India v. China: Border Games

India is now the belle of the ball, as most of the world and Asian regional powers make pilgrimages to New Delhi to flatter and flirt with India’s dynamic Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

Modi and India come with a certain amount of unpleasant baggage, which their suitors do their best to ignore.  Modi himself is an unrepentant Hindutva cultural chauvinist  whose attitudes toward Muslims (and convincing circumstantial evidence of his involvement in an anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat—so convincing, in fact, he was previously banned from the United States) trend toward the fascistic.  

 In regional affairs, India has not been a particularly responsible or constructive actor, having mixed it up with Pakistan (assisted the split-off of East Pakistan a.ka. Bangladesh in 1971), Nepal (opened the door to the Nepalese Maoists with its ineptly executed deposition of King Gyanendra in 2008), and Sikkim (Sikkim, in case you noticed, doesn’t exist anymore; it was annexed by India in 1975), and has presided over a bloody insurgency and brutal counterinsurgency in Kashmir that has claimed the lives of at least 60,000 people.  India birthed the horrific Tamil Tiger insurgency in Sri Lanka  and its intelligence services played what may have been a decisive role in organizing and executing the successful electoral challenge, on January 8, 2015, which ended the rule of the pro-Chinese (now-ex) president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa.

And there’s the People’s Republic of China, and the contested borderlands of Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast and Ladakh/Aksai Chin in the northwest.

Japan’s Foreign Minister, Fumio Kishida, got himself tangled up in the Arunachal Pradesh issue during his recent visit to India.  

China today lodged a protest with Tokyo after Japan's foreign minister was quoted as saying that Arunachal Pradesh was "India's territory".

Japan's Sankei Shimbun, a conservative daily, quoted Fumio Kishida as having made the remarks in New Delhi on Saturday.

Japan played down the issue today, saying it could not confirm Kishida's reported remarks. It added that it hoped India and China could resolve their border dispute peacefully.

Kishida's reported remarks drew an angry response from China, which called on Tokyo to "understand the sensitivity of the Sino-India boundary issue".

A Japanese foreign ministry spokesperson said "the statement was made considering the reality that Arunachal Pradesh state is basically in reality controlled by India and that China and India are continuing negotiations over the border dispute".

China disputes the entire territory of Arunachal, calling it south Tibet, especially Tawang, a key site for Tibetan Buddhism. The historic town briefly fell into Chinese hands during their 1962 war before Beijing retreated.

The Japanese Foreign Ministry backtracked expeditiously, indicating that Kishida’s remarks were perhaps a slip of the tongue and not meant to inject Japan into the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

Ever since Prime Minister Abe returned to office with an India-centric Asian policy, yearnings have been expressed that Japan might openly side with India on the Arunachal Pradesh issue.  The PRC, was extremely leery of previous PM Manmohan Singh and his overt diplomatic and emotional tilt toward Japan and, with good reason, has expected the current officeholder, Narendra Modi, to play off China, Russia, and the United States in a more pragmatic manner.

Modi will certainly keep the PRC off balance. President Obama’s decision to accept Prime Minister Modhi’s invitation to attend the Republic Day extravaganza further buttressed Modi’s prestige and popularity within India and elicited a wave of “Mobama” triumphalism in the press, much to China’s discomfiture.  

Modi averred to President Obama that he was angry and disappointed with the PRC over alleged border perfidy in Ladakh in 2014 at the time of Xi Jinping's visit, and Modi endorsed the US position on the South China Sea and efforts to upgrade the US-Japan-India-Australia security quadrilateral.  

In the matter of the "border" incident (there is no accepted border or even a mutually understood Line of Control; there is an overlapping 20-kilometer wide band in which Indian and PRC local forces work within ill-defined "Lines of Perception" and engage in persistent envelope-pushing, patrolling, hut construction, and road-building that make it easy for either side to foment an incident) in the barren wastes of Ladakh, perhaps Xi Jinping thought he could get Sino-Indian relations on a solid footing by humiliating Modi before his army and his nation with a gratuitous provocation.  

An equally plausible explanation for the otherwise inexplicable PRC affront--which recapitulated a previous incident in Ladakh that similarly overshadowed the decidedly unmartial technocrat Li Keqiang's state visit in 2013--was that it was engineered by hardliners in the Indian security establishment (who exhaustively backgrounded, briefed, and ballyhoo'd the incident to the receptive Indian press during Xi's visit) to balk PRC attempts to improve relations and negotiate the borders issue, and Modi grasped the opportunity to wrongfoot the economically and strategically overbearing PRC in order to advance his strategic agenda 

In this case, perhaps Modi was putting the incident to further good use to tell President Obama exactly what he wanted to hear, provide a compelling narrative to underpin the important Sino-US relationship, and help extract various economic and security benefits, including the heightened intelligence cooperation that advocates of the US-Indian security alliance are promoting.  

Per the Indian Express (which also revealed in passing that, in addition to the canonical "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing arrangement, the US has also midwifed "Nine Eyes" and "Fourteen Eyes" intel clubs in Europe in addition to pacts with Japan and South Korea), Indian intelligence priorities will include a) Pakistan b) China c) keeping the US at arms-length, not necessarily in that order:

The pact would enable India access to encrypted digital traffic its intelligence services are now unable to decipher.  It would also make state-of-the-art western espionage technology available to the Directorate of Military Intelligence and the National Technical Research Organization...The US has provided a growing volume of information on planned attacks by Pakistan-based groups--helping India pre-empt at least two attacks on diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan.

....

There are, sources said, several formidable challenges to be overcome before India can begin purchasing cutting edge digital intelligence technologies from the US. For example, fearful that equipment can be used to eavesdrop on sensitive information, India insists on domestic security certification for purchases.  However, no Indian firm currently certifies EAL7+, the most stringent standard for digital security.

...

Fears also exist that an intelligence-sharing agreement might allow penetration of its own secrets.  The Vajpayee government (the first BJP national government--ed.) which saw the first warming in ties with the US, was deeply embarrassed by the disclosure that the US had recruited Research and Analysis Wing officer Rabinder Sing...

