The new Indian government
This is more or less a response to Laelth's excellent post.
For those catching up: the largest democratic election in human history has just happened.
The joke making the stand-up rounds now is that the election just goes to show that a Gujarati will do anything for a US visa. Ha ha.
An element of Congress's collapse that should not be overlooked was the division of the state of Andhra Pradesh (you've probably heard of Hyderabad; that's its capital) and the creation of the new Telugu-majority state of Telangana. This completely divided Congress in the south and led to a macing of one MP by another on the floor of the Raj Sabha (their Senate, roughly). It was widely (and, frankly, fairly) seen as a cynical attempt at gerrymandering and even the Telugu nationalists who would normally want it felt left out of the process.
About the 1947 partition, I think it's always important to remember that the lines were literally drawn by a British civil servant who had never been to India. I'm using this comparison only because it's contemporary to it; if you know any Palestinians and how deeply they feel about the Naqba, it's like that, only affecting 10,000 times as many people. My Hindi teacher still remembers having to flee Sindh in the middle of the night as a little girl.
Modi neither started nor ended communal violence. He's not a figure like, for instance, Marathi nationalist Bal Thackery of the Shiv Sena, who openly and frequently encouraged his followers to riot. Modi's sin was failing to do anything to stop them, not encouraging them. Many Sikhs would point out that Sonia Gandhi (the Italian-born president of the Congress party and matriarch of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty) got a US visa and she has as much if not more to answer for from the 1984 massacre as Modi does from 2003.
Laelth touched on this, but it's important to remember that names in India are a kind of map. When you hear someone's name, that places them in location, community, religion, and caste (caste sort of covers all of those things -- but more on that in a minute). So, if you've heard of the actor Shah Rukh Khan, that name tells you immediately he's a Pathan Muslim whose parents probably moved from Pakistan during the partition (or before). That doesn't mean he believes in Islam, incidentally, just that that is his community. Similarly, the Prime Minister's name, Manmohan Singh, tells you he's Sikh and probably from Punjab. The President's, Pranab Mukherjee, tells you he is a Hindu Brahmin from West Bengal (that's where Calcutta, or as it's now called, Kolkata, is). I bring this up because the name "Narendra Modi" tells you he's a Ghanchi from Gujarat, one of the most economically disadvantaged groups in northern India (though was never nearly as poor as his hagiography makes him out to be). People have talked about the "electric" feeling for minorities in the US at looking on TV and seeing a non-white President; this is similar to that but frankly more intense. It's like having Lincoln's "born in a log cabin" story be inherent in his name.
Now, caste. Caste (it's pronounced just like "cast", incidentally, not "kayst"
is a very, very uncomfortable subject in India, more so even than race is in the US. Castes were legally abolished in India at independence, but that's like saying racism was legally abolished in the US with the Civil Rights Act: it was a start, not the end. It's not really comparable to anything in the US; it contains elements of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and community. There are, for instance, very rich Dalits ("untouchables" and very poor Brahmins (there's a Bengali saying along the lines of "never trust a Brahmin who took up a trade" . If you remember the Indian diplomat/maid kerfluffle from earlier this year, the maid was actually of a higher caste than the diplomat. The most historically disadvantaged castes are grouped into "schedules" and given quotas in civil service. This has been good for individuals in the community, but has bred corruption, nepotism, and resentment, and that resentment is barely under the surface in this election. When I said earlier that Modi was from "one of the" most disadvantaged castes, that's important: it was not the most. The Ghanchis were not scheduled (at least as far as I know). They are comparable to poor whites in the South, in that sense: near but not at the bottom, and resentful of people "below" them trying to work their way up. What's important here is that Congress has largely always been a coalition of Muslims, low caste Hindus, and the 1%, against a more communitarian lower-middle class. Up until now, that has been enough, but the emergence of a true bourgeois class presented it a challenge it did not rise to, and BJP did.
If I had to compare Modi to an American political figure, it would be Huey P. Long. I'd ask other people familiar with India to weigh in on this, but I stand by it.
Anyways, things should be interesting for the next few months.
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