes than previously reported. If she went undercover, she
argued, she could insinuate herself into his inner circle and learn the truth.
In the United States, it is
a cardinal rule of journalism that reporters shouldn’t lie about their
identity; undercover operations tend to be confined to the industry’s yellower
margins. In India, the practice is more common, if still controversial. In
2000, Tehelka sent a former cricket player, wearing a hidden camera, to
expose widespread match-fixing and bribery in the sport. Later that year, two
reporters posing as representatives of a fake company offered to sell infrared
cameras to the Ministry of Defense. Thirty-six officials agreed to take bribes;
the Minister of Defense resigned.
Tarun Tejpal, Tehelka’s
editor, told me that he authorized stings only when there appeared to be no other
way to get the story. In this case, he said, “Modi and Shah were untouchable.
The truth would never come out.” He told Ayyub to go forward.
As she began reporting,
Ayyub created an elaborate disguise, designed to appeal to the vanities of
Gujarat’s political establishment. “Indians have a weakness for being
recognized in America,” she said. “The idea that they would be famous in the
United States—it was irresistible to them.” She became Maithili Tyagi, an
Indian-American student at the American Film Institute Conservatory in Los
Angeles, visiting India to make a documentary. She invented a story about her
family, saying that her father was a
professor of Sanskrit and a
devotee of Hindu-nationalist ideas. Ayyub, who has distinctive curly hair,
straightened it and tucked it into a bun. She rehearsed an American accent,
and, for added verisimilitude, hired a French assistant, whom she called Mike.
Only her parents knew what she was doing; she stayed in touch on a separate
phone.
In the fall of 2010, Ayyub rented
a tiny room in Ahmedabad. For eight months, she flattered her way into the
local élite, claiming that her film would focus on Gujaratis who were
prospering under Modi’s tenure. “Modi’s biggest support comes from
Gujarati-Americans,” she told me. “I said, I want to meet the most influential
people who can tell me the Gujarat story—who will tell me the secret sauce of
what Mr. Modi has done in the past fifteen years.”
At first, Ayyub and Mike
appeared only at apolitical social events, to get locals used to seeing them
around. As she moved in closer, she began wearing hidden cameras and
microphones—in her watch, in her kurta, in her phone. (When she bought the
minicams, at a Spy Shop in New Delhi, she told the salesman that she was trying
to catch an adulterous husband.) Ayyub was welcomed nearly everywhere. She made
revealing recordings of senior Gujarati officials, some of whom directly
accused Modi and Shah of wrongdoing. Even Modi agreed to see her for a brief
chat in his office, where his staff offered her biographies of him to read.
Modi showed her copies of Barack Obama’s books. “He said, ‘Maithili, look at
this. I want to be like him someday,’ ” she recalled. She was struck by
his canniness. “I thought Modi was either going to be Prime Minister or he was
going to jail.”
Ayyub took her findings
back to her editors. But, after reviewing transcripts, Tejpal decided against
publishing a story. The conversations were mostly of officials implicating
others—often Modi and Shah. Tejpal told me that he needed people admitting
their own crimes. “The fundamental ethics of the sting is that a sting is no
good if a person doesn’t indict oneself,” he said. “If you come to me and say,
‘I had a conversation with someone, and he told me that Tom, Dick, and Harry are
fuckers, and he knows that Tom is taking money from So-and-So, and Harry really
fucked So-and-So,’ it means nothing. That’s just cheap gossip.”
Ayyub was convinced that
Tejpal had succumbed to pressure from the B.J.P. “He caved in,” she told me. “I
was inside Modi’s and Shah’s inner circle, as close as you could get.” (Tejpal
denied this, and other editors spoke in support of him.)
Determined to get her story
out, Ayyub wrote a draft of a book and shopped it to English-language
newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. All rejected her pitch. Some said
that the book was too partisan; most argued that her methods could expose them
to lawsuits. Several editors told me privately that they thought Ayyub’s work
was revelatory—but that it was impossible to publish. “We wanted to excerpt the
book on the cover of our magazine, but word got around, and phone calls started
coming in,” Krishna Prasad, who was then the editor of Outlook, told me.
“We simply couldn’t do it.”
By 2012, Modi had become
the most recognizable B.J.P. leader in India, and seemed likely to run for
Prime Minister. “Everyone saw the writing on the wall,” Ayyub said. “Modi was
going to win, and no one wanted to alienate him.” Ayyub kept trying to find a
publisher, but nothing came through. She told me that she fell into a profound
funk, relying on antidepressants for the next four years. In 2013, Tejpal, her
editor at Tehelka, was accused of sexual assault and spent seven months
in prison before being released on bail. (He maintains his innocence, and the
case is ongoing.) The magazine all but collapsed. “I thought that was the end,”
she said.
As Modi began his run for
Prime Minister, in the fall of 2013, he sold
himself not as a crusading
nationalist but as a master manager, the visionary who had presided over an
economic boom in Gujarat. His campaign’s slogan was “The good days are coming.”
A close look at the data showed that Gujarat’s economy had grown no faster
under his administration than under previous ones—the accelerated growth was “a
fantastically crafted fiction,” according to Prasad, the former editor. Even
so, many of India’s largest businesses flooded his campaign with contributions.
Modi was helped by an
overwhelming public perception that the Congress Party, which had been in power
for most of the past half century, had grown arrogant and corrupt. Its
complacency was personified by the Gandhi family, whose members dominated the
Party but appeared diffident and out of touch. Rahul Gandhi, the head of the
Party (and Nehru’s great-grandson), was dubbed the “reluctant prince” by the
Indian media.
