Mr. Modi’s India

In 2014, Narendra Modi, leader of India’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), became Prime Minister of India by winning the largest democratic election in history. He handily defeated the Congress Party’s candidate, and assumed office with a powerful mandate to reform.

Modi’s decisive electoral victory proved the health and dynamism of India’s democracy. His opponent, Rahul Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma), is heir to India’s most dominant political dynasty, the Nehru-Gandhi family, whose members have ruled the country in some capacity for the majority of India’s post-independence existence.

Victory for Modi, the son of a tea seller from a low-caste family, was a symbolic victory for equality in India. Perhaps more importantly, the country’s Electoral Commission reported record voter turnout, a sign of healthy democratic engagement. Modi received an outpouring of support from both foreign observers and large segments of the Indian diaspora due to his history of implementing “pro-business” policies as the Chief Minister (equivalent to a governor) in the state of Gujarat.

Despite widespread support, many Indians voiced concerns about Modi’s prior association with militant Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim violence. Quietly, some observers feared that the new Prime Minister would use his mandate to empower Hindu chauvinism instead of focusing on needed reform. In an editorial following the election, the New York Times cautioned that “Mr. Modi has set very high expectations for economic revival…but he can’t achieve those goals if he exacerbates sectarian divisions, for example, by using divisive rhetoric against Muslims.”

Four years into Modi’s reign, with India’s democratic institutions under vigorous assault and Hindu chauvinism on the rise, his skeptics’ worst nightmares have been realized.

Optimists pointed to Modi’s successful record of fostering economic growth in Gujarat as evidence that he would implement reforms to boost the national economy. Some government initiatives have been laudable. Corruption at the highest levels of government appears to have diminished. Initiatives to electrify and improve sanitation in rural villages are intelligent, despite inconsistent implementation. A new bankruptcy code should make it safer to invest in Indian firms.

Unfortunately, this is the extent of the BJP’s legislative success. The much-anticipated Goods and Services Tax (GST), intended to simplify India’s impossible tax code, has disappointed business owners by failing to do so. The policy was expected to introduce a standard tax rate on all goods and services and reduce the number of tax returns businesses would have to file. Instead, the finished product codified a huge range of rates for different goods, confusingly excluded electricity and petroleum products, and barely cut down on the burdensome process of filing taxes. While the botched implementation of the GST restricted an opportunity for economic growth, the government’s so-called “demonetization” policy was embarrassing. The law rendered 86 percent of circulating Indian currency worthless overnight, with the vaguely-articulated goal of reducing corruption. The policy led to massive queues outside of banks and a painful slowdown in economic activity which hurt thousands of small businesses. Modi has also failed to deliver on his campaign promise of land reform.

With such an underwhelming record as an economic reformer, the BJP is focusing its recent campaigning on issues that will energize its Hindu-nationalist base. In doing so, Modi and the BJP are threatening the secular democracy enshrined in India’s constitution and the country’s multicultural character.

In its historical struggles with the dominant Congress Party, the BJP has successfully mobilized voters by inflaming tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Modi himself first gained international notoriety in 2002 for his inaction during anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, which claimed the lives of nearly a thousand Indian Muslims and left tens of thousands without homes. Modi’s defiant refusal to acknowledge Muslim victims led the Bush administration to impose a visa ban on him. Since the 2014 election, BJP politicians at every level have renewed their commitment to anti-Muslim rhetoric. Party officials have circulated wild conspiracy theories that high birth rates among India’s Muslims threaten to make Hindus a minority. In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, Modi handpicked his Chief Minister as Yogi Adityanath, a militant Hindu monk with a well-documented history of instigating anti-Muslim violence. Adityanath has praised President Trump’s Muslim ban and is notorious for blaming Muslim youth for crime and poverty in his home city of Gorakhpur. In one of his more infamous speeches he threatened that “if they [Muslims] kill even one Hindu, we will kill 100”.

[su_pullquote]Ceaseless othering of the Muslim community and fearmongering among Hindus has led to a sharp increase in hate crimes across India.[/su_pullquote]Ceaseless othering of the Muslim community and fearmongering among Hindus has led to a sharp increase in hate crimes across India. “Cow vigilantes” have become a menace, murdering, lynching, and in some cases gang-raping Muslims suspected of slaughtering cattle. Cows are sacred to Hindus, but dairy farms and slaughterhouses have long operated in an India whose government was committed to secularism. Laws protecting cows are now choking new businesses already operating under the threat of violent assault. A recent study of hate crimes in the past eight years found that ninety-seven percent of reported crimes occurred after the 2014 election. Mob violence terrorizing Muslims and even impoverished Hindus, who are often left unprotected by police, has become a common occurrence. These frequent crimes continue to undermine already-fragile faith in the justice system.

