What Do Trump and Modi Have in Common?

Why is the Hindu Right excited about the Trump candidacy? Why are they openly supporting Trump for President? What do Trump and Hindu Nationalists have in common? Let's explore answers to these questions.

Photo Credit The Guardian

Hindu Nationalists Support Trump:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu supporters have organized "puja" (worship) to pray for the Trump victory in the heart of Indian capital, according to The Guardian newspaper. “He’s our hero,” said a Hindu supporter of Trump. “We are praying for Trump because he is the only one who can help mankind.” “He’s the only many who can put an end to Islamic terrorism", the supporter added.

Some of Trump's Hindu supporters have rallied outside the US embassy in New Delhi to urge their fellow Hindu citizens of the United States to vote for Donald Trump for president.

Indian-American Support for Trump:

Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar, a close Modi ally and the BJP’s advisor on U.S. politics, has emerged as a big backer of Trump’s candidacy. Kumar is actively raising campaign funds within the Indian American Hindu community for Trump. Kumar has so far raised $898,000 from Hindu donors for the Trump campaign.

“That’s just a start. That’s the seed money,” Kumar told The Hill in an interview at Cleveland’s tony Renaissance Hotel during the first day of the Republican National Convention in July this year.

Kumar has pledged to personally spend $2 million of his own money on Republican candidates this cycle, according to The Hill.

The Hill reported that "Shalli Kumar was especially won over by Trump’s tough words for Pakistan, India’s neighbor and nemesis; and the businessman praised Trump’s views on Muslim profiling".

Modi and Trump:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has built his entire political career on the intense hatred of  Muslims. Republican presidential candidate has built his entire campaign on Islamophobia and xenophobia. That's what the two men have in common.

Just as white racists form the core of Trump's support base in America, the Modi phenomenon in India has been fueled by Hindu Nationalists whose leaders have praised Adolph Hitler for his hatred of Jews.

M.S. Golwalkar, a Hindu Nationalist who Mr. Modi has described as "worthy of worship" wrote the following about Muslims in his book "We":

 "Ever since that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.”

"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

Trump's Hindu Nationalist Ties:

Trump has close business ties with Mangal Prabhat Lodha,  a real estate mogul and a BJP state legislator. Trump organization is building a 75-story Trump Tower in Mumbai that is scheduled to be completed in 2018. Trump signed the licensing deal for it in 2014, according to The Intercept.

Lodha is known for his support for anti-Muslim and anti-Christian causes. Lodha has over the past two decades repeatedly pushed for anti-conversion legislation, called the Maharashtra Freedom of Religion Act, that would criminalize the work of Christian and Muslim missionaries.

Lodha rose to political power in Mumbai in 1994 as Hindu activists protested over claims that Christian missionaries were entering slums and converting low-caste Hindus. In one incident, BJP activists attacked Christian converts over a dispute in Dharavi, a Mumbai slum. In another local incident, Hindus attacked a Catholic convent after accusing the school of converting a Hindu student to Christianity. Skirmishes between Christians and Muslims led to BJP activists taking to the streets to demand anti-conversion laws, according to The Intercept.

Summary:

Modi and Trump have much in common. Both share their hatred of Muslims and they have used it gain political support in their respective countries. Both have racist xenophobic supporters. Modi-loving Hindu Nationalists are actively supporting Trump's candidacy in the upcoming US elections.

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Comment by Riaz Haq on January 12, 2018 at 10:13pm

Trump’s Threat to Democracy
Nicholas Kristof
Nicholas Kristof JAN. 10, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/trumps-how-democracies-d...

Two political scientists specializing in how democracies decay and die have compiled four warning signs to determine if a political leader is a dangerous authoritarian:

1. The leader shows only a weak commitment to democratic rules. 2. He or she denies the legitimacy of opponents. 3. He or she tolerates violence. 4. He or she shows some willingness to curb civil liberties or the media.

