Embracing Violence and Regressive Values: India and the US
Biden Invites Modi
Like so many other Indians and Americans, I am disappointed with Joe Biden’s invitation to Narendra Modi, and shocked at the pretty obvious inanities that officials with the US government have been asserting about the state of affairs in India. As an Indian, I know well that the country is right now beyond redemption until the hold of militant Hindu supremacist organizations over the government, media, and Whatsapp is shaken. But it has been very hard to wrap one’s head around why in heaven’s name the US government has felt the need to go above and beyond what is diplomatically necessary to maintain relations between them and the Indian government.
The modest silver lining of course has been the renewed attention that the dire state of affairs in India have received in the past few days (although within India, the burning region of Manipur and the painful everyday realities of ordinary Indians continue to be swept under the White House’s red carpet). Five recent articles caught my attention, with all of them doing a fine job of analyzing the stakes involved and explaining the grave mistake that Biden has committed in flirting with an illiberal, regressive regime. What follows are excerpts from those articles.
Let’s start with historian Maya Jasanoff’s op-ed in the New York Times.
“But here is what Americans need to know about Mr. Modi’s India. Armed with a sharp-edged doctrine of Hindu nationalism, Mr. Modi has presided over the nation’s broadest assault on democracy, civil society and minority rights in at least 40 years. He has delivered prosperity and national pride to some, and authoritarianism and repression of many others that should disturb us all... A working paper from the Indian government dismisses such metrics as “perception-based.” Sadly, it is no “perception” that the government systematically harasses its critics by raiding the offices of think tanks, NGOs and media organizations, restricting freedom of entry and exit, and pressing nuisance lawsuits — most conspicuously against the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, who was recently ejected from Parliament after his conviction on a ludicrous charge of having defamed everybody named “Modi.”..
Western commentators enthusing about the “new India” tend to breeze past such outrages as distractions from India’s economic growth and investment potential. But here too are troubling indicators. [In fact this is pretty obvious to anyone who speaks with ordinary Indians. More scholarly, statistics-oriented takes can be found in Aakar Patel’s book “Price of the Modi Years” and Ashoka Mody’s writings, like India’s Boom is a Dangerous Myth.] The share of women in the formal work force stands at around a paltry 20 percent and has shrunk during Mr. Modi’s tenure. The share of wealth held by the top 1 percent has grown since he took office and is now 40.5 percent, thanks to crony capitalism resembling the Russian oligarchy’s. Unemployment is rising, the cost of basic food is surging, and government investment in health care is stagnating. As for India’s readiness to partner on efforts to combat climate change — one of the Biden administration’s highest hopes — the Indian government has cracked down on climate activists and just removed evolution and the periodic table from the curriculum for under-16-year-olds in its ongoing assault on science.
The politics of Mr. Modi’s India are also affecting American communities, workplaces and campuses as the Indian diaspora in the United States grows. In Edison, N.J., marchers in the annual India Day parade last August drove a wheel loader, which resembles a bulldozer, bedecked with images of Mr. Modi and a far-right Indian government minister who has ordered the razing of Muslims’ homes and businesses, rendering such vehicles symbols of hate as provocative as a noose or a burning cross at a Klan rally… Across America there are now more than 200 chapters of the overseas arm of India’s fascist-inspired Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., of which Mr. Modi is a longtime associate.
Healthier ways to engage with India begin with understanding that Mr. Modi’s version of India is no less skewed than Donald Trump’s of the United States, even if Mr. Modi has been more successful at getting the media and global elite to buy into it. (The two leaders enthusiastically celebrated each other at stadium-filling rallies in Houston and Ahmedabad, India.) U.S. news organizations and research institutions must continue to support vital fact-finding and reporting, to counter Indian government propaganda and misinformation about everything from humanitarian abuses to Covid mortality figures. Companies seeking to do business in India should insist their partners uphold shared values and practices of nondiscrimination. Silicon Valley can do better at pushing back against India’s increasingly autocratic digital policy, to say nothing of standing up to censorship requests — which Twitter notoriously failed to do with respect to a recent BBC documentary critical of Mr. Modi.
