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

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
11 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 3

Street leading to St Francis Church, Fort Kochi There were Christians in Kerala long before the Brahmins, who came to be known as Namboothiris, landed in the state from North India some time after 6 th century CE. Tradition has it that Thomas, disciple of Jesus, brought Christianity to Kerala in the first century. That is quite possible, given the trade relationships that Kerala had with the Roman Empire in those days. Pliny the Elder, Roman author, chastised in his encyclopaedic work, Natural History (published around 77 CE), the Romans’ greed for pepper from India. He was displeased with his country spending “no less than fifty million sesterces” on a commodity which had no value other than its “certain pungency.” Did Thomas sail on one of the many ships that came to Kerala to purchase “pungency”? Possible.   Even if Thomas did not come, the advent of Christianity in Kerala precedes the arrival of the Namboothiris. The Persians established trade links with Kerala in 4 ...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
12 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The...
62 comments
Read more