Time Magazine's new cover pokes Narendra Modi where it hurts the most

• The American magazine calls Indian Prime Minister the country's 'Divider in Chief'.
• The controversial cover has come with still two days of polling left in the ongoing elections.
• The writer, Aatish Taseer, is a British journalist whose mother veteran Indian journalist Tavleen Singh.

American news magazine Time has featured Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the cover page of its May 20 issue with a headline that can stir up a controversy across India. There are two days of polling yet to complete in a high-stakes Parliamentary election where the chances of Narendra Modi's return as the Prime Minister is just as much as that of a rival coalition winning.

The headline reads "India's Divider in Chief" that is and carries a caricature of the Prime Minister criticises Modi. This, just two years after Modi was named the Person Of the Year in an online poll conducted by Time.



The article in the magazine, written by Aatish Taseer, has the headline "Can the World's Largest Democracy Endure Another Five Years of a Modi Government?" The advent of Modi is at once an inevitability and a calamity for India, the story adds.

The 39-year old Aatish Taseer is a British-born writer-journalist, and the son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and late Pakistani politician and businessman Salmaan Taseer.

The write up compares former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of secularism with the prevailing social "stress" under Modi who "demonstrated no desire to foster brotherly feelings between Hindus and Muslims," the article read.

Besides, the article it also recalled the Gujarat riots that allegedly claimed lives of scores of people.

The whole article is based on the Hindu-Muslim relations and blames Modi for being pro-Hindu.

It is not the first time when the magazine has come with critical commentary about Modi. In its published article in 2012, the magazine described him as a controversial, ambitious and a shrewd politician.

With inputs from IANS