Opinion: Why carbon pricing is not sufficient to mitigate climate change—and how “sustainability transition policy” can help
Daniel Rosenbloom, Jochen Markard, Frank W. Geels, and Lea Fuenfschilling
PNAS first published April 8, 2020 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004093117

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Carbon pricing is often presented as the primary policy approach to address climate change. We challenge this position and offer “sustainability transition policy” (STP) as an alternative. Carbon pricing has weaknesses with regard to five central dimensions: 1) problem framing and solution orientation, 2) policy priorities, 3) innovation approach, 4) contextual considerations, and 5) politics. In order to address the urgency of climate change and to achieve deep decarbonization, climate policy responses need to move beyond market failure reasoning and focus on fundamental changes in existing sociotechnical systems such as energy, mobility, food, and industrial production. The core principles of STP can help tackle this challenge.

Carbon Pricing Critique

Realizing deep decarbonization at the pace necessary to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change has emerged as a pressing challenge for policymakers (1). As a result, the debate about appropriate policy responses has intensified. Many experts and societal actors see carbon pricing as the primary way forward (2⇓–4). Some even use it to argue against other policies, such as fuel efficiency standards. Viewed as the most efficient approach to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon pricing incentivizes actors to seek the lowest-cost abatement options for their specific circumstances. Consequently, many economists argue that carbon pricing should be the cornerstone of a climate policy response.

We question this reasoning. Carbon pricing faces five major issues that limit its use for accelerating deep decarbonization. First, carbon pricing frames climate change as a market failure rather than as a fundamental system problem. Second, it places particular weight on efficiency as opposed to effectiveness. Third, it tends to stimulate the optimization of existing systems rather than transformation. Fourth, it suggests a universal instead of context-sensitive policy approach. Fifth, it fails to reflect political realities.

Given these limitations, we propose an alternative approach that targets fundamental transformations of existing sociotechnical systems, such as energy, mobility, or food (i.e., “sustainability transitions”) (5). STP entails a mix of contextually and politically sensitive policies that simultaneously drive low-carbon innovation and the decline of fossil fuels.





Market Failure versus System Problem

The underlying rationale for carbon pricing is appealing in its simplicity: GHG emissions are viewed as a negative externality because the social costs flowing from climate change impacts are not reflected in the market price of carbon-intensive goods and services (6). Climate change is framed as the consequence of a market failure that can be corrected by placing a price on carbon so that actors also pay for the social cost of their carbon-intensive activities and reduce their demand for such goods and services.

Framing the climate challenge as a market failure, however, fails to seriously appreciate its scope and depth. Indeed, the climate challenge has been referred to as a “grand challenge” (7) or “super wicked problem” (8) that has thus far resisted traditional policy approaches.


We argue that climate change can be more appropriately understood as a system problem. Core societal functions, such as heating or mobility, are met through large and deeply entrenched sociotechnical systems made up of interconnected technologies, infrastructures, regulations, business models, and lifestyles (1). Over many decades, these systems have become increasingly locked into the combustion of fossil fuels and the associated release of GHG emissions. Consider, for instance, how the design of cities has developed alongside the diffusion of the gasoline-powered personal automobile; how norms about comfort and attire have become entwined with energy-intensive indoor temperature regulation; and how important political and economic interests have become entrenched with fossil fuel-based resource development or electricity provision.

Addressing the climate challenge, therefore, involves fundamental changes to existing systems, referred to as “sustainability transitions” (5). These transitions entail profound and interdependent adjustments in sociotechnical systems that cannot be reduced to a single driver, such as shifts in relative market prices. In mobility, for example, a low-carbon transition might encompass interacting developments around new vehicle technologies (e.g., autonomous electric cars), infrastructures (e.g., vehicle charging stations and high-speed rail), business models (e.g., mobility as a service and intermodal transport), and regulation (e.g., emission performance standards) but also changes in city planning (e.g., reduced urban sprawl) and lifestyles (e.g., telework and local vacations). The market failure framing fails to appreciate the broad scope of the climate challenge and the sweep of system elements that must undergo change. And so, the resulting solution orientation is far from sufficient.




Efficiency versus Effectiveness

Carbon pricing strategies are often considered to be the most efficient means of reducing carbon emissions (4, 6). They do so by affording heterogeneous polluters (e.g., firms from different industries) the flexibility of responding to the carbon price signal in a least-cost fashion, selecting the level of abatement and specific abatement options that are most cost-effective for their circumstances. Abatement options are then adopted in a stepwise manner in line with the carbon price. Under a series of assumptions (e.g., economic rationality, perfect information, credibility, and broad coverage), the result is that “a given level of abatement is met at least global cost” which “no other instrument than pricing is able to realize” (2).

 

We question whether efficiency should be an overriding priority of climate policy. If we are to limit global warming to less than 1.5 °C, there is little time remaining to reach carbon neutrality (9). The negative impacts of climate change are already undermining human prosperity and the cost of inaction will escalate the longer we wait (10). Despite the urgency of the problem, carbon pricing places considerable weight on seeking low-hanging fruit and, according to Patt and Lilliestam, fails to appreciate that “we must eventually pick all of the apples on the tree” (11). Furthermore, as of 2019, existing carbon pricing schemes only cover about 20% of global emissions and more than two-thirds of these have prices below $20 United States dollars (USD) per ton of CO2 equivalent.* This is far too low to be effective and increasing coverage and prices presents serious challenges, which we return to below.

Efficiency considerations must, therefore, be tempered by an immediate need to realize carbon neutrality through whatever means actually work. This implies moving beyond lowest-cost solutions to stimulate a diversity of mitigation options, including those that have considerable immediate reduction potential (e.g., phasing out coal or restoring peatlands) and others that may fundamentally transform systems in the longer term (e.g., mobility-as-a-service or biobased materials).




Optimizing versus Transforming

By increasing the relative price of carbon-intensive goods and services, carbon pricing is understood to incentivize the adoption of existing low-carbon technologies and (indirectly) stimulate the development of low-carbon innovations (2). Investments in low-carbon alternatives are not only encouraged through present carbon prices but also through expectations about future carbon price increases.

It is, however, unclear how strong such innovation effects actually are and whether carbon pricing can generate more than incremental changes. Tvinnereim and Mehling (12), for instance, review the record of several prominent carbon pricing strategies and find that they have, to date, helped realize limited opportunities for innovation and system-wide transformation. Rather, current trajectories and emission reductions deviate little from business-as-usual scenarios, even in the case of Sweden’s $140 (USD) carbon price for the transport and building sectors. Others have observed similar patterns (13⇓–15). This suggests that, in practice, carbon pricing strategies tend to promote the optimization of established business models and technologies but neglect more fundamental system change necessary for deep decarbonization.

While optimization remains important, it does little to confront carbon lock-in, encourage radical innovation, or avoid dead-end paths (16). Indeed, research indicates that investments in long-lived, carbon-intensive infrastructures, such as natural gas, are still ongoing, even in jurisdictions with prominent carbon pricing regimes (12, 17). Retiring these investments prematurely in order to align with deep decarbonization pathways will be politically difficult and costly (i.e., due to compensation for affected firms and communities).

In contrast, we argue that incremental change alone is insufficient to pursue low-carbon pathways at the required pace. Established systems are characterized by deep lock-ins (e.g., large sunk costs in infrastructure and cultural conventions underpinning user practices) that encourage movement along established development trajectories (18, 19). Deliberately accelerating transitions, therefore, involves weakening lock-ins (e.g., removing fossil fuel subsidies and banning carbon-intensive technologies) and supporting system building for low-carbon alternatives (e.g., stimulating new innovations, business models, and markets).



Universal versus Context Sensitive Policy

Carbon pricing strategies tend to be predicated on the notion that, eventually, all emissions are covered so that all prices will be corrected such that no economic decision would escape carbon pricing’s regulatory impact (2). This means that all jurisdictions and economic sectors should be included, ideally with uniform price signals (6). In the absence of uniform pricing, there is a risk that some nations will free-ride on the efforts of others and that firms will relocate to places with lower or no carbon prices (i.e., “carbon leakage”).

