TIME puts PM Narendra Modi on cover, with controversial headline

American news magazine Time has put Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the cover page of its May 20 issue. The cover picture’s headline may create controversy across India amid the election season. It has a caricature of the PM with the headline that reads as ‘India’s Divider in Chief’. Time magazine’s article on the PM has also asked if India can endure five more years of his government.

Check out the cover page here:

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In 2014, @narendramodi, then the longtime chief minister of the western state of Gujarat and leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was elected to power by the greatest mandate the country had seen in 30 years. #India until then had been ruled primarily by one party—the Congress, the party of Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru—for 54 of the 67 years that the country had been free. Now, India is voting to determine if Modi and the #BJP will continue to control its destiny. It is a massive seven-phase exercise spread over 5½ weeks in which the largest electorate on earth—some 900 million—goes to the polls. To understand the deeper promptings of this enormous expression of franchise—not just the politics, but the underlying cultural fissures—we need to go back to the first season of the #Modi story. It is only then that we can see why the advent of Modi is at once an inevitability and a calamity for India, writes @aatishalitaseer. Read this week's full International cover story at the link in bio. Illustration by @nigel_buchanan for TIME

A post shared by TIME (@time) on May 9, 2019 at 10:06pm PDT

The article in the magazine, is written by Aatish Taseer with the headline “Can the World’s Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government?”

The write up compares former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s idea of secularism with the prevailing social “stress” under Modi,” the article read. Besides, the article has also recalled the Gujarat riots that allegedly claimed the lives of scores of people. The whole article is all about Hindu Muslim relation and blames Narendra Modi for being pro-Hindu.

This is not the first time that Narendra Modi has featured on Times Magazine. The Prime Minister has been on the cover of TIME before too, an interview with BJP leader headlined a May 2015 cover. He has also won, more than once, the reader’s poll for TIME Person of the Year.

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