Eighteen year old Deepak Paswan with his family. Credit:Graham Crouch "We are the first generation born post-independence and what a mess we have made,” says Akbar, in his new role as spokesman for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “What on earth is stopping us from becoming a developing country?" After Modi's first month in office, investors and economists are buying his promise that crash-through reforms will release the potential of India’s poor and give handsome returns to long-suffering investors. Modi’s ascendancy has led the Bombay stock exchange index to record highs this month, to be up by one-third in the space of a year. “We feel this is an historic opportunity,” says Rajat Kathuria, director of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, predicting a return to the double-digit economic growth rates. “What China is doing today is what India will be doing 10 or 15 years from now.” There is less confidence, however, that Modi will transcend the extremist instincts of the "Hindutva” nationalist political base which has nurtured him. Nobody has forgotten his failure to restrain riots in the state of Gujarat, shortly after he became chief minister in 2002, which left more than a thousand Muslims dead.

Akbar, the journalist, was born into the bloody cycles of violence that erupted after the 1947 partition, when India achieved independence from Great Britain but ruptured into three parts. Two million Hindus and Muslims hacked each other to death in the ensuing exodus. Akbar’s biographical book, Blood Brothers, shows his grandfather to be a hero who repeatedly conspired to prevent opportunists from inciting his Muslim brethren and Hindu neighbours from slaughtering each other to death. He describes his father’s commitment to the secular vision of India’s founding father, the Congress Party leader Jawaharlal Nehru, who held post-colonial India together until he died in office in 1964. “My father could not control his tears, and we cried because he was crying,” writes Akbar, recalling the day of Nehru’s death. “During that long evening my father had only one anguished question, to which no one could find an answer: "Jawaharlal has gone. What will happen to India’s Muslims now?” Hindu extremists and opportunists promptly answered his father’s question by temporarily jailing him - on the trumped-up charges of being a Pakistani spy. Akbar carried his father’s Muslim faith and liberal sectarian values through his stellar media career. In the 1980s he befriended Nehru’s grandson, prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, and sat as a candidate for his Congress party. From 1991 he reported on how Ghandi’s assassination (by Tamil rebels) fed into fresh cycles of Hindutva-led anti-Muslim riots and Islamist terrorism, particularly in Mumbai. Like much of India’s intellectual elite, he was appalled at the role that Modi played in the Gujarat riots, which remains India’s worst outbreak of communal violence in 20 years. He wrote that Modi’s brand of “unique extremism” would destroy the BJP:

“Modi is an ideologue, with a difference. The difference is hysteria. It is an edgy hysteria, which can mesmerise; and it easily melts into the kind of megalomania that makes a politician believe that he is serving the larger good through a destructive frenzy against a perceived enemy. In Hitler’s case, the enemy was the Jew; in Modi’s case the enemy is the Muslim.” Unsurprisingly, critics and former friends have attacked the “opportunism” of a man who compared Modi with Adolf Hitler and then chose to work for him. “For a liberal Muslim to suddenly embrace the enemy was seen as a betrayal,” says Anil Dharker, a prominent literature and political critic. Dharker is a trustee of a group called Citizens for Justice and Peace, which has detailed allegations of Modi’s complicity in the Gujarat riots and brought one of his ministers to jail. He notes how Modi could not resist tapping into his Hindutva roots during the election campaign by slurring his opponents as agents of Islams, even when they were practising Hindus. When Modi called Nehru’s great-grandson, Rahul Gandhi, the “crown prince” he chose to use a term from the Islamic Mughal empire (Shahzada), rather than the Hindu equivalent. Similarly, he pointedly described the Gandhi family empire as a “sultanate”.

Since the election, however, even critics like Dharker say Modi's behaviour has been impeccable. They note his courageous move to improve ties with his counterpart in Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, and his commitment to ruling for all India’s 1.25 billion people, not just the Hindu majority. “He has pressed all the right buttons since he has become prime minister,” says Dharker. “And that gives hope that maybe he will rise above this Hindutva agenda.” Akbar, the journalist, says it is time to shift the terms of religious and ethnic debate from the ethnic fissures of the past towards practical opportunities ahead. “Congress has betrayed Muslims,” says Akbar, completing the full circle of his political conversion, by arguing that the party of Nehru and his descendants including Rajav Gandhi have entrenched the identity of Muslims but failed to address their material concerns. "What I'm saying is they just want a modern, successful aspirational life,” he says. By joining Modi’s team, says Akbar, he is demonstrating his convictions in the strongest possible manner.

"I do believe that much of the characterisation of Narenda Modi was wrong - including by journalists like me - and so we have to stand up and say 'we were wrong’,” he says. “There was no sudden light, no road to Damascus, but there was the evidence of Gujarat itself. I come from Bengal. You can see the plight of Muslims there and compare them to Muslims in Gujarat. In one of the slums of New Delhi, an 18 year-old Hindu migrant called Deepak Paswan is not the least bit interested in his country’s Hindu-Muslim divides. “We never feel we are different to them,” says Paswan. “We are living like brothers.” Since Year 10, when he received tuition assistance and advice from an Australian-inspired non-government organisation called ASHA, the boundaries of Paswan's ambition have stretched far beyond his tiny railway-side dwelling and his father’s occupation as a rickshaw driver. He became interested in study, gained work at a marriage banquet company to finance the fees for a better school, and clawed his way into a politics degree at the University of Delhi. Now, while doing work experience at the Australian High Commission, he has raised his sights to an executive position in the Indian Foreign Service. Paswan had previously advised his parents to vote for the Congress party, which is the traditional home for India’s poor. This year, however, in the first election in which he was eligible to vote, he invested his aspirations with Modi. “I want to become an IFS officer,” says Paswan. “I want to create money for my parents and have them live in a good situation, like you are living, because you can see where I’m living now.”

John Garnaut is Asia-Pacific editor was a guest of the Australian High Commission in New Delhi.