So even though one has used up all the synonyms for “unconscionable” in the thesaurus, when the unspeakable keeps on coming, so too must the words. His government now stands accused of acting without legal authority by revoking Kashmir’s special status. The programme went out days after Modi imposed direct rule over the disputed region. We have arrived at the inconceivable and it looks like Grylls and Modi were sniffing elephant dung in the north Indian wilderness while, reportedly, a terror attack played out in Kashmir. It is hard to think of a more monstrous exemplar of our times than this Putin-style propaganda exercise, both praised and ridiculed when it aired in India earlier this week, masquerading as, well, what exactly? Entertainment? News? One wants to say what next, but the truth is this is it.
This is Modi the sage and nature lover who reminds us, as Grylls hands him a spear fashioned out of bark and virility, that his beliefs don’t allow him to kill. ” Never mind that this is from a leader implicated in the 2002 Gujarat massacre, in which more than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed, mutilated and raped. “India is a country full of diversity,” the prime minister announces, when he can get a word in between Grylls whitesplaining India to him. No matter the environment, there is no camouflaging your condescending stripes. Actually, the way he ushers the prime minister into his own national park is reminiscent of our testosterone-fuelled PM doing his utmost to shepherd Scotland’s first minister through her own front door last month. Grylls gestures them along the track, a lone white man directing traffic in an otherwise unpeopled Indian landscape. In the reign of false equivalence, why not Narendra Modi? Come on, Grylls took Barack Obama to Alaska.
Hours later, the motorcade appears carrying the far-right nationalist leader once widely rebuked as a Hindu supremacist, but now a perfectly palatable subject for the Grylls treatment. And the other man squaring up to the wild happens to be the prime minister of India. This is what happens when “two men and a bunch of Secret Service meet in the jungle surrounded by tigers”. Like a … posh white ex-SAS soldier-turned-“survivalist” exaggerating jeopardy for the sake of his TV series (on Discovery Channel). Bear Grylls is pacing like a … No! Stop! Resist the Grylls compulsion to reverse anthropomorphise. I n the foothills of the Himalayas, the heavens open and toxic rain drills the earth of Jim Corbett national park.
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