Modi Is a Real Threat to India

In today’s India, promoters of the most radical fringe of Hindu nationalism within Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) want to constrict Indian diversity and enforce an imagined civilizational purity they call Hindutva. Their campaign has already demonstrated its power to oppress and kill Muslims, destroy their mosques, force the “reconversion” of Christians and Buddhists, wade into censorship, limit critical or analytical scholarship and police the arts. Hindu zealots drove the country’s most celebrated painter, M. F. Hussein, into self-imposed exile in London, where he died in 2011.