It remains to be seen who comes out ahead in the US-India tango and, in particular, how deep Modi is willing to follow the US down the China-containment rabbit hole.  Modi's statements on China policy are, for the time being, cost-free lip service and in the end, Modi played true to independent form in the matter of climate change by publicly and bluntly rejecting President Obama’s call to limit India’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

For the PRC, an important area of anxiety is Arunachal Pradesh and the threat that India might “internationalize” the bilateral border dispute by canvassing its actual and would-be allies for support on the issue, perhaps even to the extent of going tit-for-tat with Japan i.e. India backing Japan on the issue of Senkaku sovereignty in return for Japanese aid and comfort on AP.

However, for the time being it looks like Japan—like the Asian Development Bank, which ran into a PRC buzzsaw when it tried to put an Arunachal Pradesh hydropower project on its agenda in 2009—is not quite ready to mix it up on AP.

Let’s unpack the Arunachal Pradesh issue.

Arunachal Pradesh is a region controlled by India in its northeast quadrant, between Bhutan and Burma, home to a variety of ethnic groups.  One of those groups is Tibetan, centered on the town and district of Tawang in the western end of AP at the border with Bhutan.

The Arunachal Pradesh dispute is bookended with Aksai Chin, a blasted desert between India and the PRC in the northwest that is controlled by the PRC.  The Indian claim to Aksai Chin is not terribly robust, since it is based on an internal British Indian survey—the Johnson Line—which was never discussed or agreed with China.  The PRC built a strategic road across Aksai Chin in the 1950s, and it took several years for the Indian government to even find out it was there.

There is a third slice of disputed territory, the “Trans-Karakorum Tract” bordering Kashmir, geographically distinct from Aksai Chin, which India claims Pakistan illegally ceded to the PRC in a land swap.  For some reason, the PRC and India aren’t arguing about this piece. 

Both Arunachal Pradesh and Aksai Chin territories have been openly disputed since before the 1962 Sino-Indian war.  The PRC has at times offered a grand bargain in which the two sides acknowledge each other’s regions of effective control, by which India got AP and the PRC gets AC.

The official Indian response has been Nothing Doing and all territory it lost in the 1962 war must be recovered i.e. Aksai Chin is not negotiable.  It has decoupled the two issues, and has focused its diplomacy on the insistence that its sovereignty over AP be confirmed.  

India’s claim to AP is complicated in an interesting way.

In 1914, Great Britain was interested in creating an autonomous Tibetan buffer—“Outer Tibet”—between British India and Russia/China.  To this end, Sir Henry McMahon, the Foreign Minister of British India, invited Tibetan and Republic of China delegates to the Indian town of Simla.

Tibet, eager to be acknowledged as an autonomous power with its own rights to negotiate directly with foreign powers (and not just through China), generously conceded a delineation of Lhasa’s sphere of control—the McMahon Line--alienating Tawang, a market town that interested the Raj, to British India.

However, the Simla Agreement was negotiated between the Tibetan and British representatives in a provisional sort of way after the Chinese representatives had packed up and left.  Since Britain’s Foreign Office was protective of its China diplomacy and not interested in encouraging Tibetan pretensions to negotiate as an independent sovereign power, the absence of the Chinese representatives—and without a Chinese endorsement of the border arrangement accepted by the Tibetan authorities--was a dealbreaker.

The Simla Agreement was apparently treated as an aspirational document and was recorded in the most authoritative compendium of British Indian treaties, Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison's Collection of Treaties, Engagements, and Sanads, with the notation that neither Great Britain nor China had ratified the treaty.  China, indeed, never accepted the McMahon Line.  Since Tibet wasn’t recognized as a sovereign power, whatever it hoped to achieve with the Simla Accord—and what it had tried to give away, namely Tawang-- was, in the eyes of the British, moot.

Things puttered along until 1935, when the detention of a British spy in Tawang by Tibetan authorities awakened the cupidity of a diplomat in the Foreign Office of British India, Olaf Caroe.

Caroe checked the files, found that Great Britain had no ratified claims on Tawang, and decided to amend and improve the record.

He arranged for the relevant original volume of the 1929 Aitchison compendium to be withdrawn from the various libraries in which it was filed, discarded, and replaced with a new version—but one that still claimed to be compiled in 1929, thereby removing the need for awkward explanations or documentation concerning why the switch had happened.  The spurious version claimed that Tibet and Britain had accepted the treaty.  Thereby, the unsurveyed McMahon Line was repurposed as a sacrosanct British imperial border, and Tawang was slotted into the British Indian side of the ledger.

The deception was only discovered in 1964, when a researcher was able to compare one of the last three surviving copies of the original compendium, at Harvard University, with the spurious replacement.

Unfortunately, that was too late for Nehru, who staked his security strategy and his diplomatic exchanges with China to a significant extent on the fallacy that he had inherited from British India a clear and unequivocal claim to its borders.

In 1962 Nehru decided to move up military units to assert India’s claim to contested territory in Ladakh/Aksai Chin and in Arunachal Pradesh under a gambit optimistically named The Forward Policy.  Unluckily for Nehru, Chairman Mao was itching to stick it to India’s patron, Nikita Khrushchev, and the PLA attacked with overwhelming force on both fronts.   India’s entire strategy had been predicated on the assumption that the PRC would not respond (shades, I think, of Western confidence that Vladimir Putin would stay his hand in eastern Ukraine out of fear of sanctions and the wrath of his impoverished and disgruntled oligarchs) and the Indian Army, outnumbered, undersupplied, and disorganized, was completely unprepared for a desperate fight on the remote, high altitude battlefields.

India suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the PLA.  After its victory, the PRC decided to take the high ground, diplomatically as well as geographically. It withdrew its forces to behind the McMahon Line and offered negotiations of the boundaries based on the status quo, in other words a de facto swap of AP for AC.

No dice, as we have seen.  India clearly does not see any need to credit Arunachal Pradesh—territory that the PRC abandoned—as any kind of bargaining chip concerning Aksai Chin.  This is, perhaps, a cautionary tale to the PRC as to the geostrategic minuses as well as pluses of trying to behave like Mr. Nice Guy.  

