There is a group of (mainly older) people in my WhatsApp who believe that by pressing the forward button they are doing God’s work. No higher form of journalism exists and no one can convince them otherwise. Without their early morning reminders, I would have missed the graphic news proving turmeric can cure cancer, beetroot juice cures diabetes, cellphone waves cause autism and that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are actually clones.
I muted three of them ages ago and actually blocked the fourth because no one should be allowed to send unsolicited self-help mantras set to cat pictures without consequences. But this past week Trump’s state visit to India has sent the WhatsApp Warriors into a frenzied overdrive. Suddenly I was receiving dozens of pictures and memes, texts ridiculing both leaders, audio clips of Trump trying to stumble his way through eight-syllable South Indian names and jokes about Melania’s inner monologue as she stood in front of the Taj Mahal.
Usually when I need to know whats going on across the border, I call up my friend Priya who lives in Delhi. We’ve known each other since we were teenagers and became close after a particularly long night in Montreal which involved a cat and two clowns that I won’t go into for legal reasons. Priya remains for me the sane voice of reason in India. When I was there for the first Modi election in 2014, Priya was the only Indian I met who expressed trepidation at his ascending to power because of his record in Gujarat. Practically everyone else - from taxi drivers to industrialists - maintained that Modi wouldn’t “do that sort of thing again.”
Priya’s ability to disentangle from the state narrative may have had to do with the how her father is from Gujarat, but I also put it down to the fact that she has a functioning mind. This time, when we spoke, it was more about the protests against the citizenship law than Trump’s visit.
Part of what makes the Trump-Modi romance so nauseating is that it is based on a mutual love of hate, most obviously against Muslims/\. But to be fair, their hate seems infinitely expandable. They are both neo-fascist leaders running on the platform of ethnic division and nationalist fiction. They both rely on inventing nostalgia: Trump and his mob dream of when only white men held all the power and for Modi heaven is a time before Muslims arrived in India. You don’t need a WhatsApp forward to remind you that both men are trying really hard to actively ban muslims from their countries.
Their friendship, like that of Hitler with Mussolini, seems inevitable. And yet despite their obvious similarities, one of the points that Priya brought up was how many people she knows in Delhi who find it offensive to compare Trump to Modi because doing so it makes a direct comparison between them and Trump’s base. She told me India’s (or in her case Delhi’s) Modi’s supporters don’t want to be confused with the cartoon of the undereducated, xenophobic, neo-fascists that make up MAGA people.
Well, tough!
While I can understand her point, I think that it specifcally applies to a Western-educated class of Indians who were convinced that Modi was going to herald economic miracles and but are now embarrassed at having to defend his record at multinational cocktail parties. But to see the hate shouldn’t have been hard. After all, just recently Modi’s party head in UP said of Muslims “If they kill one Hindu then we kill 100 of them”, which isn’t exactly the kind of World Peace answer you hope for a leader to say. Then again, neither is the creation of camps for illegal Indians (read: Muslims) nor the subtle but unmissable edits to the national curriculum pushing forward a vision of India as a (purely) Hindu state.
When I become despondent about how it feels we are in a time bomb hurtling towards a volcano, I brew myself some cancer-curing turmeric tea and use humour to help me cope better. This week nothing helped me more than imagining Modi’s lips trembling in Hindutva rage at the thought of having to send Trump and his wife to the Taj Mahal, one of India’s most famous Muslim monuments.
But India is fighting for herself just fine, thank you very much. There are organized, diverse and sustained protests that are underway against Modi and his policies - protests that may well be the legacy of his time in office. It’s heartening to see much of the world’s coverage of the state visit has made an effort to talk about the protests and cover Modi with the same sense of horrified wonder they reserve for Trump’s midnight tweets. I say this not because I take joy in trashing India (Modi doesn’t represent the entirety of India for me anymore than Trump does America) but because I take joy in the bravery of Indians like my friend Priya, who have the courage to stand up for what is “right” rather than cower to the brutality of what is merely “right now”.