Three issues confront this universal approach. First, the required levels of coordination and cooperation are unrealistic, as carbon pricing encounters a fragmented international climate policy landscape (20). In the absence of a global sovereign and considering the great diversity of national circumstances (where countries have different responsibilities for generating the problem, vulnerabilities, and resources to adapt and support mitigation), cooperation or convergence among emission pricing frameworks remain elusive. Second, a universal approach will require well-functioning institutional structures and high levels of regulatory competences and monitoring systems, which do not exist everywhere. Third, carbon pricing strategies tend to ignore that policies need to be tailored to local and/or sectoral contexts in order to address specific sources of lock-in and opportunities for innovation.

Carbon pricing functions well in sectors, such as electricity, with large, fixed-point sources, where alternative technologies are available and polluters cannot easily relocate; it’s more difficult to implement in agro-food, transport, and heavy industry (14). Agro-food systems are characterized by manifold commodities, dispersed production (millions of farmers) in highly variable contexts (soil conditions, climate, local communities), and deeply entrenched cultural conventions, such as tastes and dietary habits (21), which all make it extremely difficult to assess the level of an effective carbon price and implement this throughout the system. Existing and proposed carbon prices also face problems in transport, often translating into pennies on the gallon. Such effects fall short of inducing the needed lifestyle changes or even being distinguished from standard oil market fluctuations.

This highlights the major difference between systems across different sectors, scales, and locations. The geophysical resources, infrastructures, actor networks, and availability of low-carbon alternatives diverge markedly from one system to another. Thus, the specific package of policy solutions (e.g., performance standards versus technology mandates) will also vary accordingly. And, given the above-mentioned challenges facing a uniform global response, climate policy will be defined by layered and interacting efforts within and across different contexts (22).


Many are eager to take more substantive policy steps to address climate change, but pricing carbon pricing alone won’t be sufficient. Image credit: Shutterstock/Shawn Goldberg.

Political Realities

A transparent price signal is often considered to be a core benefit of carbon pricing strategies, as it conveys information about the external costs of greenhouse gases to consumers and firms, allowing them to internalize these costs in their decision-making (6). Market forces, in this view, act as the principal drivers of change. The primary role of government is to “set the right price” and “leave the rest to the market.” This, however, fails to acknowledge the substantial contestation around climate policy and the political nature of markets.

Carbon pricing strategies are not politically neutral but normative endeavors (i.e., centered on what constitutes appropriate solutions and why) with major distributional consequences (i.e., who will win or lose). As with the majority of climate policies, they threaten the endowments of incumbent firms and industries. Many of these actors have responded by using their considerable influence to resist and weaken the stringency of carbon pricing measures, such as the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (23). Carbon pricing has also attracted political resistance among the broader public, as it is perceived to challenge longstanding practices and livelihoods, such as car-based and suburban lifestyles. Political opponents have been quick to exploit these cleavages around carbon pricing, leading to important electoral victories and climate policy reversals in Canada, France, Australia, and many other jurisdictions (24). While some advocates propose revenue recycling from carbon pricing to encourage public acceptance (3), far more is needed to appreciate the “irreducibly political character” of climate policy (25).

In this way, we argue for more explicit engagement with the politics of climate policy. While politics tends to be regarded as a barrier to climate action, research suggests that well-designed climate policies can also generate self-reinforcing political dynamics that can set in motion transformative processes (26⇓–28). Sequences of policies designed to strengthen supportive coalitions with an interest in low-carbon alternatives (e.g., networks of innovators, communities, and civil society actors) may create conditions for political victories and more ambitious climate policies over subsequent rounds of political debate and policymaking (27).


Sustainability Transition Policy (STP)

Given the limitations of a climate response based on carbon pricing strategies, we offer “sustainability transition policy” (STP) as an alternative (Table 1). Framing the climate challenge as a system problem, STP emphasizes the rapid and effective reduction of emissions, system transformation and radical innovation, the development of context-sensitive responses, and the inherent political nature of decarbonization.

Table 1.

Comparison of carbon pricing strategies and sustainability transition policy

	Carbon pricing strategies	Sustainability transition policy
Conceptual roots	Neoclassical economics	Innovation studies, evolutionary economics, institutional theory
Problem framing and solution orientation	Climate change as a market failure problem: price carbon to correct market signals	Climate change as a system problem: fundamentally transform existing sociotechnical systems
Overriding policy priority	Efficiency: reduce carbon emissions while keeping the economy wide costs at a minimum	Effectiveness: drive down emissions as quickly as possible
Innovation approach	Incremental change, indirect stimulation of innovation	Transformative change, direct stimulation of innovation
Contextual considerations	Universality: carbon pricing for all jurisdictions and sectors	Tailoring: policies should be adapted to local and sectoral contexts
Understanding of politics	Revenue recycling to deal with political realities	Creation of alternatives and formation of supportive coalitions

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Table 1. Comparison of carbon pricing strategies and sustainability transition policy


Indeed, STP is predicated on the notion that a low-carbon transition will involve multiple and co-evolving social and technological changes. Many levers will need to be pulled and deliberately aligned to realize change—from supporting emerging innovations and decommissioning existing technologies or infrastructure, to building coalitions of actors and interests, to (re)designing market rules and planning processes, to legitimizing new practices and related social norms. Carbon pricing can be part of this policy mix, but should not be seen as the single best or primary instrument.

Embracing these varied levers, STP is not about a single policy intervention but a coherent sequence of policy decisions—and associated changes in technologies, business models, and practices—that together drive potential decarbonization pathways for sociotechnical systems under conditions of complexity and uncertainty (29). Broadly, STP targets innovation and decline (30). That is, it includes policies to support low-carbon innovations and their upscaling, as well as policies to exert pressure on carbon-intensive products, technologies, and practices to eventually stimulate their decline (Fig. 1). Innovation is important to continually develop alternatives. Decline is crucial to break up lock-ins and to signal to producers and consumers that fundamental changes are necessary.



Fig. 1.

To achieve a low carbon future, we need not only policies that encourage innovations such as solar photovoltaics, but policies that discourage carbon-intensive technologies, such as coal. And those policies should enlist a variety of instruments that adapt over time.

STP also acknowledges that transitions develop through different phases, from early takeoff to later acceleration and consolidation (31, 32). Early-stage innovations, for example, need experimentation in protected spaces (i.e., niches, which shield their development from harsh competitive pressures) (33). Accelerating low-carbon innovation requires diffusion and deployment policies that aim at embedding and scaling niche experiments beyond their initial boundaries, targeting, for example, the creation of new networks, entrepreneurial activities, and standards, as well as education and training.

There is a similar phase-logic with respect to decline. Destabilization and weakening lock-in mechanisms can create windows of opportunity for new practices, business models, and technologies (34). Policy instruments for destabilization include divestment strategies, removal of fossil fuel subsidies, carbon pricing, or stronger environmental standards. To accelerate decline, policy also has a role to play in implementing phaseouts. Otherwise, problematic technologies can persist for decades. Phase-out policies have, for instance, targeted incandescent light bulbs, coal-fired power, and nuclear power.

STP also appreciates the central place of policy and politics. Climate or transition policies are layered on top of existing institutional frameworks, which means that policy formulation and implementation is a complex, messy, and often piecemeal process that resists optimal solutions. And, in the face of political conflict and resistance, it is crucial to generate societal and business support for climate policy responses. This is why stimulating low-carbon innovations and associated supportive coalitions with a material interest in these innovations is of critical importance. Over subsequent cycles of policymaking, climate policies, low-carbon innovations, and supportive coalitions can mutually reinforce one another to drive low-carbon pathways. In general, STP calls for new modes of governance that are better-suited to the context of transformative change. Such an approach recognizes the importance of continually adapting specific measures in response to new developments and learning but also acknowledges that the overarching directionality of policy (commitments, resources, etc.) should be stabilized in order to drive a transition (28).

In summary, the dominant logic of contemporary climate policy, in which carbon pricing is the central policy response, is deeply flawed. Given the aforementioned shortcomings, carbon pricing should not be the primary policy strategy to combat climate change. Instead, carbon pricing should be used as part of a policy mix that promotes innovation and decline, accounts for political dynamics, varies between sectors and over time, and aims at profound system change.

