On a June 2014 afternoon, two weeks after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India, I traveled to Ahmedabad, the largest city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Modi is the son of a tea vendor from a Gujarati village. He left home after high school in the late 1960s to work for the Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh, or RSS, an influential Hindu supremacist organization, which seeks to remodel India as a Hindu state.
Modi rose to be the organizational secretary of the group in the mid-eighties. In the fall of 1990, Lal Krishna Advani, then a leading Hindu nationalist politician in the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, rode across India on a truck designed to look like a chariot from the Hindu epics. The aim of the yatra, or political pilgrimage, was to drum up support for building a grand temple to the god Rama in what’s believed to be Rama’s birthplace, the northern town of Ayodhya—on the site of a medieval mosque, the Babri Masjid. Two weeks before the Rama chariot set out on its journey, Modi announced its itinerary to the press in Ahmedabad, explaining why the grand temple was crucial to India’s national identity. Frenzied crowds welcomed Advani’s chariot in the city—a man stabbed his arm with a trident and used his gushing blood to put a tilak on Advani’s forehead. In villages and towns across India, men and women gathered to worship the chariot in elaborate Hindu rituals using incense sticks and sandalwood paste. Militant young men offered their blood for the cause, calling on Advani to raze the mosque and build the temple. Indian love for alliteration was mixed with bigotry in the slogans at Advani’s public meetings: Tel lagao dabur ka, naam mita do Babar ka—“Use the hair-oil made by Dabur and erase the name of Babur.” Riots broke out in several states; some 600 people were killed. On December 6, 1992, tens of thousands of extremist Hindus, egged on by Hindu nationalist politicians, tore down the Babri Masjid. This triggered more riots across India that left thousands dead, mostly Muslims.
Modi had earned Advani’s confidence when he meticulously planned a stretch of Advani’s yatra, as the yatra emboldened Hindu nationalists and the BJP went on to win national elections and form the government in 1998. Advani became Deputy Prime Minister, while the older, milder Atal Bihari Vajpayee became Prime Minister. Four years later, Advani appointed Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat.
On February 27, 2002, a train carrying dozens of Hindu activists returning from the site of the demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya stopped in the town of Godhra. A confrontation between the Hindu activists and Muslim tea vendors ensued. A coach was set on fire—competing political enquiries have yet to settle who lit it—and 59 people were burned alive inside. Their charred bodies were paraded through Ahmedabad.
In the aftermath, armed Hindu mobs fanned through Ahmedabad attacking Muslim homes and businesses. Women were raped and set on fire; children and men were hacked to death. Around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Multiple human rights organizations reported that Modi’s government and police officials were complicit in the carnage. Up to 150,000 Muslims took refuge in camps.
Chief Minister Modi not only refused to apologize for his failure to protect his citizens, he called the Muslim camps “child-producing centers.” Over the years, Modi has stubbornly refused to show any regret about the carnage on his watch. In 2013, when asked about his lack of remorse, Modi said: “If someone else is driving, and we are sitting in the back seat, and even then if a small puppy comes under the wheel, do we feel pain or not? We do.” Kutte ka baccha was the Hindi phrase that Modi used, and literally it does mean a puppy. But it is primarily used as a Hindi slur: son of a dog. Modi had chosen his words carefully.
Yet Gujarat would prove to be the perfect state from which Modi could reinvent himself as a man of governance and a pro-business leader.
A wealthy boomtown of about six million people, Ahmedabad witnessed a major expansion during Modi’s reign. Real estate prices doubled as corporate parks, luxurious apartment towers, and shopping malls overran the farming towns on the edges of the city. Modi leveraged the strong economic base of Gujarat, offered sops to large corporations, and promised to attract lucrative foreign investment.
Although most Indian cities are divided on the basis of religion, in Ahmedabad this division is particularly stark. Muslims, who constitute about 9 percent of the population, live in slums on the outskirts, in parts of the walled city, or in Juhapura, a large ghetto on the city’s southwestern edge. Segregation throughout India increased in the violent aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It became starker, especially in Gujarat, after the 2002 riots. Juhapura, which houses a mixture of working-class and middle-class Muslims, has no access to basic amenities such as drinking water, piped gas, and bus service.
The horror of the Gujarat violence—India’s first televised riot—was so overwhelming that in its aftermath, it seemed impossible that Modi could run for the Indian prime minister’s job. Yet a combination of failures of the ruling Indian Congress Party, Modi’s aggressive success at crafting a new image of himself as an Indian Lee Kwan Yew, and immense support from the Hindu nationalists and beyond helped him win despite 2002.