By contrast, Modi and his
team were disciplined, focussed, and responsive. “The Gandhis would keep chief
ministers, who had travelled across the country to see them, waiting for
days—they didn’t care,” an Indian political commentator who has met the Gandhis
as well as Modi told me. “With Modi’s people, you got right in.” While the
Congress leaders often behaved as if they were entitled to rule, the B.J.P.’s
leaders presented themselves as ascetic, committed, and incorruptible. Modi,
who is said to do several hours of yoga every day, typically wore simple
kurtas, and members of his immediate family worked in modest jobs and were
conspicuously absent from senior government positions; whatever other allegations
floated around him, he could not be accused of material greed.
The B.J.P. won a plurality
of the popular vote, placing Modi at the head of a governing coalition. As
Prime Minister, he surprised many Indians by challenging people to confront
problems that had gone unaddressed. One was public defecation, a major cause of
disease throughout India. At an early speech in Delhi, he announced a
nationwide program to build public toilets in every school—a prosaic
improvement that gratified many Indians, even those who could afford indoor
plumbing. Modi also addressed a series of widely publicized gang rapes by
speaking in bracingly modern terms. “Parents ask their daughters hundreds of
questions,” he said. “But have any dared to ask their sons where they are
going?”
The address set the tone
for Modi’s premiership, or at least for part of it. As a young pracharak,
he had taken a vow of celibacy, and he gave no public sign of breaking it.
Unburdened by family commitments, he worked constantly. People who saw him said
he exuded a vitality that seemed to compensate for his otherwise solitary
existence. “When you have that kind of power, that kind of adoration, you don’t
need romance,” the Indian political commentator told me. In Gujarat, Modi had
focussed on big-ticket projects, wooing car manufacturers and bringing
electricity to villages; as Prime Minister, he introduced a sweeping reform of
bankruptcy laws and embarked on a multibillion-dollar campaign of road
construction.
Modi’s effort to transform
his image succeeded in the West, as well. In the United States,
newspaper columnists
welcomed his emphasis on markets and efficiency. In addition, Modi called on a
vast network of Indian-Americans, who cheered his success at putting India on
the world stage. The Obama Administration quietly dropped the visa ban. When
Modi met Obama, not long after taking office, the two visited the memorial to
Martin Luther King, Jr., a man Modi claimed to admire. During his stay, Modi
had a dinner meeting with Obama, but he presented White House chefs with a
dilemma: he was fasting for Navaratri, a Hindu festival. At the meeting, he
consumed only water.
The Indian political
commentator, who met with Modi during his first term, told me that in person he
was intense and inquisitive but not restless; he joked about the monkeys that
were marauding his garden, and happily discussed the arcana of projects that
were occupying his attention. The main one was water: India’s groundwater
reserves were declining quickly (they’ve gone down by sixty-one per cent in the
past decade), and Modi was trying to prepare for a future in which the country
could run dry. During the meeting, he also displayed a detailed list of nations
that were in need of various professionals—lawyers, engineers, doctors—of the
very kind that India, with its huge population of graduates, could provide. “He
is smart, extremely focussed,” the commentator said. “And, yes, a bit
puritanical.”
Not long
after Modi took power, the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, in which his old friend Amit
Shah was implicated, ground to a halt. By 2014, Shah had essentially stopped
showing up for hearings. When the judge ordered Shah to appear, the case was
taken away from him, in defiance of the Supreme Court.
The new judge, Brijgopal
Loya, also complained about Shah’s failure to show up in court. He told his
family and friends that he was under “great pressure” to dismiss the case, and
that the chief justice of the Bombay High Court had offered him sixteen million
dollars to scuttle it. (The chief justice could not be reached for comment.)
Loya died not long after, in mysterious circumstances. The coroner’s report
said that he had suffered a heart attack, but, according to The Caravan,
a leading Indian news magazine, details in the report appeared to have been
falsified. The arrangements for Loya’s body to be returned to his family were
made not by government officials but by a member of the R.S.S.; it arrived
spattered in blood. Loya’s family asked for an official investigation into his
death but has not received one.
Shah’s case was given to a
third judge, M. B. Gosavi, who after less than a month dismissed all
charges, saying that he found “no sufficient ground to proceed.” Subsequent
efforts to hold anyone accountable for Sohrabuddin Sheikh’s death came to
nothing. As the trial of the remaining defendants approached, ninety-two
witnesses turned against the prosecution, with some saying they feared for
their lives; the defendants were acquitted. Rajnish Rai, the officer tasked
with investigating Shah, was transferred off the case. When he applied for
early retirement, he was suspended.
By the time the charges
were dropped, Modi had installed Shah as president of the B.J.P. and chairman
of the governing coalition—effectively making him the country’s second most
powerful man.
In 2016, after four years
of trying to find a publisher for her book, Ayyub decided to publish it
herself. To pay for it, she sold the gold jewelry that her mother had been
saving for her wedding. “I wasn’t getting married anytime soon anyway,” she
told me, laughing. She found a printer willing to reproduce the manuscript
without reading it first, and cut a deal with a book distributor to share any
profits. She persuaded an artist friend to design an appropriately ominous
cover. Ayyub was protected by the fact that, as an English-language book, it
would be read only by India’s élite, too small a group to concern the B.J.P.
That May, the book went on sale on Amazon and in bookstores around the country.
She called it “Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up.”
“Gujarat Files” relates the
highlights of the discussions Ayyub had with senior officials as she tried to
figure out what happened during Modi’s and Shah’s time presiding over the
state. It is not a polished work; it reads like a pamphlet for political
insiders, rushed into publication by someone with no time to check punctuation
or spell out abbreviations or delve into the historical background of the cases
discussed. “I didn’t have the resources to think about all that,” Ayyub told
me. “I just wanted to get the story out.” The virtue of the book is that it
feels like being present at a cocktail party of Hindu nationalists, speaking
frankly about long-suppressed secrets. “Here is the thing,” Ayyub said.
