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Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is the American president's spiritual home: an inferno of
crueltyDonald Trump Is Going to India to Find Himself
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is the American president’s spiritual home: an inferno of systemic cruelty.
By Pankaj Mishra
Mr. Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”
Feb. 21, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/opinion/trump-india.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
"SNIP......
The following year, Mr. Modi set a new benchmark for the killer instinct by presiding over, as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, a pogrom that killed hundreds of Muslims and rendered homeless countless more. Condemnations, including from the United States, which denied him a visa, were soon followed by full-throated endorsements by India’s biggest businessmen of Mr. Modi as a leader who gets things done — for the biggest businessmen, at least.
It is clearer today that India’s quest for the killer instinct has climaxed with actual killers in high office. It is also plain that a structurally flawed and now swiftly failing economy cannot create the millions of jobs needed annually for India’s overwhelmingly youthful population and can only further concentrate financial and cultural capital on top of a 27-story private residence in Mumbai.
Presiding over a grotesquely unequal and unjust society, Mr. Modi and his toadies work harder to channel India’s enormous reserves of anger and frustration against the weak and their “liberal” and “leftist” defenders. In the process, they betray themselves as Mr. Trump’s true soul mates.
Much guff will be broadcast in the coming days about the “shared values” of the world’s largest democracies. But the most significant values that India and the United States share today are those of Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi — charlatans who succeed, initially, but then, failing abjectly at everything, retreat into resentful lies and bellicose bluster. The New India, much more than the United States, is now Mr. Trump’s spiritual home, and the president would, for once, attest to a genuine emotion when, imagining himself cheered by 10 million Hindus, he tells himself that he really loves Hindu.
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