Acknowledgments

D.R. would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. J.M. acknowledges the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research, financially supported by Innosuisse under Grant No. KTI 1155000154.


Footnotes

1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: daniel.rosenbloom@utoronto.ca.

The authors declare no competing interest.

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and have not been endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences.

*Data are drawn from The World Bank Group’s Carbon Pricing Dashboard.

Published under the PNAS license.

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COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In 'Disconcerting' Move

April 10, 2020 VANESSA ROMO

A bottle of hydroxycloroquine sits on a table outside the entrance to The Resort 
at Texas City nursing home, where Robin Armstrong, a doctor and the home's
 medical director, is giving the drug to COVID-19 residents.David J. Phillip/AP

Concern is mounting after a doctor at a Texas nursing home started giving the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to dozens of elderly patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and tracking the outcomes in what he's calling an "observational study."

Use of the drug to treat coronavirus infections has set up a heated debate between the Trump administration and leading health experts over its efficacy against COVID-19.

President Trump has been an enthusiastic champion of hydroxychloroquine, calling it a "game-changer." But some of the nation's most respected health officials have said there is insufficient evidence showing that the 80-year-old drug, which is typically used to stave off malaria or treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, is a viable treatment in battling the new virus.

The Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drug for the treatment of COVID-19. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is currently tracking clinical trials of the drug. Additionally, the University of Minnesota is undertaking a trial and Columbia University is as well. Results are not expected for weeks or months.

The controversial decision to administer hydroxychloroquine at The Resort at Texas City over the last few days was made by Robin Armstrong, a physician and medical director of the nursing home.

"It's actually going well. People are getting better," Armstrong told NPR, adding that after just a handful of days, some of the 39 patients on the medication are showing signs of improvement.

But scientists argue that relying on observational, uncontrolled evidence can be misleading and that the only way to truly prove a drug is working is through carefully controlled clinical trials. And, contrary to Armstrong's assertion that hydroxychloroquine "has virtually no side effects," it is known to have serious negative health impacts. That is why so many in the medical community worry about prescribing it without such proof.

Among them is Katherine Seley-Radtke, who is a medicinal chemist at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She specializes in antiviral drug research, including coronaviruses.

"This is really disconcerting," Seley-Radtke told NPR.

Armstrong admits it is difficult to quantify how much of his elderly patients' improvement is due to the malaria drug or how they would have fared without it. Nor can he explain why other patients are not responding to the tablet doses, though he notes many are only halfway through the five-day cycle.

"To be clear, no one is worse than when they started," he said emphatically. "From my perspective, it's irresponsible to sit back and do nothing. The alternative would have been much much worse."

In total, 87 people at The Resort tested positive — 56 of 135 residents as well as 31 staffers. One patient has since died.

TEST TEST TEST 

"We know how it happened," Armstrong said, explaining that after one staffer tested positive for COVID-19, Galveston County officials tested all other people at the facility on April 2. What they uncovered was one of the largest outbreaks in the Houston region.

"One staffer spread it to other staffers ... and each of them could work with 20 to 30 patients a day," Armstrong said.

Armstrong said he was alarmed by the test results last week and immediately began making calls to track down a source for the medicine, which is in short supply.

That's when his political connections proved useful.

Armstrong, who is a prominent GOP activist, called Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He says Patrick reached out to Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, also a Republican, who knew someone on the board of the New Jersey-based company Amneal Pharmaceuticals. The company, which makes and distributes the drug, has donated more than a million tablets nationwide, including to the states of Texas and Louisiana.

Two days later, Armstrong had received more than enough medication to begin giving it to patients. He said he started by screening those he believed would benefit most and added more people each day. He monitored their blood oxygen saturation, temperatures and how well they were breathing.

"The people who are on it were getting sicker but were not so sick that they had to go the hospital," Armstrong explained.

He acknowledged that some families were not aware their relatives were put on the drug, saying that "for the most part," he consulted with each nursing home resident prior to giving them on the tablets.

While the "overwhelming majority of them are awake and alert and can actually have a conversation," Armstrong said some suffer from middle stages of dementia. In some cases, he did not discuss prescribing the tablets with anyone at all before doing so. He said it is common for physicians to prescribe new medications to patients without explicit consent from the patient or family members. "It's not required," he said.

He explained he was convinced by clinical studies from Europe and China showing that hydroxychloroquine helps COVID-19 patients recover from the respiratory illness because it works as "essentially an anti-inflammatory drug."

He has some anecdotal evidence: "I've seen it in COVID-19 patients we're treating" at HCA Houston Healthcare Mainland Hospital, Armstrong said.

The health care network confirmed Armstrong is a practicing physician at the hospital but would not comment on treatment of patients because of privacy concerns.

Armstrong said he is tracking the nursing home patients' health changes daily and plans to put his findings in "some kind of report" that he hopes will add to the research on the malarial drug in relation to COVID-19.

"The problem with this is that it's not being conducted in a proper scientific manner," Seley-Radtke said. "It's not being carried out with controls. It's not being carried out under strict testing protocols and using appropriate guidelines."

She noted warnings issued by the FDA that the drug can lead to severe problems for people with heart issues and noted that the agency urges doctors to conduct an EKG before prescribing it. (A step Armstrong said was taken on Thursday.) Another side effect involves damage to the retina.

Because it is still in the experimental stages, how much to use is not clear.

"We know the right dosages for malaria and lupus and rheumatoid arthritis but don't know yet what the right dosages are [for COVID-19], that's why we are doing clinical trials to make sure we get it right," she said.

Seley-Radtke added: "I just find it amazing that everybody, including the President, thinks that this is just no big deal to go ahead and take this."

Armstrong denies he was swayed by politics or Trump's championing of the malaria drug in his decision to implement it at the nursing home before it has been proven safe and effective against COVID-19.

"It's up to a medical professional to determine how and when it would be appropriate to prescribe," Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told NPR.

Armstrong said most COVID-19-positive residents at the nursing home are asking to be on the medication "but we're being very judicious."

Despite the grim tally of positive cases among such a vulnerable population, he said the spread of the virus at the nursing home could have been much worse had staff there not implemented social distancing precautions before they were mandated by the state.

"We took a lot of steps early on that protected a lot of people," he said.

The most recent comprehensive inspection of the facility by Texas Health and Human Services occurred on July 25, 2019, according to a spokesperson.

At the time, the nursing home was cited for 14 violations of state standards. Among them, the report shows:

The facility did not properly care for residents needing special services, including: injections, colostomy, ureterostomy, ileostomy, tracheostomy care, tracheal suctioning, respiratory care, foot care and prostheses.

The facility did not store, cook and give out food in a safe and clean way.

The facility was not designed, built, equipped or well-kept to protect the health and safety of residents, workers and the public.

FROM THE ARCHIVE
India’s New Face
Meet Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat and the brightest star in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party. 

Under Modi, Gujarat has become an economic dynamo.

 But he also presided over India’s worst communal riots in decades, a 2002 slaughter that left almost 2,000 Muslims dead. 

Exploiting the insecurities and tensions stoked by India’s opening to the world, Modi has turned his state into a stronghold of Hindu extremism, shredding Gandhi’s vision of secular coexistence in the process. 

One day, he could be governing the world’s largest democracy.

HE IS RULING THE WORLDS DEMOCRACY AND ALL THIS HAS COME TRUE

ROBERT D. KAPLAN THE ATLANTIC APRIL  2009 ISSUE


PHOTO BY RAGHU RAI/MAGNUM PHOTOS

IF THE SPIRIT of modern India has a geographic heartland it is Gujarat, the northwestern state bordering Sindh, in Pakistan. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the mahatma—Sanskrit for “great soul”—was a Gujarati, born in Porbandar, on the Arabian Sea, in 1869. The signal event of the Indian independence movement was the Salt March that Gandhi, joined by thousands, led in March 1930 across Gujarat, from the Sabarmati Ashram 241 miles south to Dandi, on the Gulf of Cambay. There Gandhi picked up a handful of salt on the beach and defied the British law prohibiting the collection or sale of salt by anyone but the colonial authorities. “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor,” Gandhi wrote. In a letter to the viceroy he argued, “I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint. As the independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning will be made with this evil.”


