Narendra Modi and India's Nazi obsession trace from early expeditions seeking Aryan origins to the Indian Legion fighting British imperialism under Subhas Chandra Bose. The RSS modeled its paramilitary structure on fascist Germany, with leaders praising Hitler's racial purity, while Gujarat textbooks under Modi in 2004 hailed him as a hero. After abandoning his wife at 17 to join the RSS, Modi orchestrated the 1992 Babri Masjid destruction and allegedly incited the 2002 Godra pogroms where thousands died. Despite international outrage over his authoritarian traits and refusal to aid refugees, he rose to power, suggesting a disturbing continuity of fascist ideology in modern Indian governance. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Weird War Joke00:14:49
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's in quarantine, my GOP legislators!
Hello, dear friends.
I made the previous joke about Ted Cruz quarantining and then being exposed again and immediately re-self-quarantining back in an earlier, distant age when such things were a little bit more funny, seeming.
We are not in a position where that's super funny right now.
So I would like to replace the bit that Sophia and I did about that with this new bit, which is a joke.
So there's this pirate and he walks into a bar and the pirates, the bartender, looks at the pirate and he's got like a steering wheel in his pants and the bartender's like, hey, what do you, what do you got that steering wheel in your pants for?
And the pirate responds, yar, tis driving me nuts.
That is the joke.
Please enjoy the rest of this episode.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about terrible people.
Here with me, Sophia Alexandra.
Yeah.
I'm so excited to be here.
Thanks for having me, Robert and Sophie.
Thank you.
I did a musical intro for you, just doing mouth sounds.
I noticed it, and it was good.
And you didn't like malfunction like a broken robot like you did last time when you tried to intro.
So this is really a step up.
I've decided to turn a new leaf professionally because I think it's important to be professional.
So in the spirit of professionalism, do you want to play with this switchblade a stranger sent me in the mail?
Yes, please.
I got a switchblade.
So every time I come back to LA, I get new fan packages.
And this one was just a switchblade.
So that's pretty fun.
We've been carrying it around, playing with it.
Didn't know how to close it for a while, so it was just waving it around.
Sophia's trying to figure out how to close it now.
It's a good time.
Yeah, I'm excited to figure this puzzle out.
Yeah.
Chris got it in like 30 seconds.
Chris immediately, Chris, our editor, immediately figured out how to close it.
The rest of us were, particularly me, shamefully couldn't figure it out.
So I was just waving an open knife around for a while.
I know there's like a pinching situation.
and I'm just like, where?
We're good with OSHA, right, Sophie?
Mm-hmm.
Okay, Sophie says everything I do is fine.
So.
So, Sophia, have you heard about Narendra Modi?
No.
Oh, boy.
Well, he's the prime minister of India.
And you heard about how, like, a couple, three weeks ago, there was that pogrom in New Delhi where like mobs of angry Hindu extremists were chasing Muslims through the street and killed dozens of them?
Not as familiar as I should be.
Ooh, boy.
Yeah, that happened.
And we're going to talk about everything that led up to that happening.
So this is going to be a fun one.
Fascism coming.
You know how sometimes countries are like functioning democracies for a long time and then a fascist gets in charge and you realize that like, oh man, everybody was still way more racist than I gave him credit for.
Shit.
You know how that happens in some countries?
No, what do you mean?
Like, how and where?
I don't can't relate to that at all.
Yes, today we're talking about something that has only happened in India and nowhere else.
And it's currently not ongoing anywhere near or around us.
I love talking about things that every single person listening to this podcast hasn't experienced in their own country.
That's my favorite thing to talk about on this podcast.
Oh, man.
Good times.
So yeah.
How are you doing?
Hey, just quick question.
How many dead babies in this episode?
I just need to know how much to steal myself for this.
There's like one paragraph where we talk about a couple, but other than that, it's mostly the discussion of murdered adults.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's pretty light on that.
Okay, do you like me more or less now that you're only having me, now that you're not having me on only dead children episodes?
You know what it is, Sophia?
I feel like, I feel like, you know, when you get into a new relationship with somebody, like you stay with what's comfortable for a while.
And so we stayed on the dead baby train for a little while.
Because it made you feel safe.
Could have made me feel safe.
But now I'm willing to experiment with fascist foreign political leaders.
Oh, you want to invite a fascist into our relationship?
Yes, yes, I do.
There's always a point in every relationship where you invite a fascist strongman in.
You freaky.
Let's do this.
That's why they keep winning, actually.
Because you just want to fucking bring him in.
You can't keep him out of your bedroom.
You just like to Dom, and I appreciate that about you.
Oh, boy.
This is going to feel so much less comfortable after we get to all the murdered people.
I mean, that's why I'm really getting it in right now.
So I'm going to start by talking a little bit about Nazism in India.
As you know, big fan.
Big fan of Nazism in India.
Just anywhere, really.
As a Jew, nothing warms my heart anymore.
So Nazism in India have a long, strange history that's really, really difficult to talk about.
As we discussed in our Savitri Devi episodes, the OG Nazis were obsessed with India as the homeland of the ancient Aryans that they idolized.
And the SS Ananerbe, which was like the SS archaeological division, actually sent expeditions into Tibet and northern India to seek out the origins of their mythical supermen.
How heartwarming that they had enough time to like follow this beautiful while they were like murdering all across Europe.
It's just so sweet that they were like, you know what?
Let's explore a little bit of something mystical.
Yeah, this was when they were sending this out was like kind of the slow murder period where they were like they hadn't because there weren't that many like Jewish people actually in Germany proper.
So they really hadn't ramped up the killing yet and they were mostly doing weird shit and murdering their political opponents.
And then pre-Kristallnacht?
No, but it's pre-invasion of Poland and stuff.
So it's like it's like pre-the start of actual hostilities.
So they've they're they're definitely killing a lot of people, but like by Nazi standards, they haven't really got into what's more like an amuse bouche.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's have a little bit of archaeology with our murder appetizers.
Just like a like a slow ramp up.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not going to make an edging comment here.
So while the ideological underpinnings of Nazism did not get really any purchase in the Indian subcontinent during the 1930s and 1940s, many Indians saw Nazi Germany as a potential ally in their battle against British imperialism.
So one of the tough things to understand, and this is also true to a different kind of extent with like Ukraine, is there was a number of folks in India who supported the Nazis during the period when the Nazis were in charge, not because they cared about Nazism, but because they hated the British Empire, which is like, yeah, okay.
I mean, everybody hates the British Empire.
Yeah, and if you're like a Hindu nationalist or an Indian nationalist and like a reasonable person like 1930, you know, you can look at the Nazis and be like, well, I'm sure they've done bad stuff, but like, let's look at what the British Empire has been doing, right?
Like, I think that's...
It's a long history of being terrible.
A lot more reason to be concerned.
So that's part of the support here.
