Religion and Politics

Can Modi Clean Up India’s Holiest and Dirtiest River?

George Black writes for The New Yorker on new Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to clean up the Ganges, a holy river to Hindus. “Nothing sums up the failures of government in India better than the despoiling of the Ganges,” Black writes. Elected for his administrative efficiency as minister of Gujarat and in spite of the violent anti-Muslim riots there in 2002, Modi won his election in a landslide victory. “His clean-up-the-Ganges campaign, then, becomes a kind of litmus test for his vision of efficient, if authoritarian, government,” Black writes.

Read at The New Yorker

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