Will leave India if Modi becomes PM, says author Ananthamurthy

Opposition against Narendra Modi aspiring to the position of prime minister of India appears to be building up among the country’s intelligentsia. After Amitav Ghosh, Jnanpeeth award winning Kannada author U R Ananthamurthy has now expressed apprehensions about Modi assuming the high office after the BJP declared him their PM candidate. “Modi can neither reflect ancient India nor can he build a model India. I will have no belongingness to India represented by Modi. I, in fact, will not like to live in India during that period,” Ananthamurthy has been quoted as saying in this report. He said this at a book release function in Bangalore on Sunday. [caption id=“attachment_1114953” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  U. R. Ananthamurthy. Wikimedia[/caption] Under Modi, India can never be the India that Mahatma Gandhi and Jawahar Lal Nehru dreamt of, he said. Nobody with social consciousness and responsibility would want Modi as the prime minister. If Modi becomes the prime minister, nobody who has read Nehru’s Discovery of India would want to live in India, Ananthamurthy was quoted as saying this report in a Malayalam daily. The media is trying to project one face of Modi and conceal the other one. This is detrimental to the country, Ananthamurthy said. Ananthamurthy, 80, is the author of acclaimed novels such as Sanskara and Bharathipura and is regarded as a proponent of the new wave in Kannada literature. In 2004, he wanted to contest Lok Sabha elections from Bangalore South constituency and sought support from the Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular) against the BJP’s HN Anantha Kumar. However, the JD(S) was not keen on joining hands with the Congress to support him. Ananthamurthy’s statements on Modi come close on the heels of Amitav Ghosh, who said in an interview that having Modi in the highest seat would be ‘deeply destabilising’ for the country. Ghosh also said that while it was for the courts to decide the level of responsibility Modi bore for the 2002 riots, the fact remained that the ‘appalling’ event took place on his watch and he was therefore culpable.