An American academic who specialises in South Asia sent a WhatsApp message to this writer after it was known that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States: "Very soon, the US will start resembling Modi’s India."
If any analysis of his first term from 2016-2020 is anything to go by, then the US and the world should brace up for turbulence. Unlike the eccentric president he proved to be, this time around, Trump will move into the White House with sharpened knives. He will be more assured about his agenda and enemies to exact revenge on for giving him unending grief.
In many ways, revenge and how to wreak it shapes the personality of an individual and, at a different level, the policies of a leader. No one has attempted to analyse whether Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s responses and conduct would have been any different if they had not been subjected to gruelling interrogation and probes (and even incarceration) for a variety of alleged crimes before 2014.
Visibly, Modi and Shah fought the 2014 parliament elections as if their life depended on winning. In some ways, it did. They knew that their problems would compound if they did not capture power in Delhi. Modi won, and the rest is history.
Not only were all the cases against them petered out, but the individuals who filed the cases were targeted. The Congress party, which was in power in Delhi for ten years prior to 2014, could not protect them. Former and serving cops, civil society activists, and even their lawyers were all punished by the Modi-Shah regime in one way or another.
Donald Trump’s compulsion to come to power was not too different from that of the aforementioned politicians from Gujarat. Trump had every conceivable case slapped against him. If he had not been granted immunity by the Supreme Court, he would have been struggling to get any judicial relief.
Trump, after all, is a convicted felon with 34 counts against him. He was convicted by a New York court in May after a jury ruled that he had manipulated business records fraudulently to conceal an alleged sexual encounter with a porn star before the 2016 elections.
He may get a reprieve from Judge Juan Merchan if the latter decides to dismiss the case on the basis of presidential immunity. Trump's detractors want him to be sworn in as president from prison to establish the primacy of the rule of law. This is unlikely to happen.
Not very different from the Modi government, Trump has made it amply clear that he would not allow any federal government money to be spent on identifying misinformation and disinformation. He is a climate change denier and has hired a person to head the Environmental Protection Agency who does not hide his dislike for the left-wing intellectuals who even control the vocabulary of this phenomenon.
Trump also wants to do with away the Department of Education and leave it at the mercy of the states.
The president-designate would, additionally, work harder to fulfil his campaign promise of throwing out illegal immigrants. Closer to home in Jharkhand, Home Minister Amit Shah has been promising to get illegal immigrants from Bangladesh out of the state, ahead of the elections. Though Jharkhand and Bangladesh do not share a border, throwing out illegals is an emotive issue for any society.
Trump, epitomising the zeitgeist of our times, wants to throw out 11 million illegals. It would not be easy, but his administration would do plenty to keep a nation distracted.
Worse, it will be a period when the opposition, i.e., the Democrats, would be on the ropes, fighting to keep their flock together (reminds of anything here?).
Maybe Trump would have to look towards India to know whether what he is trying to do will work or not.
(The author is the editor of Delhi's Hardnews magazine. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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