Politics World
Politics The Latest
Narendra
Modi’s war on India’s democracy, explained.
By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Jun 21, 2023, 6:30am EDT
President
Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India chat ahead of a working
session on food and energy security during the 2022 G20 Summit in Indonesia. Leon
Neal/Getty Images
Zack Beauchamp is a
senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to
democracy, both at home and abroad. Before coming to Vox in 2014, he edited TP
Ideas, a section of Think Progress devoted to the ideas shaping our political
world.
This
week, President Joe Biden will host
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a state dinner — only the third foreign
leader to receive such an honor at the Biden White House, the other two being
the presidents of France and South Korea. They have a lot to talk about: A White
House statement on the meeting has a long list of discussion topics,
including climate change and security
in the Indo-Pacific region (read: countering China).
But
there’s a word missing from the agenda that is, arguably, the most important of
all: democracy.
Since
Modi took office in 2014, and especially after winning reelection in 2019, he
has systematically taken a hammer to the core institutions of Indian democracy.
The prime minister’s government has undermined the
independence of the election supervision authority, manipulated judges
into ruling in his favor, used law enforcement against
his enemies, and increased
its control over the Indian press.
The prime
minister’s anti-democratic behavior has accelerated over time. In the past year
alone, Modi’s government has:
Being in
power has become self-reinforcing for Modi. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
has used its electoral dominance to silence critics and stack the electoral
deck against his opponents, making the upcoming 2024 parliamentary election a
significant uphill climb for other parties. That vote is shaping up to be
critical for India’s democratic future.
“With
every major election loss, the window might be closing” for the opposition,
warns Pavithra Suryanarayan, a political scientist at the London School of
Economics.
This
assault on democracy is a deeply ideological project. The BJP is the electoral
offshoot of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS),
a radical Hindu nationalist organization to which Modi has belonged since
he was 8 years old. Christophe Jaffrelot, a leading India scholar at
France’s Sciences Po, told me that its ideology amounts to “an Indian version
of fascism.”
You would
think that a pseudo-fascist assault on democracy in the world’s largest country
(by
population) would merit an international outcry — certainly as much as the
attention given to other prominent democratic backsliders like Hungary. But
perhaps because of India’s geopolitical significance, criticism from the
world’s leading democracies has been largely muted — left off the agenda as
Washington and its Pacific allies court New Delhi in their effort to balance a
rising China.
“There’s
been a conscious policy decision to downplay Indian democratic backsliding
because it’s awkward,” says Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the center-right
American Enterprise Institute. “We need India as a potential bulwark against
China, and the Indians have been very skillful in exploiting the tendency in
Washington toward tunnel vision.”
In 2005,
Narendra Modi was banned from traveling to the United States on allegations
of complicity in an anti-Muslim pogrom. Now he’s the White House’s guest of
honor — while, at his direction, a country poised to be one of the greatest
powers of the 21st century slides toward tyranny.
The ideological roots of India’s democratic decline
To
understand the current crisis of Indian democracy, you need to understand the
BJP’s roots in the RSS — an organization that, in many ways, functioned as an
opposing force to Gandhi’s pro-independence Indian National Congress. Unlike
the Congress, which believed in secular liberal democracy, the RSS advocated
for a future Indian nation defined in purely ethno-religious terms — a “Hindu
Rashtra” (Hindu nation). Its ideology, called Hindutva, held that post-colonial
India should be a country ruled by and for Hindus.
In 1939,
RSS leader M.S. Golwalkar published a book — titled We, or our Nationhood
Defined — that codified this thinking in especially stark terms.
“The
foreign races in Hindusthan ... must lose their separate existence to merge in
the Hindu race, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu
Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential
treatment — not even citizen’s rights,” he argued.
In
another passage of We, a book one contemporary observer referred to as
the RSS’s “Bible,”
Golwalkar explicitly praises the Nazi treatment of Jews as a model.
“Germany
has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having
differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good
lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by,” he writes.
Such
ideas were marginal in post-independence India. The country’s 1949 constitution
was written on secular-egalitarian lines, declaring that
“the State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of
religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.”
The RSS,
meanwhile, had mostly managed to discredit its political vision. In 1948, an
RSS devotee named Nathuram Godse assassinated Mahatma Gandhi — a killing that
Godse himself credited to his Hindu nationalist ideology. The Indian government
subsequently banned the RSS for a year.
The
Indian nationalist activist Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in
1948. Mondadori via Getty Images
Even
after the RSS’s return from the shadows, the Congress party and its secular
ideology remained dominant. Until 1977, Congress won every Indian election; the
RSS’s political arm, called the BJS, never reached 10 percent of the national
popular vote.
