We Walk Hand In Hand

With his India visit, US President Donald Trump’s affinities with Prime Minister Narendra Modi have become clearer

- Sukumar Muralidharan

The city of Ahmedabad offered US President Donald Trump a sanitised spectacle the day he arrived in India. Scenes of urban poverty were walled away to prevent his incurious gaze wandering that way. Delhi, meanwhile, staged a tableau of violence. Lethal acts followed provocative words by a local leader of the BJP. The dust is yet to settle, but more than 30 lie dead in the north-eastern district of the national capital.

Trump’s affinity with India’s ruling party has grown since his first Islamophobic utterances — including his embrace of a “Muslim entry ban” — on the presidential campaign trail in 2016. From his speech at Ahmedabad’s Sardar Patel Stadium, his eager Indian constituency filtered out “radical Islamic terror” as the choicest phrase. Trump has often accused his political rivals in the US of avoiding the term from a misplaced sense of political correctness.

Demonstrations may occur when a foreign dignitary sets foot in the country, but emotions rarely spill over into violence. Trump’s presence, though, seemed to embolden partisans of the ruling party in Delhi. An ultimatum to the police, to clear up demonstrators encamped in various public spaces in protest against controversial amendments to the law on citizenship, was followed by days of violence as the police, unaccountable to the elected local government, looked away.