Behind the Bastards - Part One: Narendra Modi, And India's Weird Nazi Obsession

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Robert is joined by Sofiya Alexandra to discuss Narendra Modi.Footnotes: The Delhi pogrom 2020 is Amit Shah’s answer to an election defeat What Happened in Delhi Was a Pogrom Hitler Film Reveals India's Nazi Fascination World's Biggest Toilet-building Program in India Gets Mixed Results Hitler’s Hindus: The Rise and Rise of India’s Nazi-loving Nationalists Humble Beginnings: The Early Years In pictures: Narendra Modi's early life Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India PM Modi turns 69: As a child Narendra Modi joined NCC, wanted to serve in the Army Modi: From tea boy to India's leader Personal Life Story Narendra Modi: man of the masses Modi to youth: If you don’t make sacrifice in battle today, history will curse you tomorrow The Unbearable Loneliness of Narendra Modi Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, 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 reself quarantining. Back in an earlier distant age when such things were a little bit more funny-saming. 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 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 got that steering wheel in your pants for? And the pirate responds, yarr to his driving me nuts. That is the joke. Please enjoy the rest of this episode. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards 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've 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 I was just waving it around. Sophia is trying to figure out how to close it now. It's a good time. Yeah, I'm excited to figure this puzzle out. Chris got it in like three seconds. Chris immediately, Chris, our editor immediately figured out how to close it. The rest of us were in, particularly me, shamefully couldn't figure it out.

So I was just, I was just waving an open knife around for a while, which I believe. I know there's like a pinching situation. I'm just like, where? We're good with OSHA, right, Sophie? Okay, Sophie says everything I do is fine. 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, couple three weeks ago,

there was that Pagram 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. Oh 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. 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, oh, 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. Hey, just a 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 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.

It could make 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. Okay. There's always a point in every relationship where you invite a fascist strong man in. You freaky, let's do this.

That's why they keep winning, actually. Because you just want to fucking bring him in. Yeah, 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, huge. Just anywhere, really. As a Jew, nothing wars my heart more. 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. So, like... How heartwarming that they had enough time to like follow this beautiful thread. They really did.

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. Is this pre-crystallized? No, but it's pre-invasion of Poland and stuff. So, it's like pre the start of actual hostilities. So, they're definitely killing a lot of people, but like by Nazi standards, they haven't really got into what they're getting into. It's more like an amuse-bouche.

Yeah, yeah. Let's have a little bit of archaeology with our murder appetizers. Just like a slow ramp up. Yeah, yeah. I'm not gonna 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 where 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 could look at the Nazis and be like, well, I'm sure they've done bad stuff,

but that's basically what the British Empire's been doing, right? It's a long history of being terrible. Yeah, 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 aimed, formed at the guidance of Indian nationalist leaders, 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 a snowman? Yeah, it was a little bit like that.

So, the idea was that like these Indian soldiers would invade 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, 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... You don't get to take people away?

No, they're not really persecuting anybody. And why 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. Yeah. It's a real comedy of errors. You could get a...

Yeah. And it's weird because there's photos of Irwin Rommel reviewing parades of these guys. And you can see fucking Rommel like pinning medals on the chest of guys with turbans.

It's a very strange chapter of history. But they did have a clause in their contract that said they were not 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. 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. Can you imagine if that's what soldiering really was? You sign up but you get to say no things many times. 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. 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 and the 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 three 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 genocide.

I was just going to say 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. 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 up 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 the like there was like a Muslim conquest of India and the Mughals ruled and it was like so this is like 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 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 hundred years but Anderson gets angry when

I talk shit about the British Empire she's a big fan of that she's dressed in a really smart like British tweed right now 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 sorts 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 girls 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 like massive existential crises because New Delhi is a hard fucking city

to land in like it is 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 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 of 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 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 yeah yeah like like just sort of being a

total Hitler in a total Hitler right now yeah that's so awesome yeah we should do this we should do that one more but it it kind of hints at something which is that like Hitler and the legacy 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 J. Co another Indian book merchant sold 100,000 copies in seven years Hitler's manifesto was translated into Gujarati Hindi Malayalan

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 solely across the subcontinent so you have this I totally hear about Da Vinci code man yeah in the night's Templar

we don't want that going over there yes you have this weird thing where like there's this mix of the history of Nazis and being less immediate in India and so like people 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 Kampf has achieved popularity in India as a sort of self-help book a guide to success for Hindu businessmen

oh my god that's not great what the fuck a guide to success yeah he's like their Tim Ferriss you know not their Tim Ferriss but like a subculture within like the the Hindu business community he's like a Tim Ferriss type figure like a great

productivity guru 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 Sinkhal a management student at New Delhi's Institute of Technology

it was like without the final solution I would have never passed my marketing cause Jesus we need a final solution to get in these products off the shelves I'll tell you what so this guy Tarun read Mein Kampf as an undergraduate and he founded inspiring and he told CBS quote

it serves as a reminder that nothing is unachievable he said no 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 eleven you got this after that point

you go girl yes queen yes this does come back to my frequent refrain on this show that like 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 books pervasive anti-Semitic ideology so you got to cut out all the Jew hatred but then there's some good stuff

the old I read playboy for the articles defense I read Hitler for the management advice exactly yeah what are you talking about Mein Kampf 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 you know in luring people to their deaths it really helped it's wild because like 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 it was like he wasn't good as a manager is the

core of the point but I guess people miss that so in 2010 Bollywood director Nullen Singh announced his plan to produce a movie titled Dear Friend Hitler which was shall we say a different take on Ole it off

