They are united by their promises to make their countries great again. And they master the art of converting the fears and insecurities of citizens into electoral support. They position themselves as saviors on white horses, big-chested men who alone can rescue their nations from peril. “Illiberal democracy is a growth industry,” Zakaria wrote in 1997. His prophetic words have an even greater ring of truth at the moment.
In June 2016, the Philippines elected a brash populist named Rodrigo Duterte as its new president. Duterte, who is known as “Duterte Harry”—a pun on “Dirty Harry”—has a history of association with vigilantes and brags about using brute force to control crime and drugs. Once a great heroine of the struggle for democracy, Nobel Laureate Aung San Su Kyi, whose party won the national elections in Myanmar, has turned into a sad apologist for majoritarian politics and genocidal violence against the Rohingya minority. Apart from its failure to prevent the murders of secular bloggers, the government in nearby Bangladesh has increasingly taken an authoritarian path and turned onto its political opponents. Paul Kagame’s post-genocide regime in Rwanda, which has been hailed for order and progress by the West, has ruthlessly destroyed freedom of expression and silenced critical voices. As the great philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin said, “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
The illiberal tide and the rise of the strongmen exact a terrible human toll. At the end of these academic categories lie individuals and families whose lives are shaped, twisted, and often destroyed. I knew that well from my experience of reporting in India over the years. Through reading and through conversations with friends over time I found strong echoes of the Indian story in Turkey. These are two large democracies, which grew out of the collapse of empires, and which were led by charismatic founding fathers inclined toward varying degrees of European modernity. They are also multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies where religion and secularism are among the dominant faultlines. Both countries have been waging war against ethnic groups on their borders which sought independence or autonomy. India and Turkey are being ruled by strongmen who are business-friendly politicians, men from humble origins, who came of age in traditions of controversial religious politics. Narendra Damodardas Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also share a love of public speaking, refer to themselves in the third person, and have used hologram technology to speak to multiple audiences across their countries.
I spent a year and a half traveling across India and Turkey. This book isn’t merely the story of these powerful politicians but also the story of the men and women they victimized, who showed courage and endured great suffering in their love for true democratic traditions.
On a June 2014 afternoon, two weeks after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India, I traveled to Ahmedabad, the largest city in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Modi is the son of a tea vendor from a Gujarati village. He left home after high school in the late 1960s to work for the Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh, or RSS, an influential Hindu supremacist organization, which seeks to remodel India as a Hindu state.
Modi rose to be the organizational secretary of the group in the mid-eighties. In the fall of 1990, Lal Krishna Advani, then a leading Hindu nationalist politician in the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, rode across India on a truck designed to look like a chariot from the Hindu epics. The aim of the yatra, or political pilgrimage, was to drum up support for building a grand temple to the god Rama in what’s believed to be Rama’s birthplace, the northern town of Ayodhya—on the site of a medieval mosque, the Babri Masjid. Two weeks before the Rama chariot set out on its journey, Modi announced its itinerary to the press in Ahmedabad, explaining why the grand temple was crucial to India’s national identity. Frenzied crowds welcomed Advani’s chariot in the city—a man stabbed his arm with a trident and used his gushing blood to put a tilak on Advani’s forehead. In villages and towns across India, men and women gathered to worship the chariot in elaborate Hindu rituals using incense sticks and sandalwood paste. Militant young men offered their blood for the cause, calling on Advani to raze the mosque and build the temple. Indian love for alliteration was mixed with bigotry in the slogans at Advani’s public meetings: Tel lagao dabur ka, naam mita do Babar ka—“Use the hair-oil made by Dabur and erase the name of Babur.” Riots broke out in several states; some 600 people were killed. On December 6, 1992, tens of thousands of extremist Hindus, egged on by Hindu nationalist politicians, tore down the Babri Masjid. This triggered more riots across India that left thousands dead, mostly Muslims.
Modi had earned Advani’s confidence when he meticulously planned a stretch of Advani’s yatra, as the yatra emboldened Hindu nationalists and the BJP went on to win national elections and form the government in 1998. Advani became Deputy Prime Minister, while the older, milder Atal Bihari Vajpayee became Prime Minister. Four years later, Advani appointed Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat.
On February 27, 2002, a train carrying dozens of Hindu activists returning from the site of the demolished Babri Masjid in Ayodhya stopped in the town of Godhra. A confrontation between the Hindu activists and Muslim tea vendors ensued. A coach was set on fire—competing political enquiries have yet to settle who lit it—and 59 people were burned alive inside. Their charred bodies were paraded through Ahmedabad.
In the aftermath, armed Hindu mobs fanned through Ahmedabad attacking Muslim homes and businesses. Women were raped and set on fire; children and men were hacked to death. Around 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Multiple human rights organizations reported that Modi’s government and police officials were complicit in the carnage. Up to 150,000 Muslims took refuge in camps.
Chief Minister Modi not only refused to apologize for his failure to protect his citizens, he called the Muslim camps “child-producing centers.” Over the years, Modi has stubbornly refused to show any regret about the carnage on his watch. In 2013, when asked about his lack of remorse, Modi said: “If someone else is driving, and we are sitting in the back seat, and even then if a small puppy comes under the wheel, do we feel pain or not? We do.” Kutte ka baccha was the Hindi phrase that Modi used, and literally it does mean a puppy. But it is primarily used as a Hindi slur: son of a dog. Modi had chosen his words carefully.
Yet Gujarat would prove to be the perfect state from which Modi could reinvent himself as a man of governance and a pro-business leader.
A wealthy boomtown of about six million people, Ahmedabad witnessed a major expansion during Modi’s reign. Real estate prices doubled as corporate parks, luxurious apartment towers, and shopping malls overran the farming towns on the edges of the city. Modi leveraged the strong economic base of Gujarat, offered sops to large corporations, and promised to attract lucrative foreign investment.
Although most Indian cities are divided on the basis of religion, in Ahmedabad this division is particularly stark. Muslims, who constitute about 9 percent of the population, live in slums on the outskirts, in parts of the walled city, or in Juhapura, a large ghetto on the city’s southwestern edge. Segregation throughout India increased in the violent aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. It became starker, especially in Gujarat, after the 2002 riots. Juhapura, which houses a mixture of working-class and middle-class Muslims, has no access to basic amenities such as drinking water, piped gas, and bus service.
The horror of the Gujarat violence—India’s first televised riot—was so overwhelming that in its aftermath, it seemed impossible that Modi could run for the Indian prime minister’s job. Yet a combination of failures of the ruling Indian Congress Party, Modi’s aggressive success at crafting a new image of himself as an Indian Lee Kwan Yew, and immense support from the Hindu nationalists