And that aspect of it, the part where it's like kind of understandable support of the Nazis, reached its height with the Indish Legion or the Indian Volunteer Legion of the Waffen-SS.
This was an all-Indian military force formed at the guidance of Indian nationalist leader, Subhas Chandra Bose.
The forces were initially formed out of Indian POWs captured fighting against the forces of the British Empire.
So like they would beat a British army and they would capture a bunch of Indian soldiers that the British had taken in.
And then they would be like, you guys want to like invade India and free it from British domination?
And these guys were like, yeah, of course.
That sounds good.
You guys want to build us non-analys?
Yeah, that was a little bit like that.
So the idea was that these Indian soldiers would act as pathfinders and like help lead the German army into India when it was time to invade the subcontinent.
And Germany wound up collecting well over 10,000 Indian soldiers that way.
So there were like 10,000 Indian Hindu and Muslim Indian soldiers in the SS.
That's wild.
Yeah, most people don't know this story.
It's so wild.
It's really weird.
They were eventually stationed in France just in time for the Normandy landings.
And they never wound up taking part in much meaningful combat, but a lot of them did get killed by the French resistance.
Like, it's this really weird story.
So nuts.
Imagine how confused you'd be when like an SS officer came to take you away and he was Indian and you'd be like.
Well, they didn't do that really.
Like they weren't doing normal SS stuff.
Like they even had in their...
They don't get to take people away?
No, they're not really personal.
They might even be in the SS.
I don't think they knew what it was.
I think they were like, you guys hate the English and we hate us some English.
Again, like...
That's a horrible mistake.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a real comedy of errors.
You could get a...
Yeah.
And it's weird because there's like photos of Erwin Rommel reviewing parades of these guys.
And you can see like fucking Rommel pinning medals on the chest of guys with turbans.
And it's just this, it's a very strange chapter of history.
But they did have like a clause in their contract that said they would not be used for offensive operations anywhere but India.
So like they did kind of have written into their contract.
We're not like fully on board with the Nazi thing.
So I wouldn't call, I don't know, like it's weird.
That's kind of cool.
Do other, have other people who have joined like armed things gotten a chance to be like, you know what, this, but not this.
I don't like all the way up to the killing, but not the killing.
You don't get to do that, right?
Yeah, this is the only time I've heard about something like this happening.
Yeah, it seems unusual.
It's a weird case from the war.
Like imagine if that's what soldiering really was.
You sign up, but you get to say no things.
That's actually how the German army works today.
Really?
As far as I know, the only one where if you are a German soldier, you have a right written into like the law of the nation that says that if you have a moral issue with a deployment or something, you get to say no.
I wonder why that's there.
Yeah, I wonder why they have that rule.
So after the war, India gained her independence on the back of a fundamentally peaceful movement.
Mahatma Gandhi, one of the chief architects of independence, was assassinated, though, by a member of the RSS, a Hindu nationalist political party with ties to Savitri Devi, the birth mother of esoteric Hitlerism, who we talked about a few weeks ago.
India and Pakistan split apart, due in large part to fears by Indian Muslims that they would be dominated by Hindus in any democratic system.
This mass migration resulted in what some have termed a mutual genocide, killing well over a million people, possibly like as much as 3 million people.
Holy fuck.
It was a horrific, horrific, like the split of India and Pakistan was just unbelievably violent.
And it's one of those things where like you'd be really hard pressed to like lock down like a side that was like mutual.
I've never heard again the term mutual mutual genocide is an insane name and also the name of my death metal band.
Yeah, it is a good name for a metal band.
Yeah.
And it's this is all a very complicated history.
But there, so you can see there's like this huge tension between, so India is simultaneously has more Muslims than any other country on earth, but is also the vast majority of people in it are Hindu.
And this has been a problem for a while in terms of like violent differences between the two groups, in part because like at different points, one group or another has like ruled the nation and the other people, particularly like for a long time, there was like a Muslim conquest of India and the Mughals ruled and it was like...
So this is like, there's a lot of history here that we're not going to get to cover in enough depth.
But the fact that like the partitioning of India and Pakistan goes as violently as it does says something about the state of affairs at the time.
And it's worth noting that like a lot of that also goes on the British because there were ways to have handled this that were smarter and more understanding and would have resulted in less death.
But England was just like, ah, fuck it.
We'll just, here, we drew a map.
Hitler Insult Origins00:08:20
Like, this seems good to us.
You guys figure out how to implement it.
But we already drew the map.
We can't change it just because people are dying.
The map is already drawn.
Yeah.
And it's probably worth noting that it's unlikely any of this would be happening if the British hadn't ruled India for a couple of hundred years.
But Anderson gets angry when I talk shit about the British Empire.
She's a big one.
She's dressed in a really smart, like British tweed right now.
She likes royals.
And she does not fuck around when she's dressed to the nines.
Is royals the show about the British royal family?
Can I give her a treat?
Is that the one everyone's watching?
Anyway, so in the decades since the partitioning of India, the nation of India lurched forward to take its place as the planet's largest democracy.
Elections and crises came and went, and India took its place again as an independent power on the world stage.
Americans grew increasingly obsessed with the subcontinent as a source of ancient wisdom and as a great vacation destination.
And at the same time, Indians grew well.
Can I tell you something?
Nothing has changed.
Look at any white girl's Instagram.
It's pretty cool.
One of the neat things about going to India, particularly to New Delhi, is how many young American, like 19 and 20-year-olds, you meet there having massive existential crises because New Delhi is a hard fucking city to land in.
It is a shock.
There's so many more people than you'd expect.
It moves so fast.
It is so polluted and so like people just have massive panic attacks.
And there's like this whole industry based on like you see some rich panicking kid who like didn't realize what it was really going to be like to be in a city like that.
And you like come up to him and be like, you want to get out of Delhi, right?
You want to visit like one of these vacation spots?
And he's like, yeah, yeah.
And they're like, all of the trains are shut down.
There's no buses leaving the town, but I got a bus that you can charter.
And then like they've paid $3,000 to rent a bus for a week.
Oh my God, what a sweet fucking hustle.
It's pretty fun to watch.
I'm learning so much.
Yeah.
So at the same time as all of this happened, Indian, or a number of people in India, grew increasingly obsessed with the theories and iconography of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement.
And the reason behind this was complex and confusing.
It ranges widely from more or less harmless stuff.
Like the term Hitler has become a common Bollywood insult for characters who act badly.
Like, you know, you're like, like, like, just sort of being a total Hitler right now.
Yeah.
That's so awesome.
We should do this.
We should do that one more.
But it kind of hints at something, which is that Hitler and the legacy of the Nazis isn't really seen kind of the same way over there as it is here because it's way more distant, right?
Like all of that, those politics are more distant to people there.
So it kind of like you get some weird examples of like every couple of years, there'll be a story of just like some shop opening up in Delhi or some other city in India that's like got a huge swastika on the front or like a picture of Hitler.