U.S. legislators should pass bills to make caste a protected category and educate themselves enough to avoid the error made recently by the Illinois General Assembly when it set up an Indian American Advisory Council using terms that offensively marginalized Muslims. Employers should recognize that appeals to Hindu identity and “Hinduphobia” may themselves be rooted in anti-minority and casteist campaigns. Campus administrators should be prepared for efforts by Modi-aligned factions to censor the speech and research of faculty members, students and guests.
Like the United States, India is an extraordinary, diverse, plural democracy with incredible talent and potential — and there is much, in principle, to unite these nations for the good. But as the president of one stumbling democracy joins hands with a prime minister bent on hobbling another, the project of global freedom seems one step closer to collapse.”
Edward Luce’s column in the Financial Times did a great job of spelling out the unnecessary lengths to which the Biden administration has gone in their Modi invitation.
“Yet the US finds it hard to do foreign policy realism convincingly. Over the next few days, US officials will be unable to stop themselves from saying that India and America share common values, and are the world’s largest and richest democracies respectively. These contestable observations will have nothing to do with the reasons for Modi’s glittering welcome. If Saudi Arabia swapped positions with India, Washington would find it hard to resist praising conservative Islam.
The pity of it is that it is unnecessary. There are two problems with America’s all-out seduction of Modi. The first is that it gives the lie to Biden’s claim that human rights are “at the heart” of his foreign policy. Modi is trampling on too many rights to mention — religious freedom at the forefront. Yet the US State Department is as quiet about those as it is loud in condemning the transgressions of others in lesser positions on the global chessboard. This can only deepen cynicism about the gap between what America says and does. In an era where the global south is up for grabs, such double standards do little for US credibility.
The risk is that this all-things-China measure produces the opposite of what Biden wants. Most of the world would prefer not to have to make a choice between America and China. The last thing the global south needs is a zero-sum dilemma. As the recurring quip goes, “the Chinese give us an airport; Americans give a lecture”. This looks worse when the moralising is seen as hollow.
The second problem with Biden’s charm offensive is that it misreads how much India needs America. The false impression is that India has all the cards. India is incomparably more vulnerable to Chinese military action than the US. It shares a 2,100-mile border with China, much of it disputed, and its military is no match. In a conflict, only America could bail India out. Though China poses no direct military threat to the US, Washington has convinced itself otherwise.
There is no question that America and India share a realistic fear of an aggressive China. Pulling closer together is the rational thing to do. Behaving like a supplicant to the world’s most ruthless democratic backslider — the strongman who Donald Trump would love to emulate — is both crude and unnecessary. To Modi it will look like a green light.”
Scholar Sheena Sood wrote in Al Jazeera about the misappropriation of yoga by Hindu supremacist groups and the Indian government
“Simply put, Modi has weaponised yoga to conceal the political and systemic violence he has advanced against oppressed minorities in India. That’s what he did before world leaders and yoga followers on UN Yoga Day — it was a spectacle of what I call om-washing, used to mask a radical agenda of ethno-nationalist state violence. None of this must be confused with any genuine conviction to use yoga to build a more just, unified and liberated world.
In insisting that ancient Indian culture “sees the world as one family”, Modi often suggests that yogic philosophy guides his efforts to promote democracy and peace within India’s borders and with global partners. However, democracy is in steep decline in Modi’s India. The nation has seen a surge in state-sponsored and vigilante attacks on Muslims, Christians, Dalits and other oppressed minorities since Modi has taken office. Not only has Modi legitimised Hindu nationalists to be more emboldened in attacking marginalised populations, but his administration has also weakened independent institutions of Indian democracy, including the judiciary.
Globally, he has strengthened military partnerships with states like Israel, France and the United States — nations that are invested in the politics of Islamophobia and war-making. Modi’s touting of yoga as lending itself toward peaceful and democratic principles masks his dedicated investment in militarism and war.
With Modi’s yoga day performance live-streamed at Times Square and on social media platforms, I imagine thousands of politically neutral attendees might have joined in too. After all, what’s the harm in doing yoga with Modi, right? It’s not like doing yoga with him and thousands of others is in itself any endorsement of a political agenda. But I encourage those on the fence to recognise how participating in such events legitimises Modi’s attempts at om-washing — this agenda of using yoga to conceal his Hindu supremacist ideology. It’s time to reclaim yoga by rejecting Modi’s appropriation of this ancient practice.”
