South Asia Citizens Web

Singling out Hindu observances as one of the markers for deciding who can be an Indian is surely a red line Modi should not have crossed. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto for the 2014 election says it "believes in India being one country, one people and one nation... India constitutes of all its’ people, irrespective of caste, creed, religion or sex." Towards the end of the document, however, it reverses that formulation by asserting: "India shall remain a natural home for persecuted Hindus and they shall be welcome to seek refuge here."

A series of half an hour TV discussions on Rajya Sabha TV from six crucial states in India’s 2014 general election.

We, the undersigned, express our profound sense of grief and alarm over the gruesome massacre of Bengali-speaking Muslims on 2nd May. This most recent round of killings — in which 32 people, mostly women and children have lost their lives – is another link in the long and... bloody sequence of ethnic cleansing being carried out by tribal Bodo militant groups with impunity.

A rereading of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) is helpful in understanding the social psyche in India today that is being moulded by Narendra Modi and is greasing his - and his party’s - path to power. It can happen here.