The rise of the BJP, explained
The BJP,
founded in 1980 as a second attempt at an RSS electoral wing, initially found
success by campaigning in the mid-to-late 1980s for the demolition of a mosque
in the city of Ayodhya — one located on a site that many Hindus believed to be the birthplace of the
Hindu holy figure Rama, the seventh avatar of the god Vishnu.
The
issue, BJP leadership believed, could be used to inflame politically useful
Hindu nationalist sentiment by making it seem as if the current Indian system
prioritized the interests of the Muslim minority over the Hindu majority.
This
divisive campaign worked. In the 1984 election, the BJP won two seats in
Parliament; in 1989, it won 85 (out of a total of 543).
But when
the BJP managed to form its first-ever coalition government, in 1998, it ruled in a relatively
moderate fashion. This perhaps surprising result, according to Brown
University’s Ashutosh Varshney, reflected what was thought at the time to be an
iron law of Indian politics: that no matter which party was in power, it would
have to moderate its ideological agenda.
There
were two reasons, according to Varshney, for this so-called “persistent
centrism.“
First,
India is staggeringly diverse: It has 22 official languages, 705 officially
recognized ethnic groups, six large religious minorities, and a complex caste
system that divides the population into thousands of different groups.
Putting together a winning coalition in such a deeply divided society seemed to
necessarily require compromise.
Second,
the Indian political system places multiple checks on the ability of governing
coalitions to make major changes. A set of institutions — the court system, independent
agencies, oversight bodies, a vibrant free press — force governments to play
within certain legal and normative limits. Thus, even the most hardline BJP
government would find itself unable to take radical action to change the nature
of the Indian state.
And make
no mistake: much of the BJP leadership cadre remained dedicated to Hindutva
ideals. While the RSS formally repudiated Golwalkar’s writing in 2006, this
seemed more like a branding exercise than anything else. His basic idea of a
Hindu Rashtra remains at the center of BJP-RSS ideology.
“The
ideology has not changed,” Jaffrelot says. “They [really] believe in ... the
sense of superiority of the Hindu people, in this dehumanization of the other.”
Narendra
Modi is chief among these true believers.
In 2002,
when he was serving as chief minister of the state of Gujarat, a train carrying
Hindu pilgrims in Godhra, a Muslim-dominated part of the state, went up in
flames, killing 59 people. The fire was blamed on Muslims, setting off mass
communal rioting, primarily pogroms by Hindu mobs against the Muslim minority.
(An Indian
government investigation later concluded that the fire had been an
accident.) Human rights groups put the total death toll at more
than 2,000. The raw brutality of the assault was chilling. Amnesty
International reports that between 250 and 330 Muslim girls and women were
raped and tortured during the violence; most of them were subsequently executed
by the mob.
Modi
allegedly intervened
personally on the side of these anti-Muslim rioters, ordering police to
stand aside and allow Hindu mobs to rampage across Muslim-majority areas.
Modi’s behavior was so egregious that, in 2005, the
US denied him an entry visa on grounds of “severe violations of religious
freedom.” This ban would only be lifted
after the BJP won India’s parliamentary election in 2014, an election where the
charismatic Modi defeated an increasingly ineffectual and corrupt Congress led
by dynast Rahul Gandhi.
In this picture taken in February 2002, an Indian
nationalist activist armed with a iron rod shouts slogans against Muslims
during mob violence in Gujarat, India. Sebastian D’Souza/AFP via Getty
Images
After
becoming prime minister, Modi faced a fundamental challenge: How to implement
his hardline Hindutva social agenda given the constraints militating toward
persistent centrism?
The
answer was ... to eliminate those constraints. And his plan of attack would
strike at the heart of Indian democracy.
Modi has undermined Indian secularism — and its
democracy
The
easiest way to understand what Modi has done to India is to see it as kind of a
mutually reinforcing cycle of two different agendas.
The first
is using the powers of the premiership to spread Hindutva ideology and polarize
the electorate along Hindu-versus-Muslim lines. The second is consolidating
power in his hands and weakening countervailing authorities — including the
judiciary, oversight commissions, the free press, and opposition parties.
The more
the Hindu public is converted to his ideology, the more popular Modi becomes,
providing him political cover to pursue attacks on judges, bureaucrats, and
reporters. The more he controls India’s government and the press, the easier it
is for him to spread Hindutva propaganda.
Women
from various districts with cut-outs of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at
a rally held by Modi in 2021 in Allahabad, India. Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images
This
effect of this cycle has been both the shattering of the “persistent centrism”
that constrained previous leaders and, increasingly, elections taking place on
a playing field tilted against the opposition.
