BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you're interested, you can get it (legally) in the UK here: [1] and searching for "India: the Modi question" will most likely provide it elsewhere.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dkb144/india-the-mod...
Tbf, having seen the COVID lockdown footage of how they would beat up even larger businessmen in suits with their canes, I can't say I am surprised.
It is quite an insane sight for anyone outside the culture.
It also projects western circumstances onto places where it doesn’t make sense. Multiculturalism is a cultural adaptation to America being a post-colonial, post-slavery, immigrant nation. In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns. The moral connotations are very much tied up in the fact that those other cultural groups are in western countries because of the stuff western people did that wasn’t so nice. That doesn’t have any force when you’re talking about Hindus in India or the Japanese in Japan. Indeed in India it probably cuts the other way. My surname didn’t make its way 3,000 miles from the Middle East to Bangladesh through a process that was very nice.
I don't think even a cursory look at the history of Europe in the last few hundred years bears that out - you can probably start at the peace of Westphalia and keep going to the current war in Ukraine. The connection to white nationalism is not specious, it's precisely because it's a form of ethno-nationalism.
Now you've got me curious ....
"Liberal democracy" has a very specific meaning — or at least, it has to, or else there's no common language to describe these things. What India is engaging in is objectively not liberal democracy, it's illiberal democracy[1], but that can be okay. The fact that "illiberal democracy is bad" is the Western notion / post-colonial imposition on an independent India.
I personally disagree with most Indians, and tend to prefer liberal democracies, but that's my Western notion (and I say that as an ethnic Indian that went to high school in India, but has settled down in America).
[1] Poland, Hungary, and arguably Turkey are also notable examples of increasingly illiberal democracies
I'm asking why you think the BBC should be exempt from scrutiny like any other organisation.
And if you happen to be belong to the rest of the ~99.13% world population, you can grab it here:
Episode 1 - magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3C378A82CF67A1107523CA6C647077403A1EF74D&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E01+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopentracker.i2p.rocks%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F47.ip-51-68-199.eu%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2920%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateparty.gr%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.cyberia.is%3A6969%2Fannounce
Episode 2 - magnet:?xt=urn:btih:F55992F922B9A0E49C09E198835F0F06EE07635B&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E02+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopentracker.i2p.rocks%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F47.ip-51-68-199.eu%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2920%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateparty.gr%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.cyberia.is%3A6969%2FannounceIt’s been over a decade since I’ve used BitTorrent and I didn’t know magnet links were still popular. I hate seeding and there was also a lot of malware hidden in public trackers.
Once I switched to Usenet I never looked back. P2P file sharing has never been a good experience for me.
But even without anything more than open, decode, play - anywhere a vulnerability exists could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
Really, a video player should be a dumb bit of glue code that wires together file open APIs with video playback APIs, and a few bits and bobs for saving preferences (API) and allowing remote control (another API). There’s no reason whatsoever for a video player to be able to access files arbitrarily or connect to the internet or log keystrokes in the background or anything else! The only reason they can do this is because we haven’t built operating systems with all this in mind, apart from mobile OS’s that is.
"Standard APIs" isn't some silver bullet to never have any security vulnerabilities. There can absolutely be vulnerabilities in "standard APIs".
ffmpeg is a pretty standard media utility, and it gets lots of CVEs. Decoding complicated media is complicated and often done in unsafe languages in attempts to squeeze more performance.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-3611...
We have this kind of API permission (capability) system on phones. Why can’t we have a really fine-grained one on desktops? It’s like a firewall for APIs.
file system for finding external subs (or like, playing the video)
internet for streaming
and then oh look, it has the permission
If an attack corrupts how the OS checks permissions, it doesn't matter if you've got some API framework for calls, it broke out of it.
The level of lockdown you were describing is what we have on mobile platforms (which incidentally still have lots of malware). Generally speaking, people want more flexibility out of general purpose computers.
On the other hand something like pledge would be useful here, since the attack vector is untrusted files, not untrusted applications. With pledge, the application could open any files, then relinquish the ability to open new files before parsing the contents.
I expected this response. I think it's a false equivalence. We don't need to have a proprietary locked-down operating system like iOS in order to give the user full control over the capabilities an application has access to. We just need a standard API for handling these sorts of permissions.
Curious to hear how you would go about solving this problem. It seems that there is just a lot of inherent complexity here and I can't see any way to avoid that complexity without preventing the system from being useful.
It's not reliable unless you happen to know the specific, unpatched exploit on the target system. There aren't general purpose vulnerabilities for such things.
With my Usenet automation I’ve never had the issue in about 9ish years but it could happen. I pay a usenet provider and indexer a low fee to rid myself of torrents and seeding.
> Safe and fast parsers with Nom and Rust
It used an old version of vlc and a buffer overflow vulnerability to get code execution.
Certainly don't miss those hours of waiting for an ISO to download only to find it's all corrupt, or a record label plant, or a handheld recording of a cinema screen...
I think you mean 2 decades. I haven't waited an hour for anything to download since I used to grab bootleg concerts that were very poorly seeded in the early/mid aughts.
[1] - https://rumble.com/v26y14s-india-the-modi-question-part-1-by... [829.13MiB via yt-dlp]
[2] - https://rumble.com/v271ob0-india-the-modi-question-part-2-by... [341.35MiB via yt-dlp]
https://www.wired.com/story/rumble-sends-viewers-tumbling-to...
Seems a justified concern, please consider vouching that comment.
As in, who is the person who cannot bear this and is it because the ego is being bruised, or because it portrays India in a certain manner?
Maybe some of these world leaders should consider therapy seeing as they can't handle their own problems by themselves and rather punish people around them for it.
Modi may be able to brush off the English as patronizing assholes who have no right to lecture India on anything; but that doesn't change the fact he's playing by a Hitler-lite playbook, and speedrunning European rhetoric circa 1930-1945, with the serial numbers filed off.
The British/Irish and the Troubles, the Germans and the Jews; it's really not that hard to perceive the direction things are being steered. That the rest of the world is not more openly hostile to this type of atrocity is more frightening to me than anything else.
But eh, "India's problem, and we have bigger fish to fry". Mark my words: this won't be the end, and the ensuing bloodshed will be a stain on the state for many years to come.
People like this are why we cannot have nice things.
