Erdogan and Modi can be contrasted, not compared
Kazi Mostaque Ahmed :
There is a trend among writers and youtubers to make a comparison between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. These writers and social media activists are tempted to do it because these two leaders are very popular with their people who have been electing them to their offices for a long time. If we count Modi’s role as a (mis)chief minister of Gujarat, their stints in public office as the leaders of their people are almost the same.
However, such a reading between the two not only belittles Erdogan’s robust secular democratic credentials, it also endorses Modi’s many controversial steps in a less censorious way. In reality, Erdogan cannot be bracketed with leaders like Modi, because there are, between them, stronger contrasting points than similarities as heads of their countries.
India’s secular politician-cum-writer Shashi Tharoor published several years ago his article “The Modi-Erdogan Parallel” where he tried to find traits of comparison between the two. He made a list and pointed out that they came from the same common humble background; both were street sellers of foods and beverages when they were young men. Erdogan was a football player and Modi bragged about he had a 56 inches chest.
Shashi Tharoor however forgot to mention that as a young man Modi was a member of Rastrio Swangsevak Sangh (RSS) whose ideology was similar to the ideology of Hitler’s Nazi party. At his young age, after Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul from the Islamist Welfare Party, he served a prison term for reciting a poem of Ziya Gökalp where there were lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers….”
This was the condition of the repressive secular atmosphere of Mostafa Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey where wearing fez topi and hijab, and keeping a beard—the visible signs of Islam—were banned. Ataturk had a strong bias against Islam that bordered on hatred for the religion and abolished the Ottoman Khilafat on March 3, 1924.
According to Atatürk, the Turkish people do not know what Islam really is and do not read the Quran. People are influenced by Arabic sentences that they do not understand, and because of their customs they go to mosques. When the Turks read the Quran and think about it, they will leave Islam. The Turkish language used to be written in Arabic alphabet for centuries; but he changed it and brought Roman alphabet in its place, an act that bled the heart of the faithful Turkish Muslims.
In this repressive atmosphere as a conservative Muslim politician Erdogan arrived and gained popularity as a leader who gradually lifted various injunctions against visible display of Islam. Ideally speaking, every society, be it democratic or not, should have such an atmosphere where people can perform their religion freely. And true to the legacy of the Ottoman caliphate, Erdogan has always preserved the rights of the minorities which is not possible in many countries of the secular west even now.
No, neither consciously nor unconsciously, Modi has adapted Erdogan’s formula to his own effort to reshape India, as Shashi Tharoor has said in his article. But Shashi aptly points out that Modi indeed has marginalized Muslims and reinforced Hindu chauvinism and minorities in general feel beleaguered in India, as “Modi’s nationalism does not merely exclude them, but portrays them as traitors”.
While making his study between Erdogan and Modi, Shashi Tharoor missed to highlight Modi as a fascist leader who left no stone unturned to degrade Muslims as second class citizens. The BBC’s documentary “India: the Modi Question” portrayed how Modi was ‘directly’ responsible for the pogrom of Muslims on false accusation that they were behind the Godhara train fire that killed 59 Hindu pilgrims. Modi banned the documentary in his India where press freedom already greatly shrank making doing critical journalism very difficult.
The National Register of Citizenship (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 and annexing Kashmir as an integral part of India are doings of Modi government. Contrastingly, Erdogan, also criticized for curbing media freedom by the west, has never been a minority repressive leader like Modi. His records on minority, on secularism, are far better than that of many of his counterparts in the west, past and present.
Modi’s BJP is trying to erase centuries of Muslim rule with its historical and cultural relics in India. No, it is not Erdogan, but Kemal Ataturk, the west’s secular idol in Turkey, was the person who not only abolished the centuries-old Islamic Ottoman caliphate and but also erased its (Islamic) remnants in Turkey causing resentments among Turkish Muslims as well as Muslims in other parts of the world. Narendra Modi and Kemal Ataturk have similar personalities in this regard.
Unlike Modi, Erdogan is recovering Turkey’s heritage and history and giving back its people their ‘real’ identity. In this sense he is a better nationalist leader than Kemal Ataturk who had problems with words like ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamic’ like people in the west. The Turkish electorate is educated; they know whom to choose as their leader. I do not want to utter a word on Indian nationalists who can call Muslims “termites”, lynch Muslim people for eating beef or bringing this charge of eating, intimidate Muslim women for wearing hijab in public and deny poor Muslims financial help during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Therefore, anyone who makes a comparison between Erdogan and Modi, both popular to their people, should be cautious in drawing their personalities putting in their proper historical, cultural and political perspectives otherwise their study may appear to be ill-informed and naïve. Making an uncritical and shallow comparison not only puts Erdogan’s qualities as a leader in a lesser light, it can absolve Modi’s many crimes as a leader of Hindutwa politics.
The writer is Associate Editor of The New Nation and can be contacted at: [email protected]