I mean I guess I don't need to register my script with the WGA anymore oh that's a shame someone's taken my idea Hitler not so bad that was also another version of

I mean that was a musical I have an idea for a script do you want me 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 and it can either be

I actually think this might work best as like a Netflix miniseries his goal is to get 6 million Jewish couples pregnant oh my god how about anti-Hitler anti-Hitler we can workshop the title and you know what else we can workshop

I really like to be on board with this project let's make this happen I don't want this to slip away no we can make some bank off of this dude anti-Hitler hunters is popular it's so bad it's so bad it's like 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 why are they calling the grandparent 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 it's so bad Al Pacino is so horrible what about the fucking accent on the grandma 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 I love that during the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI

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have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus it's all made up listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

we're back and we're talking about Nazi ism in India so in 2010 this Bollywood director Nalan Sing 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 threw a bit baffled by the reaction quit while such a response would seem if anything understated in much of the world Sing 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 a 50 cent

did his own version of mine comf instead of part 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 like the real problem because while many of the Indians who created weird like 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 took

deliberately took advantage of their countryman'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 Haritz

a left-leaning Israeli news website and it documents this it was called a 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 this definitely Nazi swastika on the sign I mean obviously what are you going to take pictures in front of yeah I mean Hitler's den 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 ah boy Swayamsevak Sang 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 there fuck 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 forward in one of her books and V.D. Savarkar himself was a big fan of our old buddy Adolf 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 Nazi has improved undeniably the savior of India just passes off as a wow passes off as a Hindu extremist V.D. Savarkar's primary motivation was a desire to see India turned into a

Hindu stand that's the term here 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 you 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 hindunist stemmed from

geographical unity racial unity and a common culture which pitted the Hindus of India against all others and there was like a cast 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 any pepper tones 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 again probably 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 in 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 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 it was a really good lesson and it 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 two 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 it's not possible to get it all

I 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 by capitalism and moneyed interests as ours is because

that's always a factor in the rise of all these movements is 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 is 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 the next time you're trying to eliminate fascism maybe give that a shot

not all the way in but I'll think about it well it's all on you specifically so I hope you do but 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 Hedgewar 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 modifying which way if you look up RSS salute it's like a little bit less of the hand motion

just like less noticeable what do you want me to look at? are you getting something? 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 it's an 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 that has a very Hitler look it's got a Hitler 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 noticed you picked up the knife just sort of by reflex that's a good reflex to 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 non-violence and plurality were all equally faithful to the men of the RSS including one Natharam

Vinayak Godsi 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

the Supremo what a bad breakfast sandwich Hitler the Supremo yeah that does sound like a terrible there's like a lot of hair in it, just mustache yeah it's mostly like really greasy pork and like boiled eggs yeah greasy pork and boiled eggs

is the Supremo Hitler yeah the mustaches or the bread is moldy it's like 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 Hitler lit dignity and prestige to the German government

and the ideology 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 and do 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 in 2012 10th grade students at a private school in Mumbai

were asked to complete a sentence starting with the words I admire 9 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 to skoosh 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 gonna talk about Modi now now we're into the past preamble I'm ready I'm stroking my knife good that's the right response oh look he 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 yeah let's get a couple of knives more knives in here Sophie Narendra Modi was born in Venagar a small town in north Gujarat Minsana district on September 17th 1950

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 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 chased 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 chased doesn't always work out

nope actually it can be a real problem maybe some people should just fuck yeah people should just fuck maybe yeah but this whole like presenting himself as like a chased monk it does kind of it keeps with a broad trend 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 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 know he had tons of Hindu friends or Muslim friends he's not racist and so dude if your God doesn't want you to eat chilies abandon your God it's not that because like obviously chilies are like a traditional Hindu food it's this idea that like

um they are better than people because you don't eat chilies that because you sacrifice the comforts of the flesh you're a holy man like that's kind of what make and that's not just Hinduism that's like a huge in Christianity and Islam like this idea that I'm saying like

if you're not fucking at least have chilies if you're not fucking at least have chilies 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 mm-hmm anyway chilies or fucking ideally both to avoid fascism yeah

uh so it was however revealed during his first campaign for prime minister that Narendra was legally married and had been virtually his entire life uh he was like married it as a child the couple actually moved in together at the age of 17 but the only cohabited for three months