And it's like, usually when you read articles interviewing the shop owner, he's like, well, I didn't really know anything about him.
I just thought like the imagery was cool.
It's like, it's very strange.
So Crossword, an Indian bookseller, sold 25,000 copies of Mein Kampf in three years.
Jayco, another Indian book merchant, sold 100,000 copies in seven years.
Hitler's manifesto was translated into Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalan, Malay Alam.
Jesus, I'm so sorry to all of the people of Southeast Asia that I'm going to be butchering words from.
Bengali and Tamil, and it sold solidly across the subcontinent.
So you have this.
When they hear about Da Vinci Code, man.
Yeah, and the Knights Templar.
Oh, we don't want that going over there.
Yeah, so you have this weird thing where there's this mix of the history of Nazism being less immediate in India.
And so like people, you know, like adopt the term Hitler as a general insult.
And but also this weird phenomenon of like Hitler's actual words selling very well in chunks of India.
And what makes this unsettling is that the book is not being sold there as a historic text.
Instead, Mein Kamp has achieved popularity in India as a sort of self-help book, a guide to success for Hindu businessmen.
Oh my, that's not great.
What the fuck?
Yeah.
A guide to success.
Yeah, he's like their Tim Ferris.
You know, not their Tim Ferris, but like a subculture within like the Hindu business community.
He's like a Tim Ferriss type figure, like a great productivity guru.
You like set a timer for 30 minutes, and then when it goes off, you kill all the Jews.
I found a CBS News article that interviewed Tarun Singhal, a management student at New Delhi's Institute of Technology.
I was like, without the final solution, I would have never passed my marketing clause.
We need a final solution to getting these products off the shelves.
I'll tell you what.
He read my, so this guy, Tarun, read Mind Comp as an undergraduate, and he found it inspiring.
And he told CBS, quote, it serves as a reminder that nothing is unachievable.
He said.
It doesn't matter how many millions of people you dream of killing from how many different kinds of groups, you got this.
You want to kill three?
You want to kill six?
You want to kill 11?
You got this.
After that, you go, girl, Russians.
This does come back to my frequent refrain on this show that people should not, as often as they are, be encouraged to follow their dreams.
Some people's dreams are garbage.
Yeah.
Some people's dreams, not good.
So, yeah, he said it serves as a reminder that nothing is unachievable.
And he added that he was able to separate that message of empowerment from the book's pervasive anti-Semitic ideology.
So you got to cut out all the Jew hatred, but there's some good stuff.
The old, I read Playboy for the articles defense.
Yeah, I read Hitler for the management advice.
Exactly.
Yeah, what are you talking about?
Mein Komp?
Yeah.
I mean, sure, there's some Jew stuff in there, but mostly what I thought about was efficiency.
Yeah, mostly it taught me how to really set up an organization.
Yeah, it taught me management skills, how to talk to people before you kill them, obviously.
But, you know, it was very helpful.
It was very helpful.
You know, in luring people to their deaths.
It really helped.
It's wild because if you actually look into how the Third Reich was managed, it was a complete shit show, and Hitler was terrible at it.
And the only reason they had as much military success as they did is decades of primarily Prussian military ingenuity that like, but he wasn't good as a manager is the core of the point.
But I guess people miss that.
So in 2010, Bollywood director Nolan Singh announced his plan to produce a movie titled Dear Friend Hitler, which was, shall we say, a different take on old Adolf?
I mean, I guess I don't need to register my script with the WGA anymore.
Oh, that's a shit.
Literally, someone's taken my idea.
That's a bummer.
Hitler, Colin, not so bad.
That was also another version of that was a musical.
I have an idea for a script that I'll do.
I'm going to just throw it out here.
Nobody steal this.
It's called Reverse Hitler, The Hitler with the Heart of Gold.
And it's about a clone of Hitler that's his opposite, whose goal is to, and it can either be, I actually think this might work best as like a Netflix miniseries.
His goal is to get six million Jewish couples pregnant.
Oh my God.
How about anti-Hitler?
Anti-Hitler?
We can workshop the title.
Yeah.
And you know what else we could do?
I would like to be on board with this project.
Let's make this happen.
I don't want this to slip away.
Okay.
No, we can make some bank off of this.
Dude, anti-Hitler?
Hunters is popular, and that shit is trash.
It is.
It's so bad.
It's really terrible.
So bad.
It's like, it's horrible.
It's like written by people who I think had heard of Jewish people, but aren't.
And I know the guy involved is Jewish and the guy starring in it is Jewish, but I don't understand it.
Hunters Movie Trash00:04:39
Why are they calling the grandparents Softa?
That's a Hebrew word.
That would never be the thing.
It would be Yiddish.
It just doesn't make any sense.
It's like, just have one fucking real Jew look it over.
Just one.
Just one.
It's so bad.
I respect it.
You know what I mean?
It's so horrible.
What about the fucking accent on the gramma?
Sorry.
No, no, it's good.
It's good.
This is a terrible show.
But you know what's not terrible and also hunts Nazis?
These goods and services.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Every single one of them.
Nailed it.
Loved that.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
City Hall Shooting00:14:40
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back!
We're back, and we're talking about Nazism in India.
So, in 2010, this Bollywood director, Nalan Singh, announces that he's going to make Dear Friend Hitler.
And CBS News reports that he was, quote, genuinely shocked that this created controversy.
Genuinely shocked.
The media expressed disdain.
Jewish groups were horrified.
And his lead actor, though a bit baffled by the reaction, quit.
While such a response would seem, if anything, understated in much of the world, Singh had reason to believe his film would not generate even a ripple of scandal in India.
Here, Hitler is not viewed as the personification of evil, but with an attitude of morally ambiguous fascination.
He is seen as a management guru, akin to Machiavelli or Sun Tzu by business students, and an object of wonder by people craving order amidst the chaos of India.
Imagine if 50 Cent did his own version of Mein Kampf instead of Gard of War.
Yeah, that would be a bummer.
I feel like Kanye, maybe.
New Kanye.
New Kanye.
So that last line there about people craving order amid the chaos of India, that brings us to the real problem.
Because while many of the Indians who created weird Hitler-themed restaurants and clothing stores did so because they thought the imagery was neat and they just didn't know that much about the Second World War, there were a number of people who knew precisely what Hitler stood for.
And some of them deliberately took advantage of their countrymen's ignorance of the Third Reich to whitewash Hitler and mainstream fascist politics.
I'm sorry, whitewash Hitler.
Yeah, it's pretty funny.
Is that even possible?
Kinda.
I found a really interesting article on Herat's, a left-leaning Israeli news website, and it documents this.
It was called Hitler's Hindus, Nazi-Loving Nationalists on the Rise.
And it starts with the author's recollection of their time in a cycling expedition through India in July 2008.