When the results of India’s 2014 national elections were declared on May 16, Modi’s BJP had won 282 out of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha (“House of the People”), the lower house of Parliament. The media called his victory a tsu-NaMo. No politician had won such a popular mandate in India since 1984.
The defining image of the Gujarat riots remains a Reuters photograph of Qutubudin Ansari, a 28-year-old man with thick wavy hair, standing on the first floor balcony of a house in Ahmedabad, imploring soldiers from an Indian paramilitary police force to rescue him. His large, black eyes are filled with tears, his shirt is bloodstained. The photograph, reproduced in thousands of newspapers, posters, and pamphlets, became the emblem of the brutality in Gujarat.
Shortly after arriving in Ahmedabad, I telephoned Ansari to ask if he would meet with me. I was sure he wouldn’t answer; he has avoided the press since the riots, appearing only at a rally for the avowedly anti-BJP Communist Party in the southern state of Kerala during the 2014 election. To my surprise he picked up after only three rings, speaking in Urdu, the language of northern India. A majority of the city’s Muslims, including Ansari’s father, had migrated to Gujarat from the poor northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, seeking work in the city’s textile mills. By the mid-1980s, the textile industry had collapsed, after the government changed its policy to encourage textile manufacturing in smaller, more unorganized sectors, and mill owners began investing in more lucrative pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Many of the mill workers became tailors or worked as cutters in the garment industry, which was owned, predominantly, by Hindus.
Ansari lives in the working-class area of Sone Ki Chal in northeastern Ahmedabad, near the shuttered textile mills. We met by an overpass near his home. In the neighborhood’s narrow alleys, I caught glimpses of men bent over sewing machines, scraps of denim and cotton littering the ground. “Let’s go to my favorite place,” Ansari said. “It is very peaceful there.” Where Ansari led me to was a bench on the island that divided the highway. The Muslims lived in the shantytown on Ansari’s side of the highway; the Hindus lived across the divider, in bigger, concrete houses. Ansari pointed to a two-story house with beige tiles and a tiny balcony. “That is where the photograph was taken,” he said.
He recalled watching the riots from a hole in a door that opened onto the balcony as mobs looted and burned shops and destroyed homes. Behind him stood his wife, their eldest daughter, and a family friend and his wife. The only exit was a staircase leading to the street. Suddenly Ansari spotted a truck patrolling the street. It belonged to the Rapid Action Force, a federal paramilitary force routinely deployed to control religious riots. He shouted for help. The truck stopped. Ansari ran out onto the balcony and joined his palms in the very Indian gesture of seeking help or forgiveness. Tears rolled down his face as he pleaded for rescue. But the paramilitary men began to pull away. In that moment, Arko Datta, a Reuters photographer who had hitched a ride with the RAF men, snapped a picture of Ansari with his telephoto lens. A minute later, the RAF returned, fired tear gas at the mob, and led Ansari and his family to safety. “Arko and other journalists in the truck forced the RAF to return to save us,” Ansari said.
About ten days after the picture was taken, a European journalist found Ansari in a refugee camp and Ansari became famous overnight. For the next few years he struggled with his celebrity. He craved the anonymity and ordinariness of his life before the photograph, which had turned him into the face of the horrors of the Gujarat riots. On the streets Hindu nationalists would recognize him and taunt him: “He is the one who was crying in that picture!” Employers would refuse him work as they saw his visible association with the riots as potentially troublesome. Liberals and Muslims would flock to him, seeing in him a living testament to the failures of Modi and the Hindu right. Ansari wanted to be invisible.
He moved to a town near Mumbai, where his sister lived, then to Kolkata, which was ruled by a Communist government critical of the Hindu nationalists. The Communists gave him an allowance and a sewing machine and helped him rent a shop. But it was difficult to build a clientele in an unknown city. After his mother was diagnosed with a heart condition, Ansari headed back to Ahmedabad. He resumed his work as a tailor and as business picked up, Ansari moved from a rented place to his own two-room house, all the while watching Modi growing stronger politically and scheming for the prime minister’s job.
Modi had won over a small section of Gujarati Muslims through political patronage—a combination of access to state resources and a sense of security from future violence and prosecution. Displaying just enough visible Muslim support was essential to diluting the taint of the 2002 riots. In the fall of 2012, Modi began a week-long fast for communal harmony known as Sadhbhavana (“Goodwill”) that would be broadcast on Indian television networks. A few days before the show, Modi sent several of his Muslim supporters to ask Ansari to come to the Sadhbhavana and show his face to the television cameras. Ansari threatened to go to the press if he was forced to share the stage with Modi. They backed off.
