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

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

Robert is joined again by Sofiya Alexandra to continue discussing 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. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back minutes after we finished the first episode. It's not a lot of dead children. It is, but we don't talk about all of them.

We don't detail it. That's a silver lining. Not even a shit stain. A lot of dead children, but we don't have to talk about them specifically. Sometimes the truest form of friendship is not going into more detail about horrible ethnic cleansings than you need to. I mean, it's what I put on our t-shirts, but it's a lot of words. It has to go all the way on the sleeves and the back. Hop onto behind the bastards t-public for our new ethnic cleansing is horrible,

but there's only a certain amount of detail that's really necessary to get across the key facts of what's happening without getting into what's the word when somebody looks at a car crash, that sort of thing. A lot of words on those t-shirts. But that shirt also has you saying, uh, five times in a row, like it's quoted. Yeah, it's not. We should have edited the shirt at some point. No, but honestly, we were going for realism. We were. Cinema Verite. That's what that means. It's putting ums on a t-shirt.

On 420 De Fiance, Miles and I call that a transparency bonus. Ooh, nice. That makes it sound intentional. Yeah. In the wake of the Gujarat riots, Narendra Modi was shunned and marginalized in broader Indian society. But within Gujarat itself, his popularity grew. Some of this may have had to do with the fact the Muslim population of the area had been beaten, murdered and ghettoed into political irrelevance. Gujarat sounds tight.

Where are my Gujarat hats at? Most of it had to do with the fact that violent bigotry is actually super fun when you're on the side of the majority. See, Modi is a very intelligent man, and he grasped instinctively that the most important lesson that any would-be tyrant can ever learn, which is never ever apologize. So instead of that, he followed up this nightmarish bloodletting with a Hindu pride march across the state. Ranks and ranks of uniformed RSS members celebrated their violent oppression of the Muslim minority and were met by cheering crowds. He was careful in his actual language, always delivering the message without exposing too much of his ass,

saying things like, if we raise the self-respect and morale of 50 million Gujaratis, the schemes of Ali's, Mali's and Jamali's will not be able to do us any harm. Those are all stereotypical Muslim names in India. So you see what he's saying. He doubled down on the genocide. He sure did. Which is a real power move. A white power move, you might call it.

Aryan power, let's get a little more specific. While Narendra solidified his base of power, the rest of the BJP suffered a series of electoral reversals. This also wound up working out for Modi. The more liberal wings of the party crumbled in the wake of these defeats, and while they flailed, Modi pressed forward in Gujarat and made deals with the biggest businessmen in the region. He made life easy for them, and they pumped more money into Gujarat's economy, allowing him to brag that he developed Gujarat into a financial powerhouse during his time in office. That's a real Trump boast.

It kind of sounds like they're all working from the same playbook. Over time, Modi seized control of the BJP and married its hardline racist fascist DNA with the financial interests of the business class. I'm going to quote now from an article in the news statesman. The turning point came in October 2008, when Tata Motors moved its car plant for its much publicized new budget hatchback, the Nano, from the leftist-dominated West Bengal to the pro-business Gujarat. In 2011, Ford invested $1 billion in setting up another car plant.

Before long, Gujarat started to make headlines, not for riots, but for its new image as an economic powerhouse. Just like MineCom really wasn't about... No, it's about business. Killing. It was really just a self-help business kind of guide. Yeah, exactly. From 2003, Modi began holding an annual summit, Vibrant Gujarat, which cumulatively generated investment pledges of $920 billion.

All the prominent Indian... Yeah, all the most prominent Indian captains of industry, from Mataan Tata to the Ambani's and the Metals, rallied behind Modi and declared him India's most business-friendly chief minister. Gujarat now enjoys double-digit growth, and there's no question that Modi has run an economically successful administration. However, his claims to have made the state's economy an ideal for the rest of India is disputed by economists to point out that the Gujarat model

has done little to alleviate poverty or improve indexes of education, malnutrition, or healthcare, because the money... Does not go down because trickle down theory is not a real thing. But if you can make the numbers look good on paper, you can get people to vote for you because they think they'll get some of that money, and then genocide gets to happen. It's cool. It's cool that it always works. When the wealthiest men in Gujarat saw how good Modi could be for business,

they put their money into making sure the few thousand people he'd gotten murdered. We're forgotten. There was an investigation, of course, but the Indian Supreme Court decided there wasn't enough evidence to charge Modi himself of anything. That's so crazy. It's like we tried, but there's nothing to tie you to the genocide. So it's like, so weird, there's no evidence,

