Free Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert D. Kaplan Page B

under the benign authoritarianism of Park Chung-hee in the 1960s and 1970s. I mentioned this to Modi. He said he wasn’t interested in talking about politics, only about development. Of course, politics constitutes freedom, and his momentary disinterest in politics was not accidental. Modi’s entire governing style was anti-democratic, albeit quite effective: emphasizing reliance on a lean, stripped-down bureaucracy over which he had taken complete personal control, even as he had pushed his own political party to the sidelines, almost showing contempt for it.
    It was also revealing that he had referred to GIFT as but a detail in his larger game plan. GIFT was the
pièce de résistance
in the effort to makeGujarat an Indian Ocean economic nerve center. Modi had laid the foundation for this financial services hub in June 2007. The high-tech city would be five hundred acres, twice as large as Dockyards in London, 25 percent larger than La Défense in Paris, and larger even than the vast financial centers of Shanghai and Tokyo. GIFT would feature eleven modernistic skyscrapers, landscaped green zones, the latest in public transportation, waste management up to Western environmental standards, “intelligent buildings” with cutting-edge bandwidth connectivity and data integration, internal roads with storm weather drainage for monsoons, and a walk-to-work concept for its 50,000 residents and daily working population of 400,000. GIFT was to be a city of the future to compete with any in the world. And yet he now referred to it as merely a Dubai inside his larger, South Korean whole.
    Modi spoke to me in to-the-point phrases with a didactic tone about the cosmopolitan trading history of Gujarat going back five thousand years, and how Parsees and others had come to its shores and been assimilated into the Hindu culture. I asked him about the contribution of the Muslims, who are 11 percent of the state’s population. “We are a spiritual, God-fearing people,” he answered. “We are by and large vegetarians. Jainism and Buddhism impacted us positively. We want to create a Buddhist temple here to honor Buddha’s remains.” He then prompted me for my next question. He had nothing further to say. Of course, Muslims are meat eaters.
    I asked if he had any regrets about anything he did or failed to do since becoming chief minister seven years earlier. My question was clearly designed to give him an opening to show remorse, however oblique, about the events of 2002. Again, he had nothing to say. I then asked specifically if he regretted 2002. His answer: “There are so many views about that. Who am I to judge?” He said that a commission would decide about his role in the riots. In fact, a commission from his own state bureaucracy had already absolved him of any wrongdoing.
    “There was no Kalinga effect on Modi,” Hanif Lakdawala, a Muslim who runs a human rights NGO, told me. Lakdawala was referring to a war fought in the third century B.C . by the Mauryan Empire under King Ashoka against the state of Kalinga on the eastern coast of India. Ashoka’s forces slew 100,000 civilians. The slaughter left Ashoka with so much guilt that he forswore further military expansion, and dedicated his life thereafter to nonviolence and the peaceful development of his empire.
    Yet to give Modi the benefit of the doubt, I wondered if he wasn’t, at least partly, privately remorseful. To admit guilt would be to undermine his position in the Hindu nationalist movement. In any case, in the Indian political context, few admit mistakes. But by all accounts, after the riots, he shut himself up and manically dedicated himself to development, sleeping less than four hours every night, as he told me, up at 5 a.m., checking his email and reading the local papers. Eventually he visited about three thousand of seven thousand villages in the state, developing his own grassroots networks to check on how the state bureaucracy was functioning at the local