A year after the Sadhbhavana broadcast, a Muslim who worked for Modi’s party arrived at Ansari’s house. The government was making a promotional film and they wanted him to take part along with Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood superstar. Bachchan would say “Khushboo Hai Gujarat Main” (“Ah, the scent of Gujarat!”) and all Ansari had to do was utter “Aman Hai Gujarat Main” (“Ah, the peace in Gujarat!”) The pay was good, but Ansari, who makes around 6,000 Indian rupees, or $100, a month, refused. “My face is my prison but the memory of the storm too lives in my face,” he said.
Voting day in Ahmedabad came in May. Paresh Rawal was the BJP candidate from Ahmedabad East. Five days later as the votes were being tallied, Ansari watched the results on his old television set. Some of his friends joked about Modi’s sweep of the popular vote and the futility of his opposition. Even though 91 percent of India’s Muslim voters did not vote for Modi, it made little difference; consolidation of Hindu votes across caste divisions made Muslim opposition ineffective.
The most surprising part of the election was the elite embrace of Modi, even in India’s most cosmopolitan city of Mumbai. On a morning train to Mumbai, a teenager seated next to me had chosen as the ringtone for his smartphone a chorus of hundreds of voices chanting: “Modi! Modi! Modi!” The Mumbai elite had a history of barely voting in Indian elections, relying instead on influence and connections. But this time they had voted overwhelmingly for Modi.
I drove for an hour and a half through exacting traffic from the Mumbai Central railway terminus to Andheri to meet Rahul Mehra, who is typical of the elite voters Modi has been able to attract in India’s commercial capital. Mehra is 29 years old, educated at Princeton, and worked for a time at a hedge fund in New York before returning to India in 2008 to run the family hotel businesses. He saw Modi as the great hope for India’s future. After spectacular gains in the 2000s, India’s economic growth sputtered to about 5 percent by the summer of 2013. Government promises of better electricity, roads, infrastructure, and jobs for the millions of young Indians graduating college were fading. “Economically, things were out of control,” Mehra told me. “It was hurting me very bad as a businessman. We were trying to invest, get land banks, build new hotels, but we couldn’t get permission for our projects.” Mehra and his brother turned from India to Thailand, which gets three times the tourists India does. They built a new hotel there. “We got loans at 7 percent interest in Thailand; in India we have to pay 13 percent interest.”
Mehra, who lives in a high-end apartment complex in South Mumbai, had never voted before. But in 2014 members of the South Mumbai business elite came together to form a lobbying group, India First, to support the Modi’s campaign; a friend persuaded Mehra to join. “We talked about registering voters, about good governance, and change,” Mehra recalled. “We were impressed by Modi’s record in Gujarat. He is very corporate; he seemed to be someone who is being responsible to his shareholders. I felt that the Congress government had plundered the country more than the British did in 150 years. As [Nobel Prize-winning psychologist] Daniel Kahneman says, a person values a loss twice as much as he values a gain.”
Yet despite the massive corruption under Congress rule, the Indian elite suffered little when compared with the poor. Inequality in India is now growing at a faster rate than in other developing countries like China, Brazil, and Russia. Why, I wondered, were the rich so angry? “We could have done better,” Mehra explained. “Like the concentration of wealth at the top, there was a concentration of anger at the top as well. My neighbor has a steel factory in Karnataka, which has been lying idle for a few years because he cannot get enough coal for power. It felt like a lost decade.”
India First registered 30,000 voters in South Mumbai, and set up a call center. When measured against the machinery of the Modi campaign, the effort wasn’t much, but it signified a new embrace of Hindu nationalists by the globally connected Indian elite. India First hosted high-profile speakers, including the xenophobic and Islamophobic BJP leader, Subramanian Swamy, who called for declaring India a Hindu state and for taking away the voting rights of India’s non-Hindu citizens.
Behind his desk, Mehra prominently displayed Cornel West’s Democracy Matters and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark. Mehra had taken a class with West at Princeton. The works of West and Morrison seemed mere signifiers of an Ivy League education, markers of cultural capital, objects devoid of their ideas and politics. I wondered how he reconciled the values of Morrison and West—unequivocal supporters of civil rights and diversity—with his enthusiastic support for Narendra Modi and his party. Mehra was a little uncomfortable with the history of sectarian violence and the worldview of Modi’s BJP and its parent group, the RSS. “Their history is disturbing but the Congress too has skeletons in its cupboard,” he said. He was referring to the 1984 massacre of 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Three decades later, the perpetrators from the officially secular Congress Party have yet to be convicted. Modi’s supporters often spoke of the 2002 Gujarat riots and the 1984 carnage as if the two pogroms canceled each other out. “But time heals,” Mehra continued. “What we need right now is an economic agenda.”