Gandhi’s identification with the poor was intrinsic to his universalist philosophy. As he put it:
I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. It means in its nakedness that in order to achieve the supposed good of 51 per cent the interests of 49 per cent may be, or rather, should be sacrificed. It is a heartless doctrine and has done harm to humanity. The only real dignified human doctrine is the greatest good of all.

To protect the poor against the ravages of capitalism, which benefits only the majority rather than everyone, India would adopt socialism after independence. More to the point, although the Hindus would numerically dominate, they could not ignore or trample the rights of tens of millions of Muslims. Indeed, the “greatest good” necessitated that the conscience of the new nation and the ruling Congress Party be avowedly secular.

But the spirit of India has undergone an uneasy shift in this new era of rampant capitalism and of deadly ethnic and religious tensions, which arise partly as violent reactions against exactly the social homogenization that globalization engenders. Gujarat finds itself once again at the heart of what is roiling India, and what singularly menaces the country’s rise to “Great Global Power” status. India is home to 154 million Muslims, the third-largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan. India has arguably more to lose from extremist Islam than any other country in the world. Yet, as Dwijendra Tripathi, a historian based in Gujarat, lamented to me, “The Hindu-Muslim divide here is worse than at any time since the partition.” Not coincidentally, this rift is deepening even as Gujarat booms economically, with brand-new malls, multi plexes, highways, and private ports transforming it into a pulsing region-state athwart Indian Ocean trade routes.

Gujarat’s heightened religious tensions stem from “2002,” as it is simply called by everybody in Gujarat and the rest of India. In the local lexicon, that year has attained a symbolism perhaps as resilient as the force of “9/11” for Americans. It connotes an atrocity that will not die, a sectarian myth-in-the-making that constitutes a hideous rebuke to Gandhi’s Salt March. And at its epicenter stands another charismatic Gujarati, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, an icon of India’s economic growth and development, and a leading force in the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata (Indian People’s) Party, or BJP.

What local human-rights groups label the “pogrom” began with the incineration of 58 Hindu train passengers on February 27, 2002, in Godhra, a town with a large Muslim population and a stop on the rail journey from Gujarat to Uttar Pradesh, in north-central India. The Muslims who reportedly started the fire had apparently been taunted by other Hindus who had passed through en route to Ayodhya, in Uttar Pradesh, on their way to demonstrate for a Hindu temple to be built on the site of a demolished Mughal mosque. Recently installed as chief minister, Modi decreed February 28 a day of mourning, so that the passengers’ funerals could be held in downtown Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city. “It was a clear invitation to violence,” writes Edward Luce, the Financial Times correspondent in India, in his book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. “The Muslim quarters of Ahmedabad and other cities in Gujarat turned into death traps as thousands of Hindu militants converged on them.” In the midst of the riots, Modi approvingly quoted Newton’s third law: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Mobs coalesced and Hindu men raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, then setting them all on fire. Muslim men were forced to watch the ritualistic killings before they, too, were put to death. More than 400 women were raped; 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, murdered; and 200,000 more made homeless throughout the state.

The killers were dressed in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the uniform of the RSS, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Organization of National Volunteers)—the umbrella group of the Hindu nationalist movement—and came armed with swords and gas cylinders, as well as electoral registers and computer printouts of addresses. The police stood by and observed the killings, and in some cases, according to Human Rights Watch, helped the rioters locate Muslim addresses. As for the 200,000 made homeless, the Gujarati state government provided very little in the way of relief, or compensation for the loss of life and businesses. Today, much of Ahmedabad’s Muslim population remains sequestered in squalid relief communities that Modi once called “baby-making factories.”

For all its carnage and horrors, 2002 also continues to echo because of Modi’s subsequent political success. In a remarkable three terms as chief minister, he has never apologized, has never demonstrated regret of any sort for 2002, and has become a hero to the Hindu nationalist movement. Furthermore, his machine-like efficiency, financial probity, and dynamic leadership of the government bureaucracy have made Gujarat a mecca for development, garnering more internal investment than any other state in India. Migrants, both Hindu and Muslim, from throughout India have been streaming into Gujarat to find work at its expanding factories.

There is an element of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore in Modi’s Gujarat. What’s more, Modi’s hypnotic oratory and theatrical flair have led some to compare him to Hitler. Certainly he is the most charismatic Indian political leader to emerge since Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.

Of course, Modi is neither Lee Kuan Yew nor Adolf Hitler. He is what he is, a new kind of hybrid politician—part CEO with prodigious management abilities, part rabble-rouser with a fierce ideological following—who is both impressive and disturbing in his own right. While Barack Obama may give hope to millions in the new century, a leader like Modi demonstrates how the century can also go very wrong when charismatic politicians use modern electoral tactics and technology to create and exploit social divisions, and then pursue their political and economic goals with cold bureaucratic efficiency. And here is why Modi is so important: although he is not his party’s standard-bearer going into this spring’s national elections, his popularity and influence in the BJP mean that he could one day be governing the world’s largest democracy.

AS HINDU IDEOLOGUE and innovative CEO of Company Gujarat, Modi in many ways embodies his state’s history: his character testifies to Gujarat’s vibrant, outward-looking entrepreneurial spirit and its hard-edged communalism, and his trajectory follows the larger trends that have brought the state, and the country, to this uneasy moment.

Gujarat’s vast seaboard—the longest in India—looks westward to the Middle East and Africa, and so Gujarat has been a land of trade and migration. During the age of British imperialism, Gujarati businessmen sold cloth to Yemenis and were paid in silver, which they then lent to English merchants, who bought Yemeni coffee, sold it, and repaid their lenders, so that the Gujarati businessmen made a double profit. In the 19th century, large Gujarati communities sprang up in British East Africa. Later, when America beckoned and loosened its visa restrictions, Gujaratis flooded to its shores, becoming, among other things, motel proprietors and Silicon Valley software tycoons.

Faith—both Hindu and Muslim—underpinned the business networking, providing a social and cultural framework. Thus have two devout, highly distinct ethnic and religious communities operated easily within Gujarat’s cosmopolitan framework. Even as the state leads India in electronic governance and indexes of economic freedom, it also has the tightest dietary restrictions; alcohol is prohibited in this land of Gandhi, and vegetarianism (partly the result of the religious influence of the Jains) is widespread. Indeed, Hindus in Gujarat negatively associate meat-eating with the late-medieval Mughals, the Muslim conquerors from Central Asia who were another critical factor shaping the Gujarati historical experience.

Gujarat’s post on a frontier zone of the subcontinent exposed the state to repeated Muslim invasions. Some of the worst depredations came at the hands of the Turco-Persian ruler Mahmud of Ghazni, who swept down from eastern Afghanistan and in 1025 destroyed the seaside Hindu temple of Somnath. During a trip to India last fall, whenever I mentioned the events of 2002 to Hindu nationalists, they would lecture me about the crimes of Mahmud of Ghazni. For these Hindus, the past is alive, as if it happened yesterday.

This combination of geography and history has made Gujarat fertile ground for Hindutva (Hindu-ness) and for the Hindu nationalist movement that first emerged in the 1920s and that has since given birth to a wide range of Hindu organizations, beginning, most notably, in 1925 with the RSS, a vast, volunteer-driven self-help corps. As members of the Hindu nationalist movement such as Vijay Chauthaiwale, a molecular biologist, told me, the RSS provided a “true Hindu voice lost by the pro-Muslim tilt of the Congress Party. Muslims invaded in earlier centuries. They conquered,” he told me. “We lost. The British conquered. We lost. We were a defeated society. We needed to come together as Hindus.”

Narendra Modi, who was born into a middle-caste family in Gujarat in 1950, joined an RSS-inspired student group, going on to become a pracharak—a “propagator,” or propagandist—for the RSS itself. Unmarried, the pracharaks live sparely, inspiring hundreds of workers while trying to remain faceless, in an effort to eliminate their own egos. The average pracharak serves only two or three years before marrying and resuming a normal life. Modi is unusual. He was a pracharak for close to a decade. In 1987, he joined the BJP, which had been founded in 1980 to advance Hindutva in the political sphere. One year later, he became the party’s state general secretary.