This would have been just another docuseries on the BBC had they not reacted like this. Now everyone is sharing links and wanting to see what the fuss is all about.
Oh no. The Streisand Effect is so '90s.
Current political operatives the world over, particularly conservative/nationalist ones, have since learnt to weaponize Streisand - they stoke polarization on relatively minor arguments, in order to foster a siege mentality where everyone is forced to declare whether they are "with us or against us". This solidifies their support and makes the opposition look vague and unprincipled.
This is a line that goes all the way from GWBush to Berlusconi, Modri, Orbàn, Trump, Abbott, Turnbull, Erdogan, Salvini, and Johnson.
Modri wants this to be a big thing, precisely because it allows him to play the victim against "evil and corrupt colonialists bent on keeping India down". As policies go, it costs effectively nothing and has great propaganda value.
Unleashing tax officials on an organization painting a negative picture (well, not, Modi and accoplice paint it, the BBC only presents it) is a failed attempt of masquerading an authoritarian government overstepping their limits of governance. If they were honest and not coward they would simply tell: 'Shouldn't uncover our dirty laundry, get out of here or will get hurt!'
They only highlight not cover this way what we already suspect of India being an elective dictatorship (similar to Hungary).
Isn't that what every government do? Remember that Al Capone went to jail because of tax issues, the government couldn't prove anything he was accused to.
If you look at Germany, Michael Ballweg is sitting in jail (without trial) for tax evasion accusations. The fact that the government didn't like his movement that protested against unconstitutional anti-covid measures was not enough reason to put him there.
Almost every government has a history of unleashing a tax department on their political enemies. We call it a legal state when it happens in our country, and a state terror when it happens in another.
A cynic in me would say that, in this case, India is learning from the best democracies in the world, US and Germany.
EDIT: I'm not saying Al Capone did not do tax evasion, or that Ballweg had all his books 100% clean. In any remotely complex tax system, it's not even possible, since there is always enough place for interpretation. But the fact that some guys are prosecuted just because government doesn't like them, and the ones that government likes get away with it, is unfortunately properly of almost every legal system, democracies included. In the end, Modi's government may find a lakh or two of expenses not filled properly and punish BBC with 20 krores.
My point is just that this is not unique to India, and one should not look down at India and call out on it for doing what everyone else is doing.
> The U.S. Justice Department has reached a settlement with dozens of conservative groups that claimed the Internal Revenue Service unfairly scrutinized them based on their political leanings when they sought a tax-exempt status, court documents showed.
I don't know anything about the German guy.
I wouldn't be confident that every piece of equipment in that office was obtained legally in the country, let alone being able to prove it. For example someone whose mobile phone got lost/smashed/blownup last time they were in Kabul, so they bought a new one, then returned to their Delhi office. Or a piece of equipment that was legally imported back in 2012 but the paperwork has gone. Or a UK purchased harddrive that a passing cameraman left in the edit suite, or something bought locally but the receipt didn't list the serial number on it.
I'm confident there will be an "irregularity" somewhere. I'm confident any office in any building in any city in the world will have similar problems irrefutably proving where any equipment came from.
How is that related to the BBC?
I think iso1631 is saying that there may be enough red tape for imports into India that the BBC could technically be breaking the law for failing to declare/pay duties on some equipment they or their employees brought into the country.
If you're in the US, my experience is that it's kind of an anomaly in terms of relatively light enforcement of import taxes for individual citizens. For example, most countries will look at the declared value on foreign parcels and force the recipient to pay import tax before releasing it to them.[1] If someone walked the same thing over the border, and the government wanted to make things hard on that person, they might accuse them of tax evasion, etc.
[1] For those NOT in the US wondering how this is unusual, individuals generally don't have to pay before receiving the parcel here.
It wasn't the employees home raided but the BBC office.
Or at least that's how the law works in a lot of countries.
Assuming the perpetrator is unknown.
Who pays out for the damages ultimately?
If something stolen is found in an office, and the company has nothing to do with it, the company is not held responsible for the theft.
Then the same thing. The police and the prosecution find out if this was illegal, if the possession is illegal, who possesed if and who brought it and why, then who is responsible and a court decides if someone is guilty. The court will decide if the company is responsible E.g. because of negligence, they might not have implemented the law, educated their employees etc. In the case of dynamite that an employee brought, the company is not responsible, there might be terrorism charges against the employee.
The company is always ultimately responsible for whatever is discovered on their premises by default.
Well yes
If those phones were bought out of country there may be tax implications
I was arguing with the OP that Capone's sentence was not political but this thing is.
He is in jail because of increased flight risk as he cleaned out his house and was trying to sell it.
The highest German court is currently deciding if his jail time is too long already.
Yes to varying extends and with varying frequencies. No government is perfectly clean in this regard though some are much better than others. Comfortably wealthy westerners who've never been harassed by any government or quasi-government institutions will happily write of their own governments small amount of it though because that's more comforting than realizing we do it too and having the tough discussion of where the line ought to be.
Twisting the law so you can jail a known criminal for a term that is unreasonable for the charges you can actually convict him on is surely a far cry from jailing political opponents over BS but it is on the same spectrum of odious government behavior and the fact of the matter is that HN types tend to draw the "here is where I stop looking the other way" line on that spectrum a lot closer to the "jailing dissidents" end than people who have adversarial contact with such institutions.
> doesn't stop comfortably wealthy westerners who've never been harassed by any government or quasi-government institutions
It comes across like a prejudiced assumption, and just hurts it. Flames others into an incendiary mess. Why are you so mad, who is it towards? Westerners? Dungeons and dragons of all things has been dealing with these ethics surrounding laws for years. Games. Your anger is misdirected at "hn types" because that is just a generalization.
Regardless, your principle stands. The ends justifying the means as a principle is despised for good reasons even if some laud it as well.
The question should rather be: Is this a good thing or abusing the power?
(Al Capone did tax fraud on a spectacular level, among other more serious offenses. BBC shown a documentary. Feel the difference?)
Also: billion flies eating shit will not make it a good thing. :/
Bad habbit should be a repelling thing not something be repeated and brought forward as excuse for gods sake!
(I cannot tell if the above examples for abuse are founded or not, except Al Capone, my response is for this 'other do so I will too' kind of derailed rhetoric or alibi that I hate so so much)
Financial crimes tend to be a lot harder to hide than bodies, and the witnesses (in the form of records) harder to bribe.
