NEFARIOUS AND DIVISIVE SAFFRON AGENDA !

The Project Saffron has taken off with a bang in all seriousness with Modi leading the charge to dump the Gandhian-Nehruvian idea of a secular and inclusive India and instead raise the Hindustan of Hindutva’s dreams.

Modi is on a mission and on a roll. In his deliberate actions, speeches and approach, he reminds you of early years of the Fuhrer, out to fashion the Third Reich. Every single word he speaks and every single step he takes has a careful, well thought out purpose and a message. Like those clever art works by Leonardo da Vinci, even regulation photo opportunities have their own hidden clues and messages. Those who do not pay attention do so at their peril.

As  Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal argues, from appropriating national icons like Gandhi, dumbing him down to a cleanliness drive and the humble broom, and projecting Patel as the new national icon above Gandhi and Nehru, the Parivar is pushing its agenda: “The icons are strategically picked up, suitably distorted and recreated in a manner that is gradually and subtly bringing the Hindutva agenda to the fore through historical falsehoods and propagandist tactics that have begun squeezing space for any dissent and challenge.”

In his latest New York Times piece, Pankaj Mishra warns that the kind of retrograde 1920s-style nationalist dogma that appeared in Europe, Russia and Japan is making a big comeback in India as Modi “stokes old Hindu rage-and-shame over what he calls more than a thousand years of slavery under Muslim and British rule.”

Mishra writes: “In Madison Square Garden, in New York, last month, more than 19,000 people cheered Mr. Modi’s speech about ending India’s millennium-long slavery. But hundreds of millions of uprooted Indians are also now fully exposed to demagoguery. Interestingly, it is not the RSS’s khaki-shorts-wearing volunteers but rather quasi-Westernized Indians in the corporate-owned media and mysteriously well-funded think tanks, magazines and websites who have provided the ambient chorus for Mr. Modi’s ascent to respectability.”

It seems by the time Modi is done with India–or India is done with Modi, which looks like a distant possibility given the total decimation of the opposition and the messianic role he imagines himself–it would not be the same country and nation again. It has already changed in the past few months in ways one never thought possible. And the ride has just about begun.

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