By Maansi Shah

Arvind Panagariya is on a mission to change the minds of Indians and Indian Americans opposed to market deregulation. And he has found India’s Hindu nationalist ruling party, the BJP, to be a convenient ally.

Panagariya, a professor of economics at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, directs the Deepak Raj Center on Indian Economic Policy alongside trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati. The center gives Panagariya a platform to share his ideas with a broader audience.

“I like to think that what we write helps change minds over time,” Panagariya said to me in an interview over Zoom. 

When asked if Modi’s poor track record on human rights affected his judgement of the Prime Minister’s performance, Panagariya said “We don't go into those issues. We talk about economic policy.” 

When pushed, Panagariya conceded that this may affect economic policy. “But that’s not central. I don’t comment on that,” he said.

Bhagwati shares Panagariya’s deep admiration for Modi, describing him as “God’s gift to India” in an interview with the Economic Times, India’s leading business news daily..

Bhagwati declined to comment  on the record for this article. However, both he and Panagariya have previously made statements on Modi’s human rights record.

In a 2014 letter to the Economist just prior to the Indian national election, the two wrote that it would be “absurd to ask [Modi] to atone... for a “pogrom”... [which] was in fact a communal riot”, emphasizing that there were also Hindu deaths. 

The “riot” that Bhagwati and Panagariya were referring to was a state-sponsored massacre that shook the state of Gujarat in 2002 under Narendra Modi’s rule. Over a thousand people were killed, the vast majority of them Muslim. After the violence abated, reports poured in that police had been ordered to stand back, many even participating in the killing. 

Amid international condemnation from human rights groups, Narendra Modi, then the Chief Minister of the state, was denied a visa to the United States and Europe. 

Clamors for Modi, the “Butcher of Gujarat”, to resign grew louder. Modi stood his ground. 

In the decade that followed, Modi’s rule in Gujarat was characterized by a series of economic policies to court big business and foreign investment, often referred to as the “Gujarat Model''. In practice, the policies enacted under Modi led to mass displacement and the ghettoization of Muslims. 

Touting Modi’s economic policies for the investment opportunities that they provided for both the Indian diaspora and global financial companies, the economists were able to shift focus from Hindu nationalism to economic policy, thereby sanitizing the human rights violations of the Indian state.

Modi went from the “Butcher of Gujarat” to a harbinger of development and the developer of the ‘Gujarat Model’, an economic model that was supposed to finally make India a ‘superpower’. However, even before the pandemic, India’s GDP had declined for four consecutive years. 

The much advertised economic development never came through. The true ‘Gujarat Model’, one of religious polarization and violence against Muslims, Dalits and other minorities is now being applied across India.

Twelve years after the 2002 massacre, Modi was elected Prime Minister of India in 2014. The project had proven successful, and the US visa ban was lifted. One article posted to the Raj Center’s website characterizes India as “a proponent of human rights in a conflicted world”.

Last year, Modi was re-elected India’s Prime Minister. Since then, the administration has enacted a series of discriminatory laws, barring Muslims from expedited citizenship offered to the Hindu majority, and pushing for the creation of a nationwide registry of citizens, which many fear will create the largest statelessness crisis in the world. 

Over the past year, Modi’s BJP has ramped up assaults on media and free speech, and arrested thousands of students, journalists and political dissidents, including children as young as ten. Internet shutdowns have nearly doubled every year since Modi came to power in 2014, by far exceeding the rate of internet blackouts in any other self-labeled ‘democracy’. 

In June 2020, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended that India be designated as a “country of particular concern”, and some Indian officials be barred from entry into the United States. 

Meanwhile, SIPA’s administration has remained silent -- despite numerous requests for comment -- on student calls for the Raj Center to cut ties with members of India’s ruling party. 

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With contributions from Benson Neethipudi.