Promotion of Yogi Adityanath is seen representing the rise of Hindu power
.. Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed a hard-line Hindu nationalist politician to lead India’s most-populous state over the weekend, a surprise move that marks a swing toward contentious religious politics by a leader who had stuck largely to a development-focused agenda.Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu priest and parliamentarian for nearly 20 years, is known for his divisive and incendiary speeches targeting Muslims... Mr. Adityanath will serve a five-year term as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state where nearly 20% of the residents, or 40 million people, are Muslims and where religious tensions easily and frequently flare.
.. Mr. Adityanath’s promotion.. represents the rise of a muscular, Hindu India and a chance to correct what they see as years of official policy going too far to accommodate India’s Muslim minority.
.. “It signifies a new reading on the BJP’s part that public opinion will now accept what was considered politically imprudent not so long ago.”
.. Mr. Adityanath is among the strongest voices in the BJP pushing for the construction of a temple in a place in Uttar Pradesh where, in the 1990s, a Hindu mob destroyed a 16th century mosque
.. He campaigns against so-called love jihad, which he describes as an “international conspiracy” by Muslims to kidnap or lure Hindu women to marry and convert them.
He has exhorted Hindus to respond to attacks on members of their community with tenfold violence.
.. his choice for chief minister harks back to the Hindu nationalist roots of his party, which arose out of a nine-decades-old movement to establish India as a Hindu nation.
.. Mr. Adityanath built a support base in Uttar Pradesh by projecting India’s 80% Hindu majority as victimized and shortchanged by his political rivals, who he accuses of a pro-Muslim bias
Micromanager-in-Chief: Narendra Modi Upends How India Is Run
Prime minister is the most powerful Indian leader in a generation, working in secret and challenging bureaucrats; cabinet got 20-minute heads-up on cash crunch
It was a quintessential move by Mr. Modi, planned in secret with a handful of close advisers. He announced it to the country only hours before it went into effect. His own cabinet ministers knew just 20 minutes before the announcement.
.. A victory, particularly in India’s most-populous state of Uttar Pradesh, would give the BJP more strength in Parliament and momentum for a widely expected re-election bid by Mr. Modi in 2019. If his party loses, opponents will be emboldened to block more of his legislative agenda.
.. In 2014, Mr. Modi’s political party became the first in three decades to win a majority in Parliament, campaigning on a promise to restore the prime minister’s authority.
.. Critics ranging from human-rights groups to student unions have accused Mr. Modi’s party of propping up his popularity by stirring sectarian resentments and Hindu nationalism.
.. Even his staff is sometimes caught off-guard by his decisions. On Christmas Day in 2015, he called Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to wish him a happy birthday. Mr. Modi then decided on the spur of the moment to fly to the Pakistani city of Lahore to celebrate in person with Mr. Sharif.
.. “It’s command and control,” said Jairam Ramesh, a former minister in the opposition Congress party, of Mr. Modi’s relationship with his cabinet. “You don’t have alternative points of view. You don’t have discussion.”
.. According to an official who was there, the prime minister recalled a re-election campaign in Gujarat when he refused to match another party’s promise to make electricity free. Mr. Modi pledged only to make the power supply more reliable and was re-elected.
.. Late in the process, Mr. Modi asked that the new rupee notes be printed with the name of his “Clean India” public-sanitation drive. He also wanted the new money to show off the campaign’s logo: a drawing of Mohandas Gandhi’s round eyeglasses.
.. During the chaotic aftermath, Mr. Modi praised what he called the sacrifices of Indian citizens for the sake of the “historic rite of purification.”
.. One snag: The new rupee bills were designed to be smaller in size than the ones they replaced
.. But all 200,000 automated teller machines in India had to be manually configured so they could dispense the new money. The process ended up taking weeks, slowing the rollout of new cash.
Shekhar Gupta, a political analyst in New Delhi, said the cash exchange shows what can go wrong when “one man comes up with the ideas and everybody else just implements.”
Shades of Modi
She was referring to our soon-to-be prime minister, Narendra Modi, who was running a campaign that skillfully melded the appeal of an outsider (he had once been a tea seller, he claimed) to the established order with the language of Hindu majoritarian politics, tapping in to existing prejudices against India’s Muslim minority.
.. When I heard Mr. Trump’s speech today in New Delhi, it was difficult to escape the echo of what we have already witnessed in India. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Modi talked of pulling the poor of India out of poverty. Many pundits, quick to look for hope where there was none, said that Mr. Modi’s speech reflected a new inclusiveness after the hatred of the campaign.
More than two years later, nothing has changed for the poor of India, but the bigotry that helped Mr. Modi ride to power has flourished.
Inside India’s Unprecedented Assault on Cash
India is hardly alone in seeking to drive underground money into the banking system. But the scale, pace and finality of Mr. Modi’s action make it a stunning and painful test of what had to this point been a largely theoretical debate.
.. “The great task that the country wants to accomplish today is the realization of our dream of a cashless society,” the prime minister said in a recent radio address.
.. The lives of the poor, in particular—many of whom depend on irregular, off-the-books employment paid in cash—have been upended.
.. That was when Mr. Dastur noticed a problem: The new bills were slightly smaller than the old ones.
.. engineers would have to open up each of the nation’s ATMs and manually reconfigure the cash drawers before they could dispense the new notes—a process that NCR estimated could take two months.
.. The Modi administration insists there will eventually be big benefits, including better tax collection, improved surveillance of crime networks, and more accurate monitoring of commercial activity itself.
.. Defenders of cash see risks in those same capabilities—including a loss of privacy and a vast expansion of government power.
.. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, writing in The Washington Post, argued, “It’s time to kill the $100 bill.”
.. Fewer than a third of Indians have a smartphone
.. Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff, author of “The Curse of Cash.” “That’s a big ally of governments.”