Modi entered the political arena just as larger forces were propelling the BJP forward. Information technology enabled standardized and ideologized versions of Hinduism and Islam to emerge: just as Shiites became united across the Middle East, Hindus became united across India, and the same for Sunni Muslims. Meanwhile, the spread of education made people aware of their own histories, supplying them with grievances that they never had before. “The Hindu poor are blissfully ignorant of Mahmud of Ghazni. It is the middle class that now knows this history,” explained one local human-rights worker. That is why Hindu nationalism is strongest not among the poor and uneducated, but among the professional classes: scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and so on. In the eyes of this new, right-wing cadre of middle- and upper-middle-class Hindus, India was a civilization before it was a state, and while the state has had to compromise with minorities, the civilization originally was unpolluted (purely Hindu, that is)—even if the truth is far more complex.

The economic reforms of the 1990s, which brought India truly into the vanguard of globalization, aggravated these Hindu-chauvinistic tendencies. Because the socialistic nation-state of Hindus and Muslims had become a thing of the past, both groups needed a strengthened communal identity to anchor them inside an insipid world civilization. This need has been especially apparent among Gujaratis living overseas: even as successful immigrants in the United States, they have engaged in a search for roots that they have transmitted back to relatives at home.

Against this backdrop, Modi has gone from strength to strength. Promoted in 1995 to become the BJP’s national secretary, he helped orchestrate the party’s rise to power. After taking over the chief ministership in the wake of a disastrous earthquake, in 2001, he has been reelected twice, becoming Gujarat’s longest-serving leader. During his visits to villages, pregnant women regularly touch his feet so that their newborn will be like him. He is so honest that gifts for him are regularly deposited in the state treasury—a far cry from the corruption and nepotism that are so routine in Indian government. Even those Indians who despise Modi’s politics acknowledge his skill and power.

MODI’S OFFICE IS on an upper floor of a massive, scabby-faced ministry building in Gandhinagar, the planned city of government workers north of Ahmedabad that is a monument to the flawed architectural schemes of formerly socialist India. Outside his door, Western businessmen and investors in expensive suits clustered after meetings with the chief minister. At 5 p.m. sharp, I was ushered in. Modi sat behind a desk that looked over a long committee table. He wore traditional paijama pants and a long, elegant brown kurta—ironically, the traditional dress of India imported by the Mughals. A row of pens lined his pocket. Rimless glasses rested on his face. He had a clipped and distinguished salt-and-pepper beard. His was a handsome, welcoming visage. A small stack of documents lay in front of him. He thrust them at me before I even asked my first question. “I heard you were interested in development here, so here are your answers.” What he gave me was not the usual promotional brochures, but long lists of sourced statistics put together by an aide. Gujarat had experienced 10.2 percent annual GDP growth since 2002. It had eight new universities. In recent years, almost half the new jobs created in India were in Gujarat. The state ranked first in poverty alleviation, first in electricity generation.

Was Modi trying to create another Singapore or Dubai in Gujarat, a place that would be, in a positive sense, distinct from the mother brand of India?, I asked him.

“No,” came the reply. “Singapore and Dubai are city-states. There can be many Singapores and Dubais here. We will have a Singapore in Kutch,” he said, waving his arm dismissively, “and GIFT [Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, a new high-tech city planned nearby] can be like Dubai. Gujarat as a whole will be like South Korea. Global commerce is in our blood,” he added, lifting his eyebrows for emphasis. There was a practiced theatricality about the way he talked. I could see how he moves crowds, or takes over boardrooms. I have met Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and both Bushes. At close range, Modi beats them all in charisma. Whenever he opened his mouth, he suddenly had real, mesmerizing presence.

His ambition seemed grandiose: South Korea is the world’s 13th-largest economy. Yet I could understand the comparison. Like Gujarat, South Korea is a vast peninsula open to major sea-lanes. It emerged as an industrialized, middle-class dynamo, not under democratic rule but under the benign authoritarianism of Park Chung Hee in the 1960s and ’70s. I mentioned this to Modi. He said he wasn’t interested in talking about politics, just development. Of course, politics represents freedom, and his momentary lack of interest in politics was not accidental. Modi’s entire governing style is antidemocratic, albeit quite effective, emphasizing reliance on a lean, stripped-down bureaucracy of which he has taken complete personal control, even as he has pushed his own political party to the sidelines, almost showing contempt for it.

Modi spoke to me in clipped, to-the-point phrases, with a didactic tone, about the cosmopolitan trading history of Gujarat going back 5,000 years, and how Parsis and others had come to its shores and been assimilated into the Hindu culture. I asked him about the contribution of the Muslims, who make up 11 percent of the state’s population. “We are a spiritual, god-fearing people,” he answered. “We are by and large vegetarians. Jainism and Buddhism impacted us positively. We want to create a Buddhist temple here to honor Buddha’s remains.” He then prompted me for my next question. He had nothing further to say. His terse responses spoke volumes: Muslims, of course, are meat-eaters.

I asked if he had any regrets about anything he had done or failed to do since becoming chief minister seven years earlier. Again, he had nothing to say. I then asked specifically if he regretted 2002. His answer: “There are so many views about that. Who am I to judge?” He said that a commission would decide about his role in the riots. In fact, a preliminary report by a commission from his own state bureaucracy had already absolved him of any wrongdoing.

“There was no Kalinga effect on Modi,” Hanif Lakdawala, a Muslim who runs a human-rights NGO, told me. He was referring to a war fought in the third century B.C. by the Mauryan Empire under King Ashoka against the kingdom of Kalinga on the eastern coast of India. Ashoka’s forces slew 100,000 civilians. Yet the slaughter left Ashoka with so much guilt that he dedicated his life thereafter to nonviolence and the peaceful development of his empire.

I wondered if Modi felt differently behind closed doors. By all accounts, after the riots, he manically dedicated himself to development, sleeping less than four hours every night, up at 5 a.m. to check his e-mail and read the local papers, visiting about 3,000 of the 7,000 villages in the state, and empowering the lowest reaches of its bureaucracy through his slogan, “Less government, more governance.” As Atul Tandan, director of the Mudra Institute of Communications, in Ahmedabad, told me, “You have to separate Modi’s political ideology from his management ability. Because there is not a hint of corruption about him, Modi is effective because people believe his decisions are only results-oriented.” Even many Muslims have come to respect Modi for cracking down on the gambling and criminal rackets that have infested some of their communities.

Nevertheless, there were so many ingenious ways Modi could have shown remorse for what happened in 2002 without directly admitting guilt, and he had expressed no interest in doing so. Perhaps it was a Machiavellian ploy: first, allow RSS forces to launch what most neutral observers said was a methodical killing spree in 2002, and then turn toward development after you have used violence to consolidate power and concentrate the minds of your enemies. But Machiavelli believed in using only the minimum amount of cruelty to attain a positive collective result, and thus any more cruelty than was absolutely necessary did not, as he put it, qualify as virtue.

“I am from a poor family,” Modi told me. “If I had become a teacher, it would have made my family happy. But I got involved in a national patriotic movement, the RSS, where one must sacrifice. As a pracharak, I was like a Hindu monk in a white dress. My Hindu philosophy: terrorism is the enemy of humanism.” I assumed he meant Islamic terrorism, which accounts for most large-scale violent attacks in India. He compared himself to Gandhi: “When the British ruled, so many fought for independence, and Gandhi turned this into a mass movement. I have converted economic development into a mass-movement psychology.” His words echoed through the empty room. “I have a toll-free number where callers hear my recorded voice and can make complaints against the government, and the relevant department must respond within a week.”

He rolled off his accomplishments: “modern roads, private railroads with double-decker containers, 50,000 kilometers of fiber-optic networks, 2,200 kilometers of gas pipelines, 1,400 kilometers of drinking-water pipelines to 7,000 villages, 24-hour uninterrupted power in rural areas, the first Indian state with private ports, a totally integrated coastal-development plan, two LNG [liquefied natural gas] terminals and two new ones coming on line.” Statistics and lists seemed to have a spellbinding effect on him. He quantified everything.