This history is officially persona non grata in India.  The report the Indian government commissioned on the 1962 war—the Henderson Brooks Report--was so devastating to India’s position and its legal, military, and diplomatic pretensions it was promptly banned and publication is forbidden to this day.  In an ironic recapitulation of the case of the Aitchison compendium, it was assumed that there were only two typewritten copies and they were securely buttoned up in safes in New Delhi.  However, the Times of London correspondent, Neville Maxwell, promptly got his hands on a copy and used it to write an expose on the tragedy of errors in 1962, India’s China War, thereby earning himself the fierce hatred of generations of Indian nationalists.

Maxwell tried several times to put the report into the public domain.

As quoted in Outlook India, Maxwell provided an interesting account of how the freedom of expression sausage gets made when the information involved is not necessarily a matter of national security (the report is classified Top Secret, but its content—the minutiae of military decisions and movements fifty years ago--has no current strategic or tactical significance) but is a matter of supreme political embarrassment (to Nehru, the Congress Party, the Gandhi political dynasty, and to the army).

My first attempt to put the Report itself on the public record was indirect and low-key: after I retired from the University I donated my copy to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where, I thought, it could be studied in a setting of scholarly calm. The Library initially welcomed it as a valuable contribution in that “grey area” between actions and printed books, in which I had given them material previously. But after some months the librarian to whom I had entrusted it warned me that, under a new regulation, before the Report was put on to the shelves and opened to the public it would have to be cleared by the British government with the government which might be adversely interested! Shocked by that admission of a secret process of censorship to which the Bodleian had supinely acceded I protested to the head Librarian, then an American, but received no response. Fortunately I was able to retrieve my donation before the Indian High Commission in London was alerted in the Bodleian’s procedures and was perhaps given the Report.

In 2002, noting that all attempts in India to make the government release the Report had failed, I decided on a more direct approach and made the text available to the editors of three of India’s leading publications, asking that they observe the usual journalistic practice of keeping their source to themselves. … To my surprise the editors concerned decided, unanimously, not to publish… Later I gave the text to a fourth editor and offered it to a fifth, with the same nil result.

Narendra Modi, a determined foe of the Congress Party and the Gandhis (I had to chuckle when I read these fawning articles about President Obama bonding with Prime Minister Modi over their shared Gandhi love, despite the awkward fact that Modi's Hindutva movement was and apparently still is the spiritual home of Gandhi’s assassin), came to power promising to release the report...but didn’t.  And when Maxwell finally posted part of the report on his website in 2014, the site was symbolically blocked.

Here is a link to a scan of Maxwell’s copy of the Henderson Brooks report..

 The Indian army, in particular, is wedded to a creation myth of PRC perfidy that is infinitely more utile than acknowledging that the PLA attack, rather than unprovoked, was a response to a strategically and diplomatically bankrupt Indian border gambit compounded by non-stop miscues by India’s civilian leadership and disastrous defeat for its military forces.  This default presumption of Chinese aggression against innocent India, which is still widely accepted in India and abroad, also makes it easy for India to impose its narrative on murky matters like the Ladakh incidents of 2013 and 2014--clashes which, when viewed through the lens of 1962, invite the speculation that India has not abandoned its border-pushing ways.

 

In 2005, the PRC and India started negotiations over the borders issue.  Here’s a nice explainer from the Daily Mail! in 2013 which signals that Aksai Chin might be on the table, but Tawang is off the table, and unfortunately omits the significant complication of the Caroe forgery.

India’s move into Arunachal Pradesh in the 1950s is less than a slam dunk according to international law, complicated in particular by the issue of Tawang.

Not only is there the problem of the shakiness of the McMahon line, highlighted by Olaf Caroe’s bibliographic hijinks, there is the awkward fact that India forcefully displaced Tibetan theocratic rule in Tawang—nominally rule from Lhasa, actually local rule by the immensely powerful monastery.

Lhasa had apparently experienced cartographic remorse over Simla and implored India to recognize Tawang as Tibetan territory in 1947.  Instead, India seized the district in 1951 in a quasi-official/quasi-military “liberating the Tibetan serfs” operation rather similar to what the PRC conducted in its part of Tibet.

In recent years, the Dalai Lama has been forced into the unpleasant position of affirming Indian sovereignty over Tawang, whose great monastery (the second largest in Tibetan Buddhism) first gave him shelter when he fled PRC control in 1959, and which had hosted the reincarnation of the 6^th Dalai Lama way back when.

The Dalai Lama apparently verbally acknowledged, if not in writing, that AP and Tawang belonged to India on a couple occasions while he still served at the apex of power in the Tibetan government in exile (a position he relinquished in 2011).

However, I assume twisting the Dalai Lama’s arm to concede Indian sovereignty over Tawang falls a little bit short, since the Tibetan government-in-exile lacks international recognition (and with it the right to cede territory to India).

The PRC is happy to harp on Tawang’s role in the AP situation, since it serves as a continual reminder that India is occupying territory in AP that, however you slice it, is a core component of the Tibetan homeland, thereby keeping alive a non-Indian or, if you want, a PRC-cum-Tibet claim to at least part of the region and attempting to balk India’s attempt to claim full sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh under international law.

To understand how this relates to the Senkakus requires reflection on another piece of suppressed history—that the United States returned the Senkakus to Japanese administrative control not sovereignty in 1973 as part of the Okinawa package with the stated expectation that the sovereignty of the rocks would be negotiated between China and Japan.

 

My personal opinion is that the PRC is in no hurry to unfreeze the conflict over Arunachal Pradesh, and its insistence on sovereignty over Tawang—a district, I suspect, that has extremely limited interest in reunification with the Chinese motherland—is something of a pretext. 

With the Simla Agreement tainted and no subsequent cession of Tawang by Tibet or China, the Indian position in Tawang is embarrassingly similar to that of the PRC in the matter of its seizure of the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in 1974 i.e. having expelled the previous rulers by conquest and achieved control of the territory without attaining international recognition of its sovereignty.  And it’s somewhat similar to the Senkakus, where the United States effectively surrendered its sovereignty over the islands when it returned Okinawa and the Ryukyus to Japan, but didn’t cede its claim to anybody else.

