When Modi halted the Gaza genocide and paused the Russia-Ukraine war
This is NOT a parody.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is notorious for having never held a press conference on Indian soil during the ten years of his premiership. (Due to custom, however, he has had to take some questions from journalists during his state visits to the United States. At one such press conference in June last year, Indian-origin journalist Sabrina Siddiqui of the Wall Street Journal had the audacity to pose an uncomfortable question to Modi. Her temerity unleashed a tsunami of trolling by Hindutva leaders and their foot soldiers in the days following her misstep. The harassment became so extreme that even the White House had to defend Siddiqui.)
However, when important state elections or the national elections approach, he handpicks regime-friendly “journalists” who fawn over him and ask him pre-vetted questions of the most inane variety in what are risibly labelled interviews. Sample these: How do you manage to work so hard at your age? (Modi is 73.) How are you able to work 18 hours a day? Do you carry a wallet? Even more amusingly, before the 2019 national elections, he gave one such interview to a Bollywood actor (yes, actor) who asked him if he liked sucking the juice out of mangoes or preferred them sliced!
Now that India is in the middle of national elections, spanning seven phases over six weeks, Modi has been on an interview spree with regime-friendly media houses, which have been cheerleading his government’s excesses and actively attacking the opposition at every opportunity for the past decade. I was forwarded a short clip (attached below) from one such interview and could barely believe what I saw. I showed it to a friend who quipped that it must be a deepfake! It was that unbelievable.
In this “interview” to a group of four “journalists” from India Today, Modi revealed that he got Israel to stop bombing Gaza during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (which fell this year between 11 March and 10 April), except the last 2-3 days of the sacred month! Yes, you read that right.
Modi explained: “In Gaza, during the month of Ramadan, I sent my Special Envoy to Israel. He met the Israeli Prime Minister and others, and I told the envoy to tell them [the Israelis] not to bomb Gaza during Ramadan at least. The Israelis made all attempts to follow this advice. There was fighting in the last 2-3 days [of Ramadan]. But I sent Special Envoy to Israel.
“Here [in India], you accuse me of indulging in anti-Muslim politics, but Modi during the month of Ramadan in Gaza bombing…[doesn’t compete the thought].”
Then he publicised why no one knows about his peacemaking efforts in the middle of the Israeli genocide in Gaza: “I don’t publicise such things.”
If there was a ceasefire in Gaza during Ramadan, no one told the Palestinians or the Israelis about it. Or the demonstrators worldwide who have been relentlessly protesting against the Israeli extermination campaign against the 2.3 million Gazans. Or the America-led empire that has been continuously fuelling the genocide with its unfettered supply of weapons of mass destruction to the Zionists and helping them perpetuate it by vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations.
Notably, Modi’s path to Indian leadership was paved by the mass murder of nearly 2,000 Indian Muslims in 2002 in the state of Gujarat, which he led at the time. He oversaw a state-sponsored pogrom that decimated the minority community in his home state. During his ten years as Prime Minister, lynching and brutalisation of Muslims have become a daily affair in India. And the national government has promulgated laws that specifically target Muslims. In such a situation, Modi’s Gaza lies couldn’t be more vile.
Modi’s other intervention
It wasn’t the first time that the sheer personhood of Modi halted — or at least paused — a major global conflict. As part of his political campaign for the ongoing elections, in March this year, Modi’s YouTube channel (yes, he has one. He also moonlights as a podcaster once a month.) posted a video that depicts parents fretting over the fate of their child stuck in Ukraine. In the video, the father tells the worried-sick mother that Modi will get their daughter home no matter what it takes. Sure enough, their child bursts out of the airport and tells her parents in Hindi: “I told you no matter what the situation, Modiji will get us home. He stopped the war, dad. And then got our bus [full of her fellow Indian students] through.”
This lie has become a staple of the Modi-friendly discourse in India ever since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, and it is being put to good use in the election season.
The sycophants in his cabinet have been busy telling the voting public that Modi got Putin and Zelenskyy to pause hostilities and provide a window for Indian students to evacuate from Ukraine.
Here’s India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh:
“The Russia-Ukraine war has been on for two years. When it started, thousands of our children were studying in Ukraine. A delegation of parents of children stranded in Ukraine PM met Narendra Modi and asked to bring back his children safely. Then the PM of India spoke to the Presidents of Russia and Ukraine and the war stopped for four and a half hours. This is today’s India.”
Modi’s entourage hasn’t been able to keep the story consistent, though.
While Singh claimed the war stopped for 4.5 hours, Amit Shah, India’s Home Minister, said that the war stopped for three days.
A former minister in Modi’s cabinet drastically reduced Shah’s ceasefire duration, bringing it down from three days to a mere three hours.
While another leader from Modi’s party chose to play it safe by not revealing the duration of the pause in hostilities.
Interestingly, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had poured cold water on all such claims way back in March 2022 when these lies first started spreading.
A spokesperson from the ministry was straightforward in his assessment:
“We got specific inputs that this is a route that is available... we conveyed that to our citizens, and I am happy that many could make it.
“Extrapolating that to say that somebody is holding off bombing or this is something we were coordinating is absolutely inaccurate.”
