On the campaign trail Narendra Modi tirelessly projects himself as a fear-inspiring avenger
, India’s prime minister, likes to talk tough on terror. On the campaign trail he tirelessly projects himself as a fear-inspiring avenger. If Pakistan returns a captured fighter pilot, as recently happened following an airstrike India says hit a Pakistan-based terror camp, it is because the neighbouring state is scared of him, he says. Referring to the carnage at Easter in Sri Lanka, he claims that no such attacks have occurred in India during his five years in office.
Yet Mr Modi is not against all terrorism, it seems. Shocking many of his own supporters, earlier this month he picked a woman accused of it as his party’s candidate for the parliamentary seat representing the city of Bhopal. Pragya Singh Thakur, who is free on bail, has been charged with helping to orchestrate a bombing that killed six Muslims in 2008.
For Mr Modi’s core Hindu-nationalist constituency, talking tough on terror is polite code for harsh treatment of the relatively poor and scattered 14% of the population who are Muslim. In the effort to rally the Hindu majority other leaders of Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party have been more direct. The party’s powerful chief strategist, Amit Shah, says India is in deadly danger of being overrun by Muslim infiltrators he has described as “termites”.
Taking identity politics to a higher level, Anantkumar Hegde, a minister of state in Mr Modi’s government who is running for re-election from the state of Karnataka, scoffed that if Rahul Gandhi, Congress’s leader, was asking to see evidence that the airstrikes in Pakistan had been as successful as Mr Modi had claimed, then he would like to see evidence of Mr Gandhi’s claimed religion and caste. “What is the proof that he is a Hindu?” he sneered.
As Kerala, one of India’s most religiously diverse as well as peaceful states, headed to the polls on April 23rd, blasts of sectarian rhetoric reverberated from the rest of the country. The quiet hillside district of Wayanad, which has large numbers of Muslims and Christians, briefly became a focus of national attention after it was chosen as a second constituency for Mr Gandhi to contest. Mr Modi mocked Mr Gandhi for seeking “shelter where the majority is in a minority”.
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