The links between Modi's violent nationalism and big business

India is under attack by foreign powers. Specifically the United Kingdom and the United States.

- Arundhati Roy

Or so our government would have us believe. Why? Because former colonialists and neo-imperialists cannot tolerate our prosperity and good fortune. The attack, we are told, is aimed at the political and economic foundations of our young nation.

The covert operatives are the BBC, which in January broadcast a two-part documentary called India: The Modi Question, and a small US firm called Hindenburg Research, owned by 38 -year-old Nathan Anderson, which specialises in what is known as activist short-selling.

The BBC-Hindenburg moment has been portrayed by the Indian media as nothing short of an attack on India’s twin towers – Narendra Modi, the prime minister, and India’s biggest industrialist, Gautam Adani, who was, until recently, the world’s third richest man. The charges laid against them aren’t subtle. The BBC film implicates Modi in the abetment of mass murder. The Hindenburg report, published on 24 January, accuses Adani of pulling “the largest con in corporate history” (an allegation that the Adani Group strongly denies).

Modi and Adani have known each other for decades. Things began to look up for them after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom, which raged through Gujarat after Muslims were held responsible for the burning of a railway coach in which 59 Hindu pilgrims were burned alive. Modi had been appointed chief minister of the state only a few months before the massacre.

At the time, much of India recoiled in horror at the open slaughter and mass rape of Muslims that was staged on the streets of Gujarat’s towns and villages by vigilante Hindu mobs seeking “revenge”. Some old-fashioned members of the Confederation of Indian Industry even