“Everybody has heard the truth—but you can’t be sure. With my book, you can
hear it from the horse’s mouth.”
Among those whom Ayyub
“stung” was Ashok Narayan, who had been Gujarat’s Home Secretary during the
riots. According to Ayyub, Narayan said that Modi had decided to allow the
Hindu nationalists to parade the bodies of the victims of the train attack.
Narayan said that he had warned Modi, “Things will go out of hand,” but to no
avail. When he resisted, Modi went around him. “Bringing the bodies to
Ahmedabad flared up the whole thing, but he is the one who took the decision,”
he said.
Narayan added that the V.H.P.—the
religious arm of the R.S.S.—had made preparations for large-scale attacks on
the Muslim community and was merely looking for a pretext. “It was all planned
by the V.H.P.—it was gruesome,” Narayan said, adding that he believed Modi was
in on the plan from the beginning. “He knew everything.”
G. C. Raigar, a
senior police official, told Ayyub that the initial plan was to allow the
Hindus to take limited revenge for the attack. But, he said, the violence
spread so quickly that Modi’s government could no longer stop it: “They didn’t
want to use force against the rioters—which is why things went out of control.”
Raigar, among others, told
Ayyub that the decision to allow reprisals against Muslims was communicated
outside the normal chain of command, from officials around Modi to police
officers who were thought to harbor sectarian animosities. “They would tell it
to people they had obliged in the past,” Raigar said of the officials. “They
would know who would help them.”
Some of the officials spoke
of the killings in a remarkably casual way, as if the Muslims had deserved to
be murdered. “There were riots in ’85, ’87, ’89, ’92, and most of the times the
Hindus got a beating—and the Muslims got an upper hand,” P. C. Pande,
Ahmedabad’s former police commissioner, said. “So this time, in 2002, it had to
happen, it was the retaliation of Hindus.”
Pande guided Ayyub through
his rationale: “Here is a group of Muslims going and setting fire on a train—so
what will be your reaction?”
“You hit them back?” she
said.
“Yes, you hit them back,”
Pande said. “Here is the chance, give it back to them. . . . Why
should anybody mind?” Conversations like that, Ayyub wrote, convinced her that
the riots had happened because people in power wanted them to: “It was as if
the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to emerge.”
Several officers also said
that Shah had presided over extrajudicial killings—including those of the
alleged assassin Sohrabuddin Sheikh and the witnesses to his murder. The
conversations about Shah strengthened Ayyub’s conviction that many more
criminal suspects had been eliminated in a similar way. “It was clear that the
encounters were only the tip of the iceberg,” she wrote.
Initially, the reaction to
Ayyub’s book was muted. There was a reception in New Delhi, attended by most of
the country’s major political writers and editors—but Ayyub couldn’t find a
word about it in any paper the next day. Newspapers were slow to review the
book. But it took off on its own, especially on Amazon, helped by Ayyub’s
reputation as a journalist. The release of a Hindi edition, in 2017, opened up
a huge potential audience.
To date, Ayyub says,
“Gujarat Files” has sold six hundred thousand copies and been translated into
thirteen languages. Ayyub has been invited to speak at the United Nations and
at journalism conferences around the world. “What makes it compelling is
knowing that these are the biggest players in what happened,” Hartosh Singh
Bal, the political editor of The Caravan, told me. “They are speaking in
unguarded moments, and they are confirming and adding to the knowledge of what
we have already from every other source so far. But never from this much on the
inside. And suddenly we put a speaker right in the heart of the room with the
people who know everything.”
Perhaps the main factor
that made “Gujarat Files” a sensation was the climate in which it appeared. By
2016, two years into Modi’s first term, he was in the midst of a campaign to
crush any voice that challenged the new order.
In April, 2018, Ayyub was
sitting with a friend in a Delhi restaurant when a source alerted her to a
video that was appearing in online chat groups maintained by B.J.P. supporters.
He sent her the clip, and she pressed Play. What appeared on her screen was a
pornographic video purporting to show Ayyub engaging in various sex acts. “I
burst into tears and threw up,” she said.
The clip went viral, making
its way from WhatsApp to Facebook to Twitter, retweeted and shared countless
times. Ayyub was inundated with angry messages, often with the video attached.
“Hello bitch,” a man named Himanshu Verma wrote in a direct message on
Facebook. “Plz suck my penis too.”
The video was the crudest
salvo in a media campaign that started soon after the publication of Ayyub’s
book. A tweet with a fake quote from her, asking for leniency for Muslims who
had raped children, went viral. Other falsified tweets followed, including one
in which she declared her hatred of India. In response, someone named Vijay
Singh Chauhan wrote, “Don’t ever let me see you, or we’ll tell the whole world
what we do to whores like you. Pack your bag and go to back to Pakistan.”
India’s female journalists
are often subjected to an especially ugly form of abuse. The threats that Ayyub
received were nearly identical to those sent to Gauri Lankesh, a journalist and
book publisher from the southern state of Karnataka. Like Ayyub, Lankesh had
reported aggressively on Hindu nationalism and on violence against women and
lower-caste people. She had also published Ayyub’s book in Kannada, the
predominant language in the state. “We were like sisters,” Ayyub told me. In
September, 2017, after Lankesh endured a prolonged campaign of online attacks,
two men shot her dead outside her home and fled on a motorbike.