They found themselves in Nagpur, a city in the exact middle of India and one of the hotbeds of the Hindu nationalist movement.
In Nagpur, they found a pool parlor named Hitler's Den, complete with a definite least Nazi swastika on the sign.
I mean, obviously, what are you going to take pictures in front of?
Yeah, I mean, Hitler's dead, of course.
We all need a Hitler's Den shot.
So Hitler's Den was not just the result of good-natured ignorance about European history.
For you see, Nagpur happens to hold the headquarters of an organization called the Rashtriya Swam boy, Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS.
It's a far-right Hindu fascist political organization originally founded back in the 1920s.
And this is the group that, like, the guy who shot Gandhi was a former member of the RSS.
So they're cool dudes.
One of the co-founders or ideological founders or whatever of the RSS is a fellow named V. D. Savarkar.
And V. D. Savarkar had a brother who was a big fan of the Nazi priestess Savitri Devi and like wrote a foreword in one of her books.
And V. D. Savarkar himself was a big fan of our old buddy Adolph.
In 1940, he addressed a group of Hindu nationalists by saying, There is no reason to suppose that Hitler must be a human monster because he passes off as a Nazi.
Nazis improved undeniably the savior of India.
Just passes off as a natural.
Passes off.
Yeah.
As a Hindu extremist, V. D. Savarkar's primary motivation was a desire to see India turned into a Hindustan.
That's the term you'd hear at the time.
A nation completely dominated by Hinduism and Muslims in particular completely purged and excised from society.
At that same gathering, he stated, if we Hindus in India grow stronger in time, these Muslim friends of the league type will have to play the part of the German Jews instead.
Yeah, not a nice guy.
And V. D. Savarkar coined the term Hindutva for his new ideology.
He argued that ancient Aryans who'd settled in India formed a Hindu nation.
Hinduness stemmed from geographical unity, racial unity, and a common culture which pitted the Hindus of India against all others.
And there was like a caste angle to it too.
He was like a Brahmin.
And I think in his view of it, and it's become sort of more egalitarian fascism in the modern era, but like initially there was like a very strict like racial hierarchy within Hinduism too.
I think that's less of a factor now, but I'm not an expert on it.
Another early RSS leader, M.S. Golwalkar, was nicknamed the guru of hate.
He was another big Hitler fan.
In his 1939 book, We Are Nationhood Defined, a seminal RSS text.
He wrote this.
Something amazing about being the guru of hate.
It's like it's like Eddie Pepitone's the bitter Buddha, you know?
I mean, not suggesting he's a Nazi.
He's a very funny non-Nazi comedian.
Yeah, not a Nazi.
Just repeating it again.
Not a Nazi.
Probably.
So he said this in his book.
German race pride has now become the topic of the day.
To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races, the Jews.
A good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.
So it's so cool that when my grandpa's, I mean, my grandma's family was all shot to death.
It was like a really good lesson for.
And it goes to show kind of this thing that I don't think is talked about enough, which is like fascism functions very similarly to a cancer.
And World War II can be seen as a really aggressive dose of chemo, but we didn't fucking get it all.
And that's why this is all happening all over the world right now, is these little bitty like pockets of it.
But it's not possible to get it all.
Maybe it is.
Maybe.
I think there's an argument to be made about the nature of our society and that, and this will come into play later here, and that if you live in a system that is as completely dominated by capitalism and moneyed interests as ours is, because that's always a factor in the rise of all these movements, is the business leaders in those countries, even the ones that don't really like the fascist party, prefer it to socialism.
And that's a huge factor everywhere fascism seriously takes hold.
It's just like these rich people being like, well, I guess I prefer these folks to giving up a big chunk of my fortune.
And so there's an argument to be made that if you have a state with a strong social safety net already in place and with strict limits on how much power the wealthy can exercise, it seriously cramps the ability of these movements to get off the ground.
Nobody's ever eradicated fascism from the human race, so we can't know what the solution is.
But if I'm theorizing, that would be a suggestion I would make.
I'll take it under advisement.
Yeah, the next time you're trying to eliminate fascism, maybe give that a shot.
I'm not all the way in, but I'll think about it.
Well, it's all on you specifically.
So I hope you do.
Yeah.
As you know, people have been waiting for me to eliminate fascism.
Really solve this.
Yeah, we're all waiting.
So another one of the founders of the RSS was a guy named Hedguar.
And he deliberately patterned the RSS after the fascist parties he'd watched rise to power in Germany and Italy.
Hedgewar dressed his stormtroopers in khaki uniforms patterned off Mussolini's fascists.
He marched them through the street in an Indian equivalent to the goose step, and he gave them like a weird little salute that's like kind of like a modified Hitler salute that they still do to this day.
Hedgewar.
Modified in which way?
If you look up RSS, extra kicks to it or something more.
No, it's like a little bit less of the hand motion.
Just like less noticeable.
What do you want me to look up?
RSS salute.
You get something.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's like your arm kind of like over your with like your fist over your heart.
You can sort of see the inspiration.
But it kind of looks if you do this, it's like a almost Hitler.
Yeah.
It's a little bit of a subdued.
Oh, do you have to keep your arm straight, though?
Yeah, I think you have to keep it straight.
Okay, you know, that has a very Hitlery look.
It's got a Hitlery look to it.
Yeah.
And Hedgewar's fundamental belief was that centuries of domination by the British Empire had emasculated the Indian man, and they needed a violent fascist paramilitary force to restore their manly pride.
So, I notice you've picked up the knife, just sort of fascism.
So, the RSS was from the beginning profoundly anti-Muslim.
They preached that India's Muslims were descended from Hindus who had been violently converted and thus were not authentically Indian.
Nonviolence and plurality were all equally hateful to the men of the RSS, including one Natharam Vinayak Godzi, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi.
After Gandhi's murder, the party was banned, but not for long.
The centrist powers of India never quite succeeded in wiping it out, and as a result, it hung out in the margins of political society for years, waiting for the right time to re-emerge.
Bit by bit, it grew to hold influence over ever greater swaths of Indian society.
In 2004, the Gujarat State Board issued textbooks that described Adolf Hitler as a hero with social study textbook chapter titles like Hitler, the Supremo and Internal Achievements of Nazism.
One second.
The Supremo.
The Supremo.
What a bad breakfast sandwich, Hitler, the Supremo.
Yeah, that does sound like a terrible thing.
There's like a lot of hair in it, just mustaches.
Yeah, it's mostly like really greasy pork and like boiled eggs.
Yeah, greasy pork and boiled eggs is the supremo Hitler.
Yeah, yeah, the mustaches.
And for sure the bread.
Yeah.
It's like, oh, I mean, I prefer it to Subway, but not by much.
And it's less fascist than Subway, but not by much.
Subway, if you sponsor our show, I'll take all this back and we will eat fresh.
Seriously.
So, yeah, from that social study textbook, there's a section called Ideology of Nazism.