“My father,” Elliott Roosevelt observed of his famous parent, “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”
https://www.hillsdale.edu/educational-outreach/free-market-f...
Nobody is claiming that India's corruption is unique or unprecedented, just that it is happening. Germany and the US have done a lot worse than selective prosecution, and it would be better if India did not do those other, worse things.
"It's all right because the US and Germany did it" gives you slavery and death camps.
I think you have that backwards.
Ballweg is in jail because allegedly he took in donations to support a cause, but then (ab)used them for himself personally, defrauding the donors and evading taxation. That's illegal, and thus he's in jail.
Indeed protesting Covid is not enough to put you in jail, because that's not actually illegal. You're insinuating the government chose to persecute him for his political views. That's a pretty bold claim that I think would need substantiation.
Personally, given the amount of negativity that they have thrown around, I'm glad Modi gave them the shock treatment - I think they have earned it and in spades.
And just in case this is seen as a pure BJP persective, Indira Gandhi had also done so long ago and that straightened them out for a while.
[1] - https://rumble.com/v26y14s-india-the-modi-question-part-1-by... [829.13MiB via yt-dlp]
[2] - https://rumble.com/v271ob0-india-the-modi-question-part-2-by... [341.35MiB via yt-dlp]
Because this reminds me of the traffic light in Grozny, Chechnya that is always red, the people from the regime just ignore it but if someone undesirable doesn't obey the red light(they have no choice, the light is always red) they will face the wrath of the strict traffic code of Chechnya: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1595456040677556226
Similar approach was used in Turkey to take over the mainstream media from conglomerates. So they create very stick tax code which would be very hard to follow and the government doesn't care anyway and as a result people violate the code all the time. When these businessmen "misbehave", like one of their news channels goes a bit too hard on the government they send the tax people for an audit and uncover all the irregularities and slap a fine that would definitely bankrupt them and if the businessmen play ball most of the fine gets stripped away and goes back to business as usual. If the government loses faith with their ability to play ball or they think it would be better to take over the business, they move forward with the fine. That's how some of the larges businesses in the country were seized by the government or force-sold to government friendly businesspeople at a nice discount.
Yes, we do.
it turns the rule of law into rule by law: rulers and the ruled
it creates a class of people who are not subjected to the law while unleashing "order" on the powerless.
it's all hidden behind the curtain and turn a society into nothing more than "might makes right".
the vail is lifted whenever the inconsistencies are exposed which is why the system always aims to avoid transparency to maintain its power.
instead of rule law, society becomes nothing more than a hierarchy of power with a lot of bullshit decorum
unfortunately, it's pervasive across governments, especially less subtle authoritarian governments.
I wish nothing more than true rule of law.
Which of course is a paradox as the superior authority cannot be bound by written laws in order to do this.
In India, at least, and probably elsewhere too, charialsmatic leaders are often the one who destroys instrlitutions because rules comes in their way and slows them down (whatever they are trying to achieve). Last charismatic leader before Modi was Indira Gandhi who imposed emergency.
I'd love to see lame leaders and powerful institutions in democracies.
Which just about sums up the independence of the process.
https://archive.ph/uEqAc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_News
- Why Modi Walked Out in 2007 and the BJP Now Shuns Me: https://thewire.in/books/narendra-modi-karan-thapar-intervie...
- How India's ace journalist was punished for confronting Prime Minister Modi: https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-india-s-ace-journalist...
Recently, NDTV also saw some high-profile senior editors and journalists exit after Adani (Modi's crony capitalist buddy) bought it.
The way it presents things is, crudely put, "Hindus and Muslims were living happily together in India, and then Modi came along, stoked tensions, and things all went south". While Modi definitely played a part and has much to answer for, things are significantly more complex than that. "Muslims set pilgrims on fire during the Godhra train burning" accusation/assumption – which probably isn't true – didn't come out of thin air, as such things did happen before.[1]
One example of what I considered serious misrepresentation is (quote from the documentary) "In June last year, a BJP spokeswoman made comments about the Prophet Muhammad on TV that angered Muslims in India and around the world". Curiously, it doesn't say what the "comments" were, so I looked it up and they were really mild:
"I want to ask those with affection for the Prophet that at the age of 53, he married a 6-year-old girl Aisha and then at the age of 56, he consummated that relationship with 9-year-old Aisha ... does such relationship not come under the category of rape?" [2]
Which is a long-standing and common criticism, and the ages are generally accepted by Muslim scholars as well. And the "around the world" means the usual religio-fascist countries that are angered whenever someone criticised their religion; you know, the type of people who think that someone getting beheaded for showing a cartoon or stabbed in the eye for writing a book is just a fantastic thing.
Yet, the way it's presented in the documentary leaves the impression that she said something vile and horribly Islamophobic. She did no such thing. Yet she was suspended from the BJP, seemingly mostly to placate violent threats from some Muslims. Several people died in the protests over those comments. The person who made the remarks had to have security due to death threats.
There's a bunch of things like this where I felt it presented a rather myopic view of things. Not false exactly, but not the full story, either.
One could counter by saying that the film was only intended to examine Modi's role, and isn't supposed to be a full examination of the full conflict. But I think one needs to understand at least the basics of the full conflict and context to examine Modi's role in it.
Of course, none of this justifies India's response to the film. But I did not like the documentary, and did not consider it all that balanced. Yes, BJP officials were given ample time, but by focusing on only a specific set of events instead of a more complete picture it was quite balanced.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Chamba_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Wandhama_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Amarnath_pilgrimage_massa... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Kishtwar_massacre and more
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Muhammad_remarks_controve...
i get the pushback from the current administration for any media criticism, but i am surprised by how many indians are unaware of these events. i hate to see them only get an incomplete picture.
But oh boy do I wanna see it now - what is it that Modi doesn't want me to see about him? Definite watch for me!
My great-grandparents were victims of pogroms and my grandfather's family was killed by the nazis. The BBC doesn't go far enough in explaining why someone who led ethnic massacres isn't fit to lead a country.
Why did you redact the link? Seems a bit odd for such a specific and strong accusation against some unknown person?
[edit] please review the context of this thread and/or watch the BBC documentary in question for a deeper understanding of the topic.