He mentioned, too, the plant to be built in Gujarat by Tata Motors, which will employ several thousand workers to produce the Nano, the world’s cheapest car, priced at $2,500. Luring Tata, perhaps India’s most prestigious company, to Gujarat had been a coup for Modi, and billboards around Ahmedabad proclaimed his accomplishment. “For so long, the whole coastal area had been subjugated to Mumbai,” he said. “But now the richness is coming back home to Gujarat. Gujarat will be the center point for east-west connectivity, from Africa to Indonesia.”

He is a very driven man, with no personal life, from what I gathered. He exuded power and control. How could he not have been implicated in the 2002 pogrom?, I asked myself.

A NUMBER OF HINDUS, all of them of the enlightened, cosmopolitan class, as well as Muslims and several foreign writers, told me that Modi’s personality contains an element of fascism. Sophia Khan, a human-rights worker, put it bluntly: “He’s a fascist man. We Muslims don’t exist for him. Our neighborhoods are called mini-Pakistans, while the Hindus live where the malls and multiplexes are.”

Is Modi a fascist? Although episodes in his political career and his role in the events of February 2002 suggest as much, the answer is, ultimately, no. “What makes Modi different from Hitler,” explained Prasad Chacko, who heads a local NGO, “is that while Hitler thought fascism the end result of political evolution, Modi knows that Hindutva is only a phase that cannot last, so now he focuses on development, not communal divides.” In fact, Modi has recently gone after the very Hindu nationalists who put him in power, arresting some members of a Hindu-chauvinist group. He can’t or won’t apologize for 2002. Therefore, showing that he is less extremist than other Hindu-firsters has become his method for gaining acceptance on the national stage, in advance of running for prime minister, according to Achyut Yagnik, a journalist and historian.

Modi is helped in his ambition by the general atmosphere of civilizational tension. Whether it be the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat posed by Iran, possible chaos in Pakistan, or Islamic terrorism in Kashmir and in India itself, the global situation reminds Hindus—the overwhelming majority of Indian voters—how much they have to fear from Muslim radicalism, and how much Modi signifies a bulwark against it: not through any specific act nowadays, but through the whole aura of his no-nonsense rule. As much as India fears Pakistan, it fears Pakistan’s collapse even more. The threat of Islamic anarchy in the region is perfectly suited to the further consolidation of Hindu nationalism, even as intercommunal tension represents, arguably, a more profound threat to the country than even the increasingly drastic shortage of water. What I encountered in interviews with victims of the 2002 violence was not so much radicalization, but alienation from India, evidenced by their withdrawal into their own communities, their reluctance to venture among Hindus.

The corresponding Hindu fear of Islam runs parallel with a more understated but palpable yearning for order. India’s rise as an economic and naval power has invited frustrating comparisons with China: whereas the authoritarian government in China can make things happen, development happens in India mainly in spite of the government. Hanif Lakdawala told me that, especially because of the nightmarish chaos of Indian cities, “there are some in this country ready to accept a fascist, or at least a very strong dictator.”

Not a fascist, in my opinion, but certainly someone like Modi. As Vimal Ambani, a prominent, liberal-minded Gujarati businessman, told me, “At the end of the day, Modi still offers the best model for governance in India.”

OF COURSE, MODI’S record since 2002 has not been perfect. Because of 2002, he has been denied a visa to the United States, and this stigma has hurt foreign investment, even as Gujarat has become the prime destination for domestic deal-making. Despite all the infrastructure projects, Gujarat still ranks low on scales of human development in India: malnutrition afflicts almost half of the children younger than 5, three-quarters of the women suffer from anemia, and two-thirds of the people are literate—barely above the national average.

In fact, what truly prevents Modi from taking the grand leap of his imagination—that is, remaking Gujarat into a kind of antiseptic global entrepôt, like Singapore and Dubai—is the ball-and-chain reality of the Indian landscape itself. Take Ahmedabad, encased in tear-inducing smog, jammed with wailing motorbikes and auto rickshaws, its broken sidewalks punctuated by stray cows and beggars. Founded in 1411 by Ahmed Shah of the Gujarat sultanate, the city was something of a playground for internationally renowned architects in the 1950s, when the Western elite placed newly independent India on a pedestal as the hope of humanity. (Le Corbusier designed the Textile Mills Association Building, and Louis Kahn the Indian Institute of Management.) But with the exception of a few gems, Ahmedabad, with a population of 4.5 million, remains weighed down by the same affliction that ails other Indian cities: little of architectural note or beauty among a handful of truly magnificent medieval Muslim monuments and the mishmash of steel-and-glass Dubai-style dwellings of the newly rich.

India is 37 percent urban. Within the next two decades it will be 50 percent so. Bimal Patel, a local architect and urban planner, explained that the real governing challenge of India’s leaders will be to make cities like Ahmedabad more livable and efficient. Under Modi, a new park-and-waterfront project, designed by Patel, is rising along six miles of the Sabarmati River, which runs through Ahmedabad. For the most part, though, the chief minister has avoided the local politics of this and other Gujarati cities.

Modi has also done nothing about the communal cantons that have sprung up under his rule. Now Ahmedabad’s old walled city is one of the only areas where Muslims—who make up 9 percent of the city’s population—and Hindus can really mix. The most poignant scene I came across during two weeks of wandering around Ahmedabad was at the Sarkhej Roza, the 15th-century mosque-and-tomb complex dedicated to Sheikh Ahmed Khattu, the spiritual adviser to Ahmed Shah. Amid the medieval domes and balconies overlooking a water tank, families picnicked, young couples whispered, children played ball, and young men attended prayer meetings. The architecture, with its elegant stucco and grillwork, blended Islamic and Hindu styles in a composite known as Indo-Saracenic. But at least until the park-and-waterfront project is completed, there is no corresponding mixing of peoples in Ahmedabad today: the crowd at the Sarkhej Roza was exclusively Muslim.

FOR 10 HOURS, I traveled by bus and car from Ahmedabad south to the coast at Diu, the southernmost point of Gujarat’s Kathiawar Peninsula, the site of Portuguese monuments that have particular relevance to the larger Indian story.

We drove along broken roads through a never-ending series of hovels, past creaking and dusty carts and the shanties and lean-tos of burlap and rusty corrugated iron that define rural India. On this journey through Gujarat, though, I found paved roads in many places, and running water and electricity just about everywhere. As primitive as the scenes looked, I knew from journeys in poorer Indian states like Bihar and West Bengal that much progress had been made. Still, South Korea? No, not for a few decades at the very least. India could be a great regional power and a pivotal state, but it is not likely to reach the level of development of the East Asian tiger economies.

Diu, a key strategic base for Portugal’s Indian Ocean Empire, had been captured from the Ottoman Turks in 1535. The sea gently knocked at the ramparts of the Portuguese citadel, mustard- and lead-colored after centuries of wear. Weeds crept between the stones, wild pigs wandered about, and groups of young men loudly ambled along the stoneworks, seemingly unaware of the significance of this immense curiosity, topped at its highest point by a lonely white cross. The massive Portuguese churches, with their colossal white Gothic facades, stood equally forlorn, their walls faded and leprous. You could actually see and hear the plaster falling at the close wing-beats of the pigeons. Only a few hundred years old, these dilapidated monuments are more like relics from far-back antiquity, so divorced do they seem from the local environment.

As empires rise and fall, only their ideas can remain, adapted to the needs of the people they once ruled. The Portuguese, given only to plunder and exploitation, brought no ideas save for their Catholic religion, which sank little root among Hindus and Muslims. And so these ruins are merely sad and, after a manner, beautiful. The British, by contrast, brought tangible development, ports and railways, that created the basis for a modern state. More important, they brought the framework for parliamentary democracy that Indians, who already possessed indigenous traditions of heterodoxy and pluralism, were able to fit to their own needs. Indeed, the very Hindu pantheon, with its many gods rather than one, works toward the realization that competing truths are what enable freedom. Thus, the British, despite all their flaws, advanced an ideal of Indian greatness. And that greatness, as enlightened Indians will tell you, is impossible to achieve without a moral component.