And in that chapter, it notes, quote, Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government.
He adopted the polity of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race.
So you can kind of see something happening here.
Yeah.
Sympathizers in the state of Tamil Nadu succeeded in sliding pro-Nazi messages into a 10th grade social studies textbook in 2011, including chapters praising Hitler's inspiring leadership, achievements, and how the Nazis only ordered the persecution of the Jews in order to maintain a German race with Nordic elements.
Nordic elements.
So that's good.
In 2012, 10th grade students at a private school in Mumbai were asked to complete a sentence starting with the words, I admire.
Nine of the 25 students in that class picked Hitler.
A 2002 poll conducted by the Times of India found that 17% of respondents listed Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.
So, given all that, it would be fair to say that India's issues with Nazism go just a skoush behind simple ignorance of history.
It would in fact be fair to say that a number of very motivated people have spent decades attempting to mainstream Nazi ideology and push the ideals of fascism on the people of the world's largest democracy.
And it would furthermore be fair to say that those same very motivated people have seen terrifying success.
No individual has seen more success with this than Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of India and the man who was governor of Gujarat in 2004 when the province added that pro-Hitler curriculum to its textbooks.
So we're going to talk about Modi now.
Now we're into the right response.
Oh, looky, let me call it my knife.
What's up?
It's now my knife.
I'm kindly stroking my knife.
It's the coolest thing I've heard all day.
Let's get a couple of knives, more knives in here, Sophie.
Narendra Modi was born in Venagar, a small town in North Gujarat's Minsana district on September 17th, 1950.
He was the third of six children, and he was not born into wealth or privilege.
His family was of the Ganchi caste, which put them about as low on the cultural totem pole as one could go without literally being an outcast.
Traditionally, members of this caste pressed vegetable oil for a living, but Narendra's father supported his family by running a small chai shop at a local railway station.
The Modi family were incredibly poor and lived together in a 40 by 12 foot single-story house.
When Narendra was old enough, he worked at his father's tea shop to help support the family.
He would get up early to work alongside his dad and then cross the train tracks to head to school later in the morning.
The modern political propaganda around Modi often emphasizes the fact that he is unmarried and chaste, essentially portraying him as something of a monk dedicated purely to his work on behalf of India, a man who sacrificed even love for the love of his country.
As we know, being chaste doesn't always work out.
Nope.
Actually, it can be a real problem.
Maybe some people should just fucking love that talk.
Fuck.
Yeah.
People should just fuck, maybe.
But this whole like presenting himself as a chaste monk does kind of keeps with a broad trend in propaganda around Modi.
For example, this is how his website, NarendraModi.in describes his childhood.
As a child, Narendra Modi balanced his studies, non-academic life, and his contribution to the family tea stall.
His schoolmates recall Narendra as a diligent student with a penchant for debating and reading.
He would spend hours and hours reading in the school library.
Among the sports, he was very fond of swimming.
Narendra Modi had a wide range of friends from all the communities.
As a child, he often celebrated both Hindu and Muslim festivals, considering the large number of Muslim friends he had in the neighborhood.
Yet his thoughts and his dreams went way beyond a conventional life that began in the classroom and ended in the environs of an office.
He wanted to go out there and make a difference to society, to wipe tears and suffering among people.
At a young age, he developed an inclination towards renunciation and asceticism.
He gave up eating salt, chilies, oil, and jaggery.
So that's kind of how he's portrayed in his official propaganda, right?
So they also, he had tons of Hindu friends or Muslim friends.
He's not racist.
So, dude, if your God doesn't want you to eat chilies, abandon your God.
It's not that, because obviously chilies are like a traditional Hindu food.
It's this idea that you're better than people because you don't eat chilies.
That because you sacrifice comforts of the flesh, you're a holy man.
Like, that's kind of what makes.
And that's not just Hinduism.
That's like huge in Christianity and Islam.
Like, this idea that...
That's what I'm saying.
Like, if you're not fucking, at least have chilies.
If you're not fucking, at least have chilies.
If you don't have hot sauce, what do you even have?
That's a t-shirt.
You're not fucking.
You have some chilies.
Yeah, you gotta.
Anyway.
Chilies or fucking, ideally both, to avoid fascism.
Chilies and Caste00:09:29
Yeah.
So it was, however, revealed during his first campaign for prime minister that Narendra was legally married and had been virtually his entire life.
He was like married as a child.
The couple actually moved in together at the age of 17, but they only cohabited for three months.
Then Narendra abandoned his wife to wander around the Himalayan mountains on a pilgrimage, and he never returned.
Ah, that's sucked.
His wife.
Oh, till death draws part.
Just kidding.
No, until I wander away forever.
It's a little bit weirder than that because I can't put this on Narendra because he didn't get to choose to marry his wife.
It was like his family, because his family was very traditional, and they thought that they should do kind of the traditional thing for people in their culture, which was like you marry off the kid pretty young.
Like it was an arranged marriage sort of thing.
And so like this partner was picked for him when he was three or four and they were just like engaged to be married.
And then at 17, they moved in together.
And he kind of immediately knew like, I don't want this life.
And so he left.
And I can't really put, I mean, I could put the whole becoming like a fascist on him, but deciding that you don't want to marry this person your parents hooked you up with when you were like four, that can't be on him.
How did his wife feel, though?
I don't know.
She didn't fucking wander away.
Yeah, but that's, I mean, I can't blame him for like not wanting to be married when he didn't choose to get married.
I'm sure she didn't want it either, but she was just trying to play along for a second.
I don't know what happened to her.
I don't know that anybody does.
Okay, good.
We should research that.
Yeah, that would be next time.
To know.
Yeah.
So anyway, what I'm getting out is that like this guy's backstory is a little bit complicated, and we don't have like a really clear idea of how he spent his youth or his childhood.
We have a lot of propaganda and a few bits of like hard facts that are sprinkled in here and there.
Yeah, so it's weird.
Or not weird.
It's just it's not what we're used to and it's hard to like like a lot of this is hard to kind of square with the way things are in the U.S. Like here in the U.S., like politicians are supposed to be like family men and like to the point where like our current president literally bragged about his dick size during a major political debate.
And it's kind of hard as an American to get your head around somebody bragging that like, I don't fuck.
I have no partner and like I don't bone at all.
But no, I get that it makes you holier than other people.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And it kind of positions himself.
And you need to come.
Yeah.
I don't.
I don't.
For me, coming is politics.
And that's a good thing.
It's just different.
So Narendra's childhood coincided with an interesting time in Indian politics.
The Congress Party, the party of Gandhi, basically held power for the first 50 years of his life.
They stood for secular democratic values and were directly opposed to the RSS.
As you might expect from a violent fascist movement, the RSS was initially, RSS was initially a high caste endeavor organized by wealthy men.
But in order to expand their membership base after the partition of India, the RSS quickly found itself recruiting new members of lower castes.
