Narendra Modi’s New India is Pakistan by another name

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Editor's note: “The future is certain. It is the past that is unpredictable.” That old Soviet epigram feels increasingly like an epitaph for Narendra Modi’s New India. The squalid present we inhabit—replete with death, disease, disparity, discrimination, joblessness, sectarian strife, communal disharmony, cronyism, institutional degeneration, constitutional debasement—is nothing like the sleek vision of the future that mesmerized so many Indians eight years ago. So the regime that engineered our national nightmare, too sinister to self-examine and too vain to self-correct, has resorted to exonerating itself by recasting the past. And it isn’t the remote past, over which so much blood has already been spilled, that is the target on this occasion. As the prime minister’s speech last week in parliament clarified, the objective of the Bharatiya Janata Party now is to more than distort our distant memory: it is to deny our immediate experience. The prime minister must appreciate that there is fakery so flagrant that even the most gullible will struggle to swallow it. This is why, like an angler baiting his hook with a lure to fool the fish, Modi …