Neha Dixit, who has done
groundbreaking reporting on the B.J.P., told me that she receives death threats
and sexual insults constantly: “Every day, I get three hundred notifications,
with dick pics, and with
conversations about how they should rape me with a steel rod or a rose
thornbush or something like that.” For Dixit and other targets of these
campaigns, it is especially galling that the abuse is apparently endorsed by
prominent Modi allies. Ayyub showed me a tweet about the porn video from
Vaibhav Aggarwal, a media personality who often speaks on behalf of the B.J.P.
It read, “U want to dance in the Rain, get all wet & not want to then have
pneumonia”—a suggestion that she deserved whatever abuse she got. In June, the
fake Ayyub quote about child rape was retweeted by a prominent B.J.P. member
named Ashoke Pandit. The quote, which originated in English, was translated
into Hindi on a Facebook page for the so-called Army of Yogi
Adityanath—admirers of the B.J.P.’s Chief Minister in the state of Uttar
Pradesh.
Pratik Sinha, a former
software engineer and the founder of Alt News, which tracks online
disinformation, described a nimble social-media operation that works on behalf
of the B.J.P. In 2017, his group made a typical discovery, when a pro-B.J.P.
Web site called Hindutva.info released a video of a gruesome stabbing, which
was passed around on social media as evidence that Muslims were killing Hindus
in Kerala. Puneet Sharma, an R.S.S. apparatchik whom Modi follows on Twitter,
promoted the video, saying that it should make Hindus’ “blood boil.” But, when
Alt News tracked the video to its source, it turned out to depict a gang
killing in Mexico.
Sinha told me he believes
that some of the most aggressive social-media posts are instigated by an
unofficial “I.T. cell,” staffed and funded by B.J.P. loyalists. He said that
people affiliated with the B.J.P. maintain Web sites that push pro-Modi
propaganda and attack his enemies. “They are organized and quick,” he said.
“They got their act down a long time ago, in Gujarat.”
As Modi consolidated his
hold on the government, he used its power to silence mainstream outlets. In
2016, his administration began moving to crush the television news network
NDTV. Since it went on the air, in 1988, the station has been one of the
liveliest and most credible news channels; this spring, as votes were tallied
in the general election, its Web site received 16.5 billion hits in a single
day. According to two people familiar with the situation, Modi’s administration
has pulled nearly all government advertising from the network—one of its
primary sources of revenue—and members of his Cabinet have pressured private
companies to stop buying ads. NDTV recently laid off some four hundred
employees, a quarter of its staff. The journalists who remain say that they
don’t know how long they can persist. “These are dark times,” one told me.
That year, Karan Thapar,
the journalist who had asked Modi whether he wanted to express remorse for the
Gujarat riots, found that no one from the B.J.P. would appear on his nightly
show any longer. Thapar, perhaps the country’s most prominent television
journalist, was suddenly unable to meaningfully cover politics. Then he
discovered that Modi’s Cabinet members were pushing his bosses to take him off
the air. “They make you toxic,” Thapar told me. “These are not things that are
put in writing. They’re conversations—‘We think it’s not a good idea to have
him around.’ ” (His network, India Today, denies being influenced by
“external pressures.”) In 2017, his employers expressed reluctance to renew his
contract, so he left the network.
Modi’s government has
targeted enterprising editors as well. Last year, Bobby Ghosh, the editor of
the Hindustan Times, one of the country’s most respected newspapers, ran
a series tracking violence against Muslims. Modi met privately with the Times’
owner, and the next day Ghosh was asked to leave. In 2016, Outlook ran a
disturbing investigation by Neha Dixit, revealing that the R.S.S. had offered
schooling to dozens of disadvantaged children in the state of Assam, and then
sent them to be indoctrinated in Hindu-nationalist camps on the other side of
the country. According to a person with knowledge of the situation, Outlook’s
owners—one of India’s wealthiest families, whose businesses depended on
government approvals—came under pressure from Modi’s administration. “They were
going to ruin their empire,” the person said. Not long after, Krishna Prasad, Outlook’s
longtime editor, resigned.
Both Ayyub and Dixit said
that no mainstream publication would sponsor their work. “So many of the really
good reporters in India are freelance,” Ayyub told me. “There’s nowhere to go.”
Even news that ought to cause scandal has little effect. In June, the Business
Standard reported that Modi’s government had been inflating G.D.P.-growth
figures by a factor of nearly two. The report prompted a public outcry, but
Modi did not apologize, and no official was forced to resign.
Only a few small outfits
regularly offer aggressive coverage. The most prominent of them, The Caravan
and a news site called the Wire, employ a total of about seventy
journalists—barely enough to cover a large city, let alone a country of more
than a billion people. In 2017, after the Wire ran a story examining
questionable business dealings by Amit Shah’s son, Modi’s ministers began
pressuring donors who sustain the site to stop providing funding. Shah’s son,
who denied the allegations, also filed a lawsuit, which has been costly to
defend. Siddharth Varadarajan, the site’s founding editor, told me that he is
battling not only the government but also the compliant media. “We reckon that
people in this country very much value their freedoms and democracy—and that
they will realize when their freedoms are being eroded,” he said. “But a huge
section of the media is busy telling them something entirely different.”
