Modi should be India’s Henry VIII

Keats asserted that truth was beauty and beauty truth and that was all we know and all we need to know on earth. British diplomatic tradition, from the days of their first multinational, the East India Company, has been “Business is politics, politics business, that is all ye know in government.” Napoleon perceptively called the Brits a nation of shopkeepers.

The present Chancellor of the Exchequer comes from a shopkeeper family. George Osborne’s ancestry and relatives sell curtains and soft furnishings. The present Prime Minister, David Cameron worked as a PR man. Sell, sell, sell!

Even this year the Tory government extended a grovelling invitation to Xi Jinping, inviting China to supply Britain with one, and maybe three, nuclear plants.

Following the Chinese deal, the Brits, ceremonially involving the obedient Queen, rolled out the red carpet for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At the same time more than 50 MPs, including Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and several Sikh, Indian Gurkha and left-wing British-Indian organisations raised red banners against him. Lots of red!

One outfit projected a hologram of Modiji on the Houses of Parliament with an Om which turned into a Nazi rather than a Vedic swastika.

Modiji’s grand rally with 60,000 in the audience was held at Wembley Stadium not least because the Guajarati population of London lives in and around Wembley.

Modiji chose to address this full house of Gujaratis, peppered with a few capitalists from other communities, by removing his watch and noting that as India is longitudinally five-and-a-half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, one can turn the watch downside-up and get a fair reading of the time in India. This is a trick I learnt as a child but it seemed to delight some of the cheering audience.

The Prime Minister was emphasising the relationship between India and the UK but neglected to note that for part of the year the UK on Summer Time is only four-and-a-half hours behind India, thus killing the trick.

Modiji’s address at Wembley and to the UK Parliament did have a serious side to it. The red carpet achieved its aims. Britain and India signed deals worth a reputed £13 billion. At the same time, the Indian government announced tax relief for foreign investors, a move which could invite investment from the businessmen in his audience and corporations beyond it. But Modiji also addressed the red flag-walla objectors. He was reported on one occasion as extolling India as the “land of Buddha and Gandhi” and declaring that India was a country in which Ram and Rahim are equally important names for God.

Holy Macaroni! It’s not what anyone in his audience expected him to say. After all, Modiji presides over a government some of whose members, and the members of the governing party they represent, have been spreading a national sense of insecurity through the assassination of, or threats of death to, professors, writers and intellectuals they disagree with.

Some of the red-flag-wavers had brought out their banners of protest in memory of Mr Modi’s record as chief minister of Gujarat when a slaughter of Muslims took place on his watch. The others, presumably Mr Corbyn included, were certainly agitating about the Dadri murder of a Muslim for purportedly eating or storing edible beef and about the statements that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party elected members have made against Shah Rukh Khan, playwright Girish Karnad and even against the historic patriot Tipu Sultan.

Modiji’s statements, inclusive of Rahim and claiming the pedigrees of the Buddha and the Mahatma, statements which the RSS may not automatically endorse, are gestures towards the plain truth that an atmosphere of uncertainty and even potential internecine strife in a country is not attractive to investment. We don’t see international business rushing with cheque books and plans to Syria, Somalia, or Yemen.

The comparisons with the nascent communal friction in India is, I admit, exaggerated for effect. So also is the projection of Om turning into a Hitler Swastika. No holocaust has taken place in India. And though our democracy has witnessed and tolerated the slaughter of thousands in anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim riots, holocausts and concentration camps are not quite the way we operate.

Modiji’s statements about India being inclusive and the land of ahimsa should now herald in an era of intolerance — his government should stop tolerating inciteful statements from its members. Discipline them. expel them, silence them and even prosecute them.

More than that Modiji has, with his emphasis on internationalism and development, realised that his government can take the initiative to encourage a reform in India’s national dialogue. Modiji and his ministries can oversee not only the development of the economy but begin an inclusive, logical debate on the reform of the great religion to which they are dedicated — Hinduism. This is not to say that Mr Modi or anyone in his government is or can be Swami Vivekananda, but he can be, since British parallels come to mind, something like Henry VIII. I don’t mean he should marry several times and behead his wives. I mean he should move to purge the religion of superstition and harmful prejudice and initiate a debate through which Hinduism can undergo the process that the Reformation initiated in Christianity.

It would mean putting the persecution of scientists such as Galileo behind us and encouraging the likes of Isaac Newton to speak out without fear.

The new dispensation of Henry VIII did bring about the burning at the stake of those who resisted the reform and stayed loyal to the Church of Rome. I am recommending no such burning at the stake but such a reformation could certainly do with silencing the openly heretical, fanciful and superstitious opinion that seems to have found favour in the more primitive imaginations of Indian neo-historians and fascistic theologians. Now about those six wives, Modiji