Student journalist Shraddha Joshi wrote in The Nation about “President Biden’s tacit endorsement of repression, authoritarianism, and religious intolerance”
“The Biden administration’s messaging on Modi has been alarming. “India is a vibrant democracy. Anybody that happens to go to New Delhi can see that for themselves,” claimed John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, in a recent White House press briefing. Last summer, I worked in New Delhi and witnessed the harassment and suppression of journalists and activists from Modi’s government firsthand. The Centre for Equity Studies — like many civil society groups — was targeted by policies created by the Modi government to stifle foreign funding for nongovernmental organizations. On my first day in the NewsClick office, one of my coworkers pointed to an empty spot in the corner. “That’s Gautam Navlakha’s desk,” she said, referencing the prominent journalist and human rights defender. “You won’t see him, though, because he’s been under arrest since 2018.””
Then there are some important scholarly essays from the Journal of Democracy on the topic of “Is India Still a Democracy”
(For a quick take on this group of essays, see scholar Ashutosh Varshney’s Twitter thread)
Below are excerpts from Maya Tudor’s essay, which contains so many important and under-appreciated facts that I decided to highlight them in Bold
“And the clearest signs of such democratic erosion are that elected leaders question the legitimacy of all opposition and use every available legal tool to undermine it. Drawing on a broad range of historical cases, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that unwritten rules and norms of behavior toward political opposition are the key to preventing such democratic deterioration. They argue that the two most important norms are opposition tolerance, meaning that political opponents are not treated as enemies but simply as political rivals, and forbearance, that is, limited use of the legal methods to steamroll opposition, such as executive orders, vetoes, and filibusters. Contemporary democratic backsliders tend not to transform overnight to autocracies. Instead, democracies slowly die when opposition is no longer tolerated and when elected politicians use the full might of the law to quash rather than compromise with political opposition.
The Modi government has increasingly employed two kinds of laws to silence its critics — colonial-era sedition laws and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Authorities have regularly booked individuals under sedition laws for dissent in the form of posters, social-media posts, slogans, personal communications, and in one case, posting celebratory messages for a Pakistani cricket win. Sedition cases rose by 28 percent between 2010 and 2021. Of the sedition cases filed against citizens for criticizing the government, 96 percent were filed after Modi came to power in 2014. One report estimates that over the course of just one year, ten-thousand tribal activists in a single district were charged with sedition for invoking their land rights.
The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act was amended in 2019 to allow the government to designate individuals as terrorists without a specific link to a terrorist organization. There is no mechanism of judicial redress to challenge this categorization. The law now specifies that it can be used to target individuals committing any act “likely to threaten” or “likely to strike terror in people.” Between 2015 and 2019, there was a 72 percent increase in arrests under the UAPA, with 98 percent of those arrested remaining in jail without bail.
The frequent invocation of these strengthened laws is substantively new and has significantly chilled dissent. The state has intimidated opposition by broadly labeling criticisms of government policy as contrary to the national interest, or “anti-national,” and by employing an army of volunteers to identify problematic online dissent. BJP politicians have popularized the term “anti-national” in patterns that target individuals, causes, and organizations. Academics were first to be targeted, with university administrators and faculty investigated, disciplined, or compelled to step down owing to their perceived political views. But such tactics were quickly broadened to include any high-profile dissenters.
The government has frequently barred access to the internet, the de facto means of coordinating protest. India not only leads the world in government-directed internet shutdowns, with 84 government-directed shutdowns in 2022, but these blackouts are typically imposed before and during protests to impede effective public coordination, often without clear criteria for suspension. The report finds that while de jure protections for speech and assembly have eroded only marginally, de facto protections have significantly decreased.
The government’s critics in civil society are frequent targets of administrative harassment. In 2020, the Modi government tightened the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) to choke civil society independence, targeting the logistics of foreign-fund transfers, limiting the nature of spending and the sharing of funds between NGOs, giving the central and state governments the right to suspend NGOs at discretion, and forbidding public servants from joining organizations. Government authorities have systematically used financial audits and tax-related raids on technical but fully legal grounds against a wide range of civil society groups, including Amnesty International, Greenpeace, the Centre for Policy Research, the Ford Foundation, the Lawyers Collective, and Oxfam.