Modi’s supporters often get
their news from Republic TV, which features shouting matches, public shamings,
and scathing insults of all but the most slavish Modi partisans; next to it,
Fox News resembles the BBC’s “Newshour.” Founded in 2017 with B.J.P. support,
Republic TV stars Arnab Goswami, a floppy-haired Oxford graduate who acts as a
kind of public scourge for opponents of Modi’s initiatives. In a typical
program, from 2017, Goswami mentioned a law mandating that movie theatres play
the national anthem, and asked whether people should be required to stand; his
guest Waris Pathan, a Muslim assemblyman, argued that it should be a matter of
choice. “Why can’t you stand up?” Goswami shouted at Pathan. Before Pathan
could get out an answer, he yelled again, “Why can’t you stand up? What’s your
problem with it?” Pathan kept trying, but Goswami, his hair flying, shouted
over him. “I’ll tell you why, because—I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you. I’ll
tell you why. Can I tell you? Then why don’t you stop, and I’ll tell you why?
Don’t be an anti-national! Don’t be an anti-national! Don’t be an
anti-national!”
The lack of journalistic
scrutiny has given Modi immense freedom to control the narrative. Nowhere was
this more apparent than in the months leading up to his reelection, in 2019.
Backed by his allies in business, Modi ran a campaign that was said to cost
some five billion dollars. (Its exact cost is unknown, owing to weak
campaign-finance laws.) As the vote approached, though, Modi was losing
momentum, hampered by an underperforming economy. On February 14th, a suicide
bomber crashed a car laden with explosives into an Indian military convoy in
Kashmir, killing forty soldiers. The attack energized Modi: he gave a series of
bellicose speeches, insisting, “The blood of the people is boiling!” He blamed
the attack on Pakistan, India’s archrival, and sent thousands of troops into
Kashmir. The B.J.P.’s supporters launched a social-media blitz, attacking
Pakistan and hailing Modi as “a tiger.” One viral social-media post contained a
telephone recording of Modi consoling a widow; it turned out that the recording
had been made in 2013.
On February 26th, Modi
ordered air strikes against what he claimed was a training camp for militants
in the town of Balakot. Sympathetic outlets described a momentous victory: they
pumped out images of a devastated landscape, and, citing official sources, claimed
that three hundred militants had been killed. But Western reporters visiting
the site found no evidence of any deaths; there were only a handful of craters,
a slightly damaged house, and some fallen trees. Many of the pro-Modi posts
turned out to be crude fabrications. Pratik Sinha, of Alt News, pointed out
that photos claiming to depict dead Pakistani militants actually showed victims
of a heat wave; other images, ostensibly of the strikes, were cribbed from a
video game called Arma 2.
But, in a country where
hundreds of millions of people are illiterate or nearly so, the big idea got
through. Modi rose in the polls and coasted to victory. The B.J.P. won a
majority in the lower house of parliament, making Modi the most powerful Prime
Minister in decades. Amit Shah, Modi’s deputy, told a group of election workers
that the Party’s social-media networks were an unstoppable force. “Do you
understand what I’m saying?” he said. “We are capable of delivering any message
we want to the public—whether sweet or sour, true or fake.”
For many, Modi’s reelection
suggested that he had uncovered a terrible secret at the heart of Indian
society: by deploying vicious sectarian rhetoric, the country’s leader could
persuade Hindus to give him nearly unchecked power. In the following months,
Modi’s government introduced a series of extraordinary initiatives meant to
solidify Hindu dominance. The most notable of them, along with revoking the
special status of Kashmir, was a measure designed to strip citizenship from as
many as two million residents of the state of Assam, many of whom had crossed
the border from the Muslim nation of Bangladesh decades before. In September,
the government began constructing detention centers for residents who had become
illegal overnight.
A feeling of despair has
settled in among many Indians who remain committed to the secular, inclusive
vision of the country’s founders. “Gandhi and Nehru were great, historic
figures, but I think they were an aberration,” Prasad, the former Outlook
editor, told me. “It’s very different now. The institutions have
crumbled—universities, investigative agencies, the courts, the media, the
administrative agencies, public services. And I think there is no rational
answer for what has happened, except that we pretended to be what we were for
fifty, sixty years. But we are now reverting to what we always wanted to be,
which is to pummel minorities, to push them into a corner, to show them their
places, to conquer Kashmir, to ruin the media, and to make corporations servants
of the state. And all of this under a heavy resurgence of Hinduism. India is
becoming the country it has always wanted to be.”
On March 31, 2017, a Muslim
dairy farmer named Pehlu Khan drove to the city of Jaipur with several
relatives, to buy a pair of cows for his business. On the way home, a line of
men blocked the road, surrounded his truck, and accused him of planning to sell
the cows for meat. Cows are considered sacred by Hindus, and most Indian states
forbid killing them. But it is generally legal
to eat beef from cows that have died naturally, and to make leather from their
hide—jobs often performed by Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, leaving them open
to false accusations. The men pulled Khan and his relatives from the truck and
began beating them and shouting anti-Muslim epithets. “We showed them our
papers for the cow purchase, but it did not matter,” Ajmat, a nephew, said.
Khan was taken to a hospital, where he died soon afterward.
Khan’s
relatives identified nine attackers. Most of them were members of Bajrang Dal,
a branch of the R.S.S. Ostensibly a youth group, Bajrang Dal often provides
muscle and security for B.J.P. members. It has also been implicated in a rash
of murders of Muslims throughout the country.
In Jaipur,
I met Ashok Singh, the head of the Rajasthan chapter of Bajrang Dal. Singh told
me that he and his men were duty-bound to defend cows from an epidemic of theft
and killing. For several minutes, he spoke about the holiness of the cow. Each
animal, he said, contains three hundred and sixty million gods, and even its
dung has elixirs beneficial to humans. “They cut them, they kill them,” Singh
said of Muslims. “It’s a conspiracy.” He admitted that Bajrang Dal members had
taken part in stopping Khan, but he insisted that other people had committed
the murder. “There was a mob,” he said. “We didn’t have control of it.”