For as the influence of an economically burgeoning India now seeps both westward and eastward, to the Iranian plateau and to the Gulf of Thailand (the borders of viceregal India and its shadow zones a hundred years ago), it can grow only as a force of communal coexistence, a force that rests on India’s strengths as the world’s largest democracy. India, in other words, despite its flashy economic growth, will be nothing but another gravely troubled developing nation if it can’t maintain a minimum of domestic harmony. Mercifully, the forces of Indian democracy have already survived 60 years of turmoil, attested to by the stability of coalition governments following the era of Congress Party rule. These forces appear sufficiently grounded either to reject Modi at the national level or to contain his worst impulses as he moves—as many expect he will—from Gandhinagar to New Delhi. After all, the churches and bastions in Diu are ruins not because they represent an idea that failed but because they represent no idea at all, whereas India has been an idea since Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930. Either Modi will fit his managerial genius to the service of that idea, or he will stay where he is. Hindus elsewhere in India are less communal-minded than those in Gujarat, and that will be his dilemma.



Living history: the Hindu temple at Somnath, one of the most sacred in India, was sacked by a Muslim conqueror in 1025.

BUT IN GUJARAT, at least, peace will not come easy. From Diu I hired a car and drove two hours westward along the coast to Somnath, site of the Hindu temple destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni, as well as by other invaders, and rebuilt for the seventh time starting in 1947.

This temple, with its massive pale-ocher shikhara (tower) and assemblage of domes, sits at the edge of a vast seascape glazed over with heat. The coiled and writhing cosmic scenes on its facade are so complex that they create the sculptural equivalent of infinity. The day I was there, prayer blasted from loudspeakers. It was a madhouse on account of the full moon. Hundreds of worshippers checked their bags at a ratty cloak stand and left their shoes in scattered piles. Signs warned that no mobile phones or other electronic devices would be permitted inside, but I knew better. I put my BlackBerry in my cargo pocket, not trusting it to the mild chaos of the cloak stand, and expecting the usual lackadaisical developing-world frisk. I then joined the long single-file line to enter the temple. At the entrance, I was savagely searched, and my BlackBerry was discovered. I was rightly yelled at, and summoned back to the cloak stand. “Muslim terrorism,” one worshipper alerted me. From the cloak stand I got back into line and entered the temple.

Semidarkness enveloped me as worshippers kissed the flower-bedecked idol of a cow. The air was suffocating, as packed-together bodies approached the womb-chamber. I felt as if I were trespassing on a mystery. Though nonbelievers were officially welcomed, I knew that I was outside the boundaries of the single organism of the crowd—the philosopher Elias Canetti’s word for a large group of people who abandon their individuality in favor of an intoxicating collective symbol. This sanctum was a pulsating vortex of faith. Some dropped to their hands and knees and prayed on the stone floor. I’d had the same extreme and cloistered sensation at two of the holiest sites of Catholicism and Shiism: the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa, Poland; and the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, Iraq (where I had to sneak in with a busload of visiting Turkish businessmen).

You couldn’t help but understand Hindu feelings about Muslim depredations of this temple, one of India’s 12 Jyotirlingas, or places with “signs of light” that symbolize the god Shiva. And yet, as emotions crackled like electricity all around me, I also couldn’t help but think of what Hanif Lakdawala had asked me, in a plea as much as a question: “What can we poor Muslims of today do about Mahmud of Ghazni?”


ROBERT D. KAPLAN is a former contributing editor at The Atlantic and the author of In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond.

India Is No Longer India
Exile in the time of Modi 

PHOTO MONTAGE   ROHAN HANDE

AATISH TASEER THE ATLANTIC MAY 2020 ISSUE 


“You realize,” a friend wrote to me from Kolkata earlier this year, “that, without the exalted secular ‘idea’ of India … the whole place falls apart.”

India had been on the boil for weeks. On December 11, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government had passed its Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which gave immigrants from three neighboring countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) a path to citizenship on one condition: that they were not Muslim. For the first time in India’s long history of secularism, a religious test had been enacted. If some commentators described the CAA as “India’s first Nuremberg Law,” it was because the law did not stand alone. It worked in tandem, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah menacingly implied—in remarks he has recently tried to walk back—with a slew of other new laws that cast the citizenship of many of India’s own people into doubt. Shah, who has referred to Muslim immigrants as “termites,” spoke of a process by which the government would survey India’s large agrarian population, a significant portion of which is undocumented, and designate the status of millions as “doubtful.” The CAA would then kick into action, providing non-Muslims with relief and leaving Indian Muslims in a position where they could face disenfranchisement, statelessness, or internment. India’s Muslim population of almost 200 million, which had been provoked by Modi’s government for six years, finally erupted in protest. They were joined by many non-Muslims, who were appalled by so brazen an attack on the Indian ethos. The constitutional expert Madhav Khosla recently described the effect of the new laws as a swift movement toward “an arrangement where citizenship is centered on the idea of blood and soil, rather than on the idea of birth.” In short, an arrangement in which being Indian meant accepting Hindu dominance and actively eschewing Indian Muslims.

India was seething, but I could not go back to the country where I had grown up. I was deep in my own citizenship drama. On November 7, the Indian government had stripped me of my Overseas Citizenship of India and blacklisted me from the country where my mother and grandmother live. The pretext the government used was that I had concealed the Pakistani origins of my father, from whom I had been estranged for most of my life, and whom I had not met until the age of 21. It was an odd accusation. I had written a book, Stranger to History, and published many articles about my absent father. The story of our relationship was well known because my father, Salmaan Taseer, had been the governor of Punjab, in Pakistan, and had been assassinated by his bodyguard in 2011 for daring to defend a Christian woman accused of blasphemy

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Modi: India’s New Face ROBERT D. KAPLAN


None of this had affected my status in India, where I had lived for 30 of my 40 years. I became “Pakistani” in the eyes of Modi’s government—and, more important, “Muslim,” because religious identity in India is mostly patrilineal and more a matter of blood than faith—only after I wrote a story for Time titled “India’s Divider in Chief.” The article enraged the prime minister. “Time magazine is foreign,” he responded. “The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.” From that moment on, my days as an Indian citizen were numbered.

Read: The U.S.-India relationship is bigger than Trump and Modi

In August, I received a letter from the Home Ministry threatening me with the cancellation of my citizenship status. Then, in November, an Indian news site leaked what the government was planning to do. Within hours, the Home Ministry’s spokesperson was on Twitter, canceling my citizenship before I had been officially informed. In one stroke, Modi’s government cut me off from the country I had written and thought about my whole life, and where all the people I had grown up with still lived.

To lose one’s country is to know a feeling akin to shame, almost as if one has been disowned by a parent, or turned out of one’s home. Your country is so intimately bound up with your sense of self that you do not realize what a ballast it has been until it is gone. The relationship is fundamental. It is one of the few things we are allowed to take for granted, and it is the basis of our curiosity about other places. Without a country we are adrift, like people whose inability to love another is linked to an inability to love themselves.

For me, the loss was literal—I could not go back to India—but also abstract: the loss of an idea, that “exalted” idea of a secular India. India, as its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, vowed, was not meant to be a “Hindu Pakistan.” Rather, it was to be a place that cherished the array of religions, languages, ethnicities, and cultures that had taken root over 50 centuries.

Nehru’s idea of India as a palimpsest, where “layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer has completely hidden or erased what has been written previously,” served as the foundation for the modern republic, born of British colonial rule in 1947. The new country gave secularism a distinctly Indian meaning. As the parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor told me recently, “Secular in India merely meant the existence of a profusion of religions, all of which were allowed and encouraged by the state to flourish.” The idea of India was a historical recognition that over time—and not always peacefully—a great diversity had collected on the Indian subcontinent. The modern republic, as a reflection of that history, would belong not to any one group, but to all groups in equal measure.