but you're basically free. That's so crazy. That's wild. Yeah. Some officials within the government did try to take action against Modi. Harin Pandya, a cabinet minister, gave sworn testimony about the riots, claiming that on the night it all began, he had attended a meeting at Modi's home and heard the chief minister tell police officials

to allow people to vent their frustration and not come in the way of the Hindu backlash. Yeah, it's a good switchblade moment. Sanjeev Bhatt, a police administrator, also testified to hearing Modi express similar sentiments, discussing his hope that the Muslims be taught a lesson to ensure that such incidents do not recur. The evidence was there, but most of Modi's political rivals

were too frightened of the consequences of pursuing him to the fullest extent of the law. They decided to take their chances with the electoral system. Oh, you never take chances with the electoral system. You really never should. You never decide not to fully pursue criminal charges against a fascist because you're worried about the backlash socially and decided to just trust in voters.

Turns out that doesn't ever work. No. Yeah. Gotta be on the right side of history. Gotta throw him in a fucking cell. You can't wait until someone else is like, this is bad. So, uh, meanwhile, Modi and his followers set to work eliminating the men who testified against them. Bhatt was quickly charged with the death of a suspect

in police custody and sentenced to life in prison. Hiran Pandya was found dead in his car in 2003. His wife insists to this day that his death was a political murder. So that's cool. There's a lot more of those. Modi angrily ignored questions about the riots for years. One of the most direct responses he actually did make came in 2013 when a reporter asked him if he felt sorry for all the Muslims

who'd been murdered by those mobs he enabled. Modi responded, If someone is driving a car and we're sitting behind, even then, if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful? Of course it is. What? What?

If you're sitting behind someone in a car and they hit a puppy, does it hurt you to see? Yes, but that's the same as him enabling this mob that killed 3,000 people. That's not even an analogy. It's pretty great. That's like sentences that don't form a whole story. There's definitely some translation errors and stuff here. He originally said it, I'm guessing, in Gujarati or whatever.

It made more sense than the original language. Did it though? Because it doesn't seem to address the fact. It was always a bullshit response. I just think the phrasing is a little weird. I just mean there's no part of it where he's like... What he's saying is that his role in letting and enabling these mob to kill people... Why are the Muslims, though, the puppy?

He's still a human in the analogy. Why are the Muslims an animal? That's a good point. It's just confusing. He's like, I am a man, but in this story, the Muslims are a puppy? Sometimes puppies get hit by cars and you don't like to see it. He's not driving the car, which he is. He's behind it, which makes no sense.

I'm like, no, you're the driver and they're not a puppy. They're a man and you just ran over the man. So I don't really understand why I get why he was trying to make it different. Because he doesn't think of Muslims as people. It's like that Simpsons bit where Lionel Hutz is like, yeah, this judge doesn't like me because I hit his dog with my car, only replace the word dog with the word son, and replace the word hit with repeatedly.

That's a good bit. Oh boy. Modi's popularity was further augmented in 2005 when Gujarat police announced that they had shot dead a terrorist they believed had been planning to assassinate Narendra. Saurabhuddin Sheikh, the dead man, was said to have been a member of an Islamic terrorist cell collaborating with the ISI, Pakistani Intelligence. Gujarati police claimed Saurabhuddin had opened fire on them

when they'd caught him and they'd been forced to fire back and kill him. None of this was true, and it soon became clear that the whole affair had been blatantly orchestrated by the authorities. And I'm going to quote now from scroll.in, an Indian news website. Those were the years when Gujarat was scarred by several such encounters. The police killed more than 20 people claiming they were trying to murder the chief minister or commit other acts of terrorism. In few of these cases was the police's version effectively challenged.

Sheikh's killing would have become just another statistic in forgotten police records, except for two interventions. First, Rubabhuddin Sheikh wrote to India's chief justice that he did not believe the police's version of his brother's killing and that he was worried for the safety of Kaussar B. Saurabhuddin Sheikh's wife who disappeared since her husband's killing. In response, the Supreme Court told the Gujarat police to find out how Sheikh had been killed and what had happened to his wife.

Second, Prashant Dayal, a journalist for the Divya Bhaskar newspaper, published a sensational report claiming senior Gujarat police officials had deliberately killed Sheikh and then rape and burned alive his wife. Holy shit. Yeah, it's fucked. So a thorough investigation would eventually secure the admission of the Gujarat government's legal counsel that the whole shooting had been a fake encounter. The motorcycle that police claimed Sheikh had been riding at the time of the shootout

turned out to be owned by a relative of one of the cops who killed him. As the crime was dug into... That's not even a good cover-up. No, it was not a good cover-up. Like, get someone who's not directly involved with this case. One of the frustrating things about fascism is how lazy they're allowed to be and can still get away with it. Yeah, it's very frustrating.