I agree - there is nothing in the documentary about Modi and the BJP that has not been hashed out dozens of times before. Its all the more surprise that it is getting suppressed, which will lead to people watching it even more than if it was ignored.
The BJP is media savvy, but using the Indian bureaucracy and especially the Tax department to score points is clumsy.
Clumsy? This is Amit Shah's standard playbook. Remember how many prominent Congress leaders were arrested for tax evasion.
BJP's social media attacks on Rahul Gandhi and the Congress are effective because they seem to be more organic.
Strange.
To be clear, this is not about the West taking sides in religious or ethnic issues; there are limits on what kinds of violence people are willing to accept in the supply chain. China is incredibly hard to divorce from, but we're doing it.
The response to this run of the mill documentary which likely no one would have watched and/or heard about has been chilling. The Modi government has absolutely embarrassed itself and has basically gone out of its way to prove that whatever the documentary says is correct, whether it is or isn’t. And the doubling down will hurt not just the governments but also the country’s image.
It's also problematic having to fight battles on all fronts at once (and at home for the US, which isn't exactly at the height of democracy itself)[0].
It's also worth being aware that much of the world sees the other side of the US, meddling and not really doing so in the best interests of the local population (not to mention UK colonial history).
We're in this funny place where the US often dictates globally but the protections that are in place with it's own laws only extend as far as citizens. Which is where you end up with all the 5-eyes spying on each other and sharing intel, thereby avoiding the protections put in place to prevent the domestic use of those capabilities[1].
[0]: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/02/01/the-worl...
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...
I'm sorry but De facto it is kinda ridiculous. Since "western" entities almost completely control media and influence. Criticism always occur one way street.
> Criticism always occur one way street.
? What kind of sources are you listening to? Even the Rupert Murdoch ones are filled with vitriol critizing their respective regions. A publication having a xenophobic bent, and that being useful to politicians is another tangential thing.
What may or may not happening in China has nothing to do with it. The issue is geopolitical and the seemingly collision course between an increasingly powerful China and the West, especially the USA.
Edit: Likewise, with China the #1 threat the West will want to keep India on side. An example is Russia: India has been keeping its trade with Russia, and even increased it since the war in Ukraine started. The West has been very quiet on that.
Ironic - or scary - that this is happening in the (proudly) largest "democracy" in the world.
don't forget the american stance on india-pakistan conflicts during the cold war either. the west can do as they please with sanctions against india. they cannot be so liberal with china, however.
the eu, for example, puts a lot of restrictions on indian drugs and produce in the name of "regulations" and gets away with it.
at the end of the day, the people of india can have a "surprised pikachu" revelation about their current leader and choose to change him with someone else comes the election time. you cannot say the same about the other place. the west can influence on the same as well, if they so wish.
This is how freedom of speech dies, bit by bit......
Similar too? A law so squishy, it can target anyone and all things.
If communal harmony is that fragile, it is not communal harmony.
> it could create communal disharmony and doesn't actually provide any further court admissible evidence.
I'll wait for these tax officials to raid OpIndia and SwarajyaMag's offices soon as well then.
It seems like the West, and the US more specifically, isn't capable anymore of physically reproducing/replacing its technocratic elites, which in this day and age mostly means its tech elites. Which made me wonder what would happen in case of a direct US vs China war when in some companies 20% to 30% to even 50% of the engineers have some close family connections on the Mainland. Will those engineers and tech people be ok with seeing China losing and their close family back home physically hurting?
What would happen if the US starts playing it rough with India? When you've got the CEOs of some of the biggest US tech companies being of Indian descent themselves, not to mention the large percentage of Indian engineers active in the Valley and not only.
It was way easier to set up the Manhattan project when many of the people involved had escaped physical annihilation here in Europe (against them and against their close family), but will the US be able to reproduce a future Manhattan project (let's say in AI) using and employing people whose families back home (in China, most probably, in India, as a possibility) would be directly and life-threatening affected by their work? I have my doubts.
Actions to take against a ruling party that has widespread support from the police, legislature, judiciary, and media are limited.
In India, about 15% of Indians are Christians, Muslims, or other non Hindus. And among Hindus, about 40% are Dalits. The majority of Indians in India are threatened by this rise in fascist actions and rhetoric.
And yet, even against all odds, a few people in India stand up for justice. The silence or inaction of the majority should not be criticized too harshly since it is not easy to put everything on the line. But those that do deserve all of humanity’s appreciation.
Under Modi, India’s press is not as free anymore - April 2, 2020 - Vindu Goel and Jeffrey Gettleman https://archive.ph/zPhMH
Jailed Indian journalist gets bail almost two years after arrest - September 10, 2022 - Shaikh Azizur Rahman https://archive.ph/5sxUA
Rana Ayyub, journalist and Modi critic, barred from leaving India - March 30, 2022 - Aakash Hassan https://archive.ph/Ibu7S
I'm aware of that, as I'm also aware that many Russians (especially the educated tech elites) are against the current government in Moscow.
I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the guys calling the shots in Washington, as in, what measures should be taken in regards to the Chinese very-well represented tech diaspora in case of a war against China? (and, as I said, if some skirmishes involving the current Indian leadership were to start). When it came to Russia it looks like the the US and the West went all in, almost all Russians were treated as guilty by default unless.
I'm wondering if the same actions will be taken against the Chinese working for the big US tech firms (or against the Indians). I'm saying that that would be harder for the US to carry out (compared to the current shitting on the Russian diaspora).
There are also lower and higher castes among Indian Muslims and Christians as well. It's a indigenous form of social stratification, more analogous to how we think of ethnicity or race, that's independent of peoples' confessional identity.
Thanks for correcting me on OBC and Dalits. The framework is definitely problematic. And it adds another layer of complexity to racial, religious, and economic demographics. Thanks for prompting me to learn more about this. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/attitudes-ab...
But I don't think it's accurate to say the majority of Indians are threatened by this. The BJP enjoys fairly strong support among Dalit communities (about 40% in the last election IIRC), with a decent amount of the remainder voting for Dalit organized political parties due to communal affiliation rather than categorical opposition to the BJP as a party. The party as a whole is not minoritarian or fringe (though it has such factions within it), and the attempts by English language media to treat them as a sort of pariah government will backfire.
