Skip to main content

Sunita Williams and Narendra Modi

An Indian artist celebrating Sunita Williams' return


Prime Minister Modi has extended a cordial invitation to Sunita Williams. In a Letter dated 1 Mar 2025, Modi expressed India’s pride in her achievements and extended the invitation. “After your return, we are looking forward to seeing you in India. It will be a pleasure for India to host one of its most illustrious daughters.”

Will Ms Williams accept the invitation? I have serious reservations. She won’t, in all probability. Her cousin was allegedly murdered by Modi’s men during the investigation of the 2002 Gujarat riots.

The young generation in India are probably not aware of the 2002 riots in Gujarat orchestrated by Modi and his party for political mileage. In the last few years, whenever I raised the question in my classes, hardly one or two students out of the 200-odd ones were faintly aware of the riots.

Inhuman violence was unleashed in Gujarat against the Muslim community after some Hindu pilgrims were attacked on a train allegedly by Muslims. Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat then. He is reported to have encouraged the inhuman assaults on Muslims in order to gain certain political advantages, especially since he was going to lose the chief minister’s chair. PM Vajpayee was utterly saddened by the violence and also aware of the state administration’s complicity in it. Eventually, however, Vajpayee gave in to BJP’s Islamophobia as well as the party’s admiration of a macho leader like Modi.

Haren Pandya was one of the ministers who provided testimony to a citizen’s tribunal against Modi’s handling of the riots. There was incontrovertible evidence against Modi as Manoj Mitta’s book, The Fiction of Fact-finding, revealed clearly. Pandya was murdered in 2003 for standing against Modi. Many others like Sanjiv Bhatt IPS, Teesta Setalvad, and R B Sreekumar IPS (Additional DGP then) were arrested later with unconcealed malice by the state police.

Sunita Williams is a first cousin of Haren Pandya. If Modi had a modicum of sensibility, he wouldn’t have invited Ms Williams to his India.

Ms Williams had declined an earlier invitation of Modi. During one of his countless visits to the USA, Modi met with Williams and her father, Deepak Pandya, at the Space Shuttle Columbia Memorial in Arlington. He extended an invitation at that time too which was politely (perhaps with concealed contempt too) declined by Ms Williams.

Public memory is short. Modi knows that. But he doesn’t seem to know that individual memories are long, very long. Some Indians whose memories aren’t all that short are proud of Modi’s thick skin, it seems.

For me, and a lot of others whom I know, this invitation by Modi to Ms Williams smacks of utter insensitivity. Worse, it is also a reminder of unresolved justice.

Ms Williams, reportedly, has shown her sensitivity. She is reported to have felt “touched by the gesture.” Let’s hope that Mr Modi understands the meaning of that ‘touch.’

Comments

  1. magiceyeMarch 21, 2025 at 6:19 PM

    He is amoral, shameless and a congenital liar.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yamini MacLeanMarch 21, 2025 at 6:20 PM

    Hari OM
    I had not known of this close connection between SW and the recent history of Gujarat, although I was, of course aware of the events. For her and her colleague, I am relieved for their safe return. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 21, 2025 at 7:40 PM

      Their return was long overdue and many of us were getting worried too... Relieved now.

      Delete
  3. Liz A.March 22, 2025 at 3:56 AM

    Let's hope her memory is long, too. Shameful that he would act like this was just a gesture and not a way to try to erase the bad things he's done.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
17 comments
Read more

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...
8 comments
Read more

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
5 comments
Read more

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...
6 comments
Read more