Read Online Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert D. Kaplan - Free Book Online

public remorse,” Sofia Khan, the head of a local Muslim NGO, told me. “There has been no moral reckoning,”declared Ramesh Mehta, a retired judge. As one Hindu activist coldly rationalized to me, “If the train in Godhra had not been burnt, the riots would not have happened.” His was an attitude I heard particularly from educated Hindus throughout Gujarat. While it is true that Indian political parties have for decades played the communal card—one could argue that the Congress Party stoked anti-Sikh violence after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984—there was a particular blatancy and transparency in the way that the Gujarati authorities helped orchestrate anti-Muslim violence. And afterwards, as Johanna Lokhande, an activist who helps victims of the massacre, told me, the local government was “averse to the whole idea of providing justice.”
    More tellingly, 2002 continues to echo precisely because of Chief Minister Modi’s very success as a politician in the intervening years. He has never apologized, never demonstrated regret of any sort for 2002, and has thus become a hero to the Hindu nationalist movement, reelected several times as chief minister. Furthermore, his seeming incorruptibility, his machine-like efficiency, and his penchant for dynamic leadership of the government bureaucracy have lately made Gujarat a mecca for development, garnering more internal investment than any other state in India. To travel to Sindh and then to Gujarat is to comprehend at a very tangible level how Pakistan is a failed state and India a very successful one, with the ability to project economic and military power throughout the Indian Ocean region. And this impression, as imperfect as it may be, is to a significant extent due to the way Modi has governed.
    Migrants, both Hindus and Muslims, from throughout India have been streaming into Gujarat in recent years to find work at its expanding factories. There is an element of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore in Modi’s Gujarat. What’s more, his hypnotic oratory, helped by a background in the theater, has led some to compare him to Adolf Hitler. Modi is not only the most dangerously charismatic politician in India today, he may be the only charismatic one, and the first to emerge in decades since Indira Gandhi in the 1970s.
    Of course, Narendra Modi is neither Lee Kuan Yew nor Hitler. He is what he is, a new kind of hybrid politician—part CEO with incredible management abilities, part rabble-rouser with a fierce ideological following—who is both impressive and disturbing in his own right. Developments in mass communications have led to an evolution in leadership styles, and just as Barack Obama gives hope to millions in the newcentury, a leader like Modi demonstrates how the century can also go wrong: with unbreachable psychological divisions between religious groups masked by a veneer of cold bureaucratic efficiency. And that is why he is so important. Representing a spirit very different from that of Gandhi, he is very much part of the Indian Ocean story.
    Leaders often sum up the geographical, political, and social landscapes out of which they specifically arise, so before I delve further into the character of Narendra Modi and describe my long conversation with him, let me provide a picture of Gujarat, a microcosm in more intense form of twenty-first-century India and the Indian Ocean world itself.
    Gujarat has “tremendous locational advantage,” explains historian Dwijendra Tripathi. It is near the Indian Ocean’s midpoint, yet still close enough to Iran and the Arabian Peninsula to refine oil from there, and reexport it. With two great gulfs—those of Kutch and Cambay—Gujarat has the longest coastline and best natural harbors in India. This immense seaboard fronts westward toward the Middle East and Africa, so throughout history Gujarat has been a land of trade and the broad-based movement of peoples. 3 Camões writes in
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