Full Disclosure: I stole that line from a WhatsApp post that also confirmed that turmeric also cures depression and baldness. So, you know, fingers crossed.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com
I muted three of them ages ago and actually blocked the fourth because no one should be allowed to send unsolicited self-help mantras set to cat pictures without consequences. But this past week Trump’s state visit to India has sent the WhatsApp Warriors into a frenzied overdrive. Suddenly I was receiving dozens of pictures and memes, texts ridiculing both leaders, audio clips of Trump trying to stumble his way through eight-syllable South Indian names and jokes about Melania’s inner monologue as she stood in front of the Taj Mahal.
Usually when I need to know whats going on across the border, I call up my friend Priya who lives in Delhi. We’ve known each other since we were teenagers and became close after a particularly long night in Montreal which involved a cat and two clowns that I won’t go into for legal reasons. Priya remains for me the sane voice of reason in India. When I was there for the first Modi election in 2014, Priya was the only Indian I met who expressed trepidation at his ascending to power because of his record in Gujarat. Practically everyone else - from taxi drivers to industrialists - maintained that Modi wouldn’t “do that sort of thing again.”
Priya’s ability to disentangle from the state narrative may have had to do with the how her father is from Gujarat, but I also put it down to the fact that she has a functioning mind. This time, when we spoke, it was more about the protests against the citizenship law than Trump’s visit.
Part of what makes the Trump-Modi romance so nauseating is that it is based on a mutual love of hate, most obviously against Muslims/\. But to be fair, their hate seems infinitely expandable. They are both neo-fascist leaders running on the platform of ethnic division and nationalist fiction. They both rely on inventing nostalgia: Trump and his mob dream of when only white men held all the power and for Modi heaven is a time before Muslims arrived in India. You don’t need a WhatsApp forward to remind you that both men are trying really hard to actively ban muslims from their countries.
Modi’s supporters don’t want to be confused with the cartoon of the undereducated, xenophobic, neo-fascists that make up MAGA people. Well, tough!
Their friendship, like that of Hitler with Mussolini, seems inevitable. And yet despite their obvious similarities, one of the points that Priya brought up was how many people she knows in Delhi who find it offensive to compare Trump to Modi because doing so it makes a direct comparison between them and Trump’s base. She told me India’s (or in her case Delhi’s) Modi’s supporters don’t want to be confused with the cartoon of the undereducated, xenophobic, neo-fascists that make up MAGA people.
Well, tough!
While I can understand her point, I think that it specifcally applies to a Western-educated class of Indians who were convinced that Modi was going to herald economic miracles and but are now embarrassed at having to defend his record at multinational cocktail parties. But to see the hate shouldn’t have been hard. After all, just recently Modi’s party head in UP said of Muslims “If they kill one Hindu then we kill 100 of them”, which isn’t exactly the kind of World Peace answer you hope for a leader to say. Then again, neither is the creation of camps for illegal Indians (read: Muslims) nor the subtle but unmissable edits to the national curriculum pushing forward a vision of India as a (purely) Hindu state.
When I become despondent about how it feels we are in a time bomb hurtling towards a volcano, I brew myself some cancer-curing turmeric tea and use humour to help me cope better. This week nothing helped me more than imagining Modi’s lips trembling in Hindutva rage at the thought of having to send Trump and his wife to the Taj Mahal, one of India’s most famous Muslim monuments.
But India is fighting for herself just fine, thank you very much. There are organized, diverse and sustained protests that are underway against Modi and his policies - protests that may well be the legacy of his time in office. It’s heartening to see much of the world’s coverage of the state visit has made an effort to talk about the protests and cover Modi with the same sense of horrified wonder they reserve for Trump’s midnight tweets. I say this not because I take joy in trashing India (Modi doesn’t represent the entirety of India for me anymore than Trump does America) but because I take joy in the bravery of Indians like my friend Priya, who have the courage to stand up for what is “right” rather than cower to the brutality of what is merely “right now”.
Full Disclosure: I stole that line from a WhatsApp post that also confirmed that turmeric also cures depression and baldness. So, you know, fingers crossed.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com