the results of India’s 2014 national elections were declared on May 16, Modi’s BJP had won 282 out of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha (“House of the People”), the lower house of Parliament. The media called his victory a tsu-NaMo. No politician had won such a popular mandate in India since 1984.
The defining image of the Gujarat riots remains a Reuters photograph of Qutubudin Ansari, a 28-year-old man with thick wavy hair, standing on the first floor balcony of a house in Ahmedabad, imploring soldiers from an Indian paramilitary police force to rescue him. His large, black eyes are filled with tears, his shirt is bloodstained. The photograph, reproduced in thousands of newspapers, posters, and pamphlets, became the emblem of the brutality in Gujarat.
Shortly after arriving in Ahmedabad, I telephoned Ansari to ask if he would meet with me. I was sure he wouldn’t answer; he has avoided the press since the riots, appearing only at a rally for the avowedly anti-BJP Communist Party in the southern state of Kerala during the 2014 election. To my surprise he picked up after only three rings, speaking in Urdu, the language of northern India. A majority of the city’s Muslims, including Ansari’s father, had migrated to Gujarat from the poor northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, seeking work in the city’s textile mills. By the mid-1980s, the textile industry had collapsed, after the government changed its policy to encourage textile manufacturing in smaller, more unorganized sectors, and mill owners began investing in more lucrative pharmaceutical and chemical industries. Many of the mill workers became tailors or worked as cutters in the garment industry, which was owned, predominantly, by Hindus.
Ansari lives in the working-class area of Sone Ki Chal in northeastern Ahmedabad, near the shuttered textile mills. We met by an overpass near his home. In the neighborhood’s narrow alleys, I caught glimpses of men bent over sewing machines, scraps of denim and cotton littering the ground. “Let’s go to my favorite place,” Ansari said. “It is very peaceful there.” Where Ansari led me to was a bench on the island that divided the highway. The Muslims lived in the shantytown on Ansari’s side of the highway; the Hindus lived across the divider, in bigger, concrete houses. Ansari pointed to a two-story house with beige tiles and a tiny balcony. “That is where the photograph was taken,” he said.
He recalled watching the riots from a hole in a door that opened onto the balcony as mobs looted and burned shops and destroyed homes. Behind him stood his wife, their eldest daughter, and a family friend and his wife. The only exit was a staircase leading to the street. Suddenly Ansari spotted a truck patrolling the street. It belonged to the Rapid Action Force, a federal paramilitary force routinely deployed to control religious riots. He shouted for help. The truck stopped. Ansari ran out onto the balcony and joined his palms in the very Indian gesture of seeking help or forgiveness. Tears rolled down his face as he pleaded for rescue. But the paramilitary men began to pull away. In that moment, Arko Datta, a Reuters photographer who had hitched a ride with the RAF men, snapped a picture of Ansari with his telephoto lens. A minute later, the RAF returned, fired tear gas at the mob, and led Ansari and his family to safety. “Arko and other journalists in the truck forced the RAF to return to save us,” Ansari said.
About ten days after the picture was taken, a European journalist found Ansari in a refugee camp and Ansari became famous overnight. For the next few years he struggled with his celebrity. He craved the anonymity and ordinariness of his life before the photograph, which had turned him into the face of the horrors of the Gujarat riots. On the streets Hindu nationalists would recognize him and taunt him: “He is the one who was crying in that picture!” Employers would refuse him work as they saw his visible association with the riots as potentially troublesome. Liberals and Muslims would flock to him, seeing in him a living testament to the failures of Modi and the Hindu right. Ansari wanted to be invisible.
He moved to a town near Mumbai, where his sister lived, then to Kolkata, which was ruled by a Communist government critical of the Hindu nationalists. The Communists gave him an allowance and a sewing machine and helped him rent a shop. But it was difficult to build a clientele in an unknown city. After his mother was diagnosed with a heart condition, Ansari headed back to Ahmedabad. He resumed his work as a tailor and as business picked up, Ansari moved from a rented place to his own two-room house, all the while watching Modi growing stronger politically and scheming for the prime minister’s job.
Modi had won over a small section of Gujarati Muslims through political patronage—a combination of access to state resources and a sense of security from future violence and prosecution. Displaying just enough visible Muslim support was essential to diluting the taint of the 2002 riots. In the fall of 2012, Modi began a week-long fast for communal harmony known as Sadhbhavana (“Goodwill”) that would be broadcast on Indian television networks. A few days before the show, Modi sent several of his Muslim supporters to ask Ansari to come to the Sadhbhavana and show his face to the television cameras. Ansari threatened to go to the press if he was forced to share the stage with Modi. They backed off.
A year after the Sadhbhavana broadcast, a Muslim who worked for Modi’s party arrived at Ansari’s house. The government was making a promotional film and they wanted him to take part along with Amitabh Bachchan, the Bollywood superstar. Bachchan would say “Khushboo Hai Gujarat Main” (“Ah, the scent of Gujarat!”) and all Ansari had to do was utter “Aman Hai Gujarat Main” (“Ah, the peace in Gujarat!”) The pay was good, but Ansari, who makes around 6,000 Indian rupees, or $100, a month, refused. “My face is my prison but the memory of the storm too lives in my face,” he said.
Voting day in Ahmedabad came in May. Paresh Rawal was the BJP candidate from Ahmedabad East. Five days later as the votes were being tallied, Ansari watched the results on his old television set. Some of his friends joked about Modi’s sweep of the popular vote and the futility of his opposition. Even though 91 percent of India’s Muslim voters did not vote for Modi, it made little difference; consolidation of Hindu votes across caste divisions made Muslim opposition ineffective.
The most surprising part of the election was the elite embrace of Modi, even in India’s most cosmopolitan city of Mumbai. On a morning train to Mumbai, a teenager seated next to me had chosen as the ringtone for his smartphone a chorus of hundreds of voices chanting: “Modi! Modi! Modi!” The Mumbai elite had a history of barely voting in Indian elections, relying instead on influence and connections. But this time they had voted overwhelmingly for Modi.
I drove for an hour and a half through exacting traffic from the Mumbai Central railway terminus to Andheri to meet Rahul Mehra, who is typical of the elite voters Modi has been able to attract in India’s commercial capital. Mehra is 29 years old, educated at Princeton, and worked for a time at a hedge fund in New York before returning to India in 2008 to run the family hotel businesses. He saw Modi as the great hope for India’s future. After spectacular gains in the 2000s, India’s economic growth sputtered to about 5 percent by the summer of 2013. Government promises of better electricity, roads, infrastructure, and jobs for the millions of young Indians graduating college were fading. “Economically, things were out of control,” Mehra told me. “It was hurting me very bad as a businessman. We were trying to invest, get land banks, build new hotels, but we couldn’t get permission for our projects.” Mehra and his brother turned from India to Thailand, which gets three times the tourists India does. They built a new hotel there. “We got loans at 7 percent interest in Thailand; in India we have to pay 13 percent interest.”
Mehra, who lives in a high-end apartment complex in South Mumbai, had never voted before. But in 2014 members of the South Mumbai business elite came together to form a lobbying group, India First, to support the Modi’s campaign; a friend persuaded Mehra to join. “We talked about registering voters, about good governance, and change,” Mehra recalled. “We were impressed by Modi’s record in Gujarat. He is very corporate; he seemed to be someone who is being responsible to his shareholders. I felt that the Congress government had plundered the country more than the British did in 150 years. As [Nobel Prize-winning psychologist] Daniel Kahneman says, a person values a loss twice as much as he values a gain.”
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