Maybe Arunachal Pradesh is another one of those Mexican-standoff situations like Kashmir vs. Tibet (a.k.a. the Indian temptation to make mischief in the ethnic-Tibetan areas of the PRC is inhibited by concern that the PRC, via Pakistan, might light the fuse in Kashmir).  The PRC keeps the Tawang/AP issue alive to forestall thoughts by India of giving aid and comfort to Japan on the Senkakus or, for that matter, Vietnam on the Paracels.

Both the PRC and India are bulking up their infrastructure and military on their respective sides of the de facto McMahon-Line-based border, making it a virtual certainty that India will never alienate any part of AP, including Tawang.  

That’s good news for reduced actual tensions (as opposed to defense ministry posturing) at the shared border, but India’s heightened sense of security concerning Arunachal Pradesh may encourage it to be less tentative vis a vis the PRC in its Japanese and Vietnamese diplomacy.

So, paradoxically, greater security along the PRC-Indian border may lead to greater insecurity elsewhere.

N.B.  For further reading, readers are welcome to review my previous pieces on Sino-Indian relations: China “pivot” trips over McMahon Line; China’s Flank of Discontent;  India Places Its Asia Bet on Japan; Is Narendra Modi the Leader of the World's Largest Democracy...Or the World's Most Successful Fascist? 

Picture credits:
Republic Day photos: BBC

Map: Daily Mail 
Aitchison Compendium: www.amazon.com
Tawang Monastery: www.stevedinicol.com 

Is Narendra Modi the Leader of the World’s Largest Democracy…Or the World’s Most Successful Fascist?

Both, actually (see endnote).

That’s a duality that the United States is prepared to accommodate as it looks to a revitalized India as a strategic asset if not an outright ally in its crusade to counter “Rising China”.

And it drives US government efforts to shield Modi from the consequences of his alleged involvement in a fascist pogrom in Gujarat in 2002.

The US State Department has declared that Narendra Modi, as India’s head of state, receives sovereign immunity from US lawsuits, even if they allege human rights violations he committed as an individual while Chief Minister of Gujarat .

Attorneys for the victims beg to differ, and a US Superior Court has charged the State Department to respond to their objections by December 10.

For over a decade, Modi’s detractors have been attempting to force the spotlight on the fascist elements of his ideology and politics, and have failed to exact any meaningful political cost as he has risen to the position of ultimate power in India.

Will his critics succeed in bringing him to book this time?  Don't count on it.

The first indication that Narendra Modi is something more than the proud steward of “the world’s largest democracy” is embodied in the term “pracharak”.

As helpfully glossed by the Indian Express:

Pracharaks are Sangh ["Organization"--ed.] wholetimers who leave their families, often stay unmarried and lead detached lives devoted to the organisation. When deputed to BJP or other RSS affiliates, they are called Sangathan Mantris (Organisation Secretaries); in BJP units, they are usually designated General Secretary (Organisation). The Sangh has over a hundred affiliated organisations, but most Pracharaks working in the BJP are either from the RSS or ABVP  

Narendra Modi began his political career and spent twenty years in the BJP as a pracharak, a “spreader of the doctrine” in other words an organizer and apparatchik for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu nationalist social movement known as the RSS.  

Pracharaks are expected to devote their lives to the cause of Hindu nationalism and, among other things, remain celibate.  Modi is “single” with airquotes or married* with an asterisk; as a young man he abandoned his wife to embark on a career as an RSS organizer, a state of affairs he deemed necessary to acknowledge only forty years later as he stood on the cusp of becoming prime minister, and the fact that he had habitually filled in his marital status on electoral documents with an equivocal dash could no longer be ignored.

Palash Ghosh of the International Business Daily performed a signal service with his article on the historical roots of the RSS, which I will quote at length:

The RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a doctor from the central Indian town of Nagpur in Maharashtra, who agitated for both independence from the British crown and the strict segregation of Hindus and Muslims.

What may surprise many in the West is that some of the most prominent figures of RSS deeply admired Fascism and Nazism, the two totalitarian movements that swept through Europe at the time.

As such, RSS was outlawed by the British (and was even periodically banned by the Indian government after independence). Indeed, Naturam Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi in 1948, was himself a former RSS member who felt that the Mahatma made too many generous concessions to the Muslims.

In the decades prior to that momentous event, senior RSS members had direct links to both Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany. Part of the RSS’ fascination with these totalitarian regimes was their shared opposition to the British Empire -- however, it went far beyond that. The RSS (as well as multitudes of other Hindu nationalists) admired the way Mussolini and Hitler reorganized their respective nations so quickly from the wreckage of war to build a powerful economy and military under the banner of patriotism and nationalism.

…

“There are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow them to do so and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race,” wrote [RSS founder Golwalkar—ed].

“That is the only sound view on the minorities problem. That is the only logical and correct solution. That alone keeps the national life healthy and undisturbed… The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., of the Hindu nation and must lose their separate existence to merge in the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not even citizen’s rights.”

If one were to replace “Hindu” with “German,” Golwalkar’s words would match Hitler’s rhetoric almost exactly.

The RSS doctrine is Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness”, the idea that the preservation and advancement of Hindu identity is key to India’s revival.  Like the Deoband and Barelvi schools of Islam, the RSS emerged as an Indian self-strengthening movement resisting the imposition of British rule and values during the colonial period.  Rejection of the Muslim contribution to Indian civilization (made as a result of Moghul conquest and rule that the British eerily recapitulated) was also integral to RSS identity politics.  So, after the British were gone, RSS was still around, excoriating Muslims as an alien cancer and repudiating the Congress Party’s secularism as an attempt to institutionalize Muslim privilege at the expense of Hindu interests.  In fact, “secularism” and its legal expression, “constitutionalism”, especially as they enable the myriad government setasides for both Muslims and so-called Other Backward Caste Hindus, are derogatory epithets in the RSS catechism.

