For all his undoubted rhetorical skills, he also almost never deployed them to win over worried liberals, or to reassure minorities fearful about the rise of newly partisan Hinduism. Instead, his speeches preached a gospel of growth while dropping in dog whistles that only the attentive would hear. “Almost for 1,000 to 1,200 years we were slaves,” he told a cheering crowd of well-heeled diaspora Indians at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 2014.15 The implication was clear: Indians were subjugated not just during British rule but also under the various Muslim empires that preceded it. Only
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