Siddhartha Deb

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Modi’s Temple of Lies

MundoAsia

The sleepy pilgrimage city of Ayodhya in northern India was once home to a grand 16th-century mosque, until it was illegally demolished by a howling mob of Hindu militants in 1992. The site has since been reinvented as the centerpiece of the Hindu-chauvinist “new India” promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In 2020, as Covid-19 raged unchecked across the country, Mr. Modi, the leader of the Hindu right, went to Ayodhya to inaugurate construction of a three-story sandstone temple to the Hindu god Ram on the site of the former mosque. Dressed in shiny, flowing clothes and wearing a white N95 mask, he offered prayers to the Ram idol and the 88-pound silver brick being inserted as the foundation stone.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

It may be because I've never lived in Mumbai, but when news of last week's horrifying siege began to filter through on television and the internet, I found it hard to reconcile myself to the idea that the Taj, the Oberoi and even Cafe Leopold are places that define everything Mumbai stands for.

I've never been to the Oberoi or Cafe Leopold, and although I wandered into the Taj lobby on one of my first visits to the city, it made no impression on me beyond a sense of rather sanitised opulence. Instead, what affected me strongly and made me wish, all through my 20s, that I had moved to Bombay instead of Delhi, was the way ordinary people lived there.…  Seguir leyendo »

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A couple of years ago I visited Bhopal, the central Indian city where a toxic gas leak on the night of December 2 1984 killed at least 3,000 people within 24 hours. In the two decades since the disaster, the death toll reached at least 20,000, while another 100,000 people were estimated by Amnesty International to be suffering from "chronic and debilitating illnesses" caused by the lethal methyl isocyanate gas. The leak had come from a pesticide factory run by Union Carbide, a US multinational, and chemicals dumped on the 62-acre grounds had contaminated neighbouring slums and farmland. Successive studies found the ground water to be full of toxic elements, and the slum dwellers I met were dependent entirely on drinking water delivered by municipal tanker.…  Seguir leyendo »