Cash, Kidnappings and Luxury Resorts: A Formula for Power in Modi’s India
The New York Times
With a tactic known as “resort politics,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party has been accused of using brute force to take over Indian state governments.
The lawmakers had finished a routine assembly vote and were scattering into the Mumbai night.
Nitin Deshmukh, who represented a district 350 miles away, planned to take an overnight train. But first came an invitation to have dinner in the suburbs with a senior official from their party in the Indian state of Maharashtra. They would share a car ride, and Mr. Deshmukh could catch the train from there.
It was all a ruse.
As the car approached its destination, it kept speeding along, and eventually joined a caravan of other vehicles. That, Mr. Deshmukh said, is when he realized he was being kidnapped. The car was heading across state lines, where he would be held in a hotel behind locked gates and later restrained and drugged after trying to flee.
Mr. Deshmukh had become a pawn in what is known as “resort politics,” a longstanding practice unique to India’s rough-and-tumble democracy.
The senior party official in the car with Mr. Deshmukh that night in June 2022 had secretly recruited a group of governing-party lawmakers to try to bring down the state government in Maharashtra. To ensure that they would stick to the plan, the lawmakers were moved to other states and isolated in luxury resorts.
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