“A politician who meets even one of these criteria is cause for concern,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both professors at Harvard, write in their important new book, “How Democracies Die,” which will be released next week.

“With the exception of Richard Nixon, no major-party presidential candidate met even one of these four criteria over the last century,” they say, which sounds reassuring. Unfortunately, they have one update: “Donald Trump met them all.”

We tend to assume that the threat to democracies comes from coups or violent revolutions, but the authors say that in modern times, democracies are more likely to wither at the hands of insiders who gain power initially through elections. That’s what happened, to one degree or another, in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Poland and Peru.

Venezuela was a relatively prosperous democracy, for example, when the populist demagogue Hugo Chávez tapped the frustrations of ordinary citizens to be elected president in 1998.

A survey that year found that the Venezuelan public overwhelmingly believed that “democracy is always the best form of government,” with only one-quarter saying that authoritarianism is sometimes preferable. Yet against their will, Venezuelans slid into autocracy.

“This is how democracies now die,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.”

Likewise, the authors say, no more than 2 percent of Germans or Italians joined the Nazi or Fascist Parties before they gained power, and early on there doesn’t seem to have been clear majority support for authoritarianism in either Germany or Italy. But both Hitler and Mussolini were shrewd demagogues who benefited from the blindness of political insiders who accommodated them.

Let me say right here that I don’t for a moment think the United States will follow the path of Venezuela, Germany or Italy. Yes, I do see in Trump these authoritarian tendencies — plus a troubling fondness for other authoritarians, like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines — but I’m confident our institutions are stronger than Trump.

It’s true that he has tried to undermine institutions and referees of our political system: judges, the Justice Department, law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I., the intelligence community, the news media, the opposition party and Congress. But to his great frustration, American institutions have mostly passed the stress test with flying colors.

“President Trump followed the electoral authoritarian script during his first year,” Levitsky and Ziblatt conclude. “He made efforts to capture the referees, sideline the key players who might halt him, and tilt the playing field. But the president has talked more than he has acted, and his most notorious threats have not been realized. … Little actual backsliding occurred in 2017.”

That seems right to me: The system worked.

And yet.

For all my confidence that our institutions will trump Trump, the chipping away at the integrity of our institutions and norms does worry me. Levitsky and Ziblatt warn of the unraveling of democratic norms — norms such as treating the other side as rivals rather than as enemies, condemning violence and bigotry, and so on. This unraveling was underway long before Trump (Newt Gingrich nudged it along in the 1990s), but Trump accelerated it.

It matters when Trump denounces the “deep state Justice Department,” calls Hillary Clinton a “criminal” and urges “jail” for Huma Abedin, denounces journalists as the “enemy of the American people” and promises to pay the legal fees of supporters who “beat the crap” out of protesters. With such bombast, Trump is beating the crap out of American norms.

I asked the authors how we citizens can most effectively resist an authoritarian president. The answer, they said, is not for Trump opponents to demonize the other side or to adopt scorched-earth tactics, for this can result in “a death spiral in which rule-breaking becomes pandemic.” It’s also not terribly effective, as we’ve seen in Venezuela.

Rather, they suggested protesting vigorously — but above all, in defense of rights and institutions, not just against the ruler. They emphasized that it’s critical to build coalitions, even if that means making painful compromises, so that protests are very broadly based.

“If these actions are limited to blue-state progressives, the risk of failure and/or deeper polarization is very high,” Levitsky told me in an interview. “Extraordinary measures are sometimes necessary to defend democracy, but they should rest on extraordinary coalitions — coalitions that include business leaders, religious leaders and crucially, as many conservatives and Republicans as possible.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 6, 2018 at 11:10am

By rewriting history, #Hindu nationalists lay claim to #India. #Modi has appointed committee of #Hindutva "scholars" to change #India's national identity to one based on #Hindu religion. #Islamophobia #Pakistan http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/india-modi-culture … via @SpecialReports

By RUPAM JAIN and TOM LASSETER Filed March 6, 2018, 11 a.m. GMT

NEW DELHI - During the first week of January last year, a group of Indian scholars gathered in a white bungalow on a leafy boulevard in central New Delhi. The focus of their discussion: how to rewrite the history of the nation.