And one of those recruits was a young boy named Narendra Modi.
And it's hard to say when he first got involved with the RSS.
I've heard some sources that claim he was eight or nine years old when they went with him.
That's early as hell.
That's real fucking early.
Yeah.
His official biographies don't agree with this.
And they state that it was like after he went on pilgrimage to the Himalayas that he came back and he joined the RSS.
We don't know.
The official biographies talk about, I don't know, stuff like when he was nine years old, there was flooding in a river and he built a food stall to donate the proceeds to relief work.
And that during a war with Pakistan in his youth, he engaged in acts of charity, serving tea to soldiers passing through the railway station.
That's what they focus on in the official biography, that he's like this very patriotic kid who dedicates a lot of his time and effort to helping his fellow Hindus.
And it's entirely possible that if he did any of this stuff, it was actually at the behest of the RSS and he was doing it as like a child activist.
I really don't know.
It's kind of impossible to tell.
Whatever the precise truth, we know that at age 17, Narendra abandoned his wife and left on a pilgrimage of spiritual enlightenment.
When he came back, he set up a tea cart at a bus stand to make ends meet and began working for the RSS in an official capacity as a pracharek, which was essentially a street propagandist.
Did he holler at his wife when he got back?
I don't think so.
I don't think they saw each other again.
He's so rude, dude.
At least come by and say, like, hey, it's going to be weird.
I'm selling tea in town.
I'm back.
You know, I'm sorry.
I'm kind of a dick, but probably you don't want to be with me anyway, so this is for the best.
I'm working for the Nazis.
If you see me in town slinging tea to the Nazis, don't feel weird about it.
Don't make it weird.
I have to say I've never fucked.
So this is critical for me.
We never fucked.
They may not have.
He might be completely honest about the whole chasteness thing.
Like, it's kind of hard to tell because it's hard to get a real hint of what the man is.
But he might actually be like a no-nuts sort of dude, like really committed to that proud boy, don't come sort of sort of thing.
Fascists hate coming.
I know.
It's so weird.
So, yeah, he starts work as a pracharik, which is basically like a street propagandist.
Like, he's giving speeches and stuff to try to like rile people up and get them involved in this nationalist movement.
It really teaches him how to like stir up a crowd and work one.
And prachariks like Modi were expected to remain chaste, living like monks and dedicating their every waking hour to the party.
So when Modi was not delivering speeches and spreading the RSS gospel of intolerance against non-Hindus, he cleaned out the living quarters of senior RSS officials.
In interviews today, Modi claims that finding the RSS basically saved his life.
Quote, I got the inspiration to live for the nation from the RSS.
I learned to live for others and not for myself.
I owe it all to the RSS.
So fascist parties like the RSS de facto idolize the military, and leaders in such organizations either have to have a military background of their own, or like as we saw with people like Hitler and Mussolini, or they need to come up with a very good excuse as to why they did not serve that still reinforces their bona fides as like a lover of the military.
I was busy not fucking too busy not fucking marching off to the military.
You gotta fuck in the military.
We kind of see this with Trump's bonespurs and in his bizarre insistence that the time he spent in the military school was essentially the same as being in the military.
Like you've got to find a way to like kind of connect yourself to the military if you're going to be this sort of authoritarian strongman.
And Modi never served, but his biography really tries to thread that needle.
And I'm going to quote from it right now.
As a child, Narendra Modi had one dream, to serve in the Indian Army.
For many youngsters of his time, the army was seen as the ultimate means of serving Mother India.
As luck would have it, his family was dead opposed to the idea.
Narendra Modi was very keen to study in Sinek school located in nearby Jamnagar, but when the time came to pay the fees, there was no money at home.
Surely, Narendra was disappointed, but fate had different plans for this young boy who was disappointed on not being able to wear the uniform of a jawan, a soldier.
Over the years, he embarked on a unique path that took him across India in pursuit of the larger mission to serve humanity.
So he wanted to be a soldier, but like they couldn't make the funding work out and stuff.
And thankfully, he found another way to serve that's just like being a soldier, but doesn't risk him getting shot in a border war with Pakistan.
So that's cool.
So just like that, though.
Just like that.
It's the same.
It's the same, only he doesn't die anonymously in a trench being ordered to charge a machine gun mess.
That's cool.
That is very...
But it is the same.
It is the same, exactly the same, but very fortunate for him.
So, in 1975, when Modi was 25 years old, India went through a period of economic collapse and the attendant civil unrest that comes with it.
The RSS saw this as an opportunity to recruit and to stir up dissent against the ruling Congress Party.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded to all this by suspending parliament and instituting emergency rule, a widely unpopular and illegal move that was rightly condemned by many.
During her time as de facto dictator, Indira Gandhi had RSS leaders arrested and persecuted, and the organization itself was banned.
Modi went into hiding at this time, dressing as a Sikh in a turban and what appears to be a fake beard.
I've got a picture of him in disguise, and I'm almost certain that that's a costume piece he's wearing.
Let me see the beard.
Look at that.
It's the little line on there that makes it look like it's a fake beard.
It's so weird.
Or he's just like got like a thick version of a chin strap going.
Yeah, I can't really say for certain if it is a fake beard or not, but it's the only question that concerns me.
It's a wild choice either way.
I think the mustache is real.
You can almost see the mustache is real, but you can almost see the tape.
Yeah, it's weird.
It's a weird look.
Sunglasses help.
Yeah, they do help.
I mean, it's not a bad thing.
He just couldn't grow a beard?
He has one now, I think.
And what the fuck, dude?
I mean, he was younger than some men.
It takes a while before it comes out.
Yeah.
I'll accept that.
So, Indira Gandhi's period of emergency rule eventually ended and the RSS was unbanned.
And rather than being harmed by their period of persecution, Gandhi's targeting of the group legitimized him in the eyes of many Indians who had not identified with the organization previously.
The RSS began to grow and the loyal Narendra Modi moved up the ranks quickly.
In 1987, he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP.
And the BJP is the electorally political.
I'm also a member of the BJP.
What's up, dude?
RSS Political Rise00:04:40
I still feel like BJs.
Sorry.
Yeah, but it's the in this case, the BJP is the electorally political wing of the RSS.
You don't got to tell me about the BJP, Robert.
Robert's uncomfortable.
It's great.
You can all join the BJP.
That is so cute.
Oh, Lord in heaven.
Robert, you're adorable.
You know what else is adorable?
And pro blowjob.
That's exactly right.
All of these companies will blow you in the capitalistic sense by sending you products in exchange for currency.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice in selling, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers adopts a shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Gujarat Riots Violence00:13:29
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So, Modi has just joined the BJP, which is the political wing of the RSS.
And he started at the bottom of the party, but his skill as an organizer ensured that he rose rapidly.
By the 1980s, he had become a senior figure in the BJP's Gujarati chapter.
