In her Lunch with the FT (“‘Modi is supposed to represent all of us’”, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, February 17) Indira Jaising predictably covers a broad canvas of topics, given her decades-long legal career studded with consequential outcomes for a large swath of Indians.
However her characterisation of prime minister Narendra Modi’s tenure as turning India into a borderline theocracy overstates the ability of the regime to persuade Indians to veer away from the country’s secular foundations.
For instance, the chants invoking Lord Rama — at the consecration of the massive Hindu temple built at the site of a mosque torn down by religious zealots in 1992 — find little expression in most of south India, where in a state like Tamil Nadu, Lord Rama is not only little known, but his arch foe Ravana is venerated.
While Jaising and others who don’t subscribe to the Bharatiya Janata party’s overt display of religiosity are right to be concerned about the rights of minorities, it is Modi’s claims around his economic success that mask the fact that failures such as demonetisation and poor youth unemployment numbers are a bigger threat to India’s ascent to global power status. If Modi wins a third term, as seems very likely, it is because of the considerably worse choices on the economic front offered by his rivals.
Vijay Dandapani
New York, NY, US