So as the crime was dug into, ultimate blame for planning all this eventually settled on the shoulders of Amit Shah, a government minister in Narendra Modi's right-hand man. The state investigation eventually revealed that Shah had been running a massive extortion racket for the Gujarati police. Sheikh had been a part of this racket and for one reason or another, Shah had decided that killing him would be good for business. And since he was going to commit murder,

he figured he might as well make the murdered man's death work for his political patron. So he was like, oh, we'll just say this guy was planning to kill Modi, it'll buffer Modi's popularity, and we'll get rid of this guy. All of this took years to properly dig up, though, and the slow drip of unimpeachable evidence of Modi and Shah's shameless, violent corruption had no impact on their political futures. Instead, Modi grew more popular year after year. He was re-elected as chief minister of Gujarat in 2007.

During his campaign, he deliberately mocked his political opponents for trying to prosecute him for murder, saying at one rally, those people say that Modi is indulging in encounters, saying that Modi killed Saurabhudin. You tell me, what should I do with Saurabhudin? He asked, kill him, the crowd roared. Kill him. So, kill him, they said. Yeah, that's cool. By 2012-

This really is like Trump rallies. It's very much the same thing. It's so insanely eerie. All of them are the same person, just in different bodies. Yeah. By 2012- I hope this guy had a nicer body than Trump. It's not a high bar.

That's what I was about to say. Because that body is failing on every level. It's not doing great. It's like a diaper, but a person. Good time. By 2012, Narendra Modi stood at the very top of the BJP and the BJP was one of the most powerful parties in the country with tens of millions of members.

Yeah, it is. Modi announced his campaign for prime minister near the end of 2013. And I'm going to quote again from the New Yorker here. He sold himself not as a crusading nationalist, but as a master manager, the visionary who had presided over an economic boom in Gujarat. His campaign slogan was, the good days are coming.

A close look at the data showed that Gujarat's economy had grown no faster under his administration than under previous ones. The original slogan was, the dog days are over. Yeah. And he's saying it. Yeah, a little bit, yeah. A close look at the data showed that Gujarat's economy had grown no faster under his administration than under previous ones.

The accelerated growth was a fantastically crafted fiction. Even so, many of India's largest businesses flooded his campaign with contributions. Modi was helped by an overwhelming public perception that the Congress party, which had been in power for most of the past half-century, had grown arrogant and corrupt. Its complacency was personified by the Gandhi family, whose members dominated the party but appeared diffident and out of touch. Rahul Gandhi, the head of the party and Nehru's great-grandson,

was dubbed the reluctant prince by the Indian media. By contrast, Modi and his team were disciplined, focused, and responsive. The Gandhi's would keep chief ministers, who had traveled across the country to see them waiting for days. They didn't care. An Indian political commentator who has met with the Gandhi's, as well as Modi, told me,

with Modi's people, you got right in. So, like, Modi, number one... So, access and availability. Trumps. Yep. Trumps. Being an out-of-touch political elite who just tells, trust me, I know what I'm doing.

We've been at this for a while. Yeah, yeah, it turns out that works. And also, you know, when you're trying to get elected for the first time as a fascist, you button down a little bit on the racism and focused on, I'm a good manager. I'm gonna be good for the economy. I'm a good businessman.

Yeah. A huge amount of the BJP's success had to do with the casual corruption and elitism many Indians perceived from the Congress party. Most of their highest officials came from families who had dominated Indian politics since the nation got its independence. The act as if power was theirs by right of birth.

The men of the BJP, however, portrayed themselves less as aristocrats and more as humble warrior monks. They wore cheap, simple clothing and avoided displays of wealth. Narendra Modi talked regularly about the hours of yoga he did every day and repeatedly emphasized his simple life

and noble refusal to fuck anybody. So that's good. Yeah, this may seem odd, but Modi's refusal to have a family meant that he had no distractions from work, and that's the image, the hardworking, aesthetic that played for Indian voters. It's anyone's guess as to whether or not

Modi really is the man he portrays himself to be, but it's possible that he actually is. One political commentator told the New Yorker, when you have that kind of power, that kind of adoration, you don't need romance. I mean, I just feel like the members of the BJP should really have exploded on the scene more.

Yeah. Sorry. They should have come into power. Yeah. You're better at this than me. Why yes, she is. They should have ejaculated on parliament? No.

That didn't work. They should have really focused on stimulating the head of their party. Stimulating the head and sort of making a cream pie of the different branches. So many people have died. We do.