The political affiliate of the RSS is the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, Modi’s current outfit.  He’s been advancing the RSS electoral agenda since he was seconded to the BJP some forty years ago.  Concerning Modi’s political agenda, one of Modi’s many critics in the “left” “secular” Congress-leaning media wrote:

For Modi, as RSS pracharak, history is an act of cleansing, and ethnic cleansing is merely a way of restoring what the fascist regards as normative and normal. For Modi, the old pracharak, Muslims were "dirt". They were an irritating reminder to the Hindu majority that minorities still defined the polity. Like many Hindus, Modi actually believed that electoral democracy makes a majority feel deprived, guilty about the way it feels about minorities. Such a majoritarianism feels that too much attention and privilege is paid to Muslim minorities. For such a group, democracy becomes a source of stress. What is worse, secular arrogance makes such a majority feel guilty and embarrassed. Modi understood these majoritarian sentiments, shared them and harnessed them. He created legitimacy for communalism. He used communalism as a vector to return to electoral power.

In one of those headscratchers for advocates of bourgeois democracy, the BJP found its road to electoral success paved with orchestrated anti-Muslim violence, starting with the destruction of a mosque in the city of Ayodha, in northeastern India.  Hindu nationalists claimed, on historically rather dubious grounds, that the mosque indecently occupied the site of the birthplace of the God-King Rama, and had engineered provocations at the mosque since the 1940s.

In the 1980s, the RSS, BJP, and another RSS affiliate, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an organization devoted to “defense of Hinduism” and, in particular, reconversion of Hindus, particularly untouchables, who were converting to Islam and Christianity at a rate deemed alarming), turned the Ayodha mosque issue into a rallying cry commanding the attention of activist Hindus, known as “kar sevaks” or volunteers.

On December 6, 1992, 150,000 Hindus convened by the three organizations rallied before the mosque.  After some incendiary rhetoric, kar sevaks tore the building down, sparking communal violence which claimed 2000 lives across the country. 

Afterwards, persuasive evidence was presented that the storming of the temple was not a spontaneous exercise in Hindu extremism, but had been carefully planned over a period of ten months by RSS and its affiliates.

The Hindu electorate was energized, not repelled by the BJP’s association with this extremist agenda, and delivered big gains to the party in the subsequent Lok Sabha (lower house) national elections for India’s parliament, which signaled the emergence of the BJP as a viable national force after decades of Congress Party dominance.

Modi was a key player in the BJP’s rise to prominence at the regional and, subsequently, the national level.  While deeply invested in the Hindutva/RSS worldview, he is also reportedly a politician of unparalleled skill and ruthlessness who believes that he knows what’s best for the RSS as well as the BJP.  

Modi eventually won three consecutive terms as Chief Minister of Gujarat, a province on India’s west coast abutting Pakistan with a Muslim minority of about 10%.  Modi concentrated power in his hands by personally taking on most of the key government portfolios, and by purging his RSS rivals.  Modi allegedly sidelined his chief opponent, the RSS pracharak Sanjay Joshay, with a sex tape that torpedoed Joshay’s reputation for probity and  celibacy—and was later dismissed as a forgery.

As Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi presided over the next crank of the BJP’s anti-Muslim meatgrinder, the notorious pogrom of 2002.

Ayodha was once again the trigger.

A Muslim mob attacked a train carrying 2000 Gujarati kar sevaks returning from the conduct of a Hindu ritual at Ayodha on February 27, 2002.  Somehow the train caught fire near a town called Godhra and 59 people burned to death, most of them women and children.  In an exercise of Indian muddy-watering disguised as justice that will become increasingly familiar as Modi’s career advances, two governmental commissions, one convened under the BJP and one under its rival, delivered diametrically opposite conclusions ( “Muslim arson” according the BJP side; accidental overturning of a cookstove on the train according to the anti-BJP side.)

Communal violence predictably erupted across Gujarat, with a death toll of nearly 1000, primarily Muslims, over three days with the usual grim litany of horrors: beating, raping, mutilation, burning, and hacking .  However, Westerners who get their ideas of Indian politics from Danny Boyle movies may be surprised to learn that this was not simply a case of bigoted Hindu lumpen massacring their Muslim opposite numbers.

Violence was reportedly directed by RSS-affiliated activists dressed in the movement’s trademark khaki shorts and saffron tops.  More disturbingly, they had voter rolls to assist them in identifying Muslims for attack.  And attacks were not just directed against conspicuously Muslim individuals and institutions.  Muslim-owned establishments, even those bearing non-Muslim or Indian names and catering largely to Hindus (like the “Tasty Bakery”), were targeted.

From a contemporary account by the Indian outlet, rediff:

The manner in which people, irrespective of economic status, were targeted has raised suspicions about the possible misuse of electoral rolls to identify them.

Similarly, according to the victims, licences and other relevant papers from the civic bodies were used to target hotels and other business establishments owned by them.

"All my five hotels, including Renbasera, which is meant for poor people, were attacked," one businessman said. 

According to some people, in previous riots attempts were made to oust them from colonies like Meghaninagar. "They succeeded to a large extent during the 1985 violence, yet the posh Gulmohor Society was ours. Now, that's also gone," said one. 

Many people alleged that the voters' list was virtually used as a killing tool by frenzied mobs. "They hardly failed to lay hands on their targets, thanks to documents like the voters' list," a senior police officer admitted on condition of anonymity. "The mission was accomplished with clinical precision."

…

"The voters' list certainly made their task easier and the motivated mob knew exactly who stayed where," a woman at the Sanklitpur relief camp in Juhapura said. 

Even business establishments run by Muslims in partnership with Hindus were not spared. "The message for Hindus friendly with Muslims was clear -- do not do business with them," said Ibbal Tadah, an insurance surveyor in Juhapura area.

…

Then there is the suspicion of state connivance, as alleged by the Congress and other opposition parties, reflected in the traffic police virtually staying away from the roads on February 28.

…

Similarly, the fire brigade was hardly in action when Ahmedabad was burning. In many places, shrines were razed and houses burnt at locations hardly a stone's throw away from police stations. 