The
attackers identified by Khan’s relatives were arrested and charged, but local
sentiment ran strongly in their favor. After the prosecutor declined to
introduce any eyewitness testimony or cell-phone videos into evidence, all the
attackers were acquitted. “The case was rigged,” Kasim Khan, a lawyer for the
family, told me. “The outcome was decided before the trial.”
According
to FactChecker, an organization that tracks communal violence by surveying
media reports, there have been almost three hundred hate crimes motivated by
religion in the past decade—almost all of them since Modi became Prime
Minister. Hindu mobs have killed dozens of Muslim men. The murders, which are
often instigated by Bajrang Dal members, have become known as “lynchings,”
evoking the terror that swept the American South after Reconstruction. The
lynchings take place against a backdrop of hysteria created by the R.S.S. and
its allies—a paranoid narrative of a vast majority, nearly a billion strong,
being victimized by a much smaller minority.
When
Muslims are lynched, Modi typically says nothing, and, since he rarely holds
press conferences, he is almost never asked about them. But his supporters
often salute the killers. In June, 2017, a Muslim man named Alimuddin Ansari,
who was accused of cow trafficking, was beaten to death in the village of
Ramgarh. Eleven men, including a local leader of the B.J.P., were convicted of
murder, but last July they were freed, pending appeal. On their release, eight
of them were met by Jayant Sinha, the B.J.P. Minister for Civil Aviation.
Sinha, a Harvard graduate and a former consultant for McKinsey &
Company, draped the men in marigold garlands and presented them with sweets.
“All I am doing is honoring the due process of law,” he said at the time.
In northern India, Hindu nationalists
have whipped up panic around the idea that Muslim men are engaging in a secret
campaign to seduce Hindu women into marriage and prostitution. As with the
hysteria over cow killings, the furor takes form mostly on social media and
platforms like WhatsApp, where rumors spread indiscriminately. The idea—known
as “love jihad”—is rooted in an image of the oversexed Muslim male, fortified
by beef and preying on desirable Hindu women. In many areas, any Muslim man
seen with a Hindu woman risks being attacked. Two years ago, Yogi Adityanath,
the B.J.P. Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, set up “anti-Romeo squads,” which
harassed Muslim men believed to be trying to seduce Hindu women. The squads
were abandoned after the gangs mistakenly beat up several Hindu men.
In a
village in Haryana, I spoke with a young Hindu woman named Ayesha. A year
before, she had met a Muslim man named Omar, a purveyor of spiritual medicine
who had been visiting her home to treat her mother. They fell in love, and
decided that Ayesha would convert to Islam and they would get married. Her
family was horrified, she said. One night, Ayesha ran off with Omar to his village,
a few miles away, where they got married in a mosque, and moved in with his
relatives. For several months, Ayesha said, her family tried to persuade her to
get a divorce; at one point, her father brought her a pistol and a suicide note
to sign. “I was so sad, I almost agreed,” she said.
One
night, as Omar rode his bicycle, two men followed on scooters. One of them
pulled out a gun and shot Omar dead. Ayesha remained with Omar’s family, saying
she will never go back to her own. “I am one hundred per cent certain that my
family is responsible for my husband’s death,” she said.
When
Ayyub was a child, a group of men gathered every morning for prayer and martial
arts in a field down the street from her home. The men formed a local chapter
of the R.S.S., and sometimes chanted slogans celebrating Hindu supremacy:
“Hail, Mother India.” The men were friendly, she recalled—eager to recruit
Muslims. But she had learned in school that an R.S.S. acolyte had killed
Gandhi, so she and her brother, Aref, kept their distance. “We would watch with
fascination,’’ she said. “But I didn’t like being there.”
Early one
morning in Ahmedabad, on a playground at Ellisbridge Municipal School No. 12, I
looked on as a dozen men raised the saffron flag of the R.S.S. They ranged in age
from eighteen to sixty-three, and were all trim and fit, many of them wearing
the group’s signature khaki shorts. They began with yoga poses and
calisthenics. Then they took out long wooden rods and began to perform martial
exercises. (An R.S.S. chief once said that the group’s cadres could be
assembled to fight more quickly than the Indian Army.) The men moved together,
stepping and striking in formation. “One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four,”
their leader cried. “Don’t think you’re an expert—I’m seeing a lot of
mistakes.”
The men
finished in a semicircle on the ground, offering prayers to the Hindu sun god:
“O Surya, the shining one, the radiant one, dispeller of darkness, source of
life.” They ended by shouting, “Victory to India!”
Afterward,
the men—who included an engineer, a lawyer, a garment merchant, and a police
officer—laughed and clapped one another on the back. Together they made up the
Paldi chapter of the R.S.S., one of more than thirty thousand across India.
Paldi is an overwhelmingly Hindu neighborhood, but the nearest Muslim enclave,
which came under attack in 2002, is less than a mile away. On this morning,
there wasn’t much talk of politics. “I’m just here to stay fit,” Nehal Burasin,
a student, told me.
For a
fuller explanation of the R.S.S.’s world view, I spoke to Sudhanshu Trivedi, a
lifelong member who is now the B.J.P.’s national spokesman. Over dinner at the
Ambassador Hotel in Delhi, Trivedi told me that the R.S.S. is dedicated to the
propagation of “Hindutva”: the idea that India is first and foremost a nation
for Hindus. It is, he said, by far the largest organization of its kind in the
world. In its ninety-four-year existence, the R.S.S. has embedded itself in
every aspect of Indian society.
