INDIAN Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been featuring among TIME magazine’s100 personalities since his election in 2014. He appeared in this list in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2020. This time he has featured in TIME’s 100 most influential people’s list for all his negative traits and policies.

Modi is a fascist known all over the world for his safronism and RSS-related activities from the time he came to power.

TIME editor Karl Wick wrote the profile for Modi. Wick discussed the present pathetic and demeaning form of democracy in India, mentioning that free election is not a key to democracy as it only highlights the candidate fetching the maximum number of votes.

The most important are the rights of those who did not vote for the winner. India has been the world’s largest democracy for more than seven decades with a population of 1.3 billion people from different religions, including Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, etc.

However, Modi has brought all these into doubt, writes Wick. He says that unlike other Indian prime ministers who got elected by nearly 80 per cent of the population that is Hindu, only Modi has governed in favour of the majority.

The leading party, at various levels, has targeted the minority communities. First elected on a populist promise of empowerment, his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rejected not only elitism, but also pluralism, specifically targeting India’s Muslims.

Moreover, the ongoing pandemic has been used directly and indirectly to target communities, making them responsible for the outbreak of the pandemic. Modi has pushed to the wall all those who opposed him, considering the arrests made during the February’s Delhi riots.

Wick believes that all this is nothing but a threat to the world’s largest democracy that seems to be falling deeper into the shadows. To sum up, it should be an eye-opener for the fascist Indian ruler to act wisely and give breathing space to minorities.

Iftikhar Mirza
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, October 6th, 2020