The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi had quietly appointed the committee of scholars about six months earlier. Details of its existence are reported here for the first time.

Minutes of the meeting, reviewed by Reuters, and interviews with committee members set out its aims: to use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact not myth.

Interviews with members of the 14-person committee and ministers in Modi’s government suggest the ambitions of Hindu nationalists extend beyond holding political power in this nation of 1.3 billion people - a kaleidoscope of religions. They want ultimately to shape the national identity to match their religious views, that India is a nation of and for Hindus.

In doing so, they are challenging a more multicultural narrative that has dominated since the time of British rule, that modern-day India is a tapestry born of migrations, invasions and conversions. That view is rooted in demographic fact. While the majority of Indians are Hindus, Muslims and people of other faiths account for some 240 million, or a fifth, of the populace.

The committee’s chairman, K.N. Dikshit, told Reuters, “I have been asked to present a report that will help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.” The committee’s creator, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma, confirmed in an interview that the group’s work was part of larger plans to revise India’s history.

For India’s Muslims, who have pointed to incidents of religious violence and discrimination since Modi took office in 2014, the development is ominous. The head of Muslim party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said his people had “never felt so marginalised in the independent history of India.”

“The government,” he said, “wants Muslims to live in India as second-class citizens.”

Modi did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

INTO THE CLASSROOM

Helping to drive the debate over Indian history is an ideological, nationalist Hindu group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). It helped sweep Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to power in 2014 and now counts among its members the ministers in charge of agriculture, highways and internal security.

The RSS asserts that ancestors of all people of Indian origin - including 172 million Muslims - were Hindu and that they must accept their common ancestry as part of Bharat Mata, or Mother India. Modi has been a member of the RSS since childhood. An official biography of Culture Minister Sharma says he too has been a “dedicated follower” of the RSS for many years.

Referring to the emblematic colour of the Hindu nationalist movement, RSS spokesman Manmohan Vaidya told Reuters that “the true colour of Indian history is saffron and to bring about cultural changes we have to rewrite history.” 

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 29, 2019 at 4:39pm

#India is Legislatively Discriminating Against #Muslims with #CitizenshipAmendmentBill- This, Not #Trump's Wall is The Real Human Rights Scandal. #Modi #Hindutva #BJP #Islamophobia https://eurasiafuture.com/2019/01/09/india-is-legislatively-discrim... via @eurasia_future

Determining the citizenship of peasants in India has always been a difficult task due to the lack of modern local governance in remote and rural regions, as well as due to the fact that many of the people in question simply do not have any modern documentation that is typically used to determine one’s status as a citizen. It is against this background that India’s lower house of Parliament has decided to pass a proposal as part of the Citizenship Amendment Bill, 2019, that would see all un-documented Indian residents have their status normalised as full Indian citizens – with the exception of Muslims.


The passage of the new proposals have led to riots in India’s eastern Assam state where last year, four million Muslims were left off of citizenship rolls, effectively leaving them stateless even though most of these people had spent much or even all of their lives in India. While many believe that the controversial bill won’t be cleared by the upper house of India’s parliament, the fact that such an explicitly discriminatory piece of legislation could even be considered, says a great deal about the anti-Islamic tricks that Premier Narendra Modi’s BJP has up its sleeves in the run-up to this year’s general election.

While India has not even been able to conduct a proper tally of its own residents and has struggled throughout 2018 to attempt and conduct such a thing without resorting to overt discrimination, the wider global media has been focused more on Donald Trump’s border wall than on India’s wholesale discrimination against 172 million of its Muslim citizens, as well as the discrimination against millions of non-documented Muslims who know no other home than India.

