All that you are saying is that he is a politician and that somehow the growth wasn't real. Economics and India's Supreme Court disagree.
The growth was real so far as these things go but, as in Rick Perry's Texas, not the point for anyone who wasn't already well-off by Indian standards; legal exoneration does not equal moral innocence and the kind of deliberately contorted, brutish cynicism necessary to reduce essentially sitting back, relaxing, and enjoying the show during a pogrom (and that's the most charitable possible interpretation of his involvement) to 'just being a politician' is the kind of flagrant, frightening amorality worthy of, well, Narendra Modi.
Growth is growth, no matter how you slice it. It isn't always even, but then again it never is. You could use this logic to oppose Obama from a true leftist perspective. Also, while legal exoneration obviously doesn't equal innocence, it is the clostest thing we have to an arbiter and respect for the law is of the utmost importance. The 2002 riot was because of lack of respect for law that decades of corrupt INC leadership caused in India.
Finally, the truth is that being a politician is different in many poor countries. Due to the lack of government rescources, many tragedies and amplified and many worse things have to happen to give equal responsibility. For example, a bus crash here would generally only kill a few people but in poor countries hundred could die. Once you put in that equivalence factor, Gujarat was comparatively no worse than the Watts Riot.
Liberals shouldn't be opposing a moderate third wayer whose tenure had his province's GDP increase by 3.
Yet very few had actually benefited from this "miracle", which only proves that nominal growth doesn't automatically translate on improving living standards. In fact, under Modi there was no improvement of living standards whatsoever.
Modi is ideologically a nationalist nut and, economically, a neoliberal doctrinaire. I may not be a fan of "third wayers", but please stop insulting them by making such a dumb analogies.
I have already adressed the economic concerns. Also, many neoliberals have been nationalists. Look at Pinochet or Blair, they support what they see as their countries interests in often aggressive ways. The truth is that while one can never fully impose western standards over many other cultures, Modi is a close to a third-wayer as India has.
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