[su_pullquote align=”right”]The Ministry of Culture recently convened a committee of Indian historians with the expressed goal, in the words of committee chairman K.N. Dikshit, to “help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.”[/su_pullquote]The BJP’s religious intolerance is not limited to its rhetoric. A Reuters report confirmed what many academics in India have been saying for years: the Modi government is engaged in a concerted effort to rewrite Indian history. An initiative by the Ministry of Culture recently convened a committee of Indian historians with the expressed goal, in the words of committee chairman K.N. Dikshit, to “help the government rewrite certain aspects of ancient history.” The committee is fulfilling the long-held ambition of Hindu nationalists, who believe that all modern Indians are descended from a common Hindu people who have lived on the land for over ten thousand years. This is not true. The BJP has a track record of manipulating history and science to fit its narrative of Hindu primacy in India. One minister made national headlines advocating for evolution to be removed from science textbooks because “nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral, have said they saw an ape turning into a man.” Other ministers and officials have made claims ranging from the incorrect (yoga can cure cancer, cows exhale oxygen) to the bizarre (ancient Hindus conducted nuclear tests thousands of years ago).

While the Modi administration’s religious fundamentalism has already degraded the political discourse in India, this move to alter the national identity is insidious. The Ministry of Culture has said that the committee’s findings will be reflected in the nation’s textbooks. In addition to the escalating violence against Muslim communities, this change in pedagogy will further disenfranchise Muslims and reinforce abhorrent and false ideas of Hindu cultural superiority. The focus of this administration’s policy now appears to be on creating a Hindu homeland that subordinates the rule of law to religious considerations.

Another pressing concern for Indian democracy is the Modi administration’s assault on the checks to his power. They demonstrated their disregard for democratic norms earlier this year in the southern state of Karnataka, where a coalition of opposition parties won a clear majority of legislature seats. Rather than allow the coalition to form a government, Karnataka’s governor, a former Modi aide, declared that the BJP would instead form a government despite them being the minority party. The Indian Supreme Court was forced to intervene and prevent what would have been a blatant miscarriage of power. Now the Supreme Court itself, one of India’s most venerated institutions, is also a target. In January, four senior justices on the court took the extraordinary step of holding a press conference to decry the blatantly partisan conduct of the conservative Chief Justice Dipak Misra. Some lawyers have even accused the BJP of blackmailing Misra. The Modi government has also blocked the ascension of Justice KM Joseph to the Supreme Court in retribution for a ruling against the BJP two years earlier, when they tried to impose “president’s rule” on the Congress Party-led government of Uttarakhand.

And finally, the media, a critical aspect of democracy, has been defanged by officials seeking to censor criticism of the BJP government. Last year, India dropped three spots to 138th in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. Journalists who criticize the government too sharply can expect to become the subjects of vicious online rumors, experience harassment by local police, and even face defamation suits. The BJP government has embraced the massive potential of social media in India to push their own “facts” and narratives. For example, the government has successfully convinced millions of poor Indians that the currency demonetization, which has made their lives unquantifiably more difficult, actually pains the rich more. The Prime Minister engages in a Trumpian pattern of loudly declaring victory on issues without actually solving them. Without a strong independent media to fact-check the government, inaccurate BJP-friendly narratives go unchallenged.

Today, many countries with democratic traditions find that tradition under assault. Modi’s contempt for democratic norms echoes that of President Trump and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. The politics of fearmongering are staples in most right-wing populist campaigns, including those supporting Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte. Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński has exerted similar pressure on the judiciary. Modi most closely resembles Turkish strongman Recep Erdogan, who rose to power as a reformer and has since tightened his grip on Turkey by using security as an excuse to persecute opponents and restrict Turkey’s media while rallying supporters around his vision of Islam.

[su_pullquote align=”right”]Indians abroad must speak out against xenophobia, authoritarianism, and racist violence, which would never be tolerated at home. Continued support for Mr. Modi’s India is hypocrisy that enables those who are actively threatening India’s existence as a pluralist democracy.[/su_pullquote]This slide is not inevitable. Indians can still reclaim their democracy, and the diaspora has a part to play. After Modi’s first victory, he toured the world speaking to sold-out crowds of Indians at New York’s Madison Square Garden and Sydney’s Allphones Arena. Like the millions of Indians who voted for him, these Indians abroad were buoyed by the promise of a more robust and reform-minded government. Indians in the diaspora should now try to square Modi’s actions with their own values. It is easy for Indians living abroad to be flippantly hawkish and nationalist, since they don’t have to live with the consequences of that dismissiveness. Modi and this BJP government stand for the supremacy of Hindu nationalism, not the flourishing of India. Indians abroad must speak out against xenophobia, authoritarianism, and racist violence, which would never be tolerated at home. Continued support for Mr. Modi’s India is hypocrisy that enables those who are actively threatening India’s existence as a pluralist democracy.

Rohan Palacios ’21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at rpalacios@wustl.edu.