"He is entertaining and forceful, but nothing more than that. It is true also that it is this sort of thing that voters are looking for." - ANAND RANGANATHAN
Narendra Modi is a man before his time. A couple of decades along, too late for him, there will be a bigger constituency in India for the anti-Muslim demagogue. Modi dislocates the hypocrisy of a party whose leader fired up a mob and then said he regretted its vandalism. For those able to look beyond his superb oratory and humour, the vapidity of Modi’s message is striking. His simple views spring from his lack of knowledge. He’s not well-read, has little idea about the world or its history. It will be embarrassing, if he becomes prime minister, to have him in the same meeting as US President Barack Obama. He is aching to bring with him his social vision, which is aligned with that of the RSS, to the rest of India from Gujarat. A money-minded, intellectually barren, segregated, ghettoised, non-drinking and vegetarian utopia that some of us have fled from. Modi has never been to college and his degree is from a correspondence course. His writing, which is all in Gujarati,...