Hero worship, walls and fake crowd numbers - India welcomes Trump

US President Donald Trump is visiting India for two days on February 24 and 25. The timing of his visit appears to be strategic as the November presidential election looms close by.

A man holds masks depicting US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the "Namaste Trump" event attended by Trump and Modi at Sardar Patel Gujarat Stadium, in Ahmedabad, India, February 24, 2020.
Reuters

A man holds masks depicting US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the "Namaste Trump" event attended by Trump and Modi at Sardar Patel Gujarat Stadium, in Ahmedabad, India, February 24, 2020.

As Trump departed for his first visit to India on Sunday evening, he said "I look forward to being with the people of India, we will be with millions and millions of people. I get along very well with PM, he is a friend of mine. PM told me this [“Namaste Trump”] will be the biggest event they have ever had," according to the news agency ANI.

For Trump, size matters

Trump earlier on February 23, 2020 had commented that he was expecting seven million people at the event, according to NDTV. Yet, as Gulf News India points out, the population of Ahmedabad tops at 5.6 million.

This is not the first time that Trump had overinflated ideas about crowd size. When he found out  about the number of people who attended his inauguration on January 21, 2017 –– lower than Barack Obama’s first inauguration –– Trump apparently flew into a rage and accused the media of distorting facts.

As the then Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told Vanity Fair magazine in an interview, Trump called the Washington Post report “bullshit” and insisted ‘There’s more people there. There are people who couldn’t get in the gates. . . . There’s all kind of things that were going on that made it impossible for these people to get there.’ . . . The president said, ‘Call [Interior Secretary] Ryan Zinke. Find out from the Park Service. Tell him to get a picture and do some research right away.’ ”

Later that day the then Press Secretary Sean Spicer would tell the world that the Trump inauguration was the most-watched inauguration if you combine online and television, radio and in-person, according to Priebus’s comments to Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair called Spicer’s statement for what it was, “a lie.”

Building walls

In India, preparations were underway to welcome Trump, including the building of a wall in Ahmedabad to hide the slums from the US president. The 400-metre long wall, less than 1.5 metres tall, has been erected along the path that Trump would take when he visits India.

According to authorities the Hindu newspaper spoke with, the timing of the wall has nothing to do with Trump’s arrival and the decision to build it was made two months ago.

“It is not correct to link the building of the wall to the VIP visit. After my visit to the area, we had decided in consultation with slum dwellers to build a wall to prevent encroachment and secondly to save trees which were getting damaged,” Ahmedabad Municipal Commissioner Vijay Nehra said.

Both Trump and Modi seem to think that building walls to keep out undesirables (Latin American migrants in Trump’s case and poor people in Ahmedabad in Modi’s) are valid solutions.

Hero worship

A man in Konney village in the southern state of Telangana, India is an example of people who worship Donald Trump as a deity. Bussa Krishna first began worshipping the US president four years ago when he appeared to him in a dream.

Krishna says his extended family has not appreciated his worship of the US president.

“I am facing difficulties because of my relatives,” Krishna told Reuters. “They tell me that I am disgracing them in society. I told them that just like you believe and worship Shiva, I believe and worship Trump. Neither of us can stop the other from doing so.”

Krishna’s literal worship, complete with a shrine and a statue of Trump in his backyard, is not unlike the admiration of Trump followers in the US who believe in Trump’s nostalgia-tinged slogan “Make America Great Again (MAGA)”.

In fact, MAGA believers are not limited to low-income white Americans frustrated with the economy anymore –– there are now pigeons wearing MAGA hats glued to their heads in Las Vegas in a stunt pulled by Trump supporters in response to the Democratic presidential caucus there.

Mariah Hillman, who runs Lofty Hopes, a Las Vegas pigeon rescue organization, called the MAGA stunt "animal cruelty."

Route 6