Post-truth Modi
In this post-truth world of political discourse, facts don’t matter, more so to Modi. He — and his ministers — can just mouth whatever he wants, knowing full well that there will be no pushback from the servile “journalists” he is peddling his lies to. For all the criticism levelled at him, there is no denying that Modi is a master of the political theatre. He knows exactly what to say to his core voter base: the words, the intonations, the inflections, the jokes, and the lies, Modi has it all locked down and unleashes his fictions with impunity at political rallies on his marvelling fanbase, who lap up his every word as if it is the only way to nirvana.
In a recent stump speech, he addressed the the 200 million Muslims of India with the vilest of slurs, and received virtually no pushback. Here’s a sample of his speech from an editorial:
He bracketed the Muslim minority with “ghuspaithiye (infiltrators)”, resorted to prejudiced stereotyping, “jinke zyada bachche hain (those who have more children)”, and (mis)used the emotive symbolism of the “mangalsutra” to paint a spectre in which the majority would be deprived of their “mehnat ki kamai” or hard-earned money.
Through years of propaganda — which has been turbocharged by the deft use of the widely-adopted messaging service WhatsApp in a country with one of the lowest mobile internet costs in the world — such divisive and dehumanising discourse against Indian Muslims has been thoroughly mainstreamed and normalised to such a degree that when Modi uses such hostile language, he doesn’t incite revulsion, but applauses and loud cheers from his supporters.
The masses line up for his speeches and take his every word as the truth. He can do no wrong. Lying is beneath him. He is dearer to them than their parents and children. He is god. He is India. Some have mused if he should be conferred the Father of the Nation honorific, replacing Gandhi from the pedestal he has occupied since India’s independence in 1947. Another made the case for keeping Gandhi on his pedestal, but making it bigger to accommodate Modi.
India’s active participation in the Gaza genocide
Modi’s lies, especially about the Gaza genocide, wouldn’t be so pernicious and revolting had India not been an active participant in the extermination of Palestinians in their tiny enclave.
On the same day of the interview in which he made claims about stopping the genocide in Gaza, reports emerged that Spain had blocked passage of a ship coming from India and bound for Israel through its ports because it was carrying arms for the Zionists. AFP reported:
Spain has refused permission for a ship carrying arms to Israel to dock at a Spanish port, its foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, said on Thursday.
“This is the first time we have done this because it is the first time we have detected a ship carrying a shipment of arms to Israel that wants to call at a Spanish port,” he told reporters in Brussels.
“This will be a consistent policy with any ship carrying arms to Israel that wants to call at Spanish ports. The foreign ministry will systematically reject such stopovers for one obvious reason: the Middle East does not need more weapons, it needs more peace.”
The report added:
El País said the Danish-flagged ship was carrying 27 tonnes of explosive material from Chennai in India to the port of Haifa in Israel.
Spain, a NATO member, has chosen to steer clear of any participation in this Israel-US-led genocide in Gaza. Even America’s trusted vassals of Canada and the Netherlands have chosen to stop arm shipments to the Israelis, but India, a supposed leader of the Global South, is all in in this depraved Palestinian extermination campaign.
As I have written previously in these pages, a factory in India has supplied drones to the Israelis and Indian ports have been used to subvert Yemeni blockade of Israel-bound shipments.
Earlier this month, another report revealed details that implicate India even further in the Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
From the report:
Publicly available records now indicate that Munitions India Ltd (MIL) – a public sector enterprise under the Ministry of Defence – has also been permitted to ship its products to Israel as recently as January 2024. On April 18, 2024, the company has again applied for exporting the same products under a repeat order from Israel. Approval for the company’s second export to Israel is under consideration by the licensing authorities.
Furthermore:
Similarly, a private Indian company, Premier Explosives Ltd. (PEL), which has been exporting explosives and allied accessories to Israel under SCOMET [Special Chemicals, Organisms, Materials, Equipment and Technologies] licence from the DGFT [Directorate General of Foreign Trade] at least since 2021, has been permitted to export these items twice since Israel’s war on Gaza began last year – on November 20, 2023, and January 01, 2024.
The report goes on to add:
There is every possibility that, in the context of the ongoing bloody war being waged on the Palestinians in Gaza, these would be used by the IDF for its military ends.
While its fellow Third World countries have shown remarkable leadership in halting the Gaza genocide either legally (South Africa and Nicaragua) or militarily (Yemen), India has been shamelessly doing the Western imperial bidding. Even 40,000 dead Palestinians hasn’t made it change course.
In the lead up to the 2014 national elections when Modi first came to power, he made tall promises to the Indian electorate. After becoming Prime Minister, however, his acolytes labelled those promises as mere “chunavi jumla” (electoral gimmicks). This election cycle, however, Modi’s election gimmicks, being used at the expense of the Palestinians — whose inhuman suffering his government is actively perpetuating — are extremely sinister.
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Narendra Modi is a Biblical Islamophobic Mass Murderer. Ever since he was in charge of Gujarat he's incited Anti - Muslim hatred and unleashed his Hindutva Murder Mobs to destroy Mosques and have untold Muslims beaten to death. His lies have given him power, and his Puppet Master Media ensures the silence of dissenters. His followers worship Mahatma Gandhi's Assassin, and want nothing but the Death Knell of India's secular strengths. Wealth Inequality is rampant, and if you're not Hindu, you're invisible, and irrelevant, nothing more than chattel or slave labour.
When the Zionist empire has been ended, all nations that supplied arms to Israel will be tried by a world court and excluded from trade. This will be especially awkward for two nations, India and Australia.