When an Indian newspaper, The Hindu, reported that Gujarat officials in September 2007 were claiming that World Economic Forum (WEF) Chairman Klaus Schwab invited their chief minister to Davos summit in 2008, Indophile American professors were alarmed.
They decided to approach WEF to rescind the reported invitation in light of Narendra Modi government’s role in the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002. Leaving aside her busy academic commitments, Meriam Belli, a young historian at the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology rushed into my office, and signed a letter I drafted and sent to WEF in Switzerland asking it not to invite Modi to Davos. Arindam Dutta, a professor of architecture followed suit. Around the same time two other MIT professors, Balakrishnan Rajagopal and Haimanti Roy, joined the signature campaign.
Within a few days, an impressive array of professors specializing in Indian studies in the United States and Canada joined hands to make the same request.
Signatories to this letter came from a variety of academic disciplines, history (Professor Barbara Metcalf, University of Michigan), law (Martha Nussbaum, University of Chicago’s Law School), political science (Professor Narendra Subramaniam, McGill University, Montreal), women studies (Geeta Patel, Wellesley College) and so forth. Before too long, over 100 academics had signed the letter, faxed individually to WEF. These academics represent world-class scholarship on India; many are recognized as the leading authorities in their particular field of research. Most teach at some of the renowned institutions. Moreover, these academics are passionate about the subject they teach and research: India.
They would like to see India remain secular, democratic and pluralistic. Many don’t easily join public campaigns. But the invitation to a pogrom-perpetrator at a highly visible forum, tipped the balance in favor of the campaign to remove Modi from Davos. One professor specializing on Hinduism called the WEF invitation “an outrage.” Another asked me, “Can you put my signature twice?”
Independently, the Indian Muslim Council (IMC), run by a group of young Indian Muslim women and men, almost all under 30, demanded the WEF to revoke the invitation. IMC volunteers are a new breed of Indian Muslims abroad. Tech-savvy, upwardly mobile, passionately in love with Mother India, they work in close collaboration with Indian activists and organizations of all kinds, whether concerned with women’s rights, poverty alleviation, educational advancement, economic development, secularism, or human rights back home.
Unbeknown to each other, they worked for the same cause. In their effort, they found support in American and Canadian academia specializing in Indian studies, ethnic Indians or otherwise.
For months, the WEF did not bother to respond to the academics and activists’ demand. It neither confirmed the invitation nor denied it. Finally in late November, Mark Adams, communications officer at World Economic Forum, bowing to the international outcry, told me that Modi is not invited to the summit, and the Gujarat officials making such claims were wrong. Those officials were simply, if recklessly, cooking up stories to whiten their boss’ black record. Their doings are part of the move Modi made to hire a Washington-based firm, Apco Worldwide, an American firm for public relations purposes.
The campaign for upholding human rights and justice in India in general and Gujarat in particular launched by Indophile academics and activists shows that what happened in Gujarat more than five years ago is still fresh in the memory of a significant number of people.
The professors and activists reminded World Economic Forum that Modi is barred permanently from entering United States per violation of Section 212 (a) (2)(g) of United States Immigration and Nationality Act, that makes “any foreign government official who was responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom, ineligible for visa.” Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry confirmed to the present writer in a recent letter that the ban on Modi is still in effect. A similar ban on Modi is enforced in European Union, of which Switzerland is not a member.
The rebuff to Modi at Davos demonstrated that the absence of Swiss EU membership is not a passport for Modi to move about freely. Modi is now all but caged. He continues to roar like a tiger and may be lionized in China and South Korea, but the rest of the world sees him and Gujarat mostly with reference to the pogrom. In other words, the Gujarat pogrom and Modi and his government’s role in it, is not forgotten internationally.
Sympathizers of Gujarat pogrom victims have sought US intervention to bar the perpetrators; some may approach existing judicial system at home and abroad to seek justice, others like the North American academics and activists successfully tried him in the court of world opinion which found Modi guilty yet another time, as was the case in 2005 when his US visa was revoked.
Which means that Modi has become a monstrous liability to Gujarat and plain public relations disaster for India.
As long as he remains the chief minister, the world public opinion will continue to see Gujarat through the prism of the 2002 pogrom.
In an age of instant communication, an alert public opinion, backed by the efforts of the angry victims of the pogrom, it is unlikely that any amount of PR exercise will pay off, certainly not the $25,000 Gujarat government is reported to be paying monthly to Apco Worldwide.
Some physical wounds of the pogrom may have healed, but not the psychological ones that continue to fuel the desire to prosecute Modi, ideally in a court of law, failing which at the bar of public opinion.
— Hyderabad-born Omar Khalidi is a US-based author of “Muslims in Indian Economy” and “Khaki and Ethnic Violence,” and a scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
