In Rahendra Modi's India, all is not as cool as it seems. Outside the mordenity illustrated by the flashy Suzuki Vitara and other automobiles, steel mills, petroleum refineries, computers, software and telecoms, aviation, armaments, agriculture and pharmaceuticals, India remains trapped in its Hindu past.
I recall reading an account more than a decade ago in The Economist titled THROWING OLD STONES of the destruction, (related again in the following narrative), of a prominent mosque based on a centuries old claim that IT USED TO BE A HINDU TEMPLE. It is most amazing and downright unsettling that in India, and many countries like Nigeria, nothing is actually ever settled. What a pity.
The coming to power of Prime Minister, Modi, a fundamentalist Hindu politician, with such an intolerant bent and large but unquestioning following, has forced me to seriously reconsider my earlier belief that the Indian model presents many good lessons for Nigeria.
End-time religion adherents may interprete these trends, inclusive of Brexit, Trump in the US, Marie Le Pen in France, other far right and fringe movements in what remains of Western Europe, with the Putin bear looming in the background, in strictly apocalyptic terms. Adding the iconoclastic Boko-Haram in Nigeria's northeast does not give any cause for comfort.
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