The party's attacks on civil society are troubling and, while, the presence of roving goon squads running around terrorizing people over random slights didn't start with them (and is usually more by junior local parties like the Shiv Sena), their selective approach to meting out justice and slow-rolling investigations has begun to normalize this behavior. This will only mean further ratcheting up of communal tensions across the country and making the social trust and cohesive political culture necessary for democratic institutions to work more brittle.
But all that said, they don't seem to really be engaged in the kinds of election rigging we see from right-wing parties in other countries with creeping authoritarian movements (like the USA). They actually win fair elections straight up, without leaning on counter-majoritarian institutions or voter suppression schemes like our own GOP rely on. Nor do they engage in the same extent of corrupt, clientelist political organization that the opposition Congress Party is dependent on (there is plenty of corruption, but it's India and we apply a normalized scale). I think a lot of the English language commentary on Indian politics has trouble grappling with the fact that this is a political party with a broad-base of popular support across the country. They try to cast it as a minority faction that is playing unfairly, characterized by its most lunatic fringe elements, but that is simply not the case. It's a mainstream institution with serious statespeople in it that mostly engages in consensus-seeking approaches to enacting policy.
I also don't really think the BJP is in the driver's seat with the ratcheting up of rhetoric and political violence as much as it is victim of some sort of societal radicalization loop as everyone else (though Modi, and particularly some of the goons under him, are a bit of an accelerant). I think the conflicts about national identity is a predictable consequence of globalization and a colossal generation of poor and rural communities being fast-tracked into structured, urban, capitalist lifestyles and all the social dislocation that brings.
You actually see the same kinds of hardening of identity lines and empowering of regressive and conservative elements across all religious groups in India. It's just that the Muslims and Christians aren't numerous enough to push that agenda as effectively in the political arena. But internally Muslim and Christian communities in India have also begun to adopt more fundamentalist and hardline approaches to practice. Many of the traditional, indigenous Indian Christian traditions are losing ground to more aggressively evangelical Churches (largely bankrolled by American missionaries). The traditionally syncretic Islamic traditions in India have become increasingly strict. Even the vaguely atheistic, educated secularist set is enamored of Marxism and other dogmatic ideological positions. It's an endemic social disease that seems to be even worse in India than it is here.
The size of the Hindu population creates a disparity in power dynamics in a democratic country that makes the same tendency extra problematic. But characterizing this as just being a "Hindu" thing is missing the underlying driving force and mistaking a symptom for the disease. The pluralist country of my youth, where everyone was kind of loosey-goosey about these boundaries seems to be gone. I just hope this is some sort of temporary mania brought on by all the social dislocation I mentioned and not the new status quo.
GPs claims like: "They actually win fair elections straight up" need citations.
The rest of the pseudo theory about identity fault-lines, and mental gymnastics about "English media biases" doesn't even warrant a reply let alone a reductionist one. The right-wing political party governing India is affiliated with fascist organizations, and this isn't even remotely debatable.
Why do you feel it necessary to deflect criticisms instead of addressing them directly? The purported rigging of elections in the US does not justify the eroding of democratic institutions in India [0]. Claims of increasing evangelism and strictness among Christians and Muslims doesn’t justify the large number of public lynchings of minorities [1] and politically motivated prosecutions of media outlets perceived to be critical of the BJP or their affiliated organizations.
Several organizations have recognized this deterioration of Democratic institutions and adjusted their ratings accordingly [0]. I understand you may think this is a conspiracy against India, but be assured it is not. Western countries have a deep seated interest in preventing unfettered nationalism and fascism from causing a widespread conflagration.
The term fascism is not used flippantly [2]. The RSS was modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. The RSS and the currently ruling BJP have a symbiotic relationship. Perhaps you were referring to the RSS when you say the BJP is not in the drivers seat.
You are well spoken and obviously care for India. I urge you to take a more critical look at what is happening in India. The international community is not trying to perpetuate colonialism or hold India to a unique standard. They want a vibrant trading partner that upholds human rights and rule of law. They also do not want to see a genocide occur in a country that is the worlds largest democracy.
0. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-56393944
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremac...
The right wing in India plays from a position of electoral strength and they have a clearly defined ideology with an evidently compelling narrative. They have well articulated things they're fighting FOR, not just an inchoate ball of resentments they're lashing out against. They are simply more concerned with functioning governance and having a political system that works than the Republicans are because they expect to live out the next 100 years.
Because they are electorally competitive they do not meaningfully threaten free and fair elections. They threaten a specific cluster of civil society organizations that are politically hostile to them (and, just so we're clear, I think this is bad too) but that's a completely different and more solvable problem. Over the next 10-15 years I worry more about the long-term health of American democracy than I do India's. India's problems are more of a 50 year horizon depending on whether the bad trends soften or harden over time.
India suffers from illiberalism, not authoritarianism. The seeds were sown before Modi's political career ever got started. The Congress party was buying votes by currying favor with caste-based parties and religious leaders, building the salience of these factors in political organizing. The norms of censoring media due to public outrage were already well established in the early 2000s when Christian and Muslim leaders organized to ban controversial media like "The Da Vinci Code" and "Satanic Verses." This isn't whataboutism, but a demonstration that when international activists frame this as a uniquely BJP or Hindutva problem, it doesn't exactly look like they're prepared to grapple with how deep the problem actually goes and care more about scoring political points.
I mentioned how the boundaries between religious communities were porous when I was a kid for a reason. The only solution is to reduce the salience of communal ID as a cleavage point. You have to hamstring regressive goons across the board, you can't be particularistic it just doesn't work.
It was a low blow for you to say I was "excusing lynching" by mentioning fundamentalism. I never said anything of the sort. You seem to view different religious communities as if they live on different planets and make decisions in isolation. These are the same people living in the same world and are all reacting the same way to the same cultural forces. Only directing the treatment at conservative Hindus is like only treating the orange cattle in the herd. They're just going to keep getting sick from the others. They pick up behaviors and respond to their surroundings. This is how the RSS started. Yeah it was modeled on Mussolini's party, but it is also true that it was a counter-reaction to the Moplah Massacre. You could tell a story that paints Savarkar as Huey Newton as easily as Mussolini and you'd only be about 10% less right. These sorts of people feed off each other and you cannot just expect one religious community to cast off its nutcases while allowing others to write the civil code and get government grants. Americans have a really reductive approach to power dynamics between races that buckets everything into White oppressors and non-White oppressed classes. It's a crude oversimplification here, but it is hilariously out of touch in India. There are a lot of overlapping dimensions of identity and everyone is a minority along at least one of them. There is a bottomless well of history for people to harbor resentments over, with plenty of justified grievances to go around.
