Given Donald Trump’s first visit to India this week, in which he praised the prime minister, Narendra Modi, as “the father of India”, John Oliver dug into Modi’s increasingly controversial reputation and widespread protests against his government’s citizenship measures. “Calling Modi the father of India is completely inappropriate for multiple reasons,” Oliver said on Last Week Tonight, “not the least of which is that there is a certain Gandhi who already holds that exact fucking title.”
Still, Modi is popular; he handily won re-election last year, has a loyal following and appeared on Man vs Wild with Bear Grylls. “But while Modi may have charmed Grylls, the world and our current president, within India, he’s an increasingly controversial figure,” said Oliver, as his government has escalated campaigns of persecution against religious minorities, leading to abundant protests.
Citizens in the world’s biggest democracy, with over a billion people, are either wearing masks of Modi’s face or protesting against him in the streets – it’s worth exploring why, said Oliver, and “why calling Modi the father of India is stupid at best, and dangerous at worst”.
First, there’s Modi’s broad appeal. He has an inspirational story of rising from poor tea salesman to province leader. Since his election as a populist in 2014, Modi and his government have delivered on some big goals, such as new cooking gas connections for 72 million poor families and the installation of 110 new toilets, “which is a big deal”, said Oliver. “That addressed a major public health hazard, so much so that a few years back, Unicef India started a catchy campaign called Take Your Poo to the Loo.” The song is … catchier than one would expect. “That is my new favorite song,” said Oliver, “and it will remain so until the inevitable Take Your Poo to the Old Town Road remix, and then that will be my favorite.”
Modi has also struck out, badly. In his first term, he cancelled 86% of the working currency in India with just four hours’ notice in the name of fighting corruption. The fallout was, predictably, chaotic. “Just think about what would happen here if Trump suddenly announced that as of midnight tonight, every $10 and $20 bill is worthless,” said Oliver. “It would be complete mayhem – and then, of course, Republicans would defend it, the supreme court would uphold it, and within two weeks people would be holding up signs denouncing money at Trump rallies, because that’s the fucking world we seem to live in now.”
But the cash ban didn’t make Modi less popular, demonstrating “one of his greatest strengths – his charisma is such that he somehow evades public anger sticking to him”, said Oliver, “which is a very dangerous superpower, especially when you consider how extreme one of his defining beliefs is”.
That belief would be Modi’s Hindu nationalism – the idea that India is a fundamentally Hindu state, despite the fact that India holds the second-largest Muslim population in the world and the country’s founders preached religious pluralism. Modi’s party, the BJP, has served as the political arm of the RSS, a Hindu paramilitary group formed in 1925 whose founders admired Hitler for his methods to ensure “the purity of the race” – “which is just not a chill thing to admire Hitler for”, said Oliver. “There is one and only one thing that it’s OK to admire Hitler for, and it’s the fact that he killed Hitler.”
Modi doesn’t talk much on his religious-targeting policies, said Oliver, but those close to him do. His party-appointed head of Uttar Pradesh, for example, said at a recent rally: “If they kill one Hindu then we will also kill 100 of them.”
“That is not even dog-whistle Islamophobia,” said Oliver. “That is basically just writing ‘We hate Muslims’ on a dog and then throwing that dog at the nearest Muslim.”
Modi’s party has also edited religious pluralism out of history textbooks, and introduced primary school textbooks teaching Indian supremacy. But the most drastic move yet is his citizenship proposal, which would “strip millions of Muslims of citizenship, and they did it in a diabolically clever two-step way”, said Oliver. First, a national register of citizens would kick millions of poor and illiterate people off the rolls. Then, a second bill will add undocumented citizens back on – but only if they’re not Muslim. “They’re basically Marie Kondoing India and it’s only Muslims who don’t seem to spark joy in them,” Oliver explained.
The citizenship laws have already had a major impact in India, “with many understandably terrified, especially as the government is now building detention camps for all the illegal immigrants they are creating”, said Oliver. To demonstrate a “cruel irony” of this, Oliver showed footage of a Muslim man building one of the camps; he thinks every night, he told an interviewer, how he may end up inside it.
The image is “nauseating”, said Oliver, and “the only glimmer of hope here is that for perhaps the first time in Modi’s whole career, his actions are creating a massive and sustained backlash”.
The protests are ongoing, diverse and filled with people determined to protect India’s secularism and multicultural values. So when Trump says Modi is bringing India together, Oliver concluded, “with any luck, the thing that unites them may actually end up being their complete disgust over what he is trying to do”, since India, home of the “symbol of love” Taj Mahal, “frankly deserves much more than this temporary symbol of hate”.