Few places symbolize the economic promise of India as much as Hyderabad, the information technology capital of India. Hyderabad was traditionally a slow-paced city proud of its traditions of courtesy and grace. Its skyline was dominated by the palaces, tombs, and mosques built by the Nizams, Hyderabad’s pre-independence Muslim rulers. The information technology district is built on the periphery, on farmland that was appropriated after India opened up its state-controlled economy in the early 1990s. Cyber Towers, a circular glass and steel office complex built in 1998, marks the beginning of what is known as HITEC City or Cyberabad.
Before Microsoft, Infosys, Oracle, and Toshiba, among others, built their own corporate parks, they worked out of Cyber Towers. Google arrived in 2004 and Facebook followed in 2010. Chandra Babu Naidu, then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, earned the moniker “Laptop Chief Minister”; Naidu was credited for putting his weight behind the transformation of Hyderabad into an information technology powerhouse between 1999 and 2004. In the past decade and half, several thousand cyber towers have sprung up. (In 2013, Telangana split from Andhra Pradesh and became its own state, with Hyderabad as the new capital.) IT exports from Hyderabad during 2013–14 were about $10 billion; the city provided employment to as many as 450,000 people.
I’d stopped in Hyderbad to meet V. Rohit Kashyap, an engineer who ran the social media campaign for Modi and his party in undivided Andhra Pradesh, which sent 42 lawmakers to Parliament. The Modi campaign was fought in village processions, but also on social media. Some of the most strident voices of the Hindu right working in support of Modi came from the world of engineering and information technology.
Kashyap works at Back Office Associates, a data firm which attracted investments from Goldman Sachs. We met at the Heart Cup, a café and bar in Cyberabad popular with IT professionals. A small, somber man who wore the caste mark of a Brahmin on his forehead, 27-year-old Kashyap comes from a family affiliated with the RSS for three generations. Members of the RSS attend early morning assemblies at shakhas, or local chapters, where they receive ideological indoctrination and paramilitary training. But Kashyap was a frail boy; his engineer father suspected he was too weak to bear the physical rigors and the mental pressures of a political life in the RSS. “They kept me away from it,” Kashyap said. His voice was taut with anger at that old slight, the haunting parental assumption of his puniness.
In 2005, Kashyap moved to Guntur, a town 160 miles south of Hyderabad, to study mechanical engineering at a university there. He was 18. He was struck by the intensity of the caste tensions in his college. “Even in the classroom, students sat according to their caste,” he recalled. One day he made a snide remark about Balakrishna, a popular actor and the son of legendary lower-caste actor-politician N. T. Rama Rao, who broke the hegemony of Brahmins and other upper-castes in Andhra Pradesh in the early eighties by forming his own political party and ruling the state for almost two decades. His lower-caste classmates interpreted the remark as stemming from his upper-caste, Brahmin prejudice. “I was beaten up,” Kashyap recalled. A Marxist professor consoled and supported him. Under that professor’s influence, Kashyap began to reevaluate his feelings about caste prescriptions and Hinduism’s role in creating them. It marked the beginning of a shift in his politics, he says, toward the extreme left.
On a visit home, his father sensed his son was slipping out of the fold. He gave Kashyap a CD of the lectures of Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu revivalist from the nineteenth century, whose speeches about universal truths being behind all faiths were admired by Leo Tolstoy and Aldous Huxley. Vivekananda expressed qualified critiques of the caste system, and his work was appropriated by post-colonial Hindu nationalists for propagating a modernist, muscular Hinduism. I remembered the BJP’s student wing would paste posters of Vivekananda on the walls of Delhi University in the late nineties: a robust, young man with large eyes in a turban, his muscular arms folded across his chest. His words: Strength is life; weakness is death. Kashyap’s readings of Vivekananda increased his zeal. “I realized that caste discrimination is not a problem specific to India because America and Europe also have this problem,” Kashyap said. “They call it racism. The argument that it is only Hinduism that oppresses lower castes simply does not hold.”
After graduating in 2008, Kashyap traveled with his father to their ancestral home in Kurnool village. Certain of his ideological moorings, of the Hindu nationalist path, Kashyap asked his father to initiate him into the RSS by taking him to a shakha. One day in 2009, Kashyap heard a speech by Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS. “He said that for a civilization and nation, three things are needed: Identity, Credibility, Character,” Kashyap recalled. “It really touched my heart.”