At the time, the BJP was still definitely French.
It had only two seats in parliament.
The party leadership looked out at the political situation in India and saw that they needed a cause to crystallize the divisions between Hindu and Muslim in the country.
And they found this cause in the city of Ayodhya.
That holy city had a mosque called the Babri Masjid, Masjid, sorry, the Babri Masjid, which had been built by the Muslim Mughal Emperor Babur in 1528.
For a variety of confusing reasons, a number of local Hindus had grown convinced over the years that this mosque was built over the site of an old Hindu temple.
And some of these people began to claim that Ram, an avatar of Vishnu, had been born on the spot.
And I'm going to quote now from a New Yorker article laying out what happened next.
In September 1990, a senior BJP member named L.K. Advani began calling for the Babri Masjid to be destroyed and for a Hindu temple to take its place.
To build support for the idea, he undertook a two-month pilgrimage called the Ram Rath Yatra across the Indian heartland.
Traveling aboard a Nissan jeep refitted to look like a chariot.
He sometimes gave several speeches a day, inflaming crowds about what he saw as the government's favoritism towards Muslims.
Sectarian riots followed in his wake, leaving hundreds dead.
Advani was arrested before he reached Ayodhya, but other BJP members carried on, gathering supporters and donations along the way.
On December 6th, 1992, a crowd led by RSS partisans swarmed the Babri Masjid and, using axes and hammers, began tearing the building down.
By nightfall, it had been completely razed.
So they destroyed this mosque.
Wow.
And Narendra Modi was still pretty low on the totem pole at this point, but his skill as an organizer earned him a place organizing the Rath Yatra, that like chariot march across the country.
It was his job to organize the Gujarat section of the chariot march.
And the Ram Yatha sparked a series of horrifically bloody Hindu-Muslim riots all across the subcontinent.
The violence took weeks to die down, and it was particularly bad in Mumbai, one of India's largest cities.
Muslims were forced either by mobs or iBasic self-preservation to move out of neighborhoods their families had occupied for generations.
Many moved into what were effectively ghettos.
The riots and dislocation caused by the Ram Rath Yatra's aftershocks contributed to the growing violent polarization of Indian society.
One survivor the New Yorker interviewed reported feeling as if Mumbai had been transformed by all this.
That is the first time I ever really thought about my identity.
Our entire neighborhood, our friends, were going to kill us.
And all this was fucking bank for the RSS.
By 1996, nine years after Modi joined, the BJP had grown to become the single largest party in parliament.
As it ever does, the rioting and racial hatred sparked by this fascist organization convinced more people to join it.
As they grew to consume the Indian political system, a few forward-thinking academics began to study the party and its members.
One of these was Ashish Nandi, and I'm going to quote again from the New Yorker here.
A trained psychologist, he wanted to study the mentality of the rising Hindu nationalists.
One of those he met was Narendra Modi, who was then a little-known BJP functionary.
Nandi interviewed Modi for several hours and came away shaken.
His subject, Nandi told me, exhibited all the traits of an authoritarian personality, puritanical rigidity, a constricted emotional life, fear of his own passions, and an enormous ego that protected annoying insecurity.
During an interview, Modi elaborated a fantastical theory of how India was the target of a global conspiracy in which every Muslim in the country was likely complicit.
Modi was a fascist in every sense, Nandi said.
I don't mean this as a term of abuse.
It's a diagnostic category.
Cool and good.
The only diagnostics that I'm sorry.
Just going to come back to the BJP.
Yeah, I really know.
Sometimes all you can do is laugh about blowjobs when you're talking about fascism.
Yep.
Because they hate blowjobs.
It's a diagnostic category, that's what she said.
Yeah, that's what this psychologist is.
Because I'm not just being like, you're a fascist.
I'm being like, fascism is a mental disorder and I am diagnosing you with it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting.
So, in September 2001, a month in which nothing else of historical import occurred, Narendra Modi was appointed to be the chief minister of the government of Gujarat, which the RSS and BJP had begun to dominate in a series of elections.
Modi's rise to power was not due to his own electoral success, though.
It was due to basically his ability to politic internally.
And he basically undermined another rival of his in the BJP, a guy named Keshubhai Patel.
I am so sorry about the names here.
BJP, yeah, you know me.
Yes, yes, yes.
So, yeah, I found a quote from a guy named Vinod Mehta, which is the former editor of an Indian news magazine called Outlook, who remembers Modi turning up at their office in the year 2000 with a bunch of documents incriminating this rival of his, Patel, in a scandal.
Quote, I immediately felt this man was bad news.
There was something sinister about him and the way he spoke, and I felt deeply uncomfortable in his presence.
He complained about Patel and talked about corruption.
He came back a couple times, but I didn't run the story.
Before I knew what had happened, he was back at Gujarat as the chief minister in Keshubhai's place.
So Narendra, like, basically fucks with this other guy.
He sees his arrival, succeeds in kind of maneuvering him out of power, and he winds up as the man in charge of Gujarat on February 27th, 2002, when a passenger train stops in the city of Godra after departing from Ayodhya.
Many of the people on board the train were Hindu pilgrims who had been visiting the destroyed Babri Masjid Mosque in order to advocate the building of a Hindu temple over its remains.
Most of them were members of the RSS.
Somehow, Muslim residents of Godra realized that this train was filled with RSS activists, and they began to shout and jeer at them.
And the Hindu partisans inside began to shout back.
The train stalled as it began to depart, and this provided time for the confrontation to escalate.
No one knows exactly what happened next, but someone threw something on fire into one of the cars.
Possibly like a Muslim shop owner tossed a stove in there.
It's really not known for certain, but one of the people in the crowd outside tossed something on fire into the train.
And I've been on a lot of Indian trains.
They're incredibly crowded, and a lot of people wearing like long flowing cotton garments and also carrying like piles of like clothes and stuff with them, like what they own and whatnot.
And it's incredibly flammable in there.
And this catches, like, members of the group inside catch and the fire spreads.
And it's just this horrific fire.
And really, like, before anyone knows what's happening, 58 people had either burned to death or suffocated on board the train.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
And blame quickly settles on Muslims in general for this horrible tragedy.
So members of the VHP, the religious wing of the RSS, the group that most of the people in the train had been a part of, petitioned Narendra Modi for the right to parade the burnt corpses of their members through the streets of Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat.
What?
Yeah, they're like, we want to really make the most of this tragedy.
So we want to carry the dead bodies of our members who got burnt to death and march them through the city to try to spark a fucking riot.
That's the goal here.
Excuse me.
I got to say that, you know, I was like, oh, I'm with them.
I'm with them.
They're grieving.
Wait, what?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I feel like that really went to murder 100 real quick.
Yeah.
And the home secretary of Gujarat warns Modi that allowing them to do this will spark another violent riot, telling him things will go out of hand.
But out of hand is exactly where Modi wanted things to go.