Meanwhile, with each successive riot, there has been a definite pattern in the relocation of population. "Each Hindu pocket is becoming more concentrated with its own people, while the story is the same for Muslim-dominated locations," a police officer said.

A report by an Indian Editors Guild factfinding mission pointed out rioters were also able to enter otherwise secure government areas and torch Muslim property records:

The Old Secretariat is a protected area. Yet the Gujarat State Wakf Board [which oversees religious and charitable foundations endowed by Muslim philanthropists—ed.], located just below the Directorate of Information, and the Gujarat Minorities Finance and Development Corporation housed in the Block opposite, both Government offices, were attacked and torched by a mob during office hours on February 28. …. No arrests had been made until April 2, the day of our visit. Records pertaining to dargahs, mosques, madrassas and kabristans were lost in the fire.

Over 100,000 Muslims fled to refugee camps, which Modi refused to support since doing so, according to him, would serve as acknowledgment of government responsibility for the riots.

The riots fit into an effort to marginalize Muslims in the province’s political and economic life.   A few months after the riots, an observer wrote:

This time around, it was cosmopolitan Muslims, including judges and professors, who preferred to live with the rest on Main Street, out there in the “mainstream”, that were particularly vulnerable. A liberal, forward looking Muslim spoke feelingly to the Editors Guild team. He said he had fought the orthodoxy and had spent years exhorting members of his community to take to modern education, compete for opportunity and stake their future on the assertion of their civic rights. And now his world had crumbled, hopefully only temporarily. Now when he went to the ghetto what he heard was, “if only Latif [a local mafia figure often invoked by the BJP as a “bad Muslim” bugbear –ed.]had been around, this would not have happened”.

In 2014, Reuters’ John Chalmers and Frank Jack Daniel reported from Juhapura, a Muslim ghetto in Ahmedabad:

Separation of communities is common across India. Nowhere is it as systematised as it has become in Gujarat.
…
Husain is one of roughly 400,000 people living in Juhapura, a teeming Muslim township within Ahmedabad, Gujarat's largest city. Many of them moved there after the 2002 riots. Local Hindus jokingly refer to it as "Little Pakistan".
…
Memories of the 2002 rioting have not faded for the many residents of Juhapura who lost relatives, homes and businesses. And its legacy has been increasing segregation.

In particular, a property law unique to Gujarat has perpetuated segregation, creating ghettos such as Juhapura and a sense of apartheid in some urban areas.

The "Disturbed Areas Act", a law that restricts Muslims and Hindus from selling property to each other in "sensitive" areas, was introduced in 1991 to avert an exodus or distress sales in neighbourhoods hit by inter-religious unrest.

Modi's government amended the law in 2009 to give local officials greater power to decide on property sales. It also extended the reach of the law, most recently in 2013 - 11 years after the last major religious riots.

The state government says the law is meant to protect Muslims, who account for just under 10 percent of the state's 60 million people. "It prevents ethnic cleansing and people being forced out," a senior government official who requested anonymity told Reuters.

Critics say the act's continued enforcement and the addition of new districts covered by it - about 40 percent of Ahmedabad is now governed by the law - means it is effectively being applied as a tool of social engineering.
…
The Indian Express newspaper said in a recent editorial: "More Muslims and Hindus have moved into separate spaces in Gujarat, finding trust and assurance only among neighbours of their own community, and it has ended up entrenching segregation and shutting Muslims out of the mainstream." 

Indeed, those taking note of the heightened ties between India and Israel after Modi’s elevation to Prime Minister will find something to ponder in the politics of communal exclusion in Gujarat.

Government preplanning of the 2002 pogrom has been alleged; prompt planning and coordination of the pogrom by RSS affiliates after the Godhra train outrage is an acknowledged fact.

In a startling revelation, Professor Keshavram Kashiram Shastri, 96-year-old chairman of the Gujarat unit of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, told rediff.com that the list of shops owned by Muslims in Ahmedabad was prepared on the morning of February 28 itself.
…
A scholar of the Mahabharat and a highly respected literary figure of Gujarat, Shastri said in a tape-recorded interview, "In the morning we sat down and prepared the list. We were not prepared in advance."

Clearly, the RSS affiliates in Gujarat regarded the Godhra tragedy as an indication of Muslim criminality and, perhaps worse, presumption that must, as matters of Hindu supremacy, justice, policy, and political calculation, receive immediate, unrestrained, maximal, and conspicuous punishment.

As to Modi, for whom membership in the RSS family was a matter of intense personal as well as political identity, his role in the Gujarat pogrom has been a subject of considerable scrutiny and legal gyrations over the last decade, complete with allegations of collusion, coverup, evidence destruction, and witness intimidation, which gave the US sufficient grounds to deny him a diplomatic visa (and revoke his tourist and business visas) in 2005.  

In 2007, an Indian media outlet, Tehelka, covertly recorded interviews with several participants in the 2002 pogrom.  

One mob leader described Modi's fury at the deaths of the kar sevak activists at Godhra:

In Godhra, he gave a very strong statement...He was in a rage...He's been with the Sangh from childhood...His anger was such...he didn't come out into the open then but the police machinery was turned totally ineffective...

Another mob leader stated that Modi gave him three days to conduct the pogrom before the army came in and restored order:

TEHELKA: What was Narendra Modi’s reaction when the Godhra incident happened?

Haresh Bhatt: I can’t tell you this… but I can say it was favourable… because of the understanding we shared at that time…

TEHELKA: Tell me something… Did he…

Bhatt: I can’t give a statement... But what he did, no chief minister has ever done …

TEHELKA: I won’t quote it anywhere…For that matter… I am not even going to quote you

Bhatt: He had given us three days… to do whatever we could. He said he would not give us time after that… He said this openly...After three days, he asked us to stop and everything came to a halt…

TEHELKA: It stopped after three days… Even the army was called in.

Bhatt: All the forces came… We had three days… and did what we had to in those three days...