> Several organizations have recognized this deterioration of Democratic institutions and adjusted their ratings accordingly [0].
I put it right in the start that there's been attacks on civil society and breakdown in social trust and political violence so I don't know why you're claiming I'm ignoring this. I will still stress that these adjustments are not uncontroversial, even within those organizations. In the actual text of the Freedom House report they point out that while the trend-line is bad the downgrade is partly a quirk of their methodology which doesn't handle edge cases well. The "Partly free" rating makes it look overly severe, and something as simple as using a 5 point scale instead of a 4 point one would have avoided it.
I sincerely do not believe a genocide is in the cards and people need to cool it. Violent riots and vigilanteism ARE going to happen, but that actually calls for a different set of interventions that revolve around professionalizing the police force, tackling corruption, speeding up timelines to prosecution and trial, and creating more jobs and opportunity for young men and women. The worst case scenario you are looking at is something more like the the post-Reconstruction American South than Rwanda or Kosovo in the 90s, or even Pakistan in the 40s and that's only if they fail at doing all of the above. (And I feel ridiculous needing to stress that the post-Reconstruction South was not good! But there are many different ways to not be good, some worse than others. And they require different responses.)
> The term fascism is not used flippantly [2]. The RSS was modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. The RSS and the currently ruling BJP have a symbiotic relationship.
And it has evolved substantially in the nearly 100 years since then. We might as well be talking about how the Democrats used to be the party of slavery and Hitler modeled his Jewish policy on their model of segregation. The organization itself is enormous, and is affiliated with everything from priests who go around serving free school lunches to goon squads that go around beating up couples for holding hands on Valentine's Day. It is partly due to this big tent and their reformist streaks on social issues like casteism and LGBTQ+ rights that the more extreme wings think the RSS has "gone soft."
FWIW I'd see Modi as a Latin American caudillo type, like Juan Perón minus military regalia (who I will also stress WAS NOT GOOD). But even that's an imperfect analogy for a host of reasons.
> The international community is not trying to perpetuate colonialism or hold India to a unique standard. . .They want a vibrant trading partner that upholds human rights and rule of law.
Firstly, upholding human rights and rule of law has never been a prerequisite for being a trading partner with the USA. Depending on what you're trading, it is as likely to be a detriment as anything.
Secondly, India has been held to a unique standard by the international community since independence. This is nothing new. Most recently the international community said and did nothing when Chinese forces illegally initiated skirmishes on the Indian side of a disputed border, but mere months later got on India's case about the importance of upholding a "rules based international order" when Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Narendra Modi was banned from entry into the United States, an unprecedented action to take against a foreign politician that we have never done before or since. Now he's not a great guy, but I will wear my keyboard out and not even get a fraction of the way through a list of deplorable leaders who would have been more deserving, starting with MBS on the night he dismembered an American journalist. Things like this make it difficult for even centrist or liberal Indians to take US based international organizations seriously. These antics have severely eroded their credibility when they try to raise alarms about things like the subject of this article.
For whatever it's worth I think India SHOULD be held to unique standards because it's got a billion people and if it ever bothered to project diplomatic influence it would exert enormous pull. But the hectoring tone that international organizations adopt reads as condescending, hypocritical, and filtered through the biases of a narrow clade of English media figures rather than coming from any position principled concern. All of this, obviously, makes it difficult for anyone who gives a shit to operate.
This is common for creeping authoritarianism, though. Putin won his first presidential election fair and square, and the first thing that he cracked down on was free press, not elections themselves. I'd say that the latter were not massively fraudulent until 2011.
I understand your point about how unfair and unjust guilt by association is. In a country that hoists the banner of freedom and attracts the best and the brightest from around the world, the US must take steps to protect civilians in the US from bigotry and discrimination. Regardless of their background.
I apologize for the current political climate causing Russians civilians in the US to feel this way. If it is of any solace, be assured they are not alone in their experiences.
> The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the most popular political party among Indian Americans. One-third of respondents favor the ruling BJP while just 12 percent identify with the Congress Party
> Indian Americans hold broadly favorable views of Modi. Nearly half of all Indian Americans approve of Modi’s performance as prime minister
This goes to a central contradiction which I’ve observed among Americans originally from the subcontinent: “liberalism for thee but not for me.”
1. Globalisation showing its cracks and becoming increasingly clear to be the reason for the skyrocketing of inequality and the widening of the wealth gap between the rich and the poor
2. People waking up to the fact that the West and the East are equally bad with a constant stream of bad leaders who make bad decisions for their own riches and for the huge hypocrisy as well as the apparent propaganda to which we are all (West and East) are subjected by our own governments and mainstream media outlets
3. Internet and social media making 1. and 2. extremely visible to everyone in every corner of the world
As a result the world is becoming a lot more cynic on a much wider scale than ever before, people are becoming increasingly more selfish because they see that this is how the world operates as a whole without any shame and people are therefore increasingly more inclined to give their vote to people who "offer" radically different views to the status quo.
If it's ok for them, gimme some of that sugar too!
Having said that, maybe it's only the loud minority amplified by a desperate mainstream media making it appear that way?
You probably want to define what "East" is in this context. If East is Russia + China, it's trivially easy to prove that the West is better for its own citizens.
1. Economic levels in the West.
2. Respect for citizens' lives in the West.
I'm from a country that used to be in the Eastern Bloc, and let me tell you, nobody respects its citizens' lives like the collective West. Yes, the West is still horrible for many groups for human dignity, and yes, they don't always respect their citizens' lives, but boy, are they an improvement over most of the rest of the world.
And we have the numbers, check out military casualties for each side in various wars. The West has by far fewer military casualties than China or Russia have.
And that mentality permeates everywhere. Because if you don't care if your troops die in a war, you won't care if they die in a mine or an office building.
Before you reply, keep in mind I'm talking about statistics.