Between
bites of salad, Trivedi rattled off R.S.S. talking points. The organization
says that it runs some thirty thousand primary and secondary schools; that it
administers hospitals across India, especially in remote areas; and that it
maintains the second-largest network of trade unions in the country, the
largest network of farmers, the largest social-welfare organization working in
the slums. The B.J.P., India’s dominant political party, came last in his
litany. “So, you can see, in the entire scheme of things, compared to what the
R.S.S. is doing, what the B.J.P. is doing is small,” he said. In fact, the
R.S.S. was rapidly becoming a state within a state—capturing India from within.
Over the summer, the organization announced that it was establishing a school
to train young people to become officers in the armed forces. This year, more
than a hundred and fifty former officers and enlisted men signed a letter
decrying the “completely unacceptable” use of the military for political
purposes. They referred to Modi’s taking credit for the cross-border strikes in
Pakistan, and to the boast by some B.J.P. politicians that it was “Modi’s
army.”
The key
to understanding modern India, Trivedi told me, was accepting that “Hinduism is
not basically a religion—it is a way of life.” Anyone born in India is part of
Hinduism. Therefore, all the other religions found in India thrive because of
Hinduism, and are subordinate to it. “The culture of Islam is preserved here
because of Hindu civilization,” he said.
As part
of the Hindutva project, B.J.P. leaders have been rewriting school textbooks
across the country, erasing much of its Islamic history, including that of the
Mughals, Muslim emperors who ruled India for three centuries. The B.J.P. has
changed Mughal place names to ones that are Hindu-influenced. Last year, the
Mughalsarai railway station, built in central India a century and a half ago,
was renamed for Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, a right-wing Hindu-nationalist leader.
Allahabad, a city of more than a million people, is now called Prayagraj, a
Sanskrit word that denotes a place of sacrifice. In November, the old story of
Ayodhya was in the news again, when India’s Supreme Court cleared the way for a
Hindu temple to be constructed on the former site of Babri Masjid. In a
thousand-page decision, the Court provided no evidence that a temple had been
destroyed to build the mosque, and acknowledged that the mosque had been torn
down by an angry mob. Nevertheless, it handed control of the land to a
government trust, effectively allowing the B.J.P. to proceed.
Trivedi
told me that no one in the R.S.S. bore any animus toward Islam. But, he said,
it was important to understand just how far the faith had fallen. “In India,
the most educated community is the Parsis, which is a minority. The second most
educated is the Christians, which is a minority. The most prosperous is the
Jains, which is a minority. The most entrepreneurial is Sikh, which is a
minority. The first nuclear scientist in India was a Parsi—a minority,” he
said. “Then what is the problem with Muslims? I will tell you. They have become
captives of the jihadi ideology.”
When
Ayyub and the photographer were detained at the hospital in Srinagar, I found a
hiding place across the street, screened by a wall and a fruit vender; Ayyub
would have faced serious repercussions if she was found to have snuck in a
foreigner. After about an hour, they emerged. Ayyub said that an intelligence
officer had questioned them intently, then released them with an admonition:
“Don’t come back.”
The next
morning, we drove to the village of Parigam, near the site of the suicide
attack that prompted Modi’s air strikes against Pakistan. We’d heard that
Indian security forces had swept through the town and detained several men. The
insurgency has broad support in the villages outside the capital, and the road
to Parigam was marked by the sandbags and razor wire of Indian Army
checkpoints. For most of the way, the roads were otherwise deserted.
In the
village, Ayyub stopped the car to chat with locals. Within a few minutes, she’d
figured out whom we should talk to first: Shabbir Ahmed, the proprietor of a
local bakery. We found him sitting cross-legged on his porch, shelling almonds
into a huge pile. In interviews, Ayyub slows down from her usual debate-team
pace; she took a spot on the porch as if she had dropped by for a visit. Ahmed,
who is fifty-five, told her that, during the sweeps, an armored vehicle rumbled
up to his home just past midnight one night. A dozen soldiers from the
Rashtriya Rifles, an élite counter-insurgency unit of the Indian Army, rushed
out and began smashing his windows. When Ahmed and his two sons came outside,
he said, the soldiers hauled the young men into the street and began beating
them. “I was screaming for help, but nobody came out,” Ahmed said. “Everyone
was too afraid.”
Ahmed’s
sons joined us on the porch. One of them, Muzaffar, said that the soldiers had
been enraged by young people who throw rocks at their patrols. They dragged
Muzaffar down the street toward a mosque. “Throw stones at the mosque like you
throw stones at us,” one of the soldiers commanded him.
Muzaffar
said that he and his brother, Ali, were taken to a local base, where the
soldiers shackled them to chairs and beat them with bamboo rods. “They kept
asking me, ‘Do you know any stone throwers?’—and I kept saying I don’t know
any, but they kept beating me,” he said. When Muzaffar fainted, he said, a
soldier attached electrodes to his legs and stomach and jolted him with an
electrical current. Muzaffar rolled up his pants to reveal patches of burned
skin on the back of his leg. It went on like that for some time, he said: he
would pass out, and when he regained consciousness the beating started again. “My
body was going into spasms,” he said, and began to cry.
After
Muzaffar and Ali were released, their father took them to the local hospital.
“They have broken my bones,” Muzaffar said. “I can no longer prostrate myself
before God.”
It was
impossible to verify the brothers’ tale, but, as with many accounts that Ayyub
and I heard in the valley, the anguish was persuasive. “I am a slightly more
civilized version of these people,” Ayyub told me. “I see what’s happening—with
the propaganda, with the lies, what the government is doing to people. Their
issues are way more extensive—their lives. But I have everything in common with
these people. I feel their pain.”
