The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

had assassinated Gandhi in 1948. Within a few years of Modi becoming prime minister, the civil and political rights of India’s Muslim minority came under sustained assault. It started with a symbolic issue. Cows had always been a marker of cultural and religious difference in India: Hindus worshipped bovines; Muslims ate them. ‘The cows I want to eat, the Hindu stops me from killing,’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah remarked. After Modi came to power, that distinction became a pretext for communal violence. Hindu mobs lynched Muslims who worked with cows under the noses of indifferent police officers. The Hindu supremacists turned to other issues. Muslim romantics were accused of waging ‘love jihad’ against Hindu women. State governments curbed their civil liberties. In December 2019, Modi passed a law that blatantly restricted Muslim citizenship. Two months later, Hindu mobs set upon Muslims in New Delhi, in a wave of destruction and arson that left fifty people dead, and had chilling echoes of partition. Such flagrant discrimination was strikingly similar to the intolerance of Pakistan’s Islamists. Modi himself was riding a larger wave, as the South Asian flag-bearer for the wave of right-wing populism washing across the globe. ‘This is extraordinary. This is unprecedented,’ Modi told diaspora supporters in the United States in September 2019, before grasping the hand of President Donald Trump.