[With unrest over a divisive new citizenship
law sweeping the country, the prime minister is losing some support, even in
his strongholds.]
By
Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari KumarPhotographs by Saumya Khandelwal
 |
|
Cremating
bodies at the Ganges River in Varanasi, an Indian city that Prime Minister
Narendra
Modi relies on for spiritual strength and for votes.
|
VARANASI,
India — Nidhi Tiwari is an
upper-caste Hindu. She voted for India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, in the
last election. She lives in Mr. Modi’s constituency, Varanasi, a holy Hindu
city. She was, up until last week, one of the millions of bricks in his base.
But Ms. Tiwari, a university student, has
turned against Mr. Modi, joining the growing protests sweeping this country
after he pushed through a contentious citizenship law that more and more
Indians see as anti-Muslim and a blow to India’s foundation of tolerance and
secularism.
“I used to see Modi as a strong leader, as
the person India had been waiting so long to get,” Ms. Tiwari said. “Now, I see
him as a monster.”
Until this outpouring of anger, Mr. Modi
seemed unstoppable. Riding a populist wave, he was pushing ahead with plans to
bring India closer to becoming a Hindu homeland, a divisive dream harbored by
his political party whose roots lie deep in a Hindu-centric worldview that
poses an existential threat to India’s large Muslim minority.
Now some of his support is beginning to
crack, even in strongholds like Varanasi. For the first time, Indians are
standing up to Mr. Modi in a widespread and forceful way. How this plays out in
the next few weeks could have a seismic impact on India.
The protests are jumping from city to city.
They are drawing in an increasingly broad cohort of Indian society, including
former Modi fans and many non-Muslims.
If they succeed in slowing him down or
changing his course, it could be a lasting victory for the secular version of
India that the founders envisioned as a multicultural nation encompassing a
dizzying diversity of languages, religions and geographic identities. If the
protests fizzle, Mr. Modi’s vision of a Hindu nation could draw closer.
“This is undeniably the biggest pushback Modi
has faced from civil society since coming to power in 2014,” said Milan
Vaishnav, the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace.
Varanasi, a city of temples along the banks
of the Ganges River that Mr. Modi repeatedly returns to for spiritual strength
— and for votes — reflects his challenge. He still has a lot of support, but
parts of the city have erupted beneath him.
Muslims, students, left-leaning
professionals, and lower- and upper-caste Hindus have poured into the narrow,
brick-walled lanes yelling, “Down with Modi!”
The police have responded by beating people
up, kicking in doors, shutting down the internet, arresting scores, and in one
incident charging into a crowd and setting off a stampede that crushed a
9-year-old boy who was out riding his red bicycle.
As the protests have swelled across the
country, hundreds of thousands have joined. Thousands have been arrested and
more than 20 killed.
The demonstrations are still mostly confined
to the new citizenship law that fast-tracks Indian citizenship for migrants
from neighboring countries who are Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Sikh, Parsee or
Jain — all of South Asia’s major religions bar one: Islam.
But the broader context is an India whose
star is not quite as shiny as it was a few years ago. Grumbles are growing
about the weakening economy, which the protests are not helping. Mr. Modi had
promised to create millions of new jobs; he has not. Across northern India’s
industrial heartland, people are feeling the pinch.
Varanasi may be a sacred city, where
countless bodies are cremated along the banks of the Ganges, but it is also a
modern city where countless saris are made in factories.
“I’m hearing it all over town: People are fed
up with this regime,” said Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, an electrical engineering
professor and the head of an important temple. “Why did he push this? Was this
really the need of the time?’’
Even at this divisive and turbulent moment,
much of India is solidly behind Mr. Modi. He has deeper and broader support
than any Indian figure has generated in decades, which has enabled him to
pursue an agenda that alienates minorities and frightens progressives.
His government and its allies have been
changing place names to Hindu from Muslim, rubbing out historic Muslim figures
from textbooks and celebrating lynch mobs who murdered Muslims.
After Mr. Modi’s overwhelming re-election in
May, the Hindu nationalist campaign reached a fever pitch. His government
stripped statehood from Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, and then
passed the new citizenship law.
