1 / 3Photo: Jeenah Moon/AP/TT
Dressed in white and with a traditional shawl around his neck, he made the UN leaders stand in the dog and do various twists.
India’s prime minister, the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, looked pleased as he recently led a high-profile yoga session at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The ancient practice has become an important diplomatic tool for Modi.
The yoga session was held on the lawn north of the UN headquarters on International Yoga Day on 21 June. At the site stood a bust of the freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi, a gift from India to the UN during the country’s presidency of the Security Council last year.
Yoga mats that participants could take home as souvenirs were included.
Modi, who nine years ago got the United Nations to designate an International Day of Yoga, took center stage. The session was completely in line with his view of yoga as a cultural export.
– Our prime minister has done a good job by spreading yoga to the world. Today it is taught and followed even in Muslim countries, says yoga instructor and Modi follower Surinder Goel in Delhi to the AP news agency.
Increased tensions
Modi has undeniably used yoga strategically. In 2018, he tweeted an almost two-minute long film clip in which he himself does, among other things, yoga exercises in a garden. And after the 2019 election, he retreated to a cave in the Himalayas to meditate. However, he was not completely isolated, a camera team broadcast live from the cave to the whole country. That same year, Modi tweeted a series of film clips in which an animated version of himself shows yoga exercises.
Many in India seem to be following his example. Military personnel have been photographed in the dog yoga position along with their canine units. Soldiers on aircraft carriers have assumed the boat position and in the Himalayas, in freezing cold weather, military personnel have taken up the mountain position, according to the AP. Indian bureaucrats show off their yoga practice on social media.
But India is also the world’s most populous country and a place where tensions between Hindus and the minority group of Muslims have increased for a long time. Hindu nationalist Modi is often criticized for increasing intolerance towards non-Hindus under his rule and for Hindu nationalist reforms fueling the growing antagonism.
Don’t want to be forced
Yoga practitioners often emphasize that the practice is spiritual but not religious. But some of Modi’s ministers have added religion to their yoga by doing sun salutations while chanting Sanskrit verses considered sacred in Hinduism. Students and government employees have been asked to do the same. And in states ruled by Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP party, there have been attempts in some places to make such yoga compulsory in schools.
The trials anger some camps. Among the Muslim minority, which has faced increasing violence from Hindu nationalists in recent years, many believe they should not be forced to perform sun salutations or sing Hindu verses.
Secular or not?
Yoga instructor Srivalli Cherla in the Indian region of Ladakh says yoga has become more politicized in recent years. She dropped out of a government-approved training to become a yoga instructor after ten days because she heard the teacher call yoga Hindu, not secular.
– I have never seen it as religious. It’s part of India’s culture, but that comment made me realize that what they were teaching was not in line with my own beliefs or experience with yoga,” she told the AP.
Yogi or not, globally Narendra Modi has become more accepted. In June, he was warmly welcomed to the White House by US President Joe Biden. Biden is considered to see India as an important ally in the power struggle against China.
However, before he became head of government, Modi was blacklisted in the US. He has been denied a visa to the country because of the riots in the state of Gujarat in 2002 when hundreds of people, most of them Muslims, lost their lives. Modi was Gujarat’s state leader at the time, and has been accused of inciting the Hindu majority to hatred and violence against Muslims.
THE FACTSArendra Modi
Born 1950 in Gujarat. Sold tea together with his father at a young age.
Joined Hindu nationalist organizations early on. Has made a career in the Hindu nationalist Indian People’s Party (Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP).
Was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014. Has been accused of ordering the police to be passive during the massacre of around 1,000 Muslims in 2002, but was acquitted by the Supreme Court of the charges.
Prime Minister since May 2014. The BJP government embarked on an ambitious reform agenda to deliver on a host of election promises ranging from a million new jobs per month and rapid infrastructure expansion to a crackdown on corruption and the black market. As the mandate drew to a close, it was clear that the results had been mixed. Nevertheless, the BJP and Modi were re-elected with an even larger margin of victory in the 2019 elections.
Source: Landguiden/UI and others
Read moreFACTSHindu nationalism
The idea of an ethnically homogeneous Hindu state was already formulated in the 1920s, when that type of idea was more accepted. The ideology, Hindutva (which roughly means “Hinduness”), grew just before India’s independence from Britain, only to lose popularity after independence. Then it grew strongly again from the mid-1980s. From that movement, Narendra Modi’s party BJP sprung.
In Hindutva ideology, Hinduism is seen as a given part of Indian identity and Muslims and other religious minorities are seen as deviant.
Hindutva lives on through the huge Hindu nationalist and conservative movement known as the Sangh Parivar, which is made up of organizations at many levels of Indian society. One of the main organizations of the Sangh Parivar is Modi’s party BJP.
As the BJP’s power has grown, intolerance in Indian society has increased, above all against minorities such as Muslims and Christians, but also against Dalits (low caste) and the opposition. Harassments against Muslims in the so-called Hindi belt (cobalt belt) in northern India have increased and lynchings of people dealing in beef have occurred.
Many times the perpetrators are BJP supporters, according to the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, which writes that “the failure of the authorities to investigate attacks, while advocating Hindu supremacy and ultra-nationalism, has fueled the violence.”
Academics or activists of various kinds who have voiced criticism of the government testify to increased political pressure, and there have been criticisms of political interference in the courts and even against the central bank.
The Indian political opposition, which mainly consists of the Congress Party which long led India, is today fractured.
Source: Landguiden/UI, HRW, UU
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