249 - The World's Largest Democracy Subverts Democracy

Naked Power Grabs

            India is by far the globe's most populous democracy. But, like so many electoral near autocracies, India is steadily attacking its own democratic underpinnings by limiting the rights of its own 205 million Muslim citizens (15 percent of India's total), giving citizenship to refugees and undocumented immigrants who are not Muslims, crippling the Congress Party (its main opposition) by sequestering its bank accounts, and -- last week -- arresting Arvind Kejriwal, chief minister of Delhi State.

            Prime Minister Narendra Modi's all powerful Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is set, probably overwhelmingly, to win the country's next parliamentary voting contest, starting April 19 and continuing for six weeks.  Modi is immensely well-liked, having in recent years zealously promoted hindutva -- Hindu Together -- a movement that has cemented his support from most of the 700 million Indians who are Hindu religiously and linguistically. Hindutva is described as "an extremist political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India." Invented as a creed in 1922, it was revived or advanced by Modi from about 2014.

             This emphasis on Hindu chauvinism has been particularly successful in arousing and gathering popular backing across northern India, where the inhabitants are more numerous, growing faster demographically, poorer, and less well-educated than those living in the states of the south. 

            India is a federation of twenty-eight states and eight territories.  Modi seeks obsessively to strengthen control over the states from the center, the better to entrench his power, the better to centralize his Hindu government's control over non-Hindi speaking parts of the nation that seek to follow their own traditions, their own forms of governance, and maintain the independence from New Delhi that they have long enjoyed. Modi is determined, in contrast, to make himself the sun around which each state and its leaders and people orbit.

            Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana are four southern states that have embraced the electronic (and now the AI) revolution of recent decades; they speak Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu in preference to Hindi and often vote for regional parties or the Indian National Congress in preference to the BJP. Their residents, by and large, are less enamored of hindutva than their counterparts in Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, and other northern states where agricultural pursuits are much more central to daily life than in the more manufacturing and service-oriented cities of the south.

            India may be considered a vast nation of 1.4 billion people divided by ethnicities and languages and held together previously by the common English language and a democratic ethos nurtured by its Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, its founding father, and by the liberal ideological example of Mohandas K. Gandhi, a secular saint.

            Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi led the Indian National Congress Party to victory in national elections from 1947 to 1989.     Modi became Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2002 after several decades adhering to and promoting the extreme Hindu nationalistic views of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the far-right Hindu ideological platform of the BJP.  Shortly afterwards, there were racial riots in Gujarat, with thousands of Muslims victimized. Modi was an authoritarian chief minister, but he also modernized the state and improved its infrastructure and its economic competitiveness.

         In elections in 2019, the BJP won almost 38 per cent of the vote, growing its majority to 303 of the 545-member lower house. Congress only took 52 seats, with no party large enough to be designated the official opposition.

             Ever since, India has moved incrementally to strengthen Modi's strong hand, increase the reign of the BJP, and marginalize anyone and any group opposing him and the BJP.  Dissent has not been welcomed. Even India's judiciary has gradually lost its vaunted independence and become an instrument of state control.

            Advancing Hinduism has been a Modi talisman and a BJP political pledge that has led to more and more attacks on Muslims by local vigilantes.  Local gangs only infrequently hampered by police or arraigned by prosecutors accuse Muslims of slaughtering cows and eating beef illegally; many innocent and unwitting Muslims have been killed or maimed.

            Destroying a mosque in Ayodhya because it allegedly occupied the site of a pre-Mughal Hindu temple was one of Modi's great projects. The building of a temple in place of the mosque was well celebrated as a BJP victory.

            Last month, Modi's government announced that Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis, and Sikhs who can prove that they have lived in India for a least six years and who come from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, or Pakistan could become citizens. But not Muslims, certainly under no circumstances the handfuls of oppressed Rohingya (Muslim) refugees from Myanmar who had managed to enter India and settle down.  The new law explicitly violates the secular principles of India's 1947 constitution. Faith was never a condition of citizenship but will become one now.

            The persecution of the Chief Minister of Delhi State (which surrounds New Delhi, the national capital) takes this slicing away of democracy to another level. Kerjiwal has been a thorn in Modi's side for several years. He came to power in Delhi in 2015 on an anti-corruption platform which succeeded poorly across the sprawling nation but propelled him and his Aam Aadmi ("Common People's) Party (AAP) to power in Delhi.

            His state has been more permissive and less bureaucratic than most. It also loosened rules against state control of the sale of alcohol, which angered Modi's administration. Delhi's new liquor policy was intended to curb black market sales, increase revenues, and ensure even distribution of liquor licenses across the city. But, under pressure from the national government, Kerjiwal had to rescind those reforms, especially after his deputy chief minister and a key cabinet minister were accused by Modi's Federal Enforcement Directorate of accepting kickbacks from private liquor barons. Now the Directorate has moved against Kejriwal, accusing him and his associates of accepting $12 million in bribes from the liquor industry. Kerjiwal says that he is innocent, and that Modi is retaliating to prevent AAP from winning the Delhi contest yet again.

            Kejriwal, a former tax inspector and mechanical engineer who started battling corruption in 2000 and had won the internationally prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Asian leadership prize in 2006 for his efforts to promote transparency and the "right to information" in India, in 2012 formed the AAP to mobilize voters against corrupt practices throughout the nation. Two years later his party contested 400 seats in a national election but was wildly outvoted. Kejriwal personally lost his own contest in Varanasi by 300,000 votes -- to Modi himself.

            A year later, however, Kejriwal and the AAP surprised everyone by winning 67 of 70 seats in a regional election for control of Delhi State.  Kejriwal had campaigned vigorously against corruption and for housing for the poor, clean water, lower electricity costs, free wifi, and protection for women. The AAP said that it intended to change the local political culture in a state of now about 20 million people and to "provide a model where an ordinary common man is encouraged to become a stakeholder in our democracy."

            Kejriwal opened up the budgetary process in his state to citizen participation. More broadly, he began consulting with citizens about legislation and about how Delhi State should be run.  He encouraged citizens to report corruption and established a mobile telephone application allowing anyone to start recording (and then submitting) conversations soliciting bribes. In 2020, Kerjiwal and the AAP again won 67 of 70 seats in the Delhi State assembly.

            Kejriwal later opposed the national government's emphasis on Hinduism. He tried within his state to keep Muslims from harm.  For residents of his state, the chief minister also provided clean water and free electricity, as promised.

            Modi's men have never been happy with AAP's rule in the national capital. With an election a month away, it has now crippled the AAP as it has equally crippled the Congress Party.  "Power drunk Modi Govt has frozen the accounts of the country's largest Opposition party," said the head of Congress. It can no longer pay its organizers to canvas for votes.

            Modi's successive triumphs have installed him as a world leader. The U.S. and Russia court his favor. But India's remarkable recent GDP growth and its other signs of prosperity and advancement mask the creeping authoritarianism at its core.  India is far less democratic than it was in its earliest decades. It is far less fair, and just, to its non-majority inhabitants and, as the jailing of Kejriwal suggests, increasingly intolerant of anything or anyone that threatens Modi' personalistic rule.

            India is a major world power, but with a very flawed core. Washington and Brussels must dance around the flaws, support India against China (in the Himalayas), bemoan its arbitraging of Russian petroleum imports, and hope -- somehow -- to persuade Modi to behave more democratically.  His billion people deserve as much.