One of the worst massacres occurred at the Gulburg Society, a primarily Muslim housing estate in a Hindu section of Ahmedabad.  Almost 200 Muslims sought shelter inside the house of Ehsan Jaffri, a Muslim and ex-member of Parliament.  The mob started to gather at 10:30 am, stormed the compound at 11:30 am, then engaged in five hours of butchery and rape that included slashing Jaffri, dousing him with kerosene, and burning him alive.

No police appeared.  At least sixty nine people died.  In 2009, a witness testified at an inquiry that Jaffri had desperately tried to phone Modi and other Gujarat politicians during the siege.

Sandhi (48) said she was standing near Jaffery in his house, while he was making frantic calls to officials and senior politicians like Advani, Modi, Chaudhary and Sheikh, seeking protection.

Two key witnesses -- Imtiyaz Pathan and Rupa Mody --had also testified before the court that Jaffery called Modi and other senior officials for help.

Jaffri’s widow subsequently demanded phone records for some of Modi’s aides, alleging they had visited the district with him the day before to coordinate the attack.

Despite these apparent smoking or smoky guns--and thanks to a solid phalanx of political, media, and legal defenders--nobody was able to lay a glove on Modi as an initiator and enabler of the pogrom.

Modi urged everybody, Muslims included, to “move on” after the riots, and calculatedly made a name for himself as a business-friendly technocrat, not a wild-eyed ultranationalist.

By most accounts, Muslims in Gujarat now "know their place"; they are thoroughly cowed by memories of the massacre and the BJP's conspicuous local and national political success and are, for the time being at least, resigned to their subordinate status in the state.

As the Congress Party floundered, Modi clearly became the electoral man of the hour, and India and the world were both eager to forget the murderous ugliness that had marked his tenure in Gujarat.

Modi’s riot-related difficulties apparently ended with his receipt of a “clean chit” of exoneration from a governmental commission in 2012.  The composition and probity of the commission were of course questioned by Modi’s opponents; judging from descriptions of the commission’s report, which included generous conclusions like this, they have a point:

[As to the allegation that] Mr Modi had told the police during the riots to allow the Hindus to vent their anger over the massacre of 56 kar sevaks in the Godhra train burning incident…[The report says] "[E]ven if such allegations are believed for the sake of argument, mere statement of alleged words in the four walls of a room does not constitute any offence".

With Modi poised to become Prime Minister in 2014 James Mann delivered the requisite whitewash in the Wall Street Journal on behalf of the Western world, ascribing the visa ban to inexplicable application of some weird religious freedom statute.

Well-intentioned U.S. policies sometimes work out in absurd ways, but this is hard to top: In a few weeks, India, the world's largest democracy, will probably elect as its next prime minister a politician who for nearly a decade has been prohibited from setting foot on U.S. soil… The State Department invoked a little-known U.S. law passed in 1998 that makes foreign officials responsible for "severe violations of religious freedom" ineligible for visas. Mr. Modi is the only person ever denied a visa to the U.S. under this provision, U.S. officials confirm.

The most revealing perspectives on Modi, both in 2002 and today, are supplied by three Indian journalists, admittedly of the “secularist/constitutionalist/pro-Congress” bent, who had visited Gujarat shortly after the riots as representatives of the Editors Guild in May 2002 to investigate the role of the media in fanning communal hatred.

Their report describes an atmosphere of brutality, intimidation, and impunity, presided over by Mr. Modi, who blithely tap-danced away from culpability thanks to the loyal savagery of the RSS/BJP/VHP apparatus.  

On the issue of incitement—Modi had first deemed the train fire a terrorist attack orchestrated by Pakistan, then allegedly explained away the subsequent violence as “Newtonian action/reaction”—there was apparently an awkward moment:

            Responding to queries regarding various statements attributed to him by the media, Mr Modi denied citing Newton’s law. Nor had he spoken of “action-reaction”; he had wanted neither the action (at Godhra) nor the subsequent reaction. When we cited footage in Zee to the contrary (Annexure 4A), there was no reaction from Mr Modi 

None of the three authors, Aakar Patel, Dileep Padgaonkar, or B.G. Verghese are, it is safe to say, fans of Mr. Modi.

Shortly after the visit, Verghese wrote:

The rest of the country witnessed a storm of anger and protest against what was widely seen as a planned genocide in furtherance of the Parivar's [umbrella term for the constellation of Hindu nationalists organizations with the RSS at its center--ed.] warped agenda.  This was spearheaded by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other front organisations and orchestrated by the BJP chief minister, Narendra Modi...

 

As the evidence piled up—and was ignored by Indian voters--some of the Indian media elite reacted to Modi’s rise to ultimate power with disbelieving horror.

The second author of the Editors Guild report, Dileep Padgaonkar, a stalwart of the liberal secular order who edited the Times of India for a stretch, delivered a half-amusing half-disconcerting, and totally desperate mea culpa cum beat-sweetener on the occasion of Modi’s elevation in 2014.

In A Missive to Distraught Liberals addressed to the “Sentinels of the Republic”, Padgaonkar wrote:

We goofed. Every assumption we made during the election campaign has been savaged. … We missed no chance to harp on Modi’s RSS background. Time and again we raked up the 2002 violence in Gujarat. We pooh-poohed the ‘clean chit’ the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team and a lower court in Ahmedabad had given Modi. We picked gaping holes in his much-vaunted development model. … On all these counts, we came a cropper.

So why did we lose the plot? The plain answer is that we misread the nation’s mood. …

An equally miserable failure of ours was to underestimate the spell Modi cast on the electorate. …He also tapped into voters’ yearning for a leader endowed with the will and aptitude to bring prosperity to the people, ensure clean and effective governance, provide security and instil national pride in citizens.

To reassure observers who might worry that there are limits to abject, self-destructive groveling, Padgaonkar promised to internalize the lessons of his defeat:

What we need is to acknowledge the flaws in our idea of secularism. Correctly or otherwise, it has been perceived as a hostile attitude to even the most uplifting traditions of India’s myriad religious and spiritual traditions. And, by that token, it has been equated with an indulgent attitude to Muslim extremism. A course correction is in order.

In contrast to this demoralized liberal rout, the third author, Aakar Patel, a Gujarati, offered rediff a clear-eyed appraisal of Modi:

I think he is the most talented politician of our time. A brilliant public speaker, charismatic, very hardworking, uninterested in most things outside politics and government.