Where the hell was I here? The BJP won the popular vote and Modi, its leader, became prime minister. He immediately set to work dealing with problems the prior government had ignored. Chief among them was public defecation. But India is fucking huge.

It's one of the biggest countries on the planet and this is not just sort of because of the lack of a lot of good plumbing and stuff. It's often a lot of people consider it cleaner to go out in public, but then you wind up like this stuff spreads disease. It was a big problem.

I was mostly just laughing because I thought that it would be amazing if that problem only circulated around the BJP headquarters because people were like, fuck you and just coming over shit just around it. We have this really weird public defecation

problem and like the rest of the city is totally clean. Yeah, but it's just like shits running in the streets. People are like, no, no, it's not. Unfortunately not. It was a problem and they decided to deal with it.

Again, in the traditional way that you see with this, they launched a thing that looked really good but was less effective than it actually wound up being, but allowed them to publicly claim that they were making great strides. In one of his first speeches in Delhi, Narendra Modi promised to launch a nationwide campaign to build public toilets in every

school. In 60 months, 110 million toilets were constructed serving more than 60 million Indians. It was probably the largest, fastest toilet building program in world history. But also the largest fascist building. It's also just that too. And it's hard to fault Modi

on at least the idea of adding more public toilets to India, but its execution and its efficacy were distinctly mixed. And I'm going to quote now from a voice of American right up quote. Critics, however, charged that overzealous government workers may have inflated the number since a deadline had been set for declaring India open defecation free by October 2nd, 150th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of India's independent struggle. The entire movement happened in a mission mode. There were targets to achieve

according to Nazar Khalid, a New Delhi research fellow at the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, a nonprofit that works on child and sanitation issues in India. He charges that in some places people were coerced into building toilets by local authorities who wanted to demonstrate progress. A study conducted last year by the group and four of India's

biggest states found that access to household toilets increased from 37% in 2014 to 71% last year. However, roughly one quarter of people who owned a toilet continued to defecate in the open. They considered it wholesome and healthy and an opportunity to get some fresh air or see their fields.

So I thought that was going to be and see their friends. I was like, damn. Just pooping and talking. That's pretty awesome. Oh, P&T. A little bit of P&T for the BJP. That's a shirt. That's a merch shirt. That's for sure. You notice

how good I sliced this? You did. You sliced it great. We're playing with knives when we talk about fascism. And I really did a great job with mine. I'm very proud of you. And you know what else I'm proud of? These goods and services. Absolutely. I am so proud of these goods and services.

I have no children. But in a way, all of the products and services that we advertise are my children. And by in a way, I mean in a literal way in that I have fucked the parent companies in order to produce the products that you can now buy.

So you are purchasing the spawn of my loins when you buy. What, Sophie? This is how you sell products. Just sell, Sophie. Absolutely. Just sell my loins is the line I never needed to hear from you. This podcast is built on the fruit of my loins.

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Very ready to continue here. So, the toilet building project had a debatable impact, but it achieved its real purpose, which was to give Modi a strong out-of-the-gate win that made him look like a decisive and powerful leader. And since it was impossible to make more

toilets into a partisan issue, there was nothing his opponents could do but kind of hand him that win. And Modi scored another early victory when he attacked India's massive problem with gang rape. In 2012 a 23-year-old woman had been raped and tortured by six men on a public bus. She died of her injury.

It was a huge story internationally. It happened right before I went there. And it was still the big topic of discussion in Delhi at the time. And it was this kind of horrible, horrible crime that catalyzed the fact that India had a major problem with gang rape. This makes the international news.

India gets criticized for it worldwide and it is something that has to be addressed. And I hate to give Modi credit for anything, but his first public speech on the issue, he actually gave a really good statement. He told a crowd, parents ask their daughters hundreds of questions, but have any dared

to ask their sons where they are going. Which is like kind of the right way to lean into that. Mike drop for that fascist. Yeah. One good thing. Yeah. He handles this talking about that well. I mean, Hitler was a vegetarian. We got to give him this one. He was pretty good.

He had a lot of animal testing too. So with stories like that coming out of the early days of Modi's reign, it was hard for the world to stay mad at him for the minor issue of helping to orchestrate an insight. Three months of bloody riots that killed thousands of people and ethnically cleansed large chunks of a major state. He said the woke thing.