Over the last decade, Indian media have radically circumscribed their criticism of government due to outright intimidation and structural changes. Since 2014, India has fallen to 161st out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, ranking below Afghanistan, Belarus, Hong Kong, Libya, Pakistan, and Turkey. According to the organization, Indian journalists sometimes receive death threats and are frequent targets of social-media hate campaigns driven by troll farms affiliated with the government. Major media networks do not feel free to criticize the Modi government. One study analyzing prime-time television debates on the channel Times Now over three months in 2020 found not a single episode in which a debate criticized the Modi government in any form. A separate study of RepublicTV from 2017 through 2020 found coverage to be “consistently biased in favour of the Modi government and its policies.” Modi himself has limited his interactions with the media, holding not a single press conference in the last nine years. Practices such as selective licensing, the acquisition of independent networks by Modi-affiliated businessmen, and harassment of the few remaining independent outlets further undermine media independence.
While the sheer number of news organizations in India would seem to indicate a thriving media, scrutiny of the functional ownership structure indicates otherwise. The independent Media Ownership Monitor finds in India “a significant trend toward concentration and ultimately control of content and public opinion.” Mukesh Ambani, a businessman with close ties to Modi, directly controls media outlets followed by at least 800 million Indians. Another close Modi associate, Gautam Adani, acquired India’s last major independent television network, NDTV, in December 2022. According to analysts, Adani’s acquisition of NDTV “marks the endgame for independent media in India, leaving the country’s biggest television news channels in the hands of billionaires who have strong ties to the Indian government.” While there are a handful of smaller, determined sources of independent news left, they have faced tax raids and lawsuits for their reporting since 2013.
The loss of horizontal accountability. Legislative scrutiny of executive action has been waning in real terms during Modi’s government. Committees of India’s primary parliamentary bodies serve as a key check on the executive, closely examining and debating the merits of all bills. Committees scrutinized 71 percent of bills in the 2009–14 parliament before Modi came to power and just 25 percent of bills in the 2014–19 parliament under Modi’s first term. Since 2019, such scrutiny has declined to 13 percent, with not a single legislative bill sent to a committee during the 2020 pandemic. Some of India’s most important laws and political decisions in recent years — the imposition of a national lockdown with four hours’ notice, demonetization, farm laws — were passed without parliamentary consultation and over opposition protest. The Modi government also introduced a raft of legal amendments to weaken whistleblower protection.
The growing lack of executive accountability to Parliament is exacerbated by an increasingly quiescent judiciary. The Supreme Court is the custodian of India’s constitution and through it, of civil liberties. During the two decades before 2014, the independence of the Supreme Court was seen to grow mightily, earning it the moniker of the “most powerful apex court in the world.” This has notably changed, with the central government controversially transferring independent-minded justices and minimizing norms that checked executive power. Such moves prompted the four most senior members of India’s Supreme Court to hold an unprecedented press conference in 2018, warning that the chief justice’s unusual assigning of cases could be a sign of political interference. One of those four justices, Jasti Chelameswar, also penned an open letter to the chief justice, admonishing that the “bonhomie between the Judiciary and the Government in any State sounds the death knell to Democracy.” The Supreme Court’s rulings on every major political issue that has come before it — the Ayodhya temple, the Aadhar biometric ID system, habeas corpus in Kashmir, electoral bonds, the Prevention of Money Laundering Act — have gone in favor of the Modi government. This marks a break from the past. The practical difference between the Supreme Court during the Emergency and today is minimal. Some even argue that, today, an Emergency is simply “undeclared.”
Democracy in India, as elsewhere in the world, is not today dying through a military coup or the dramatic, coordinated mass arrests of opponents. Instead, autocrats have learned to talk democratically and walk autocratically, maintaining a legal façade of democracy while harassing opposition and shrinking space for loyal dissent. While India’s formal institutions of democracy are also under pressure — Modi’s most prominent political rivals have recently been disqualified from running in elections — it is primarily the inability of the ordinary citizen to read critical appraisals of government policy, to speak and assemble freely without fear of harassment as well as the absence of substantive checks on executive power that have transitioned India into a hybrid regime.”
I will end with some cartoons from one of the bravest artists we have in India today, Rachita Taneja, who publishes biting, powerful commentary on Indian society and politics through the “Sanitary Panels” comics.