One
afternoon, Ayyub and I walked through Soura, a hardscrabble neighborhood in
Srinagar’s old city which has been the site of several confrontations with
security forces. By the time we got there, the police and the Army had
withdrawn, evidently deciding that the narrow streets left their men too
vulnerable. The locals told us that they regarded Soura as liberated territory
and vowed to attack anyone from the government who tried to enter. Every wall
seemed plastered with graffiti. One bit of scrawl said, “Demographic change is
not acceptable!”
The
Kashmiris we met felt trapped, their voices stifled. “The news that is
true—they never show it,” Yunus, a shop owner, said of the Indian media. Days
before, his thirteen-year-old son, Ashiq, had been arrested and beaten by
security forces, just as he himself had been thirty years before. “Nobody has
ever asked the people of Kashmir what they want—whether to stay with India or
join Pakistan or become independent,” he said. “We have heard so many promises.
We have lifted bodies with our hands, lifted heads that are separate, lifted
legs that are separate, and put them all together into graves.”
Many
Kashmiris still refuse to accept Indian sovereignty, and some recall the
promise, made by the United Nations in 1948, that a plebiscite would determine
the future of the state. Kashmir was assigned special status—enshrined in
Article 370—and afforded significant powers of self-rule. For the most part,
those powers have never been realized. Beginning in the late eighties, an armed
insurgency, supported by Pakistan, has turned the area into a battleground. The
conflict in Kashmir is largely a war of ambush and reprisal; the insurgents
strike the Indian security forces, and the security forces crack down. Groups
like Human Rights Watch have detailed abuses on both sides, but especially by
the Indian government.
The
R.S.S. and other Hindu nationalists have claimed that the efforts to assuage
the Kashmiris created a self-defeating dynamic. The insurgency has stifled
economic development, they said; Article 370 was curtailing investment and
migration, dooming the place to backwardness. Modi’s decision to revoke the
article seemed the logical endpoint of the R.S.S. world view: the Kashmiri
deadlock would be broken by overwhelming Hindu power.
As Ayyub
and I drove around Kashmir, it seemed unclear how the Indian government intended
to proceed. Economic activity had ground to a halt. Schools were closed.
Kashmiris were cut off from the outside world and from one another. “We are
overwhelmed by cases of depression,” a physician in Srinagar told us. Many
Kashmiris warned that an explosion was likely the moment the security measures
were lifted. “Modi is doing what he did in Gujarat twenty years ago, when he
ran a tractor over the Muslims there,” a woman named Dushdaya said.
The
newspaper columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote that, in Kashmir, “Indian
democracy is failing.” He suggested that the country’s Muslims, who have
largely resisted radicalization, would conclude that they had nothing else to
turn to. “The B.J.P. thinks it is going to Indianise Kashmir,” he wrote.
“Instead, what we will see is potentially the Kashmirisation of India: The
story of Indian democracy written in blood and betrayal.”
In
Srinagar, Ayyub and I visited the neighborhood of Mehju Nagar, which many young
men have left to join the militants. The talk on the street was of a couple
named Nazeer and Fehmeeda, whose son, Momin, had been taken away in the
crackdown. Armed men from the Central Reserve Police Force came to the door
late one night. A masked civilian—evidently an informer—pointed at Momin. The
soldiers took him away.
We found
Fehmeeda at her house, kneeling on the floor of an unadorned main room. The
morning after the raid, she told us, she went to a C.R.P.F. base, where her son
was being held. He told her that he’d been beaten. “I begged them to give him back
to me, but they wouldn’t consider it,” she said. When Fehmeeda returned the
following day, the police told her that Momin had been transferred to the
city’s central jail. But guards there said that he’d been transferred to a
prison in Uttar Pradesh, on the other side of the country. “There’s no use
crying, Auntie,” they told her.
Fehmeeda
said that she was not told what charges had been filed against Momin; Indian
antiterrorism law allows the security forces to detain any Kashmiri for any
reason, or no reason, for up to two years. In the three decades that Kashmir
has been in open rebellion, tens of thousands of men have disappeared, and many
have not returned. “I must accept that I will not see him again,” she said.
At
Fehmeeda’s house, her friends had gathered around her, while men from the
neighborhood stood outside open windows. Ayyub sat facing her, their knees
touching. As Fehmeeda spoke, some of the men talked over her, and each time
Ayyub told them to shut up: “Don’t scold her, Uncle, she has problems of her
own.”
Fehmeeda
had begun stoically, but gradually she lost her composure. Ayyub gripped her
hands and said, “Your son will return to you. God is very big.” Fehmeeda was
not consoled. Momin, a construction worker, had paid for the entire family’s
needs, including her medicine for a kidney ailment. Fehmeeda’s thoughts began
to tumble out in fragments: “I told him, don’t throw stones, somebody took him,
somebody was paid—” Then she started to sob and heave. Ayyub began to cry, too.
“I can’t take any more,” she said. “This is too much.”
Ayyub
said goodbye to Fehmeeda, promising to return with medicine for her kidneys. (A
few weeks later, she did.) We were both gripped by a sense of foreboding, that
we were witnessing the start of something that would last many years. “I feel
this as a Muslim,” Ayyub said. “It’s happening everywhere in India.”
We rode in silence for a
while. I suggested that maybe it was time for her to leave India—that Muslims
didn’t have a future there. But Ayyub was going through a notebook. “I’m not
leaving,” she said. “I have to stay. I’m going to write all this down and tell
everyone what happened.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the December 9, 2019, issue, with the headline “Blood and Soil in India.”
·
Dexter Filkins is a staff writer at The New
Yorker and the author of “The Forever War,” which won a National Book
Critics Circle Award.
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