So we're good. This is the day Modi became prime minister. Oh man. Yeah. According to the New Yorker, quote, Modi's effort to transform his image succeeded in the West as well. In the United States, welcome his emphasis on markets and efficiency. In addition, Modi called on a vast network

of Indian Americans who cheered his success at putting India on the world stage. The Obama administration quietly dropped the visa ban. When Modi met Obama, not long after taking office, the two visited the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., a man Modi claimed to admire. During his stay, Modi had a dinner meeting with Obama,

but he presented White House chefs with a dilemma. He was fasting for Navaratri, a Hindu festival. At the meeting, he consumed only water. That makes him look really good to his very religious base. He's not even going to eat at this White House feast and stuff. Pretty awkward to have a full dinner

in front of a man that's just like, no, I'll have water. Thanks. You knew when this meeting was happening. We could have, like, picked a different day. Rescheduled or something. Maybe not done dinner. We don't invite a lot of, like, the leaders of Muslim countries over during Ramadan. Or if we do, we do, like, the night thing

that you're supposed to do. We could have worked this out. Could have just done, like, a tea meeting in the Rose Garden, you know. He might not be allowed to consume tea during it. It kind of depends, like, those different levels of fast. Well, never mind. Should have just rescheduled. Yeah. Well, Modi's early days were relatively unproblematic on the outside.

There were numerous clear signs that he was still exactly as much of a fascist as he's always been. The trial of his old buddy, Amit Shah, over the murder of Sourabuddin Sheikh was still going on at this point. But in 2014, Modi's first full year in power, Shah just stopped showing up to court. The judge ordered him to appear

and in response, the government removed the judge from the case. So Shah got a new judge, named Brish Gopal Loya. And this judge also complained about Shah's refusal to come to court. He confessed to his friends and family that he'd been offered $16 million from the Chief Justice of the Bombay High Court to drop the case. Damn, that's a lot.

That is a lot of money. Loya refused because he was a good judge. And then he died conveniently of a heart attack. The Caravan, an Indian news magazine, reported on some peculiarities about how the judge's body was returned to his family. Rather than the arrangements being made by government officials, like you'd expect for a government employee,

they were handled by the RSS. And his corpse arrived back at home covered in blood. A lot of people suspect maybe it wasn't a heart attack. They didn't even bother to wipe the blood off. No, they were sending a message. We were just saying how they were like, we don't give a fuck. It's frustrating because I've gone to a lot of protests

where thousands of activists organized for weeks and held like a mostly peaceful event. But like one kid tosses a rock and that's like the whole story. Whereas like fascists get to like murder people and send their bloody corpses back to their family. And everyone's like, yeah, but the economy. It's very frustrating. Very frustrating.

Cool and good is what I meant to say. Shah's case was given to a third judge named Gosavi, who dismissed all the charges after about a month. Oh, that's so weird. Did the Pittsburgh assessor's bloody corpse have anything to do with his decision? Might have been, might have been. And while all this was going on,

Narendra Modi went ahead and made Amit Shah the president of the BJP, making him the second most powerful man in the country. Over the next few years, Modi and his followers consolidated power, killing or sidelining judges who worked against them and orchestrating a vast campaign of suppression against the press. Good journalists had been the chief enemy of Narendra Modi from day one, and the BJP set up a sophisticated cyber harassment campaign

to shut down or scare off anyone who might speak out against them. Neha Dixit, a reporter, told the New Yorker, every day I get 300 notifications with dick pics and with conversations about how they should rape me with a steel rod or a rose thorn bush or something like that. And obviously the worst of the abuses saved for female journalists who have been kind of at the forefront of attacking Modi's regime. A lot of very brave women reporters in India.

Dixit's abuse does not just come from random Modi bros online. Official representatives of the BJP regularly tweet abuse to her, suggesting that this behavior is officially condoned by the party. The New Yorker continues, Pratik Sinha, a former software engineer and the founder of Alt News, which tracks online disinformation, described a nimble social media operation that works on behalf of the BJP. In 2017, his group made a typical discovery,

when a pro BJP website called Hindutva.info released a video of a gruesome stabbing, which was passed around on social media as evidence that Muslims were killing Hindus in Kerala. Punit Sharma, an RSS apparatchnik whom Modi follows on Twitter, promoted the video, saying that it should make Hindus blood boil. But when Alt News tracked the video to its source, it turned out to depict a gang killing in Mexico.