Prior to
Modi’s rise, the BJP’s electoral success was limited by an elite
base that supported the party’s economic reforms and social agenda. Many
upper-caste Indians cared deeply about blocking a long-running effort to expand
India’s caste-based affirmative action program for university admissions and
government jobs, seeing the BJP as a party that would oppose
this and other efforts to undermine the caste hierarchy.
Under
Modi, the party has managed to significantly expand its
demographic base among both lower-caste and poor Hindus (two groups that
overlap to some degree but not fully) without losing its base. By 2019, poor
Hindu voters were
as likely as rich ones to vote for the BJP.
The
party’s success at selling its Hindutva narrative since Modi’s ascension is not
the only part of this story, but it has been an essential one. Modi and
state-level BJP leaders have relentlessly hammered Hindutva themes in their
speeches and pursued
policies undermining Muslim rights and inflaming Hindu anxieties about
their Muslim neighbors.
“All the
big achievements of the BJP thus far are ideological ones,” says Suryanarayan.
“The
Citizenship Amendment Act, the revocation
of special status to Kashmir, the way in which they are very carefully
transforming textbooks and textbook representations of what the founding
fathers of India were about and the
role of Muslims in Indian history — every one of these is clues to what
commitments of the BJP are.”
(The
Citizenship Amendment Act creates a special pathway to citizenship for
non-Muslims living in nearby countries. Meanwhile, Jammu and Kashmir is India’s
only majority-Muslim state and the subject of a territorial dispute with
Pakistan; it enjoyed a special autonomous status until Modi
revoked it in 2019.)
In
effect, the BJP has used the power of the state to convince Hindus that what
unites them against Muslims is more important than what divides them among each
other.
One
especially egregious example is the so-called “love jihad,” a conspiracy theory
that Muslim men are seeking to marry Hindu women as part of an organized plot
to convert them to Islam and erode India’s Hindu majority — a pernicious myth
that has led to the arrest
of Muslim men. Modi and other BJP officials have even
promoted a film spreading this idea.
Research
suggests these anti-Muslim efforts have deeply affected public attitudes and,
even more ominously, behavior. A 2022
paper by Varshney shows a spike in lynchings of Muslims that coincides
almost exactly with Modi taking power.
“Lynchings
cannot become widespread without an atmosphere of impunity in which those who
have a mind to commit lynchings know that they are unlikely to be punished by
the state,” Varshney writes.
Stoking
anti-Muslim sentiment has been politically profitable. Modi’s approval ratings
have been quite high in recent years, most recently clocking in around 75
percent — a level of support that experts say is bound up with his ability
to use the politics of fear to consolidate support among Hindus.
“In
different sectors of society, in all kinds of provinces across the country,
[Muslims’] image has been so badly portrayed. That is the main impact [the BJP]
has made,” Jaffrelot says. “They have demolished something that will be very
difficult to rebuild, and that is secularism.”
Modi’s multi-pronged attack on Indian democracy,
explained
There’s
no doubt that Modi’s agenda is illiberal, in the sense that it involves
asserting the legal and social dominance of the Hindu at the expense of Muslims
and other minorities. Modi insists that he is merely acting on behalf of the
majority — that he and his government are honoring India’s historic status as “the
mother of democracy.”
His long
record of anti-democratic policy says otherwise.
Some of
Modi’s tactics involve clever legislation. Take campaign finance: Under
Modi, Parliament set up a new system that allows for unlimited donations
through the purchasing
of electoral bonds — a system that all but announces to wealthy donors that
the government knows which party you gave money to.
Another
tactic has been the manipulation of appointment powers. Modi has seized
control over the judicial “collegium” system of appointments, simply
refusing to appoint judges he doesn’t approve of. Similarly, Modi has refused
to appoint commissioners to the Central Information Commission, which
handles freedom of information requests from the public, grinding its work to a
halt.
A third
set of tactics has been outright intimidation and abuse of legal powers.
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the country’s FBI equivalent,
has a longstanding problem of being unduly influenced by political
considerations — a problem that has gotten far worse since 2014. Under the
prior Congress government, 60 percent of CBI investigations into
politicians targeted opposition leaders. Under Modi, that figure has jumped to
95 percent.
The
recent state-level conviction of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and his
subsequent expulsion
from Parliament speak to the way that both law enforcement and the legal
system have been politicized across the board.