Legally, Trump’s border wall does not violate any part of the US constitution and it is of course the right of every nation to physically secure its borders, just as Pakistan and Turkey have done in respect of portions of their borders with hostile neighbours. But what India is doing is something very different. India is punishing millions of people in Assam and beyond, for the fact that they were brought to India as genuine refugees and had lived for years in a system with widespread deficiencies in local governance that did not allow for a traditional normalisation of their status within India.


The current citizenship proposals do in fact acknowledge past deficiencies in local and regional governments that have left many millions of people without genuine social security. While New Delhi seeks to rectify this situation in respect of undocumented Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and others so long as they can prove that they have lived normal lives in India for at least six years, Muslims are not covered by the new legislation which acknowledges past injustices against those who arrived in India after leaving Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 14, 2019 at 7:17am

"White Nationalist" Steve Bannon: As a nationalist, #Modi was a #Trump before Trump. #India #BJP #Islamophobia #Xenophobia http://toi.in/9fjcIb46/a24gk via @timesofindia

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 23, 2020 at 10:33pm

As India’s #Economy Sags With Country's Worst Slump in Years, Even the #Trump Brand Is Struggling. #India has the largest number of Trump Towers outside North America, but sales are cool in an ailing market for luxury real estate. #Modi #BJP https://nyti.ms/37PJbih

According to its most recent annual financial disclosure, for 2018, the company earned perhaps as little as $200,000 last year on all four of its projects in India. The maximum revenue reported at Trump Organization from the four India projects dropped from $6 million in 2017 to $2 million in 2018, although some income from India might be counted as contributing to other accounts.

------------

As Donald J. Trump prepared to run for president, Indian real estate magnates made a bet that licensing his name would sell apartments. Now India has more Trump-branded projects than any country except the United States — six residential towers in four locations, including Pune, a quiet industrial city of more than 3 million people.

But when Mr. Trump touches down in India on Monday to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his first official visit as president, he will enter a country caught in a grave slowdown. As the Indian economy faces its lowest growth rate in more than a decade, developers have abandoned residential projects and slashed prices to attract buyers.

It is not just the Trump brand that is suffering from weak demand. Thousands of apartments are vacant nationwide or trapped in construction delays and prices have stagnated. Debt-strapped builders cannot secure loans.

Real estate agents and developers sold about 40 percent less square footage last year than in 2014, according to Prashant Thakur, the head of research at Anarock Property Consultants, a real estate research firm.

At Trump Towers Pune, which were completed a few years ago as the first project in India to bear the Trump name, only seven of 46 units are occupied, according to building employees and others with knowledge of occupancy and sales.

The real estate market is now so weak, the Trump family’s partners in Pune decided to not even attempt — at least for now — to sell half of the luxury apartments in the complex, which retail for about 35 percent more than comparable properties.

Pune, Mumbai, Kolkata and Gurugram, a tech hub near New Delhi, all have Trump-branded projects. The deals in India were negotiated before Mr. Trump was elected, and the Trump family said they were contractually obligated to see them through. But the decision to push ahead has generated conflict-of-interest questions about the mixing of presidential duties with family business.

Panchshil Realty, which built the towers in Pune, did not answer emailed questions. Through a spokesman, the company’s chairman, Atul Chordia, declined to comment.

Asked to comment on its projects in India, the Trump organization and one of its India-based partners did not dispute that their real estate projects in India, particularly in Pune and Mumbai, have faced challenges because of the downturn in the luxury real-estate market.

But they argued that while they are suffering too, their sales are still better than others in the market.

“Despite the slowdown in India, Trump is still the most sought after luxury residential brand in the country,” Kalpesh Mehta, the developer of unfinished projects in Kolkata and Gurugram, said in a statement.

