Given this history, the West\u2019s apparent concern for Muslims is too facile a reason for the trenchant opposition to Modi. Riots have happened in independent India under many different governments. The\u00a0British\u00a0policy of divide and rule had instigated the division of India on religious lines, leading to large-scale displacement and killing. \u00a0After independence, simmering conflict fanned by politicians broke into riots, most often during the rule of the Congress. In Gujarat in 1969, nearly 5000 Muslims were killed under Congress rule, yet the Chief Minister was not ruled satanic. Unlike in Gujarat 2002, where scores of Hindu rioters were killed in police firing to stop rioters, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots under\u00a0Rajiv Gandhi\u00a0hardly saw any such preventative action. However, Rajiv Gandhi was never demonised in Western academia and media. What is special about Modi?<\/div>\n
In his book \u2018Clash of Civilizations\u2019, Harvard professor Samuel P Huntington laid out his thesis that basic differences in civilisations will result in a clash. In his book he identified \u2018Western\u2019 and \u2018Hindu\u2019 civilisations among the major distinct civilisations of the world. While Huntington\u2019s thesis has been criticised, we must accept Huntington\u2019s view as an important way the West looks at the world. Huntington was deeply embedded in the institutions of American power. He was the White House Coordinator of Security Planning under President Jimmy Carter, a consultant to the US Department of State, founder and editor of\u00a0
Foreign Policy<\/i>\u00a0magazine and a professor at Columbia and Harvard.<\/div>\nThe rise of Modi bothers the West because the BJP and Modi, unlike the\u00a0Congress, appear to stand for the Hindu civilisation. This view may not be far off. Unlike the other parties, the BJP\u2019s manifesto, explicitly invokes continuity with Hindu kingdoms of the past. It sees modern India, as not just born today, but as a continuity of an ancient civilisation. This threatens both the Christian Right and the Secular Left of the West, the two prongs of Western civilisational imperialism. The Christian Right sees the rise of a Hindu civilisation as threatening its conversion agenda, the Left sees it as a \u201creligious\u201d threat to the expansion of Western secular universalism.<\/div>\n
Fed on Doniger-esque caricatures of Hinduism and partisan account of the Gujarat riots, they are inclined to view the rise of a Hindu party as an extremely distasteful and incomprehensible existential threat. Just as the a handful of British people ruled India with the help of a large number of Indian sepoys, the intellectual Indian sepoy army that has internalised the Western worldview, view this rise with the same distaste and actively write against it in India and abroad.<\/div>\n