Which, you might recognize, does not have a high Hindu population or Muslim population. It was probably unrelated to any conflicts there. Yeah, it also seems again pretty lazy. They get to be lazy. It's fine. Sinha told me he believed that some of the most aggressive social media poster instigated by an official IT cell, staffed and funded by BJP loyalists, he said that people affiliated with the BJP

maintain websites that push pro-Modi propaganda and attack his enemies. They were organized and quick, he said. They got their act down a long time ago in Gujarat. Pretty cool. That's so fucked up and again, so similar to what we have going on. I was going to say completely different from anything that's ever happened anywhere, but I guess what you say works too. 2016, the Modi administration went after Indi TV,

one of the most prominent and influential critics of their regime. All government advertising was pulled from the network in members of the Modi cabinet, pressured business owners and private corporations to stop buying ads on Indi TV as well. The station was forced to lay off a quarter of its staff. While good journalists lost their jobs and in some cases their lives, Narendra Modi continued to pump money into his social media operations. In 2019, Modi faced-

Gotta stay up on your socials. Gotta stay up on the socials is Sosh Meads. Sosh Meads. In 2019, Modi faced re-election. He spent as much as $5 billion on his campaign. A regular fucking Bloomberg over here. Yeah, I mean, it's a big country, so you do have to spread it out more. Yeah, pouring money into his propaganda efforts to mitigate the fact that Indi's economy actually took a bit of a dive under his leadership.

It's like fascists aren't actually good at the one thing, fascists aren't good at. So crazy. He was helped along in this by an attack by a suicide bomber on Kashmir on February 14th, 2019, which killed 40 Indian soldiers. Modi's online propaganda machine swung into action. Video went viral of Modi consoling the widow of a soldier. That recording was actually from 2013, but the truth never gets in the way of spreading a good meme.

They're like, she's a widow, you know, one widow is as good as another. Exactly, they're all the same. Throw it out there. Modi used anger over the attack as an excuse to ratchet up his anti-Muslim rhetoric. He gave speeches claiming that the blood of the people is boiling and sent thousands of troops into Kashmir on the pretext that India's only semi-autonomous Muslim majority state had to be cracked down on for the safety of the people. 12 days after the attack, the Prime Minister ordered a series of airstrikes

on what he claimed was a terrorist training camp in a town called Balakot. Predictably, online Modi supporters hailed this as a massive success in the battle against terrorism, claiming that more than 300 Islamic extremists had been killed. Viral pictures of smoking corpses spread throughout social media. But journalists who investigated found only a few holes in the ground and no evidence that anyone at all had died. The viral photos were actually just pictures from the aftermath of a deadly heatwave. Proported to you of the airstrikes was actually footage from a video game called Arma 2,

which I believe the Russian government has also used to like fake videos of airstrikes. It's very funny and good and cool. None of this mattered. The lies sold. Amit Shah bragged to a group of election workers that the BJP's social media operations had created an impenetrable wall of bullshit. Quote, Do you understand what I'm saying? We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake.

What about a little sweet and sour, am I right? Just bounce it out? Like a good chicken, yeah. Narendra Modi was reelected, and while his first term started with a series of feel-good measures almost everyone could support, there was no pretense at all the second time around. And I'm going to quote from The New Yorker again. Modi's government introduced a series of extraordinary initiatives meant to solidify Hindu dominance. The most notable of them, along with revoking the special status of Kashmir, was a measure designed to strip citizenship from as many as 2 million residents of the state of Assam,

many of whom had crossed the border from the Muslim nation of Bangladesh decades before. In September, the government began constructing detention centers for residents who had become illegal overnight. Fuck. Cool and good. I mean, terrible. Again, does it remind me of anything happening anywhere? No, not unlike anything in history or now, elsewhere on the planet. As is always the case in situations like this, the government's open embrace of bigotry acted as a blank check for bigots among the population.

Hindu nationalists and... That's so crazy how there's a connection between that. Really? Yeah, it's really weird, right? Yeah, I mean, this is the only time that's happened too. A lot of only time happenings here. Lots of firsts and onlys. Lots of those.

So, Hindu nationalists in Northern India, for example, started to spread rumors that Muslim men had launched a hidden operation to trick Hindu women into marriage and then force said women into prostitution. These bogus rumors spread like wildfire on social media and WhatsApp and quickly acquired the name Love Jihad. Interfaith couples have been increasingly assaulted as a result. Love Jihad is actually the next show from the Love is Blind people on Netflix. Seriously?

No. Because it is a good title. You know. The only thing I watch on Netflix, well, no, they don't have it on Netflix, so I had to torrent it. Yeah, never mind. Just know it's not for you. That's good. The only thing that's for me is rewatching old episodes of Star Trek the next generation in community,

so that's basically it for me. I'm an old man and I hate new things. You're wearing an adorable cardigan. Thank you. That proves. Thank you. Yes, you are. Thank you.

A tiny little cute old man. Working on it. You know what else I'm working on? These goods and services? I'm working on getting together, making a little love connection with another corporation or two, just kind of pumping a couple of products. Out. Getting them to push out a service or two.

