India At A Turning Point

The growing instances of attacks on minorities, capture of democratic institutions, repression of academic freedom, hounding of social activists, frequent internet blackouts, intimidation of the media, the brisk rewriting of history, increasing embrace of digital surveillance, promotion of a brand of toxic ultranationalism under which critics of the government are branded unpatriotic and “antinational”, and the cult of a supreme leader, have for some time now worried Indians who value democracy. Modi’s latest policy initiatives have only added to the growing fears that India is being pushed deeper into authoritarianism, intolerance and chaos.

The Hindu nationalist government of his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is embarking on two programmes that together could leave many of the country’s 200 million Muslims disenfranchised – just as the predominantly Muslim Rohingya were stripped of citizenship in Myanmar in 1982, leaving them stateless and vulnerable to abuse that led to their massacre in 2016 and subsequent exodus......... The NRC in Assam disenfranchised 1.9 million people, most of whom have never known any other place as their home. It was poorly implemented, resulted in detentions, suicides and penury, and destroyed lives and families, especially the poor, who are neither protected by the privilege of “documents” to establish their ancestry nor have the resources for legal recourse. ..... With its consistent politics of Muslim-bashing to consolidate its Hindu support base, the BJP has made no bones about its intention to remake India as a majoritarian state. The party sees Modi’s back-to-back national electoral victories as the stamp of popular consent on this project. ...... China’s all-powerful President Xi Jinping might still have rivals in his party – Modi has none in his. If there is any entity Modi answers to, it is the BJP’s ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist paramilitary volunteer organisation, of which Modi was once a foot soldier....... Federal investigative agencies act almost as a party unit, conducting raids on political gadflies and Modi’s old enemies with the same frequency and efficiency that Chinese agencies once did for Xi when he was waging his anti-corruption campaign and cementing power. As a result, an unusual climate of fear pervades the circles of power and beyond in New Delhi today, more befitting a totalitarian regime than the world’s biggest democracy....... Kashmir has been under lockdown for five months after the Modi government in August abolished its special constitutional status of semi-autonomy. Internet services remain shut down and its top leaders are still in jail, but the Supreme Court has shown no urgency in dealing with the petitions challenging the validity of Delhi’s actions. With the citizenship protests as well, it has yet to act even as reports of deadly police crackdowns on protesters and Muslim neighbourhoods pour in from BJP-ruled states and the body bags pile up. ...... India’s mainstream media for the most part has been browbeaten into submission while new media outlets sympathetic to a Hindu-first world view have emerged. High-profile editors with an independent streak have been mostly forced out. Most of the new crop of top editors, especially in television, are so openly partisan that a government with a more sophisticated approach to propaganda would actually be embarrassed by their cloying adulation......

Few prominent newspapers or television channels dare to challenge the Modi administration’s stated position.

..... The result of all this is a mainstream media landscape where some of the news organisations have come to resemble a more excitable version of the usually staid Chinese state media – and are sometimes more unabashedly fawning and fearful of the political leadership than in China. Newspapers and websites that show signs of independence are denied advertisements and slapped with libel suits, while their journalists are intimidated........ Vicious troll armies allied with the Hindu supremacist cause are just as well-funded and ubiquitous as China’s wumao – the “50 Cent Army” hired to swing public support towards the Communist Party – but far more sinister, with their rape and murder threats.

India last year fell two more places on the World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders. From 80th in 2002, it now ranks 140th out of 180 territories, behind South Sudan, Myanmar and Palestine.

......... In the first four years after coming to power in 2014, the Modi administration spent about US$700 million on advertisements. The prime minister’s face features prominently in most of these, beaming out from the front pages of national dailies or smiling benignly at passers-by at traffic intersections and petrol pumps........ His online warriors make and unmake trends on social media every day, troll his critics and amplify his admirers. Bollywood falls over itself to please him and sports stars vie for his attention. School students are asked to write essays on his courage, college students are expelled for writing protest letters. If Xi has “Xi Jinping Thought”, Modi has the far more interactive Mann ki Baat, or From the Heart – his own radio programme. For all the reams written on Xi’s personality cult, they are not a patch on the one built around Modi. ....... The fact is, for all the hype around the BJP’s irreversible political hegemony, it will never be the Communist Party of China. Just as China is stuck with one party, India is stuck with many.........

In March 2018, the BJP and its allies ruled 21 of the 29 Indian states. They now control just 15.

........ In his book The Argumentative Indian, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen traces the historical roots of the country’s democracy in the rich tradition of public arguments and debates that “make heterodoxy the natural state of affairs in India”. ...... Sample this 19th century Bengali poem by social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, which says: “Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be; Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back.” .........If only Modi had paid more attention to Hong Kong.

After a torrid December, how will India’s Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and the BJP fare in 2020? Such widespread protests have not occurred in the last few decades. “Somewhere, this is affecting Modi’s popularity, bit by bit”

India’s slowing economy takes deadly turn, but Modi’s in denial

India At A Turning Point https://t.co/QaWfZsSkzk #india #Indian #Modi #NarendraModi #amitshah #CAA_NRC_NPR #CAA_NRCProtests #bjp

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) January 7, 2020