But as he said so, his face hardened, and he began to explain why Hindus needed to take pride in their heritage. “We feel inferior to gora chamda (white skin). We think all the Nobel laureates come from the West and we are good for nothing. Very few people know that if Nobel prizes were awarded on the past achievements, be it medicine, be it physics, be it chemistry, Indians would have won hands down.” He spoke about how the Vedas, the ancient Hindu texts, had calculated the speed of light with utmost precision, how Indians knew the antiseptic value of turmeric for centuries (women who did household work barefoot used turmeric to protect their feet), how Susrutha, a Brahmin, performed the first surgery in history. “You know, ants bite!” Kashyap said. “He used ants to cut a patient’s skin and stitch. Google him.”
A few months after our meeting, Modi echoed Kashyap’s sentiments about the scientific feats of ancient Indians while speaking at the inaugural ceremony of a hospital in Mumbai. “We worship Lord Ganesha,” Modi told his audience, referring to the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha. “There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”
Kashyap had the manner of a much older man. His sense of mission and the intensity of his large brown eyes made him an outlier among the bantering, flirtatious men and women patronizing the café. He was aghast at what India remembered of its past. “A student of history today will tell you he read about Robert Clive, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb,” he said, referring to a British adventurer and two Mughal emperors. “Stop glorifying people who invaded and conquered our country. Why do we still espouse Mughal culture? Why do we have a street in New Delhi still named after Aurangzeb?” (Aurangzeb Road was renamed in 2015 to A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Road, after the Muslim scientist who was tactically appointed by the BJP government in 2002 as President of India, and his acceptance of the ceremonial presidential position helped Hindu nationalists ease the taint of the Gujarat carnage.) These were the “historical wrongs” he sought to correct by going into politics. His Twitter bio prominently mentioned the goal of India as Hindu Rashtra, a Hindu nation. “It requires a transformation, the way we teach history, the way we inculcate a sense of pride in our past and history,” he told me. In Narendra Modi, he saw someone who thought like he did. “I could connect every time he spoke. He always makes his pride in India, in our history and our civilization, very clear. I was able to connect.”
Kashyap formally joined the information technology cell of the BJP in Andhra Pradesh in 2010, and four years later he was leading the party’s social media campaign in the region. His focus was on getting the urban youth to vote for Modi. “They might not read the morning papers, but the urban youth do start their day with Facebook and Twitter,” he explained. “So we went where they were.” He trawled the comments pages of popular television network websites and various Facebook groups. He identified users whose comments echoed his own ideology. “If he was from our area, I would send him a friend request and request a private phone conversation,” Kashyap explained. He would invite the potential convert for dinner at a restaurant or at his house. Kashyap’s team built a network of 2,000 social media warriors for Modi and his party. “I personally met around five hundred people.” Most of the people Kashyap enlisted were engineers and information technology professionals. “We are used to corporate culture where merit is appreciated. Our CEO’s son does not become the CEO. When the techies see the Congress Party and its dynastic practices, they cannot relate to it.”
One of the biggest challenges on Modi’s road to prime ministership remained the traditional opposition of the lower and middle castes to his party, especially in the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The two states elect 120 lawmakers to the Lok Sabha, more than a fifth of all members.
In Bihar, Modi was challenging the coalition of two veteran politicians: Laloo Prasad Yadav, a former Chief Minister of the state, who empowered the lower caste and prevented sectarian violence but had also faced serious graft charges during his term, and Nitish Kumar, who defeated Yadav to take over as Chief Minister in 2005. Kumar was praised for strengthening infrastructure and improving security and safety in Bihar, and he ruled in a coalition with the BJP until he broke with them in 2013, when Modi was chosen as the candidate for prime minister. Kumar, a believer in pluralism, found Modi’s majoritarianism unacceptable. “I cannot work with anyone who poses a challenge to that idea, I will fight such a person, I will fight such an idea,” he told his biographer.
Jadhua is a small village 15 miles north of Patna, the capital of Bihar. The traffic moved slowly, becoming nearly impassable once I reached a massive bridge over the River Ganges that linked Patna and the northern parts of the state. Jadhua’s proximity to Patna and Kumar’s infrastructure projects have brought relative prosperity to the village—expansive multi-story houses sit beside tiny, cramped huts; young men on motorcycles race past buffaloes and cows grazing lazily in the alleys.
There I met Dinesh Prasad, a 46-year-old guard with the Indian railways, who lives in a three-room brick house at the edge of the village. As we sat on red plastic chairs, Prasad talked about the history of bitter caste divisions in Bihar. “Laloo Yadav is my god,” Prasad told me. “Because of him we lived without the fear of upper castes, because of him we got jobs in government.” He planned to vote for Yadav in state elections in the winter, but in 2014 it didn’t matter that he and his lower- and middle-caste neighbors had always supported Yadav and the Congress Party, who now were staunchly opposed to the BJP; he was won over by Modi’s aggressive, authoritarian personality. Modi had fielded a blistering campaign in the state that focused on his economic record in Gujarat, middle-caste origins, polarizing Hindu nationalistic rhetoric, and embodiment of a muscular strongman.