Tax
enforcement plays a similar role. When a leader of the independent Election
Commission voted to penalize Modi for hate speech on the campaign trail in
2019, he swiftly came under tax investigations — as did his
sister, wife, and son. This year, the tax police raided the BBC’s India
offices after the broadcaster had released a documentary on Modi’s role in the
2002 Gujarat riots.
The BBC
raid speaks to yet another area of democratic backsliding: a clampdown
on the independent press and freedom of speech more broadly through new
rules, like the creation of an agency empowered to take down social media
posts, and harassment
of journalists and human rights organizations. But it has also happened
more subtly, through consolidation
of media ownership in the hands of ultra-rich moguls friendly to Modi and
the BJP like Gautam Adani and Mukesh
Ambani.
The
weaker checks on Modi’s authority get, the more he is empowered to infuse the
Indian state with Hindu nationalist ideals — and the harder it will be for the
divided Indian opposition to unseat the BJP through electoral means.
Can Indian democracy be saved?
This is
not the first time India’s democracy has been in crisis.
In June
1975, in the midst of an episode of civil unrest, Congress Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi — a charismatic populist not entirely dissimilar from Modi —
announced the beginning of a so-called “Emergency,” which in effect suspended
basic rights and freedoms.
For
nearly two years, the Indian state was a functional autocracy. News outlets
were placed under a
strict censorship regime; police rounded up Gandhi’s political opponents, including
RSS leaders, and imprisoned them.
In March
1977, the Emergency suddenly ended. Indira Gandhi announced new elections, which
Congress lost. She left power voluntarily (only to return after the next
round of elections), and Indian democracy moved away from a system dominated by
the Congress party to a healthier multi-party system.
Does this
provide reason for optimism that Modi might fall in a similarly surprising
fashion? The experts I spoke with were skeptical.
While the
Emergency was a blatant suspension of democracy in response to immediate
events, Modi’s power grabs have involved a more subtle and durable corruption
of institutions unfolding over the course of years.
“The way
that they control information ... the way they can amass funding — part of
that, of course, is by changing funding laws — is pretty impressive,” says
Milan Vaishnav, the director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace.
However
grim an unfavorable comparison to the Emergency might make the situation
appear, it is also important to note that Indian democracy is not dead yet.
There are upcoming scheduled elections in 2024, and there is a chance —
unlikely, but a real one — that Modi may go the way of Donald Trump and Brazil’s
Jair Bolsonaro.
That the
BJP can still lose elections has been demonstrated by recent state-level
defeats, like in the fiercely contested 2021
West Bengal election. India’s federal system means that state governments
have a reasonable amount of power.
And even
at the national level, opposition parties still retain some capacity to get
their message out.
Between
September 2022 and January 2023, Rahul Gandhi embarked on a pilgrimage — called
the Bharat Jodo (“Unite India”) Yatra — across 2,200 miles of Indian territory.
The demonstration, which evoked a
tradition of political yatras in India, was designed as an explicit act of
protest against Modi’s politics of division. It seems to have done real work in
rehabilitating
Gandhi and Congress in general.
Supporters
walk next to giant cutouts of Indian National Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and
his sister Priyanka Vadra as they arrive to attend an election rally on April
16, 2023, in Kolar, India. Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images
“He
acquired charisma because of his lifestyle [on the march] and the way he
related to people. ... In a society where the stigma of caste is so strong, he
had no problem shaking hands with any of the people passing by,” says
Jaffrelot.
For all
of these reasons, the 2024 national elections are shaping up to be absolutely critical
for India’s future — not that you can tell from the US government’s public
response.
In
October 2021, President
Biden declared that “defending human rights and demonstrating that
democracies deliver for their people” is “at the center of my administration’s
foreign policy.” This has not been the case when it comes to its India policy,
which has focused overwhelmingly on courting the Modi government as an ally
against China rather than challenging its anti-democratic practices.
“I don’t
detect any willingness, any serious efforts, on the part of this administration
to hold India to a higher democratic standard,” Vaishnav says.
A White
House spokesperson suggested to me that this is something that top American
officials bring up in high-level meetings, presumably privately. “In these
engagements we address policy differences constructively and in an atmosphere
of mutual respect,” the spokesperson said.
One
should hope so. A slide toward Hindu nationalist authoritarianism in India
doesn’t serve America’s interests, especially given the ever-present
risk of conflict with nuclear-armed Pakistan. And the contradiction between
the administration’s soaring rhetoric about democracy and its relative quiet
about the world’s most important instance of democratic backsliding is glaring.
There are
some actions
the administration could take that could matter at the margins — at the
very least, by suggesting during the upcoming state dinner and future
engagements that there might be some cost if Modi takes things too far.
But at
the same time, the United States’s ability to change the course of Indian
domestic politics should not be overstated. What happens in India will
ultimately be determined by what Indians decide to do in 2024 and beyond —
choices that, given India’s size and rising influence, will have profound
consequences for the future of democracy around the world.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/3ycdwhyu