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 7, 2020 at 8:04am

For #Trump and #Modi, ethnic purity is the purpose of power. Both strongmen favor immigration & citizenship policies designed to demonize minority groups. Top #Hindu Nationalist leaders like Golwalkar were influenced by #Mussolini & #Hitler | Jason Stanley https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/24/trump-modi-ci...

The European-American concept of a national state had influence outside Europe. VD Savarkar, the Indian political theorist who ushered in Hindu nationalist ideology, was influenced by European ethno-nationalism. He took the Nazi treatment of German Jews to be a model for eventual Hindutva policy towards India’s Muslim residents. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a Hindu nationalist movement dating back to the mid-1920s, many of whose members venerated Savarkar. Senior leaders, such as MS Golwalkar, were influenced by Mussolini and Hitler. The Bharatiya Janata party, the political wing of RSS and now India’s ruling party, has begun to implement changes in citizenship laws that echo the Nuremberg Laws.

India’s new Citizenship Amendment Act allows for a fast-track to citizenship for non-Muslim migrants, thereby discriminating against Muslims. The proposed national register requires residents to prove their citizenship with documentation – which many in India lack. Together, these laws place Muslims without documentation in a quandary. Large detention centres are being built to house India’s Muslim residents who are declared ineligible for citizenship. Like the US immigration policy so admired by Hitler, these laws are a mask: they are designed to privilege Hindus in the citizenship laws of the world’s largest democracy.

Trump leads an administration that seeks to return the US to the national state of Hitler’s adulation. In many respects, Modi’s India is considerably further along this path. The student has become the teacher.

There is more to fascism than changing citizenship laws. Fascist movements seek one-party rule: over the courts, the police, the military and the press. They involve a cult of loyalty to a single leader and nostalgia for a mythic past when the nation was dominated by the privileged group. But the core of fascist ideology is realised in changing citizenship laws to privilege a single ethnic group. This is why we regard the Nuremberg Laws as a defining moment in German history, and the concentration camp as the defining Nazi institution.

History has been rightly horrified by the Nuremberg Laws and their consequences. Why, then, are so many countries going down this path?

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 26, 2021 at 11:24am

In January, #Modi poured scorn on experts & scientists who warned his country faced a "tsunami" of infection. Now the #Indian PM is facing harsh criticism for premature triumphalism amid a terrible surge that has people dying in the streets. #BJP #Hindutva https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/26/world/meanwhile-in-america-populism/...

Among its deadly properties, Covid-19 appears perfectly engineered to destroy the houses of sand built by populist leaders.

Back in January, Narendra Modi poured scorn on experts and scientists who warned his country faced a "tsunami" of infection. Now the Indian Prime Minister is being harshly criticized for premature triumphalism amid a terrible surge that has people dying in the streets.
Modi is only the latest populist crusader to come unstuck. Former US President Donald Trump's denialism appears to have cost tens of thousands of lives. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro fueled a disaster by rejecting Covid-19 countermeasures in favor of crank cures. UK PM Boris Johnson paid a heavy personal and political price for ignoring the threat of the pandemic early on, though he has since become more cautious.

Covid-19 doesn't have political preferences. Even some leaders praised for their scientific approach have seen their standing consumed by the virus. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's final months in power for instance are being tarnished by a wave of infections worsened by Europe's slow vaccine rollout.

But the pandemic is guaranteed to expose leaders who undermine truth, create alternative realities, ostracize experts and scientists and refuse to take precautions to keep the public safe. Earlier this month for instance, Modi boasted of huge rally crowds ahead of elections in West Bengal. His hubris in the face of the virus recalls Trump's refusal to give up rallies last year at which he boasted the virus was being driven out -- even as his crowds contributed to a building wave of lethal infections that winter.
Having their negligence exposed may not deter the truth-twisting populist leaders inspired by Trump (who is already spoiling for a comeback). Populism will find fertile soil in the economic and social detritus left in the pandemic's wake. But when leaders prioritize their political image over public health, millions of people suffer.

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