Mr. Modi’s popularity cannot be chalked up only
to the fact that Hindu nationalist ideology plays well in a country that is 80
percent Hindu. The Modi administration has also done a better job than previous
governments in pushing big anti-poverty initiatives, such as building 100
million toilets to help stop open defecation and the spread of deadly disease.
His Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies
control nearly two-thirds of the lower house of Parliament. These past weeks,
opposition politicians have shown once again how fractured they are, by not
capitalizing on the protests.
There has been nothing close to a coordinated
strategy, and as students and intellectuals are dragged away by riot police
officers, many opposition leaders have been cheering on the protesters — from
Twitter.
Politically, analysts say, Mr. Modi is safe.
But these protests pose a threat to his ideological agenda.
“Modi is not a normal politician who measures
his success only by votes,” said Kanchan Chandra, a political scientist at New
York University. “He sees himself as the architect of a new India, built on a
foundation of technological, cultural, economic and military prowess, and
backed by an ideology of Hindu nationalism.”
The effects are already being felt. Mr.
Modi’s party lost state elections in Jharkhand this week. And he and party
leaders have shelved plans to plow ahead with a national citizenship review.
The process could have forced all Indians to
produce documentary proof that they were citizens, a difficult task in a
developing country where countless people do not have such records. The
widespread suspicion was that the administration was pushing this review, in
combination with the citizenship law, to disenfranchise Muslims, though Mr.
Modi has vehemently denied that.
It has been a long time since Mr. Modi, 69,
has had to play defense. He began his career from humble roots — first
wandering solo through the Himalayas as a young preacher, then becoming a
ground-level party operative, then chief minister, then prime minister.
He knows, intimately, the perils of
Hindu-Muslim tensions. In 2002, when he was chief minister of Gujarat State, he
was accused of allowing more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, to be
slaughtered in communal violence. He was never charged, though suspicions
remained.
Mr. Modi radiates intensity, but lately he
seems a little less self-assured.
At a huge outdoor rally on Sunday afternoon,
in the winter chill and in front of a crowd roaring, “Modi Modi Modi!” he
looked tight, distracted, distant, even a bit angry.
He lashed out at what he called a
“conspiracy” by opposition politicians and expressed little sorrow, or even
acknowledgment, for those killed. He gave the impression that he thrived on the
controversy, thundering, “The more they hate me, the more the love of this
country’s public rains on me.”
At the same time, Mr. Modi has been trying to
act as if, somehow, everything is normal. He went to a meeting on the Ganges
River one day and spoke at an investment conference on another. Within his
administration he has expressed confidence that the storm will soon pass. He
believes that the discontent is simply naysayers upset about how fast he is
moving with policies that previous Indian politicians struggled to carry out.
Though protests have erupted in virtually
every Indian state, the violence has been the most intense — and the most
people have been killed — in the states controlled by Mr. Modi’s political
party, such as Uttar Pradesh.
Witnesses say that police forces under the
command of Yogi Adityanath, the state’s chief minister, a Hindu monk and a Modi
acolyte, have systematically swept through Muslim neighborhoods, breaking into
houses, hauling off Muslim men and destroying Muslim families’ property.
Mr. Adityanath’s police have also been widely
accused of firing live ammunition into crowds.
In Varanasi, which is in Uttar Pradesh, the
Muslim quarter feels under occupation. Life goes on — children fly kites from
rooftops, people fry balls of dough in piping hot skillets, half of the markets
are open — but it all happens under a thick tension coiled with violence.
Police officers in riot gear and helmets
prowl the lanes, some carrying submachine guns. The residents glare at them.
“What would I tell Mr. Modi?" said Vakil
Ahmed, whose son was the one trampled last week. “I’d ask: ‘Why are you doing
these atrocities to us?’”
The crowds at the protests usually run in the
thousands, and for them to expand they would have to draw in other groups. The
Dalits and members of other lower castes, for example, have been complaining
for years about discrimination under Mr. Modi.
Many protesters have been young progressives
like Ms. Tiwari, a 20-year-old political science student whose family are
longtime Modi supporters. She believes Mr. Modi’s recent moves are threatening
India’s “soul.”
“Every day I argue with my dad,” she said.
And even though her father will not give her
logical arguments, she says, he still supports Mr. Modi.
