With India’s election in full swing, Narendra Modi is getting desperate – and dangerous | Salil Tripathi

The Indian PM may still be in a strong position; but incendiary, anti-Muslim rhetoric shows that all may not be going to plan

When Narendra Modi ran for prime minister for the first time in 2014, his overriding aim was to convince voters that he was a different man - no longer the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, where, under his watch, more than 1,000 people were massacred in a communal pogrom in 2002. (A British government report found Modi directly responsible" for not stopping the killing of Muslims; he has always denied culpability and was cleared of all charges by the supreme court.) Modi was going to be the man who would transform India by ushering in vikas, or economic development, for everyone.

His record as prime minister in the past decade belies that. Now the mask has fallen completely. In a recent campaign rally in Rajasthan, Modi made an exceptionally incendiary speech in which he claimed that his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, had declared that Muslims had the first claim" to the nation's resources. This was distortion and exaggeration. The reference was to a speech that Singh had made in 2006 about India's development priorities.