then Narendra abandoned his wife to wander around the Himalayan mountains on a pilgrimage and he never returned haha second wife oh till death drew his part just kidding no until I wander away forever it's it's a little bit weirder than that because I can't put this on Narendra because he didn't get to like

choose to marry his wife it was like um his family like his family was very traditional um and they thought that like they should um 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 can 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 that can't be on him how did his wife feel though I don't know if I can 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 um yeah so it's 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 US like here in the US 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 now I get that it makes you holier than other people exactly yeah and in a kind of position you need to come

yeah I don't I don't for me coming as politics and that's a good thing it's just different um 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 for secular democratic values and were directly opposed to the RSS as you might expect from a violent fascist movement the 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 8 or 9 years old when they when they went with him that's early as well that's real fucking

early yeah his official biographies don't agree with this and they state that he was like after he went on pilgrimage to the Himalayas that he he came back and he joined the RSS we don't know the official biographies talk about

you know stuff like when he was 9 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 and 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 pracharik 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 that's so rude dude we just come by and say like hey it's gonna be weird I'm selling tea in town I'm back you know sorry I'm kind of a dick but probably

you don't want to be with me anyway so this is for the best but if you see me in town if you see me in town slinging tea to the Nazis don't 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 I'm still pretending we never

fucked so they may not have he might be completely honest about the whole chasteness thing like well it's kind of hard to tell because it's hard to get like a real hint of what the man is but he might actually be like a no-nut sort of dude

like really committed to that proud boy don't come sort of thing fascist hate coming I know so weird so yeah he starts work as a pracharic 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 and really teaches them how to like stir up a crowd and work one and pracharics like Modi were expected to remain chased 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 and 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 bonafides as like a lover of the military I was busy not fucking I was busy too busy not fucking jerking off to the military you got to fucking the military we kind of see this with Trump's bone spurs 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 strong man and Modi never served but his biography really tries to thread that needle 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 Sainik school located in nearby Jemnagar 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 jaw on 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 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 in the attendance 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 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 can sense 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 disguise. Do you think he just couldn't grow a beard

or? He has one now I think so and what the fuck dude? I mean he was younger then some men it takes a while before it comes out right 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? I feel like BJ's sorry. Yeah but it's the, in this case the BJP is the electorally political wing of the RSS.

You don't gotta 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?

Job. That's exactly right. All of these companies will blow you in the capitalistic sense by sending you products in exchange for currency. During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series of Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy

to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced

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Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow

to train to become the youngest person in the world of space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth his beloved country, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App,

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convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, 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 fringe. It had only two seats in parliament. The party leadership looked out at the political situation in India and found 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 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 and Avatar 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 in flaming 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 raised. So they destroyed this mosque. Well, and Narendra Modi was still pretty low on the totem pole at this point, but his skill organizer earned him a place organizing

the Rath Yatra, that liked 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 by basic 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 and security. 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. Only diagnostics that.

I'm sorry. This is just going to come back to the BJP. It's really no way. Sometimes all you can do is laugh about blowjobs when you're talking about fascism. Yup. Because they hate blowjobs. It's a diagnostic category. That's what she said.

Yeah, that's what this psychologist said. Look, 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. 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 was 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 in Gujarat as the chief minister and Keshubhai's place. So Narendra, like, basically fucks with this other guy.

He sees his rival, 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 in Jirat 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. I've been on a lot of Indian trains. They're incredibly crowded, and a lot of people wearing long flowing cotton garments and also carrying piles of clothes and stuff with them,

like what they own and whatnot. 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. 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 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 I was like, oh, I'm with them. I'm with them. They're grieving. Wait, what? Yeah. So I feel like that really went from zero to 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-raised. Yeah, this is where we get to that. This is where you fucking got me. This is that paragraph. All right. 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 know that's not the part I should focus on. Yeah, it's not. I don't think well.

Geez. Yeah. And also a member of the Congress party, Assan Jafri, 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

nocty. 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 hand. 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's one of, like, the few heroes of this time. So he, like, 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 there's huge organized crowd of RSS supporters with weapons start, like, posting up outside a school filled with 400 Muslim children. And he eventually ordered 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 Amidabad. 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-Kudnani,

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, Atal 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. 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 the Sophia S-O-F-I-Y-A

and you can hear me on my two podcasts. One is on iHeart with Miles Gray from Dailies, I guess, called 420 Day Fiancé. And the other one is Private Parts Unknown with Kourtney Kosak where we travel all around the world

and talk to people about love and sex and sexuality. Yeah! Love Kourtney. Kourtney's the best. Love Kourtney. Hate the growing specter of international fascism. Listen to Sophia's podcast. That's weirdly on her website.

Yeah. From you. It is. It is. That's my only book jacket 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 and I write okay. You can find us on the twin-stagram at at bastards pod. You can find our sources underneath the episode notes if you just scroll down.

And you can listen to Robert on Worst Year 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 fascists. That's what I'm here for. Thank you. Thank you for that. Over. Excellent. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse we're like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training

in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science

you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.