Of course China still has many of its own problems. But the cartoonish notion that it's some sort of totalitarian police state dictatorship where everybody wants to flee from is propaganda. China and the west both have their own problems and their own strong points.
EDIT: Again, I'm not ignorant to the problems in China, but I don't need to list the because our main stream media makes sure that every person in the West knows about every little problem China has. So instead I focus on highlighting some of the many positives which I've seen and experienced as well, because for some reason the people in the West are (deliberately) not being told about those.
The population of China was about 1.412 billion, quite similar to the population of India at 1.408 billion so not really an accurate statement that nobody else has issues of population scale to deal with.
China has concentration camps.
- De Standaard (Belgium newspaper): "Are Uyghur detention camps really 'concentration camps?'" — https://m.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20210210_98292303
- Italian research paper: https://eurispes.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/rapporto.en-x...
- A legal analysis of ASPI's, Amnesty International's and Uyghur Tribunal's allegations: https://www.cowestpro.co/papers.html
China has prisons (for convicted criminals/terrorists) as well as compulsary rehabilitation and vocational training camps to combat terrorism. Western media puts both of them in the same bucket and calls them "concentration camps". A heavy-handed, quite possibly overload broad, anti-terrorism response where there are two different kinds of facilities is not at all the same as "putting innocent people in concentration camps for no reason" and certainly not "they're only doing it to ethnically cleanse". A heavy-handed anti-terrorism response deserves criticism, but is not at all the same as "genocide". The fact that media does so anyway is disingenuous.
Besides, most of the compulsory rehabilitation/training facilities have already been dismantled a couple of years ago when they concluded that the terrorism threat is gone. See this very biased AP article where they try to make you feel like something sinister is going on, but when you read the content then they essentially admit that many security measures are already gone: https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...
Earlier in this thread it is said that China uniquely deserves punishment for its actions in Xinjiang, implying that India doesn't have any problems with minority group abuse, but you really should read into Kashmir and why nobody makes a fuss about that. Even if China's Xinjiang response deserves legit criticism, the fact that Kashmir is given a free pass means that western governments, media and public don't really care about Xinjiang human rights, but merely use Xinjiang as a club to beat China. Not to mention that e.g. France also has an anti-terrorism response on which the Xinjiang response is partially inspired, but nobody talks about that as being some sort of mortal sin. This sort of double standards is a huge abuse of the concept of "human rights".
Look, I support genuine efforts to help China improve in the area of human rights. But current efforts are not genuine, they're just geopolitical attacks hidden behind the guise of human rights, and the public even can't see through this bullshit even though it's apparent if you research things up close, so I do not support them.
So does USA. It’s called the prison system. Except USA is imprisoning many more people, per capita.
But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
> But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
Again you're engaged fully in whataboutism here. I get that you have a giant hate boner for the US, but you're spewing nonsense. I'm not here to justify the war in Iraq, it was wrong. But locking up 3 million people in your own territory for no reason and surveilling a whole population around the clock is pure evil. Its gross that you're trying to defend it.
"Locking up 3 million people" is a false claim. If you look into the source of the claim that "1 million people" are locked up then you'll see that that's based on interviewing around 10 people, and then extrapolating their villages' figures to the whole of Xinjiang. The quality is evidence is so bad that even the Uyghur Tribunal failed to provide any evidence for the "1 million people" figure, but they still concluded "genocide" despite lack of evidence.
This "3 million people" figure that you cite now is absolutely without evidence. It's just the media taking the "1 million" figure and then sensationally inflating it, until finally people like you take "3 million" as a fact.
Calling it "[genocide] denial" (sic) is a way to shut down conversation and to dismiss counter-evidence and criticism out of hand.
Was the poster defending Chinese crimes? I see it entirely differently: he's pointing out double standards which is completely legit, even necessary. Let's say that China and the US are both bad. But only one of them is painted as a genocidal fascist expansionist existential threat. There can be no honest conversation about China until double standards are destroyed.
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You invoke whataboutism, but mentioning the US here is absolutely relevant because US officials have admitted on video that an important reason why they were in Afghanistan was to encourage Uyghur extremism, forcing China to respond with anti-terrorism measures.
Imagine your neighbor funding your enemies to harass you. You take measures against the harassers, but you had to resort to some dirty tricks and had to overrespond to make them stop. Your neighbor then reports you for those dirty tricks and overresponse in which you violated some laws. Yes you were absolutely wrong for violating laws, but you are also right in pointing out that your neighbor instigated the situation. Calling out your neighbor is not whataboutism, it's essential context. I don't think you think will appreciate people who deliberately ignore your neighbor's contribution and only focus on you.
How could you possibly know this? I'm from an Eastern European country that was under dictatorship (partially inspired by North Korea and PRC).
There's a deep culture of duplicity in such authoritarian regimes. You'd be a fool to say stuff that puts a bullseye on your head.
Saying that stuff is not working correctly and the future isn't bright is an implicit criticism of the authorities and I'm sure the very politically astute and smart Chinese citizens are super aware of this.
Research by Harvard, York University, Democracy Perception Index, more.
Or you could... go visit China, talk to Chinese people. The majority of them support the government.
And I haven't even brought up my own friends and family as anecdotal evidence.
But let me turn this around. If you're so convinced that all satisfaction is fake and a result of coercion, then how do you possibly prove that western European countries are not dictatorships? You could always argue that elections are fake, and that all their citizen who says that their country is a democracy only say so under coercion. One can always rationalize this to the point where the notion becomes unfalsifiable.
You should check out the talks of Kishore Mahbubani, ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat. He has seen the Soviet Union, he has seen what a dictatorship looks like, and what's going on in China looks nothing like that. The past 40 years, the freedom of the Chinese people have exploded. 40 years ago you couldn't choose what clothes to wear, what to study, where to live, where to work. All of that has changed. Millions of Chinese travel abroad every year, and they all return to China. Why would they do that if China is such a miserable place? Why would a "dictatorship" allow its citizen to travel abroad where they are exposed to democracy?
The answer is twofold: China isn't a dictatorship, and you can't reason about all countries using this dictatorship-vs-democracy dichotomy. These are the best 30 years out of 3000 years for Chinese people, Chinese people have been freer than they have ever been in Chinese history. Western analysis projects a Stalinist communism dictatorship on China but this projection is wrong and doesn't fit. China has authoritarian elements, yes, but it is still very far removed from the typical dictatorship that people imagine.