Read: ‘Howdy, Modi!’ was a display of Indian Americans’ political power

But beneath the topsoil of this modern country, a mere seven decades old, lies an older reality, embodied in the word Bharat, which can evoke the idea of India as the holy land, specifically of the Hindus. India and Bharat—these two words for the same place represent a central tension within the nation, the most dangerous and urgent one of our time. Bharat is Sanskrit, and the name by which India knows herself in her own languages, free of the gaze of outsiders. India is Latin, and its etymology alone—the Sanskrit sindhu for “river,” turning into hind in Persian, and then into indos in Greek, meaning the Indus—reveals a long history of being under Western eyes. India is a land; Bharat is a people—the Hindus. India is historical; Bharat is mythical. India is an overarching and inclusionary idea; Bharat is atavistic, emotional, exclusionary.

It was this tension between two distinct ways of looking at the same place—modern country or holy land—that the founder of Hindu nationalism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, took aim at in the early 20th century. As he wrote in his 1923 book, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?, “To be a Hindu means a person who sees this land, from the Indus River to the sea, as his country but also as his Holy Land.” This Hindu person was, in Savarkar’s view, the paramount Indian citizen. Everyone else was at best a guest, and at worst the bastard child of foreign invasion. Savarkar was, as Octavio Paz writes in In Light of India, “intellectually responsible for the assassination of Gandhi,” in 1948, at the hands of Nathuram Godse, now a hero of the Hindu right. Modern Hindu nationalism is represented by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the cultural organization in which Narendra Modi was reared, and of which his party—the Bharatiya Janata Party—is the political face.

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As much as people in India bridle against the binary distinction of India and Bharat, it recurs again and again in the country’s discourse—Bharat as a pure, timeless country, unassailable and authentic; India as the embodiment of modernity and all its ills and dislocations. When a medical student was raped and murdered in Delhi in 2012, the head of the RSS had this to say: “Such crimes hardly take place in Bharat, but they occur frequently in India … Where ‘Bharat’ becomes ‘India,’ with the influence of Western culture, these types of incidents happen.”

Growing up in 1980s India, in a Westernized enclave where, to quote Edward Said, the “main tenet” of my world “was that everything of consequence either had happened or would happen in the West,” I had no idea of this other wholeness called Bharat. That ignorance of Hindu ways and beliefs was not mine alone, but symptomatic of the English-speaking elite, which, in imitation of the British colonial classes, lived in isolation from the country around them. Mohandas Gandhi, at the 1916 opening of Banaras Hindu University, a project that was designed to bridge the distance between Hindu tradition and Western-style modernity, worried that India’s “educated men” were becoming “foreigners in their own land,” unable to speak to the “heart of the nation.” Working closely with Nehru, Gandhi had been a great explainer, continually translating what came from outside into Indian idiom and tradition.

By the time I was an adult, the urban elites and the “heart of the nation” had lost the means to communicate. The elites lived in a state of gated comfort, oblivious to the hard realities of Indian life—poverty and unemployment, of course, but also urban ruin and environmental degradation. The schools their children went to set them at a great remove from India, on the levels of language, religion, and culture. Every feature of their life was designed, to quote Robert Byron on the English in India, to blunt their “natural interest in the country and sympathy with its people.” Their life was, culturally speaking, an adjunct to Western Europe and America; their values were a hybrid, in which India was served nominally while the West was reduced to a source of permissiveness and materialism. They thought they lived in a world where the “idea of India” reigned supreme—but all the while, the constituency for this idea was being steadily eroded. It was Bharat that was ascendant. India’s leaders today speak with contempt of the principles on which this young nation was founded. They look back instead to the timeless glories of the Hindu past. They scorn the “Khan Market gang”—a reference to a fashionable market near where I grew up that has become a metonym for the Indian elite. Hindu nationalists trace a direct line between the foreign occupiers who destroyed the Hindu past—first Muslims, then the British—and India’s Westernized elite (and India’s Muslims), whom they see as heirs to foreign occupation, still enjoying the privileges of plunder.

Almost 30 years ago, in the preface to his book Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie, fearful of the “religious militancy” threatening “the foundations of the secular state,” had expressed alarm that “there is no commonly used Hindustani word for ‘secularism’; the importance of the secular ideal in India has simply been assumed, in a rather unexamined way.” As it happens, the exalted idea of India has no commonly used translation either. Rushdie was saying that this is not merely a failure of language, but an expression of the isolation of an elite that thought its power was inviolable. “And yet,” Rushdie wrote, “if the secularist principle were abandoned, India could simply explode.”

India is now exploding. Even the visit of an American president in February was not enough to contain the rage. As Modi and Donald Trump bear-hugged each other, Hindu-nationalist mobs roamed the streets of New Delhi a few miles away, murdering Muslims and attacking their businesses and places of worship. The two leaders did not acknowledge these events, in which Hindus and Muslims alike were killed. India is approaching an especially dangerous point: the right quantity of unemployed young men, the right kind of populist strongman, and the right level of ignorance and heightened expectations, emanating from an imaginary past. Who knows what elements of modern nation-building and democracy might conveniently be sacrificed on the altar of a vengeful and revivalist politics?

Read: What leaders like Trump and Modi do to democracies

I was not Muslim, and not Pakistani, but, as the writer Saadat Hasan Manto once noted, I was Muslim enough to risk getting killed. It was game over for my sort of person in India. We had been so blithe, so unknowing, so insulated from a wider Indian reality that it was as if we had prepared the conditions for our own destruction. If I became attuned to the danger, it was because I had seen what had happened to my father in Pakistan, where the shape of society is identical to that of India. He had died like a dog in the street for his high Western ideals. They mourned him in the drawing rooms of Lahore, and in the universities, think tanks, and newsrooms of the West. But in Pakistan, his killer was showered with rose petals; his killer’s funeral drew more than 100,000 mourners into the streets.

All over the old non-West, as well as in Western Europe and America, the symbols of belonging—race, religion, language—are being repurposed for a confrontation between what David Goodhart has referred to as the “somewheres” and the “anywheres,” the rooted and the rootless. I, with no tribe or caste, no religion or country, have had nowhere to go but to the cities of the West, where I hoped to wait out the storm. But, as my break with India acquired a cold new finality, exile turning into asylum, I could not help but ask whether any harbor would survive the destructive wrath of what may be coming for us all.

This article appears in the May 2020 print edition with the headline “Exile in the Age of Modi.”

AATISH TASEER’s most recent book is The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges. His documentary In Search of India’s Soul was released in 2020.

Positive coronavirus tests jump in Navajo Nation
Number of positives expected to increase this week with the arrival of rapid testing kits.

U.S. NEWS APRIL 12, 2020 By Glenn Singer

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez continued to urge residents to stay at home to avoid contracting the COVID-19 virus. Photo by the Office of U.S. Rep. Tom O'Halleran/Wikimedia Commons

April 12 (UPI) -- The number of positive tests for COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation jumped this weekend as the tribal president and vice president remained in self-quarantine after exposure to a public safety officer whose test showed presence of the virus.

The death toll related to the coronavirus on the reservation has reached 24, up two from Friday, officials said.

As of late Saturday, the total of positive tests reached 698, an increase of 101 positives from a day earlier, according to the Navajo Department of Health and Navajo Area Indian Health Service.

The agencies' report noted that 2,760 people tested negative. In all, 3.5 percent of those tested have been positive for the virus.

Navajo County, Ariz., led the eight counties in three states with 252 positive cases, followed by Coconino County, Ariz., with 150.

Some 175,000 people live on the reservation, which overlaps the state boundaries of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. About 40 percent of residents have no access to running water, which makes hand washing and intense hygiene difficult.

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer said the number of positive results is expected to rise this week, in part because rapid testing kits supplied by Abbott Laboratories are expected to arrive within a few days at the Navajo area Indian Health Service and tribally operated health care centers.

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"Quicker test results will likely result in even higher numbers of positive cases, but it will help to identify those who have the virus and begin to mitigate the cases much quicker," Nez said.

Nez thanked those who are complying with a weekend-long curfew on the reservation, and offered praise for healthcare workers and first responders.

"We know it is not easy, but we are with you and we are praying for you every day," he said Saturday.

Lizer added, "Yes, the numbers are growing, but many people are also testing negative for the virus and many are recovering, as well. We will beat COVID-19 together, but we will beat it quicker if we stay home as much as possible."

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SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/04/navajo-leaders-self-quarantine-after.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/03/solar-powered-cisterns-bring-running.html

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