Modi sets PM race on fast forward

India’s next general election is almost three years away, but the race for prime ministership may have already begun.
Many top leaders of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is India’s main opposition party, attended the launch of the fast in Ahmedabad.Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, started a three-day fast on Saturday—his 61st birthday—purportedly to bring peace, prosperity and harmony to a state he has ruled for nearly a decade. But the manner in which the fast has been played up as a national event reflects its larger political significance.
Some other parties in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) also sent representatives.
The fast, analysts say, is Modi’s springboard from which he is launching himself as the BJP’s, and possibly the NDA’s, prime ministerial candidate at a time when the ruling Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is battling a spate of corruption scandals and a leadership crisis.
Using the fast as a launch vehicle has symbolic value: the UPA recently buckled under the pressure of an indefinite fast by activist Anna Hazare to bring crucial changes to a proposed corruption law.
The stated purpose of the fast, bringing harmony to Gujarat, also deals with what many perceive to be Modi’s Achilles’ heel—his poor record in maintaining inter-community relations in the state.
The 2002 blot
Within six months of Modi taking over as chief minister in October 2001, Gujarat faced its worst hour. More than 1,000 people were killed in months-long communal riots that started after the burning of a train carrying Hindu devotees at the Godhra station in February 2002.
Many victims of the riots were Muslims, and critics accused the Modi government of not just failing to keep them safe but also of tacitly supporting Hindu rioters in an attempt to polarize the electorate and win state assembly elections due later that year.
Whether the polarization was intentional or incidental, Modi then reaped its rewards. The BJP won by a handsome margin, and he became the poster boy of its hardliners, or the supporters of its right-wing Hindutva ideology.