“Manmohan Singh is meek, he could barely speak,” Prasad said. “If the head of your house is so weak, then the neighbors will mess with you. Pakistan’s army came and cut the heads of our soldiers and Manmohan Singh did nothing. China threatens us on our borders and they do nothing. We needed a strong man, a powerful man to lead India. If Pakistan cuts heads of two of our soldiers, Modi will chop off twenty Pakistani heads.”
Modi carried the impoverished, semi-feudal Bihar by an unexpectedly wide margin, winning over aspiring youths as well as members of the lower and middle castes, like Prasad—the traditional voters for Kumar and Yadav.
At a campaign rally in late April, Giriraj Singh, a leader of the BJP from Bihar, who is devoted to Modi and Hindu nationalist politics, declared that there will be no place for Modi’s critics in India. “Those who intend to stop Narendra Modi are looking at Pakistan. In the coming days, there won’t be any place for them in India, or in Jharkhand, but Pakistan.” Modi appointed Singh as the junior minister for enterprise in his government.
One early July 2014 morning, I arrived in Varanasi, the holiest Hindu city, in Uttar Pradesh. As street lamps flickered in the blue dawn, I watched crowds of Hindu pilgrims walk briskly through narrow, serpentine alleys, past crumbling houses to the Ganges riverfront. From wooden poles by the riverbank fluttered the saffron flags of the BJP. “Mother Ganges has called me,” Modi declared during a campaign stop in late April. As he spoke, Amit Shah, a former minister in Gujarat and Modi’s closest aide, stood on his right. Shah had been running the Modi campaign in Uttar Pradesh. A burly, balding man in his early fifties, Shah faces charges for the murder of three people the police suspect of plotting to assassinate Modi as revenge for the 2002 anti-Muslim violence. Shah, who insists the murder charges are politically motivated, also has the reputation of being a brilliant and ruthless political strategist.
I fully understood Shah’s shrewd political acumen only after meeting one of his workers, Rajneesh Singh, inside a gaudy shopping mall and office complex a few miles from the Varanasi riverfront. Singh, an athletic man in his mid-thirties from an upper-caste landlord family from a village near Varanasi, wore aviator shades and body-hugging shirts popularized by Bollywood star Salman Khan. Singh ran a small construction company in partnership with a BJP legislator he met at an RSS training camp. Like Modi in his youth, Singh worked as a propagandist and outreach worker for the RSS. Singh had campaigned for the BJP in many elections; but after Shah took over Modi’s campaign in Utter Pradesh, the organization gained new energy. As Singh saw it, “Amit Shah came with a new plan that he had tested in Gujarat.” Singh recalled excitedly how he implemented one of Shah’s ideas for ensuring maximum polling for a BJP candidate.
The sheer numbers of voters in Indian elections can be daunting for anyone trying to make sure supporters get to the polls. In the 2014 election, 814 million Indians voted in 930,000 polling stations. On average, each polling station caters to around 900 voters, who are listed in a sheaf of paper about 15 pages thick. Shah’s organizational insight was to create a new position of “page supervisor,” a volunteer responsible for persuading the 60-odd voters on a single page of the list to vote for the BJP. India had never witnessed such meticulous planning to get out the vote. “It amounts to being responsible for ten families in your neighborhood,” Singh explained. “Every page supervisor looked after his own family and other families who live next door, people he knows. He ensured that they came out on the day of voting, that they knew lotus was the electoral symbol for the BJP and Modi.” I asked Singh if I could meet a page supervisor. He pointed toward the man who had served us tea.
A few hundred miles from Varanasi, the western region of Uttar Pradesh and the abutting state of Haryana form a belt of prosperous middle-caste, land-owning Hindu Jats. The area remains culturally conservative and is infamous for honor killings and female feticide. While Modi spoke of development and governance throughout his campaign, it was in Western Uttar Pradesh that his party’s strategy of religious polarization between Hindus and Muslims, and the exploitation of sectarian tensions to bring various caste groups under the saffron banner of the BJP, became visible.
Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts in Western Uttar Pradesh, about 80 miles north of New Delhi, are dominated by miles of sugarcane fields, which form the core of the area’s economy. I met Gul Bahar, a 20-year-old college student from Lisarh, a relatively prosperous village of 8,000 people around 35 miles from Muzaffarnagar town, which is the center of the eponymous district. Muslims once made up about a third of its population. But in late August 2013, intense sectarian violence broke out in several area villages. The troubles began after two Hindu Jats killed a Muslim youth who allegedly harassed the sister of one of the men. They were in turn killed by a group of Muslims who were arrested for the murder, but rumors spread that they were released without charge.
Hindu Jats already saw the ruling socialist Samajwadi Party as partial to Muslims; Jats in the district traditionally voted for a regional party allied with the Congress Party. The BJP saw an opening. They held rallies and made incendiary speeches, arousing passions further.
About two weeks later, Hindu Jats held a panchayat, an assembly of villagers, to “save the honor of daughters and daughters-in-law.” Thousands attended. In videos of the meeting, young Jat men carrying scythes, rods, and swords shouted anti-Muslim slurs. Politicians from the BJP led the gathering, making provocative speeches. Hukum Singh, a BJP leader, roared: “The purpose of this panchayat is Hindu unity.” On their way to the assembly, Hindus stabbed two Muslims; on their way back, Muslims retaliated and killed thirteen Hindus, according to police officials. As word of the attacks spread, mobs of Hindu Jats began attacking Muslim homes in surrounding villages.
Bahar was home with his extended family when he heard the terrifying roar outside his house. A crowd armed with knives, scythes, country-made pistols, and swords flooded his street. Some carried jerry cans filled with gasoline. “They began setting our homes on fire,” Bahar recalled. “They attacked whomever they saw.” Bahar and his family escaped through the sugarcane fields surrounding their village and walked through the night. His family took shelter in the largely Muslim village of Kandhla. His grandfather, Mohammad Sukkan, a retired farmer in his early seventies, refused to leave.
As Bahar and his family settled into a refugee camp, they waited for news of Sukkan. “Thirteen people from our village were killed,” Bahar told me. “Only two bodies were found.” Eventually, police discovered Sukkan’s body in a canal, fifteen miles from Lisarh. Bahar showed me the photograph of his slain grandfather that the police gave the family. The body was covered in a white sheet; the head, severed from the neck by a sharp object, lay by the torso.
More than 40,000 people, mostly Muslims, were displaced from their homes. Sixty-two people were killed. After a few weeks, Bahar and a few others visited Lisarh. “They had burnt our houses,” he recalled. “Our stuff lay scattered in the alleys. I couldn’t bear to look at it.” In the spring, they moved with a few other families to a patch of agricultural land in Kandhla, a mile from their refugee camp. A few months later, government assistance provided to families victimized by the violence allowed them to buy a patch of land and rebuild a house of bare bricks. “Our village is eight kilometers from here but we can’t return home,” he said.
The violence drew a stark boundary through the region. Amit Shah, the Modi strategist, nominated several BJP politicians facing charges for inciting violence for the national elections. On the campaign trail, Shah described the polls as “an election for honor, for seeking revenge for the insult, and for teaching a lesson to those who committed injustice.”
At another public meeting in Muzaffarnagar, Shah returned to a subject Modi had spoken of earlier: that the Congress Party promoted slaughterhouses and the export of meat through tax breaks—a process he described as a Pink Revolution, referencing a speech Modi had given in Bihar lamenting the spread of large abattoirs across India. “When animals are killed, the color of their flesh is pink,” Modi said. “If you want to rear cows, the Congress government won’t give you any subsidy, but it offers subsidies to those who slaughter cows, to those who slaughter animals.” Although India’s meat exporters and traders include Hindus and Christians, many of those associated with the industry are Muslim. “Beggars have turned millionaires by running butcher houses,” Shah said, according to a report in Scroll. India’s national election commission censured Shah for his derogatory remarks and banned him from campaigning for a while. But after the BJP won 71 of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, Modi, deploying a cricket metaphor, described Shah as “the man of the match.”
The violence in Muzaffarnagar and the incendiary rhetoric during the campaign polarized the state on religious lines, uniting Hindu voters across the barriers of caste to vote for Modi and the BJP. One afternoon, as I drove through the crowded bazaars of Muzaffarnagar, posters of the Hollywood action movie Expendables 3 competed for attention with the faces of Hindu and Muslim politicians. A potholed road led off the town square to Khaderwala, a lower middle class neighborhood a few miles away, where many of Muzaffarnagar’s Dalits live.
