The strong likelihood is that the remarkable general election currently taking place in India will result in victory for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. In itself, this will be significant for Myanmar. Also of rather dismal cross-border interest is the long record of sectarian discord associated with Modi. Basharat Peer’s recent New York Times article examines it in some detail.

In October 2001, Modi was elected chief minister of Gujurat. A few months later, at the end of February 2002, a train fire that claimed the lives of around 60 Hindus triggered rioting across this prosperous western state. More than 1000 people, many of them Muslim, were killed. Allegations of official complicity have never been satisfactorily investigated, and Modi has done little to reach out to those affected by the violence.

Looking back, it is clear that this episode was the culmination of a series of sectarian clashes – 1985, 1992, 2002 – that cumulatively drove Hindus and Muslims apart. What were once mixed communities became divided along religious lines. Today the state’s largest city, Ahmedabad, is an economic success story dominated by a wealthy Hindu core. On its southwestern periphery is, however, Juhapura, a Muslim ghetto of about 400,000 inhabitants known locally as The Border. Peer pays a visit and files this report: “Modi’s engines of growth seem to have stalled on The Border. His acclaimed bus network ends a few miles before Juhapura. The route of a planned metro rail line also stops short of the neighborhood. The same goes for the city’s pipelines.”

Change the names, and there’s all too much chance this could be a Myanmar story written several years from now. It doesn’t have to turn out that way.