And sure enough, he allows them to march the corpses of their dead members through the street.
And this provokes mobs of furious Hindus to take to the streets all throughout the cities of Gujarat, shouting, take revenge and slaughter the Muslims.
Rioters cut open the stomachs of pregnant Muslim women and murdered babies.
Hundreds of women were gang raped.
Yeah, this is where we get this is where you fucking go.
This is that paragraph.
All right.
Yeah.
Okay, touche, you son of a bitch.
There's mass gang rapes.
At least one Muslim boy is forced to drink kerosene and swallow a lit match.
It's bad.
It's a bad set of riots.
Can you swallow a lit match?
No.
I'm not.
I know that's not the part I should focus on.
It's not.
I don't think well.
Jeez.
Yeah.
And also a member of the Congress party, Assange Jaffre, was caught by a crowd and publicly dismembered.
So like these are really bad riots.
Holy fuck.
By the time it's all over, somewhere around 2,000 to 3,000 people are dead, and the vast majority of them are Muslims.
And we'll never get an exact death toll.
Reports began to filter out in the immediate wake that this violence had not been purely spontaneous, just an uncontrollable expression of rage.
And I'm going to quote from the New Yorker again.
They appeared to have been largely planned and directed by the RSS.
Teams of men armed with clubs, guns, and swords fanned out across the state's Muslim enclaves, often carrying voter rolls and other official documents that led them to Muslim homes and shops.
So they get like government information on where Muslims are living in town to carry out this stuff.
Sounds very crystal nocti.
Yeah, for sure.
Modi, the man in charge of the Gujarati government, was nowhere to be found.
But his influence was felt everywhere as he ordered Indian army soldiers to post up in their barracks rather than intervene to stop the violence.
Police also received orders to stand down.
And in many areas, they just took part in the killing.
One of the very few officers who did not go along with this was Rahul Sharma, the top cop in the heavily Muslim district of Bhavnagar.
He later testified that he received no word at all from his superiors on how to contain the riots, which lasted more than three months.
Sharma took matters into his own.
Oh my god, the riots lasted for more than three months?
Yeah, three months of constant street violence.
Holy shit.
Yeah, it's hardcore.
It's a bad time.
And Sharma is one of like the few heroes of this time.
So he is being told nothing at all from his superiors about what to do about these murder mobs.
And it kind of comes to a head when this huge organized crowd of RSS supporters with weapons start like posting up outside a school filled with 400 Muslim children.
And he eventually orders his cops to like fire into the crowd, which is really maybe the only time I can think of where I'm like, yeah, it's good that the police shot at that crowd.
Holy shit.
But he successfully saves all these kids.
He's a good guy.
He did the right thing.
Most police did not.
The vast majority of Gujarati police let the pogroms continue unabated.
As a general rule, this too conforms to the standard behavior of law enforcement during acts of ethnic cleansing all around the world.
The ones who do not actively participate very often sit back and watch.
So we can assume anywhere there is ethnic cleansing occurring, the police will be a part of it actively rather than protecting the victims.
That's just true on multiple content.
Silver lining?
What's the opposite of a silver lining?
Like a shit streak?
Yeah, it's like a shit streak.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
Yeah, like a shit streak covering one of those like thin blue lines.
Yeah.
So Sharma was shuffled out of his job and criticized by India's home minister, a BJP functionary named Advani, for allowing too many Hindus to die in his district.
So like one of the few cops who like does what you would hope a police officer do and protects the public gets like basically fired for the fact that too many Hindus died because like some of his cops had to like shoot at Hindus to like stop them from massacring holy school children.
So in the end, 2,000 people or more were killed in three months of horrific violence.
More than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, were forced out of their homes.
As with the earlier rioting in September 1990, the Gujarati riots left a vastly more polarized state in their wake.
Muslims were forced out of neighborhoods they'd long inhabited and dumped into slums for their own safety.
One of these formed in the vast garbage dump of the city of Ahmedabad.
Citizens Village, as it came to be known, hosted tens of thousands of Muslim refugees.
What little aid it received was supplied by volunteers.
Narendra Modi's government refused to help.
When he was asked why he had abandoned these people, who were also citizens of Gujarat, Modi replied, Relief camps are actually child-making factories.
Those who keep on multiplying the population should be taught a lesson.
Wow.
He's a cool guy.
Cool.
Not coming, dude.
The Gujarat riots were met with a tepid response by the Indian government.
Only a few dozen rioters were ever convicted of anything, and only one elected official in the BJP, Maya Ben Kodnani, was ever convicted of murder and conspiracy.
She was cleared of all charges when Modi became the prime minister, so that's nice.
Pretty convenient.
Pretty convenient.
I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, though.
The international community was outraged by what happened in Gujarat, and the RSS and Narendra Modi in particular became global pariahs.
Modi was banned from travel to the United States or the United Kingdom.
His reputation suffered enough that his fellow BJP members in India temporarily disavowed him.
In 2004, the BJP prime minister, Atoll Vajpayee, was voted out of office, and he blamed Narendra Modi for his loss.
So for a while, it seemed like the Gujarat riots, as horrible as they were, had sounded a death knell to Modi's career and to the RSS.
But of course, those riots would prove to be only the beginning.
Modi Career Death Knell00:04:33
And on Thursday's episode, we're going to talk about what came next.
But you know what?
It's time to talk about now.
I don't know the amazing goods and services.
No, the amazing plugs that you have to plug.
What?
Yeah, we're in the P-zone.
Me and the other members of the BJP can be found on Twitter and Instagram at theSophia, S-O-F-I-Y-A.
And you can hear me on my two podcasts.
One is on iHeart with Miles Gray from Daily Zy Guys called 420 Day Fiancé.
And the other one is Private Parts Unknown with Courtney Kosak, where we travel all around the world and talk to people about love and sex and sexuality.
Yeah.
Love Courtney.
Courtney's the best.
Love Courtney.
Hate the growing specter of international fascism.
Listen to Sophia's podcast.
It's probably on her website.
Yeah.
As a quote from you.
It is.
It is.
That's my only bookjacket quote.
So listen to those podcasts.
Maybe pick up a couple of knives, a couple of other weapons.
Just, you know, get ready for your own local ethnic cleansing mobs.
Boy, howdy.
Sophie, how do we end an episode?
You can find Robert on Twitter at iWriteOK.
You can find us on the Twin Instagram at BastardsPod.
You can find our sources underneath the episode notes if you just scroll down.
And you can listen to Robert on Worst Chair Ever.
And we have another project coming out very soon.
Look for that.
Yeah, The Women's War, March 25th.
Episode 1, March 25th, trailer, March 18th.
Look out for it.
So, boy, Sophie, the way you handled that was so much more responsible than just telling the audience to arm themselves to fight against mobs of violent fashion.
That's what I'm here for.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right, the episode is now over.
Excellent.
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