Ram Kumar is among the wave of Dalit voters who helped Modi and Shah win the “match.” The 31-year-old tailor lives with his family in a three-room house on a narrow street in Khaderwala. Kumar and his neighbors always voted for the Bahujan Samaj Party, led by Kumari Mayawati, who became the first Dalit Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1995. Mayawati, who was 39 and unmarried when first elected Chief Minister in 1995, embodied a sense of dignity and power for India’s lowest castes, who suffered centuries of oppression. People referred to her as Behenji, an honorific for elder sister. A shrewd political operator, Mayawati was elected to lead India’s most populous state four times. But in the recent campaign dominated by Modi, she chose mostly non-Dalit candidates, hoping to reach out to non-Dalit voters. “Behenji forgot us, neglected us, and assumed that we will always vote for her,” Kumar said.
His turn from Dalit activism to Hindu nationalism was also prompted by the religious violence and tensions in Muzaffarnagar. After the riots, Muzaffarnagar was under military curfew for almost two weeks. Kumar walked me to the main street, which I had taken to reach his neighborhood. He pointed to an utility pole a few blocks away. “The Muslims live beyond that,” he said. He turned around and pointed toward a stretch of bigger houses. “There you have Jats, Brahmins, and other upper castes.” The Dalits lived in the middle. In the riots, Kumar said, the Dalits and upper-caste Hindus fell on one side of an unmarked boundary and the Muslims on the other side. “Nobody crossed from the Hindu area into the Muslim area for about a month,” he told me. The Dalits found little support from Mayawati during that volatile season. “It was the people from the BJP who stood by us here.” The Indian constitution reserves 17 of the 80 seats of the Lok Sabha for the Dalits; Modi’s candidates won them all.
The highway from Lucknow to Ayodhya, where Lal Krishna Advani wanted to build a grand Rama temple, cuts through empty fields and sparsely populated villages. On the banks of the ancient Sarayu River flanking the town, a group of old Brahmins sought refuge from the heat under a tree and played cards. Pilgrims ran down flights of stairs and bathed with their clothes on. The old temples—their domes a combination of Hindu and Muslim influences—looked run down, their façades peeling, in need of a coat of paint. It was a rather quaint scene for a place that had come to symbolize the strivings of Hindu nationalist politics, in whose name Advani furiously tore apart the country’s civic life and irrevocably broke the consensus of Nehruvian secularism as the religion of India.
For a few hours every day, pilgrims are allowed to visit and pray at the makeshift temple that marks Rama’s birthplace on the foundation of the mosque Advani worked to demolish. Armed police and paramilitary troops stood guard along the road to the site, which is officially known as Babri Mosque-Ram Birthplace. A row of shops sold everything from Hindu scriptures, copies of Arthashastra, plastic idols of Hindu gods, and DVDs showing the demolition of the mosque.
After being frisked at several checkpoints, I passed through a metal detector and entered a tunnel, just a few feet wide, covered by an aluminum wire mesh. I noticed sandbags and more soldiers with machine guns in the grassy ground beyond. About half a mile into the tunnel, in an opening in the wire mesh, two Hindu priests collected offerings behind a counter. Behind the priests, on a small patch of flat earth, was the makeshift temple built after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. I recognized a few idols of Rama and his wife Sita. A mound of exposed earth lay around it. I failed to see even a fragment of an arch, a section of the broken dome. The erasure of the mosque was complete. I left with a feeling that it was not the construction of the temple but the erasure of the mosque that seemed to have moved the Hindu nationalists.
As I walked back through the wire mesh tunnel, I got a call from Sandeep Trivedi, a young Brahmin from Faizabad, a few miles from Ayodhya. Trivedi had served as a wireless operator with a paramilitary force in my hometown in Indian-controlled Kashmir. After a few years, he left the force and found work as a civilian in New Delhi. We met in one of the few restaurants in Faizabad; the restaurant had bright red chairs and a large aquarium. Trivedi talked about Ayodhya, Faizabad, and the scores of villages around the conjoined towns. “Two criminal gangs attacked each other in the courtroom yesterday,” he said. “We have no working streetlights.” He lamented the world’s focus on Ayodhya’s religious and political histories and the utter neglect of civic amenities. “We don’t even have a sewage system that works.”
What most frustrated Trivedi was the region’s anemic healthcare system. At a certain point in the election campaign, a young woman from his wife’s family, who was expecting her first child, was moved to a hospital in Faizabad. The local doctors didn’t have the equipment for the medical tests she needed. The family was told that a hospital in Lucknow, 78 miles away, could help her, so they drove her there. “She lost her child on the way,” he told me. As the new globalized economy evaded small provincial towns, their decay accelerated, and the middle class continued to flee to glossy urban centers. “Anyone who can afford to buy or rent an apartment in Lucknow or New Delhi leaves Ayodhya and Faizabad,” Trivedi said. He hoped a new government might do better, and voted for Modi.