The Indian PM may still be in a strong position; but incendiary, anti-Muslim rhetoric shows that all may not be going to plan<\/p>\n
When Narendra Modi ran for prime minister for the first time in 2014, his overriding aim was to convince voters that he was a different man \u2013 no longer the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, where, under his watch, more than 1,000 people were massacred in a communal pogrom in 2002. (A British government report found Modi \u201cdirectly responsible\u201d for not stopping the killing of Muslims; he has always denied culpability and was cleared of all charges by the supreme court.) Modi was going to be the man who would transform India by ushering in vikas<\/em>, or economic development, for everyone.<\/p>\n His record as prime minister in the past decade belies that. Now the mask has fallen completely. In a recent campaign rally in Rajasthan, Modi made an exceptionally incendiary speech<\/a> in which he claimed that his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, had declared that Muslims had \u201cthe first claim\u201d to the nation\u2019s resources. This was distortion and exaggeration. The reference was to a speech that Singh had made in 2006 about India\u2019s development priorities.<\/p>\n