And then you can buy them wet and fresh from the womb. Or dry because it's less gross. No, no. No, no. You can't trust that it's fresh. All the products are wet. Every product that we sell is damp as hell. That is our guarantee.

Mice. Ew. Bye. 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, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. 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. 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 to go to 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, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. The 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet 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? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of 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. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back! We were just talking about how good we are at advertising products and services. I'm proud of us. We were doing a lot of hands shaking and popping champagne bottles. I love that this industry works the way it does. It's great and good and cool. The years in power do not seem to have changed. Modi, a journalist with a new statesman,

interviewed a number of people who worked closely with the prime minister, and they all reported more or less the same thing. Quote, He is teetotal and a vegetarian and lives an almost monastic lifestyle, one told me. He is extremely focused. When he talks to you, he really listens. He can focus like few people I know.

He calls it a day by 11 and gets up at 4 in the morning, another aide told me. He spends the first 90 minutes of the day happily surfing the internet for articles about himself. His staff starts getting calls by 5.30, latest. He is obsessed with personal hygiene, said a third. He changes his clothes at least four or five times a day, and he always eats alone, always.

Which is weird in India, like eating together big groups of people is like a really important thing. That's a very strange fact. But also if you look at all the pictures of like even the Democratic candidates eating, they all look like none of them know how to eat food like a normal human being. It's bizarre. Like why can't you, maybe it's just like being photographed makes you look weird eating.

Like you just like get self-conscious. I don't know. I've never had to eat on camera. I was going to say happily surfing the internet for articles about himself. First of all, obviously that is what Trump does, but happily is a hilarious thing to insert in there. I just pictured him like going like, like singing to himself and clicking around.

Yeah. Good times. It is of course impossible to say whether or not all this is true, but it plays well with Indian voters, particularly young voters who support Narendra Modi at unprecedented levels. And Modi is already hard at work earning the next generation of young votes. He's written a number of books that could best be described as dictatorial pop philosophy and had even more written about him that sell him as a management guru,

essentially a cross between Tim Ferriss and Adolf Hitler, who's also a management guru. I was going to say, yeah. I was like, he's like Hitler 2.0. They're so psyched about it. Modi even wrote a book specifically aimed at school age children called exam warriors. This book is innocuous enough on the surface and mostly focuses on urging children to study hard,

look forward to exams as a way to prove and improve themselves and do lots of yoga. It includes an odd amount of militant wordplay though, not just in the title exam warriors, but in chapters with headers like be a warrior, not a warrior, and sleep as a great weapon. Sharpen it? Wow. Got to sharpen your sleep.

That's hilarious. Can't get to bed without a nice sharp, I mean, I never sleep without a machete. Yeah, I'm holding a knife. So I'm like, I get sharp sleep. Yeah, I get sharp sleep. I got a machete bayonet for one of my rifles recently. I've been sharp asleep.

I'm very excited about it. Yeah. We should get you a machete. Please. Let's get a lot of machetes. A lot more machetes. Like all great dangerous narcissists, Modi saw in radio and podcasts the ultimate opportunity to brainwash the masses.

His monthly show, Man Kibat, is hugely popular, and he recently launched the Narendra Modi mobile app to further connect his followers to himself. See, I mean, he has time to run a monthly show. I know. I'm trying to run a monthly show as a stand-up, and it's like we're hard to find at the time. I mean, I think it might be easier to be dictator of India than a stand-up.

I think so. Yeah. Dictator's actually the wrong word. We'll get to that in a little bit. While Modi's role in the Gujarat riots saw him condemned by the international community, it seems as if nothing he does now will be met by any real condemnation around the world. On February 25th, 2020, while President Donald Trump visited New Delhi, the city was convulsed by a wave of mass violence that is probably best described as an anti-Muslim pogrom.

It started with protest against the expansion of the Citizenship Amendment Act, the law Modi used to remove the citizenship of some 2 million Muslim citizens, and I'm going to quote now from coverage by The Print, an English-language Indian news site. This is about how the riots started off. Quote, Make it look like a clash between pro and anti-CAA supporters. The clash goes violent. Muslims provoked and forced to respond in self-defense.

It looks like a riot. Use the violence as an excuse to clear the protests, the peaceful and democratic protests. When the Jaffrabad protest site was cleared, a CHOP BJP RSS leader declared victory. B.L. Santhosh is the BJP's general secretary, a post-reserve for the RSS representative. Here was his tweet just as news came in of the Jaffrabad site being cleared. Jaffrabad Metro protest area totally cleared. The game starts now. Rioters need to be taught a lesson or two of Indian laws.

