The expression “birds of a feather, flock together” springs to my mind to best describe the forthcoming meeting of the ‘leaders of the two largest democracies in the world’. Each of them comes to the summit with a heavy baggage of past transgressions, but they would have us believe that they are ‘lily white’. Personal chemistry is often cited as the force pulling them together, though they differ widely in backgrounds as cheese does from chalk.
On one side, we have the zaniest President the U.S.A. has ever known. Writing about him in the Politico magazine, Jack Shafer notes and I quote
“To begin with, Trump suffers no shame when confronted with the outrages of his personal, professional and political lives. A normal fellow would blush crimson if caught paying a porn actress hush money after purportedly having sex with her. He’d cringe if confronted with the lascivious things he’d repeatedly said about his eldest daughter. He’d wear a mask to avoid being recognized if 17 women had accused him of sexual misbehavior. He would leave politics if captured on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Your standard politician would be strong-armed into resigning by his own party if he is ever accused of urging a foreign country to intervene in a U.S. election; giving classified information to Russia; denigrating U.S. intelligence while standing next to Vladimir Putin; obstructing justice; or calling for the imprisonment and investigation of his critics and opponent.
But not Trump.
Unquote
And on our side, we have a Prime Minister with an equally chequered past. But in the five plus years he has been in office, he has more or less succeeded in shaking off the criminal charges against him from his gory days in Gujarat, much as a duck gets rid of the droplets of water dancing on its back. From publicly available information we know that Narendra Modi once faced fifteen serious charges of engineering, orchestrating or cynically supporting the deadly Hindu backlash against Muslims following the tragic Godhra incident.
And indeed that was the reason Modi was considered as global criminal by United States and his entry in United States was banned until the day he took oath as PM of India; but most of us have forgotten that, smothered as we ‘ve been by repeated news of his subsequent triumphant visits to the very same U.S., when he unveiled himself as a great reformer. Yes, democracy has a way of wiping the past clean when one is elected to high office.
(a picture from ‘Howdy Modi’ event in Houston)
So the twain meet again, with Modi trying hard to refurbish his image dented in the anti-CAA protests and Trump emerging “white as snow” from the recent impeachment charges and eager to score a diplomatic victory as he eyes a second term as POTUS.
As we bend backwards to celebrate the privilege of hosting him, we are asked to forget Trump’s murky past and believe that his sensibilities today are so very pure that he shouldn’t behold the squalor of slums in Modi’s Gujarat; so we erect brickwalls to blinker him!
Not only should Trump not see poverty, his magnificent nostrils should not smell anything foul during his visit! So U.P. releases 500 cusecs of water into the Yamuna in a move to improve the environment.
With these and other whitewashing steps which will surely follow in war footing, we are edging close to the visual metaphor from Mahatma Gandhi, of the “Three wise monkeys”, representing the principle “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”. We can add another animal standing for “do no evil” to make that a quartette; perhaps that’s the complete message the duo needs to hear.
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