The New India, Indeed

On Saturday, the Chief Minister of the Indian Punjab, Parkash Singh Badal, will be in Ahmedabad, attending the opening ceremony of the three-day fast by his Gujarati counterpart, Narendra Modi. Modi is a member of the BJP, and heavily implicated in the anti-Muslim pogroms of recent years in Gujarat. Singh Bardal is a member of the fiercely Sikh Shiromani Akali Dal, which depends on the BJP to give it a majority at State level, and which therefore backs up the BJP at Union level. So much for the Sikhs, with their heavy presence in the Army, as the bulwarks of the old India, her political elite Anglophile and more lately Americophile. Those days are gone.

The BJP is now about as likely as the Congress Party to be the principal party of government. Within and allied to it are violently fascistic elements such as the Shiv Sena and those who massacre Christians in Orissa, or indeed Muslims in Gujarat. In the Punjab, it sustains the SAD, which therefore sustains it in return at national level. And the BJP centrally is increasingly seeking to join forces with political Islam around such causes as the strong nationalism that has always been expressed by the Darul Uloom Deoband, the conduct of Waqf Boards, and the recognition of Urdu as one of the “authentically” Indian languages to be promoted at the expense of English. However, the BJP has little or no understanding that patriotism must include economic patriotism.

If there is a third force in India, then it is made up of Far Left parties, it is led by the party that followed Chairman Mao when he broke with the Soviet Union, and it includes the successors of Subhas Chandra Bose, who raised an army in support of the Japanese during the Second World War, an “anti-colonial” cause cheered on by Leftist intellectuals in the West just as the likes of Christopher Hitchens have cheered on the “liberal interventionist” wars of Bill Clinton, George Bush, Tony Blair and David Cameron.

India is endlessly fascinating, her rise is a fact of life, and she is certainly preferable to a lot of other places. But dewy eyes or rose-tinted spectacles are not appropriate.