Hum Do Humare Do: Modi, Trump, and the Danger of Comparative Idiocy
This article was written by guest author George J. Watts, the Class President of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. Mr. Watts has a particular interest in the Politics and History of the Indian Subcontinent.
The statistical likelihood of humanity is that no matter how bad a person you are, you are probably not the worst person. This is a comforting idea in times of self-deprecative despair, but it is fundamentally dangerous when we consider those whose actions have the widest impact.
You may have read the article published last week about Modi’s insidious legal campaign to expand his grip on power. The combination of performative, populistic jibber jabber and grave, calculated legal exploitation seems to be the norm to us these days. Modi makes public appearances far less frequently than The Donald, preferring to keep an almost mythical presence domestically. Much like Boris’ disappearance from the COVID daily reports (even long-after hospitalisation), Modi has a soft spot for always being absent just enough to never really be to blame for anything. He is a great ambassador for India abroad, adored by Trump and the thousands of NRIs (non-residential Indians) who welcomed him to the roads of Texas not so long ago. Like Trump, he has the support of ethically-incompetent, far-right, pseudo-religious groups. The RSS is a far more formalised version of the Christian American alt-right, which groomed Modi throughout his childhood from chaiwala to leader of the Hindutva brigade.
I could sit on my sofa comparing Modi to Trump and Johnson until the cows come home. Why? It’s easy. Is this ease useful? Not really. Our tendency to suppress ‘other world leaders’ by either branding them to be ‘not Trump’ or ‘similar to Trump because’ leaves us in a problematic state of analysis. When Modi exists in relation to Trump through the Western eye, the damage he causes will always be comparative. Modi’s Islamophobia will be equated with Trump’s. Of course, they are both Islamophobes, but their Islamophobias stem from and manifest differently.
Whilst Modi’s Islamophobia exists within a general construction of Hindu superiority (Hindutva), Trump’s comes from a place of anti-immigration. Both stem from dangerous nationalistic ideology. Trump’s is less explicitly anti-Muslim and more anti-non-americans, with Trump conceiving most non-white communities as non-american; Modi sees Islam as a threat to the purity of India’s Hinduness, which for him is hand-in-hand with what Indianness means. There are of course overlaps with the Trumpian variety, but to explain Modi as ‘Islamophobic like Trump, so they’re mates’ is dangerous. It prevents us from properly examining the routes of Indian issues, centralises Trump as the ‘real problem’ and Modi as some Hagrid-side-cart danger man. Modi is more than a supporting character in the Trump-parade-of-global-fuckery. India is home to 200 million Muslims, and over his term Modi has managed to blame them for Covid-19, economic downturns, unemployment, and essentially most other things of which you may conceive. Following Covid’s ability to mask the Citizenship Amendment Act’s passing, millions of undocumented Muslim migrants that are at the core of India’s rapid infrastructural expansion may end up in concentration-camp-esque detention centres.
Students are being beaten for protesting. Muslims are being lynched for existing. Homeless people are being whipped for breaking lockdown rules by virtue of having no home to isolate in. Portraying Modi as primarily a Trump-chum, even when done with educational intent, neglects and decentralises the daily suffering of millions of India’s forgotten races and classes, pitting them as some mythical consequence of a man with thinning hair and poor orange tan as opposed to a calculated consequence of cruel rule.
The Modi-Trump rhetoric also directly prevents Modi’s victims from being heard and aided. If Modi’s issues always exist as a consequence of or a diluted version of Trump’s, the age of performative celebrity activists gain greater clout through opposing the regime with greater vitriolic attitudes surrounding it. If I want to look like I care, I should do something about the things it will look best for me to care about. Thus, if Trump is worse than Modi, I should do something to stop Trump. Worse yet, if Trump is somehow responsible for Modi, if I stop The Donald I will somehow be dismantling the crux of the Hindutva movement.
“At least we ain’t America” is a phrase one hears repeatedly when locked in familial and pub-based BLM debates in the UK. Of course, this is true. It is nice not to be America, but that doesn’t mean it’s nice to be oneself. I’d rather be responsible for 5 bad things than 10 bad things, but I’d generally not like to have done any bad things and having 5 fewer bad things than someone else doesn’t mean I should be patting myself on the back. This metaphor loosely extends to the Indian discourse around BLM. The forms of racism in India are often very different to the West, in the sense that there is a strong emphasis on casteism and internalised racism as opposed to black-white dichotomies.
To many in the West, the ‘Indian’ identity is a homogenised one. We might say that someone ‘looks Indian’ and be utilising a monolithic definition. The reality is that India is a nation with diverse identities, religions, castes and languages. The idea of ‘India’ itself is something often retroactively imposed on History. We hear stories of how Gandhi The Pacifist Freed India, implying that some united India existed beforehand. Over the course of history, this ‘India’ was comprised of and ruled by a series of empires and sects of people, with the now federalised states being redefined, redrawn and redistributed over the centuries. I am not the person to be providing a lesson on Indian racism, but distinguishing its history and manifestations from the West is an important first step to understanding how to tackle it.
Fairness of skin is a fundamental idea at the core of Indian racism. In the online dating era, websites allowed for suitors or parents of suitors to filter by lightness of skin. The whitening cream industry is worth astronomical amounts, and there is an association of darkness of skin with poverty and labour-work. The darker skinned an individual, the greater the association with having to work in the outdoors and ‘dirtying’ one’s hands. With lighter skinned Indians favoured throughout the Raj, the British codified and solidified these racialised ideas into the ‘national’ mindset. The transition from covert ideology to overt legal and social frameworks has embedded a racial and caste hierarchy within the subcontinent that still exists to this day. Lots of these are so normalised and unacknowledged by the non-liberal or liberal-performing elite that it is a lot easier to stand up against ‘US Racism’, which does not require self reflection and a deep examination of one’s own prejudices.
This total differentiation, merged with ingrained attitudes that changing America will change the world, led to many famous Bollywood actors speaking up in support of BLM, but refusing to do anything about pressing issues ‘at home’ like the Kashmiri Internet shutdown, and the passing of the CAA. This pseudo-centralisation of the US harms those that are being forcedly related to it, because it misguidedly conflates with the improvement of the West with the saviour of the rest.
Don’t be led to believe that this is just a Modi-problem. These Trump-comparisons-cum-evil-justifications can be seen worldwide, from Salvini to Duda and from Bolsonaro to even Johnson. The tendency to centralise Trump consistently desensitises us to the dangerous acts of other leaders. Modi is an idiot. Trump is an idiot. These fourteen syllables are worth uttering within their own right. They don’t always come together, and they’re not always the same kind of idiocy. They’re idiots in different ways, about different things, with different contexts and different consequences. But they’re both dangerous. Just because someone is an idiot, doesn’t make them a fool.
