A progressive Indian friend has been assiduously trying to convert me to his cause. While India has the strongest civil society in all of Asia and the 'cause' here could conceivably be an innumerable list of activities, his mission is a curious one: to get the premier of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, elected as the next prime minister of India. Unfortunately for India, Mr. Modi has a track record as a fanatical ideologue while his likely opponent is severely lacking the leadership and experience necessary to run a democracy of one billion people.
The state of Gujarat under Mr. Modi's leadership has become one of the most prosperous in all of India. From 2004 through 2012, Gujarat grew at over 10 per cent a year. Mr. Modi's supporters point to his economic stewardship, his incorruptibility, and his steadfast leadership as the reason behind Gujarat's resurgence. In some quarters, his state is being called the next Dubai. While it is true that Mr. Modi has unleashed an economic miracle at the state level, his dictatorial style is unlikely to work at the federal level and India's 176 million Muslims are unlikely to forgive him for standing idle as pogroms targeted their community during communal riots a decade ago.
Over three days in 2002, Hindu mobs in Gujarat, using swords and explosives, systemically targeted Muslim homes and businesses. Mosques were destroyed and Muslims were killed indiscriminately, the murderers cheered on by local newspapers. An estimated 150,000 people were ultimately displaced and it is estimated that at least 1,000 Muslims were killed. It is undeniable today that the attacks were premeditated, well-coordinated, and conceived well in advance. Final reports on state complicity vary, but Mr. Modi's government stood by indifferently at best and some of its members directed the pogroms at worst. It is a depressing irony that all of this happened in the home state of Mohandas Gandhi.
A decade later, as the prime ministerial candidate of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Mr. Modi remains largely unrepentant. Responding to a question earlier this year about his role in the riots, Modi responded: "If someone else is driving a car and we're sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is." Comparing the killing of civilians to driving a car over a puppy should indicate to the electorate that Mr. Modi thinks the dead civilians were nothing more than an unfortunate inconvenience. It is hardly surprising that his visa to the United States was rejected and he currently is not allowed to step onto U.S. soil, despite his stature in India. Other countries could follow suit in the future, turning the future leader of India into an international pariah.
Even though he has a stained human-rights record, many Indians are quick to exculpate Mr. Modi because he has delivered economic growth. Yes, he did unspeakable harm, the argument goes, but he will deliver jobs and prosperity to the country. This thinking is difficult to argue with when one considers the fact that India has one third of the world's poor, but it is important to ask: how far can such a rationalization be taken? Stalin and Mussolini both provided stellar economic growth for some time, after all. The crime itself becomes a necessary evil one must bear in the hope of some greater good.
Unfortunately for India, there is no compelling candidate across the aisle. The Congress Party is in decay with an octogenarian prime minister embroiled in numerous scandals, slowing economic growth, and a foreign policy widely derided as feckless. Congress has implicitly put forward a member of Indian royalty to lead their ticket in 2014: the young Rahul Gandhi. As the son of India's most powerful woman, Congress chairwoman Sonia Gandhi, and great grandson of India's first prime minister Jawaharal Nehru, Rahul Gandhi is the most recent political aspirant riding on the famed Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Yet he has made numerous gaffes throughout the year and has done a poor job of explaining Congress's policies to the public. Younger Indians, millions of whom have advanced upward through sheer hard work in India's extremely competitive schools, are quick to scoff at a candidate who was born with everything. Even if Mr. Gandhi had the intelligence and charisma of his Cambridge-educated great grandfather, anyone on the Congress ticket will have a difficult time justifying a third mandate when the current government has become so ineffectual.
For India then, the choice is a difficult one – but Mr. Modi is certainly the more dangerous pick. A BJP government led by Mr. Modi could worsen inter-communal relations and silently condone the actions of Mr. Modi's government and its far-right supporters during the 2002 riots. While India's pluralistic civil society and democratic machinery will muddle through regardless of who wins, the prospect of a hardliner at the helm of Indian politics should be unsettling to Indian voters and India watchers.
Omer Aziz (@omeraziz12) is a writer and journalist from Toronto.