When dominant caste vigilantes mercilessly flogged Dalits for transporting dead cows in Gujarat, Modi offered his enigmatic views. He said that miscreants who bring disrepute to society commit seventy to eighty percent of the acts of violence. Does that mean that twenty to thirty percent of the acts of violence committed by the vigilantes are acceptable?
When asked about the victims of the Gujarat pogrom, Modi said that when one is riding in the backseat of a car and if the car hits a puppy, the passenger feels bad about it. The pogrom becomes an accident, the victim is a stray animal and Modi is the bystander.
India trundles towards the land of farce. The signs are visible now. A man in Meerut said that he would build a temple for his god—Modi—with a hundred-foot statue of his idol. This is not the first temple to Modi. That was built in Gujarat in 2014. Modi disapproved of it at that time. Now he is silent. The first time it was an embarrassment; the second time it is a farce.
Grabbing hold of this farce, this distraction, is the insidiousness of the RSS. It wishes to change the Constitution of India and to alter the fundamental social fabric of the land. Plutarch writes of a ship whose parts are all altered. If the ship is no longer made of its original parts, is it the same ship? Is India fated to be like Plutarch’s Ship of Theseus? What will the apologists of Modi say when they wake one day and find that the republic that they lived in is no longer recognizable?
In this new land, Modi will be its principal deity. In his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the vanity of the tyrant,
The inflated ego of a tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.
Somewhere, Ghalib is singing his old poem,
ERDOĞAN
A Normal Man
Burhan Sönmez
Victim
WHEN ERDOĞAN STARTED to run for office in 1994, he took his wedding ring from his finger. He held it up to the people during a speech. “That is my only wealth,” he said in front of the press. Five years later, in 1999, he stated, “If some day you hear that Tayyip Erdoğan has become so rich you should consider that he has committed sinful things.”
This was the year when he ascended to the peak of his fame as a victim. Erdoğan was convicted by the Turkish state for reciting a poem during a rally. The poem, written by Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp a century before, was said to be changed from its original by Erdoğan; he added in some extra elements.
At that time, Erdoğan was the mayor of Istanbul. Reciting the poem got the attention of the secular-sensitive judiciary. Having been sentenced to ten months in prison, Erdoğan served four months in jail. The prison was not a prison. It was a prison in name only. They had converted it into an office for him. He had a secretary in the prison with him. The secretary’s name is Hasan Yeşildağ, who deliberately committed a small crime in order to get into prison and welcome Erdoğan. They prepared a special ward for Erdoğan. It had a television, a fridge, and a sofa. Visitors came daily to see him. National and international luminaries came to see him. Their interest suggested that they saw him as a figure of political promise for Turkey.
When Erdoğan left prison, he did not wait long to depart from his political party, which was saturated in traditional Islamist discourse. Erdoğan had learned a lesson. Not to abandon Islamism, but to walk away from its traditional—and marginal—form. He said he had changed, but he never pointed out what parts of his ideology had changed.
These were the years of turmoil for the Turkish economy and for Turkish politics. Erdoğan met with international celebrities, such as George Soros, and with elected officials from the United States. He was seen as a moderate Muslim leader who could provide a positive example for the Middle East.
In 2002, Erdoğan’s newly-formed political party—Justice and Development Party (AKP)—won a surprising victory in the elections. It won thirty-four percent of the vote and—because of the system of Turkish politics—sixty-six percent of the seats in the parliament. Erdoğan had the complete support of almost all Western governments and the European Union. He was seen as a symbol of change and moderation as well as a bridge between cultures—the cultures of the West and Islam. When the Constitutional Court investigated the AKP in 2008 on the allegation that it had breached the secular basis of the Turkish Republic, none other than Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain paid an unexpected visit to Turkey. She was a guest of Turkish President Abdullah Gül—Erdoğan’s man. The visit was interpreted as support of the West for Erdoğan and his government. Two months after Queen Elizabeth’s visit, the Constitutional Court rejected the proposal to close the AKP. The vote in the Court was close—six judges won over five. Four of the five judges who voted to close down the AKP said that the party was at “the centre of anti-secular activities.” It was of no consequence. Erdoğan got away with it, backed by the West.
Erdoğan sees himself as the victim. He has pushed for and supported the fabricated and politically motivated cases against journalists, army officers, and dissident politicians over the past few years. But their problems are not his. “Where were you when I was sent to jail?” he responds plaintively when he is asked about the detention of the dissidents. Everyone can be victimized, but Erdoğan is the one and only real victim. It first appeared that he was playing a political game. But now it seems that this is Erdoğan’s genuine sensibility. He truly thinks of himself as the victim. Erdoğan The Victim.
Erdoğan does not care about those who are not on his side. In 2011, he visited a small town in north-eastern Turkey. The locals protested the government’s anti-environmental policy, which had terrible effects in the region. The police acted with violence against the protestors. A school teacher was killed. Erdoğan was asked about this during a live television program. He neither showed remorse nor expressed any sadness about the death of the school teacher. No one could be named a victim while Erdoğan himself was a victim.
After nearly two decades, Erdoğan read the same poem again that was the reason for his imprisonment. This time no official body opposed him. Official bodies—such as the police, army, judiciary, universities, and media—are now on his side. There is no one left to defy him.
This is a snapshot of where our story begins and where it has now ended.
Innocent