Pretty cool that it's a game. Yeah, and Santhosh deleted the tweet later and to remove game starts now and replaced it with time to enforce the law in its entire spirit and a new tweet. The mask was a little bit too off for him. At least 42 people were killed during this game and probably a lot more, but we don't know yet. It sounds like a fun game. I do play a lot of games that kill 42 people, but everyone knows when we play knife tennis. You know, there's a risk.

Sometimes you get shot. That's why you have people sign the waivers. Sign the waivers with a knife. It's the only way. Yeah, 42 people were killed, the vast majority of them Muslims, and once again the police stood by or actively aided the mobs. It is not a coincidence that the Delhi police report directly to the home minister of India. One Amit Shah.

Oh, no. Cool. As I write this, the fallout from this pogrom has not fully fallen out. It took three days for Modi to even make a statement on the matter. The Delhi police have made a lot of noise about holding reconciliation meetings to try and de-radicalize people, and it is worth noting that Modi's muted response, a tweet that said, We cannot allow vested interest groups to divide us and create disturbance,

smacked more than a little bit of fear and uncertainty in a mass explosion of public rage that he and his party inspired, but cannot fully control. Because the frightening reality of the situation in India today is that while Narendra Modi enjoys almost unchecked power, he's not really a dictator. It seems more accurate to say that he and his propaganda have inflamed a huge chunk of the electorate enough that they have vested him with unprecedented power, so long as he uses it to hurt the people he has worked to convince them they hate. One of the journalists the New Yorker talked to, a guy named Prasad, the editor of an Indian magazine called Outlook, said this of his country,

It's very different now. The institutions have crumbled, universities, investigative agencies, the courts, the media, the administrative agencies, public services, and I think there is no rational answer for what has happened, except that we pretended not to be what we were for 50, 60 years, but we are now reverting to what we always wanted to be, which is to pummel minorities, to push them into a corner, to show them their places, to conquer Kashmir, to ruin the media, and to make corporations servants of the state, and all of this under a heavy resurgence of Hinduism. India is becoming the country it has always wanted to be.

That's eerie and sad. Yeah. Hopefully not true. Hopefully not true, but I do find a lot I identify with in this fear of like, we're not reverting here in the US, you know, to the way we were before the civil rights movement, before the LGBT rights movement, before all these gains were made, we're becoming the country a lot of us always wanted us to be. Like that's a terrifying thought.

It is. Cool and good. Sophia, how you feeling? Feeling good. Feeling good as hell? Yeah. I'm going to stab myself with this knife. Don't do that.

Don't do that. You know what? Keep it ready for a Nazi. It's true. If I go, I'm taking at least one Nazi with me. That is what George Orwell, there's a fun quote from George. I said, do you like that? I said, if I go.

If I go. It's because I believe in the singularity and I'm like, well, if we don't all die, I'll be. We've got to get rid of the fascist before the singularity. Otherwise we get fascist robots. Truth. Yeah. I don't want that.

No. That doesn't sound terrifying. Yeah. I mean, fascists are also really inefficient. So maybe like a machine would be fundamentally anti-fascist because it's just frustrated by the inefficiencies that they generate in the system they control. Yeah. Or if the machines did arise against us and they were fascists,

that because they're so poorly made, there would be like one flaw that would be very easy to hack and they would just all die at the same time. Either that or we'd wind up in like an I have no mouth, but I must scream sort of situation. Oh no. Yeah. Again, this is like a shit streak. Yeah. It's rough.

Let me have a silver lining, dude. Don't turn into a shit streak right away. Yeah. I guess the silver lining is, you got any pluggables to plug? Yeah. God. Really love the lead-in from shit streak. Yeah.

Guys, if you want to keep the shit streak going, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at thesophia, S-O-F-I-Y-A. And you can listen to me on my two podcasts. One with Miles Gray of the Daily Zygites called 420 Day Fiancé. And the other one with Courtney Kosak called Private Parts Unknown about love and sex around the world. So yeah, follow me. Follow.

Listen. Subscribe. Great. Review. And we have a dog-related problem. Yeah. What the fuck? There's some dogs barking outside the studio.

That sounds very intense. I hope Andy's not involved. We have to go deal with a dog-related situation, but you all deal with this fascism-related situation, perhaps by stockpiling arms, perhaps by just watching, listening to Behind the Bastards, visiting our website, behindthebastards.com, buying a t-shirt, a t-public, or listening to our political podcast, The Worst Year Ever. See, Sophie, I still do it sometimes. You did great.

No, you don't. I know. Let's go see if the dogs are okay. Yay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye.