Avishek Das/SOPA/Sipa via AP Images
Protesters release black and white balloons at a demonstration against the visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Kolkata, India, January 11, 2020. An anti-Muslim citizenship bill passed by the Indian government in December has resulted in violence, strikes, and protests.
In February, possibly in the midst of an ongoing impeachment trial, Donald Trump will travel to India to visit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The visit will mark Trump’s maiden trip to India as president, and is expected to consummate an agreement between the two leaders on civil aviation, independent of a long-pending trade deal. It’s the continuation of a dalliance that was commemorated in spectacular fashion with Modi’s September visit to Houston, where Trump walked the stage hand in hand with Modi before a crowd of some 50,000 at a packed NRG Stadium. That event was aptly titled “Howdy, Modi.”
For Trump, the allure of an ally like Modi is not hard to understand. He fits squarely into the class of strongmen heads of state of which Trump would like to consider himself a member. Modi is also an ardent nationalist, and, like Trump, has sought a plainly anti-Muslim program. As prime minister, his government has suspended Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which grants autonomy to Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. He flooded the Kashmir region with troops, while passing a bill that would expedite Indian citizenship for immigrants from three neighboring countries—so long as they are not Muslim. Kashmir has since spent over five months blanketed by a communications blockade, with the Indian government completely shutting down internet access. Only last week did the shutdown begin to ease for hospitals and banks, though social media will continue to be banned. Meanwhile, masked vigilantes have attacked liberal students and opponents of the Modi regime on college campuses throughout India. Those moves have expedited the rapid deterioration of the world’s largest democracy.
But Modi is hardly a monster of Trump’s own making. In fact, Modi was a long-standing international pariah, forbidden from even traveling to the United States for nearly a decade for his role in a rash of mob violence that resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 Muslims in 2002. But as Modi rose through the ranks politically, it was President Barack Obama who chose to rehabilitate his image on the world stage, inviting him to the White House as a personal guest, and bestowing upon him the political goodwill that’s allowed Modi to usher in this agenda with little international pushback. And while Obama’s flagship accomplishments as a statesman have been wiped away with the dissolution of the Iran deal and the end of the thaw with Cuba, the dire and lasting consequences of his elevation of Modi have quickly become among the most enduring parts of his presidential legacy.
As a politician, Modi rose through the ranks of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organization, becoming its chief propagandist. By 2001, he was elected chief minister of Gujarat, a state in the country’s west. During his first year in office, a train caught fire, resulting in the deaths of 58 Hindu pilgrims, which set off a wave of sectarian religious violence against the state’s Muslim population. According to conservative official estimates, the riots ended after three days with over 1,000 dead, and thousands more injured and missing. As the journalist Dexter Filkins recently wrote in The New Yorker, “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.”
One senior police officer gave a sworn statement to India’s Supreme Court alleging that Modi deliberately allowed anti-Muslim riots in the state, claiming he heard Modi say that Hindus should be allowed to vent their anger. Multiple investigations came and went without anything being pinned to him firmly, though it’s long been suspected that was the result of destruction of evidence. And even without a conviction, it’s widely understood that Modi assumed some culpability for the violence—even the most generous of interpretations would say he stood idly as these atrocities transpired.
In fact, Modi’s record on anti-Muslim violence was unequivocal enough that the United States government deemed him ineligible for an American diplomatic visa. In 2005, George W. Bush’s State Department invoked a little-known 1998 law, the International Religious Freedom Act, that makes foreign officials responsible for “severe violations of religious freedom” ineligible for visas, to deny Modi’s application. In doing so, he became the only person ever denied a visa to the U.S. under that provision. In addition, the B-1/B-2 visa that had previously been granted to him was also revoked under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
He even tried again after a 2012 special investigation commissioned by the Indian Supreme Court acquitted him of all responsibility in the 2002 riots. But his petition was again denied, and the strength of that acquittal was not enough to change his standing in the eyes of the international community, where he maintained his status as persona non grata.
Then, in 2014, Modi was elected prime minister of India, and his visa status became a hurdle for ever-important trade negotiations. And while Modi’s record was too odious for the Bush administration, for Obama it was no problem. He simply looked the other way, congratulating him on his victory and inviting him to Washington as a White House guest right away, essentially conferring a visa on him by fiat. Soon after, he was invited to address a joint session of Congress, which he did in June 2016. Obama ultimately visited India twice to meet Prime Minister Modi, becoming the only American president to have visited India twice in just two years, including once as Modi’s chief guest at the Republic Day parade.
What did it take for Modi to finally clear his own record? Well, according to reports at the time, Modi assured Obama that he was committed to further liberalizing the economy. During his White House visit in 2014, Modi repeated his promise to “cut red tape, develop infrastructure and make it easier for companies to do business in India,” according to a BBC report at the time. A suggestive wink in the direction of pro-market policies was all it took to slough off that treacherous record on anti-Muslim violence. In exchange, Obama set to work rehabbing Modi as one of the signature projects of his second term.
The credibility afforded to Modi by the personal endorsement from Barack Obama has helped bring India’s democracy to the brink, and Trump’s praise suggests no course correction.
In fact, former Obama adviser Steve Rattner, himself a dubious character with an arguably criminal track record (for financial crimes) dusted off by Barack Obama to write the auto bailout, went on MSNBC to exalt Modi’s India in 2014 as a paragon of justice because it had less wealth inequality than the United States. Rattner continued his noble service once Obama was out of the White House—in 2019, just before the blockade of Kashmir began, he wrote a glowing review of Modi’s work for the New York Times Opinion page. Modi, Rattner maintained, had “fulfilled his economic promises,” with his old downside explained by his “suffering from a common problem of transformational leaders: unfulfilled lofty expectations.” (It should be mentioned that Rattner remains an MSNBC regular, as well as a Times contributor, and, oh yeah, one of presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s money managers.)
Of course, Obama doing PR work for junior varsity autocrats was hardly an aberrant move. In 2015, White House aides told Politico they weren’t worried that Obama’s embrace of Modi would create a situation similar to that with former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whom the Obama administration warmly embraced, before eventually distancing itself, or Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom Obama exalted as a model leader, before Erdogan set to work consolidating power, arresting journalists, cracking down on anti-government protesters, and launching a military incursion to ethnically cleanse the region of its Kurdish population. That’s to say nothing of the various think tanks and nonprofits that sang Modi’s praises, including the Brookings Institution and the Gates Foundation, which just months ago bestowed on him its humanitarian award.
But the devolution of Egypt and Turkey pales in comparison to what’s happening in India, which is the world’s largest democracy, and a troubling bellwether of the state of democratic governance broadly. The credibility afforded to Modi by the personal endorsement from Barack Obama has helped bring that democracy to the brink, and Trump’s praise suggests no course correction. Meanwhile, even Modi’s economic dogma has proved to be a chimera: The country currently faces its slowest growth in a decade. By whitewashing Modi’s record in the name of marginally pro-corporate policies, Obama set in motion a perilous situation that has put hundreds of millions of Indian Muslims at risk.
Even The Economist has balked at the willingness to tolerate authoritarian policies so long as they come with market reforms, recently calling Modi’s work “a form of ethnic cleansing by bureaucracy.” And damage done to the country’s democracy hasn’t even been buttressed by the economic heyday the Obama regime promised. “India’s economy is incompetently managed and doing badly.” And yet, Modi looks as entrenched as ever. He won re-election in May 2019 on the strength of a landslide victory, and despite his economic failures and growing popular outrage in India, he seems to have mastered the use of cultural grievances to legitimate his increasingly ethno-nationalist ambitions.
Meanwhile, the American business community continues to salivate at the opportunities the Modi regime has afforded them. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, the pharmaceutical, agribusiness, and telecom industries all expect to reap significant financial windfalls from forthcoming negotiations. Modi is good for multinationals, at least, if bad for democracy.
