Politics makes strange bedfellows

Bill and Melinda Gates are set to honor mOdi, "who is being cited for building toilets for millions of rural Indians as part of his Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission)."

To the Gateses, it apparently does not matter that mOdi looms behind the killings in Gujarat; is mute about lynchings; has systematically stripped millions of Muslims of their citizenship; and most recently has transformed Kashmir into a highly militarized prison.

Ten years ago--yep, in 2009--I wrote that "I won't be surprised at all if Modi, or somebody like him, becomes the prime minister really soon."  It was not all that difficult to predict the turn that India was going to make. Except, I was overly optimistic--I thought his authoritarianism would be benign!

Since then, he and his party have been doing exactly what they said they would do in the socio-political arena.  The Indian electorate, as are voters anywhere, did not understand that no autocrat can dictate how the global economy should work, and slowly they are beginning to realize that their favored fascist has failed to deliver the economic goods.  And, basic political science says that when a power-hungry thug knows that the economy is failing or under-delivering, well, he will resort to political violence of various sorts, exactly along the lines of what has been happening.

Authoritarians also love showing their cojones to their loyal supporters. In the global lives that we lead, with a large Indian diaspora, it means that mOdi struts on stages outside India too.  Recall this from five years ago, when he was on Times Square?  It was all about self-aggrandizement.

Now, he is ready for another tour.  This time in Houston.  And he will be joined by our own symbol of self-aggrandizement--tRump!  I suppose mOdi doesn't care that care that tRump thinks mOdi is from a shithole, and tRump doesn't care that mOdi is from a country that he considers a shithole.  All the two of them care for is a eVa Peron-like "You must love me, you must love me | You must love me"

It is one hell of a combination, and full of contradictions.

“Part of what makes it complicated for Indian-Americans is that they don’t like Trump for the most part and yet they like Modi,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside and the director of AAPIData.com, a policy research and data firm that focused on Asians and Pacific Islanders, told Power Up. “They bristle against the kind of nationalism that Trump represents here in America, but then they still support Modi regardless of what he is doing in India. So, there is some ideological inconsistency there, but that is the kind of complicated world that we live in.” 

  Indian-Americans are not tRump voters:

It will be interesting to find out what percentage of the audience at this freak show also support tRump; my hypothesis is that it will be far greater than 28%, because of the anti-Muslim common denominator!

This is how the world's two largest democracies work now.  What shining examples!