He is neither well-read nor well-travelled and as a writer is not particularly interesting. He is also a published poet.

You had mentioned how as chief minister, he held most of the key portfolios? Is it because he wants absolute power or is it insecurity?

Both. For over a decade (till he became the BJP's PM nominee), he has held most of the top portfolios.

In 2006, he was personally Gujarat's minister for finance, home, industries, energy, administration, mines and minerals, ports, petrochemicals and any other important ministry you can think of.

He doesn't think anyone else has his brilliance or integrity. And he cannot bear to stand a rival.

Or is it because he genuinely believes that when power is concentrated in one person, the government functions better?

He also believes in this principle -- so long as he is the man with power.

…

Do you see him redefining his relationship with India's Muslims if he did come to power?

He has the atavistic RSS attitude to South Asian Muslims as traitors (Indian Muslims) and enemies (Pakistanis). He cannot shake this off because he is a man of little education and strong convictions.

What is his relationship with the pillars of democracy? The legislature? The executive? The media?

He has contempt for the legislature in Gujarat and here his record is pretty clear. He is a demagogue in the classical sense and is democratic to that extent.

He doesn't understand the democratic idea of minority rights or of legitimacy.

So far as the media goes, he doesn't think he needs it and because of its attention, he can reach his audience over the head of the media, which is something he has done successfully for the last 12 years.

The optimistic scenario for Modi’s rule of India is that he will devote the bulk of his attention and energies to pursuing India’s Hindu renaissance through rehabilitation of its rickety economy and foreign policy. The pessimistic scenario is that Modi, either frustrated by his failures or emboldened by his successes, will turn on the institutions and minorities he sees as the final barriers to the implementation of his Hindutva fascist vision.

Photo by AP

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Endnote

*A few words about the “F” word.

China Matters has an aversion to the casual use of the epithet “fascist”.  

“ Fascism” is a particular political response to a perceived national crisis.  To fascist practitioners, the root cause of the crisis is identified as contamination of a pure, virtuous national polity by alien elements, maybe ethnic, maybe religious, maybe cultural, often “all of the above”.  The national essence must be purified, first by creating an unpolluted kernel of activists in a mass movement.  The movement has its own armed force, to protect itself and impose its will on others.  The purpose of the movement is state capture: to seize control of the state and purify it, other key institutions and, if possible, the territory of the nation from the contaminating elements.

Hitler was a nasty, clever practitioner of fascism, but not its creator.  The roots of fascism go back to the 1880s.  What Hitler did was adopt the current best practice in insurrection, the mass mobilization of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and subsequent crash industrialization in Russia, to Germany.  With a twist.

For Hitler, the virtuous conspiracy to capture state power would be conducted against the polluting influence of Jews and Bolsheviks by the Volk under the leadership of the Nazi Party, instead of by the proletariat perfecting the class and productive relationships in Russia under the guidance of the Bolsheviks.  

I am willing to defer the knotty question of whether fascism and Bolshevism are qualitatively the same, or if one is worse or better than the other, to the philosophers.  Both exploited the unchecked power of the ruling party and group to do massively horrible things to the world.

But the relevant point here is that both systems were astounding successful, albeit for relatively brief periods of time.

When the bourgeois liberal capitalist world was flat on its ass during the Depression, Hitler created an economic and military power that subdued continental Europe.  During the same period, Stalin’s USSR achieved feats of high-speed industrialization that I suspect still have not been equaled.

Truth be told, it’s easier to awake the demon of nationalism than it is to persuade people of their class interest, so I guess that’s why there are only four nominally communist regimes left in the world, while fascism is doing great everywhere.  Indeed, if the geopolitical obsession of the United States with Russia and China is set aside, the main enemy of liberal democracy today is not godless communism; it’s good old fascism.

The fascists’ brutal and somewhat transitory achievements of wealth and power still exercise a dark attraction for people who see their nations in crisis.  Moving beyond the “all or nothing” categorical assertions of the defenders and enemies of the current Kyiv regime, the classic example of a purely fascist strain in European politics today is within the Pravy Sektor/Svoboda factions in Ukraine.  

I wrote on the relatively undiluted fascist character of these movements in Counterpunch a while back and concluded with this observation:

It is anathema to liberal democrats, but it should be acknowledged that fascism is catching on, largely as a result of a growing perception that neo-liberalism and globalization are failing to deliver the economic and social goods to a lot of people.

Democracy is seen as the plaything of oligarchs who manipulate the current system to secure and expand their wealth and power; liberal constitutions with their guarantees of minority rights appear to be recipes for national impotence. Transnational free markets in capital and goods breed local austerity, unemployment, and poverty.  Democratic governments seem to follow the free market playbook, get into problems they can’t handle, and surrender their sovereignty to committees of Euro-financiers.

Fascism, with its exaltation of the particular, the emotional, and the undemocratic provides an impregnable ideological and political bulwark against these outside forces.

Fascism has become an important element in the politics of resistance: a force that obstructs imposition of the norms of globalization, and an ideology that justifies the protection of local interests against the demands of liberal democracy, transnational capital, and property and minority rights.
…
For some, resentment will, inevitably, congeal around nationalism and the perception that fascist resistance, defiantly militant, uncompromising, and irrational, racial and undemocratic, exclusionary and brutal, is the best instrument to achieve local identity and agency—power– in an ever bigger, more dangerous, and less responsive continental order.

Fascism, I’m afraid, isn’t just part of Europe’s past; it’s part of Europe’s future.

And also India’s future, as can be seen through my review of the rise of the RSS and BJP…and Narendra Modi.

In summary, “fascist” is not a shorthand term for “racist”, “xenophobic”, “authoritarian”, “totalitarian” or “brutal, murdering asshole”.  When I use it, I’m referring specifically to an alarmingly nasty and relatively robust strategy for popular mobilization, state capture, and governance.

And consider this extended digression as a notice that, when I say that Narendra Modi’s roots are fascist, I am not employing the term as a lazy perjorative.