EMERGING FROM THE SHADOWS: Modi became a craftsman of hate

Once in a while in a nation's life, one man emerges from the shadows and shatters the idyll. Suddenly he is an emperor amidst the wreckage, his eyes surveying a grand tomorrow and his feet trampling on the dead residue of yesterday. He becomes the sole arbiter of that space between fear and freedom, anxiety and adoration. The man becomes a force, an idea, that storms the minds and hearts of a people, and forever shifts the centre of political gravity. The national script is rewritten: he against the Other. He divides and dominates. Such men are the frontbenchers of history.

There are many synonyms for them. Dictator. Liberator. Redeemer. Revolutionary. Their temptations have powered some of the most captivating national sagas, both great and grotesque. Their dreams-and occasionally hallucinations-have driven vast sections of humanity to an imaginary heaven on earth, or to a real hell on earth. And they have always needed an enemy, within and without: the bogeyman who can mobilise, unify and, most effectively, divide. They are craftsmen of enlarged expectations and of hyperactive hate. Such men are the choreographers of national movements-for better or worse.

UP IN ARMS: Godhra transformed Modi into a defender of faith with words of mass destruction

Narendra Damodardas Modi shook India. And how. Look at him, look at him up close. For so long, he was just another politician. Then one day, he was just another chief minister. Today, he is just Modi. What's in a surname? Quite a lot, much more than Narendra Damodardas himself is aware of. This name has launched a million arguments, evoked as many variations of raw passion, monopolised editorial pages, fathered instant and, invariably, insipid pamphleteers of angst. It still continues to rhyme with freedom, fear and hate. The commentariat has not stopped adding new prefixes and affixes to his name, seeking new adjectives to magnify the phenomenon. For, the man has changed the mind and body of Indian politics. The India of so many illusions cracked beneath his feet. The divide is stark. Force Modi is swaying the nation, still.

MASTER MANIPULATOR: Glossing over the riots, Modi turned the polls into a referendum on terror; (below) the Parivar was delighted

He has made it a division between Good and Evil, the desirable and the despicable, the nation and the enemy. It was a mesmerising piece of soul-engineering, and in that respect, he was a man of the times. In 2001, when he was an ordinary politician, a new morality, almost biblical, was added to global politics: the post-9/11 rage against Evil. Being in love with the hounded nation was an honourable state of mind; and the war against Evil was endorsed as a just war. Patriotism became fashionable. It was an American show, and India was another country, far away. Though India had been living through terror for so long, its suffering, its sorrow, was not worth a war, somehow. At that time India didn't have a warrior. Or perhaps he was elsewhere.

Then, one day in Godhra in Gujarat, men and metal burned together on the railway tracks. The Sabarmati Express as a moving inferno was not as spectacular as the flaming twin towers in New York. The differences were only in size and style; the horror shared the same grammar of hate. In retrospect, the Sabarmati Express was a historical variation of one of the "cattle trains" that once moved across Europe. For the Hindu volunteer workers returning from Ayodhya, unlike the Jews, the train itself turned out to be the charnel house. The terror was an Islamic show, and the revulsion it evoked in "secular" India was strangely subdued. Overnight, Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, metamorphosed into the chief defender of faith, reportedly with words of mass destruction. Terror in Godhra was the first notation of Modi Unbound.