Case in point: the recent Covid protests. Western media has been writing for several years now about how "all-powerful dictator-for-life Xi Jingping" made up an anti-Covid apparatus merely for his own entertainment and to show off power and to control people. Then suddenly there were protests. Did they sent in the tanks? No, they... lifted the 0-covid measures!
Seriously, does this sound like what a power-hungry dictator would do? Maybe, just maybe, everything you think you know about China is wrong, and all the shallow China analyses you have read in the news are all wrong. In this "dictatorship" there are 15000 (!) protests a year, and often the protesters get what they want.
Can I complain about the man in charge? If I go to social media and I post that I hate the bear, what happens? :-)
For comparison purposes, on a daily basis, Klaus Iohannis (the Romanian president) can fill his fridge with meat, as we say in Romanian (I'll let you figure out from which body part that meat comes from :-))) ).
* * *
Oh, to note. I hope you're right and those material freedoms cover more non-material freedoms and that China will especially have a friendly policy towards its neighbors. I'm not optimistic at the moment.
Concretely: yes in China there is censorship, and yes you can't just criticize the president. However, you can criticize policy. Not only can you, people do: as I've said before, there are 15000 protests in China every year, and often times the government gives in to protesters. The 0-covid protests resulting in lifting of 0-covid measures being a big recent one.
In contrast, in many western countries you certainly have the freedom to complain about more things, but your ability to get policy changes is almost non-existant. Not so in China: policy changes happen all the time as a result of protests, even if there are topics that are more taboo than in the west.
Material vs non-material freedom is also not the point (even though it's somewhat relevant). There are classes of immaterial freedom in China that the west doesn't even recognize as freedom. For example, the sheer safety in China grants one a huge amount of freedom of movement. A female Australian acquaintance once told me that she thought that political freedom and freedom of speech are the most important things. But once she visited China and experienced how safe the streets were, and how she could walk around during the night without escort, she realized that she valued freedom of movement much more.
To understand China one must move away from the dichotomy. China should be understood using entirely separate paradigms, on its own terms, not the terms that the west (in its relation/history with the Soviet Union) tries to project on China.
Personally, I could not tolerate living in a country where I have to watch what I say out of fear of me and my family ending up in prison for years. (Or in an internment camp, depending on my ethnicity.) Perhaps your Australian didn’t think they had anything interesting to speak out about; if they did, they might be singing a different tune.
By the way, a decade ago, Russian leadership suggested that Russia was a “democracy with Russian attributes,” and that it had to be understood on its own terms. Of course, it was just a convenient fig leaf for the erosion of freedoms and consolidation of power happening behind the scenes. We can all see where Russia is today.
I am glad Chinese people are still able to affect policy, but I wonder how long that will last. If there is a war with Taiwan, will the government tolerate dissent? I think not.
To make a comparison: the US also has many grave human rights abuses, including jailing people for saying "too interesting" things. But the US is not painted as some human rights abuse hellhole. It's clear that in the minds of many, human rights abuses in western countries can be bad but are at least redeemable or even incidental, while Chinese sins are inherent, systematic and unforgivable.
And again: here you hold political rights as the highest goal. I dispute this notion. This "one might be singing a different tune" can be reflected right back at you: if you've experienced how it is like to live in a country that has had 150 years of war and poverty, where eating your next meal is not guaranteed, with western "democratic" countries looting your treasures (and still having them on display in foreign museums today) back then when your country was itself dabbling in introducing democracy and republicanism, then maybe you would value safety and economic prosperity way more than you do now.
Said differently: when you are poor, you are not free, period. The ability to vote has no value on an empty stomach with thugs roaming the streets. The Chinese government has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, which is also a big human rights improvement. That does not excuse bad things, but it's worth putting things in perspective, something which many refuse to do because few are willing to hold an honest conversation about China.
> By the way, a decade ago, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev said that Russia had “democracy with Russian attributes,” and that Russia had to be understood on its own terms. Of course, it was just a convenient fig leaf for the erosion of freedoms and consolidation of power happening behind the scenes. We can all see where Russia is today.
Whatever problems you have with Russia has got nothing to do with China. Saying that "X has problem A, so Y must also have problem A" is a fallacy. Correlation is not causation.
> I am glad Chinese people are still able to affect policy, but I wonder how long that will last.
The ability to affect policy has increased over years, not decreased. In the past 15 years, government has improved systems to consult citizen.
This notion of yours have been around for at least 10 years. But when you ask Chinese how many of them would rather live in 25-30 years ago, you will not find many.
> If there is a war with Taiwan, will the government tolerate dissent?
You got this entirely backwards. Many people in China support reunification with Taiwan. If Xi Jingping announces today that he accepts Taiwanese independence, then he'll be overthrown tomorrow and replaced with another government that supports reunification.
Also, dropping this here: https://asiatimes.com/2022/11/harvard-guru-gives-biden-a-d-f... Dr. William Overholt, Harvard professor: "we are creating the problem that we think we’re trying to deter." In other words, all this talk about China invading Taiwan, and taking actions to "deter" China from invading Taiwan, incentivizes China to invade — because people fundamentally misread China's relationship with Taiwan. But the US government knows this and is deliberately stirring things up, breaking decades of diplomatic agreements, in order to goad China into shooting first so that the US can have a war with China while claiming moral superiority.
I did not: I am fully aware of this fact. However, while the majority of people in China may support a war with Taiwan, many will not. What will happen to those that oppose it? Will they be allowed to protest in the streets, or will they be brutally repressed? I know where I'd put my money.
As to everything else, China should be commended for bringing so many people out of poverty. But authoritarian regimes are not sustainable. Give too much power to one man, and he almost invariably gets it in his head that he is the state, and starts repressing, pogromming, and dismantling any person or institution that gets in his way. (Observe that Xi has already eliminated presidential term limits.)
I was born in Russia. The Soviet Union brought many millions out of poverty, including some of my direct ancestors. Was it all worth it in the end, though? I'm not so sure. The sins of the Soviet government ruined millions of lives and lead the country to where it is today: a crippled, fascistic, frothing-at-the-mouth oligarchy. Perhaps that's what's in store for China in the future. I really hope it manages to avoid this fate, but I'm not optimistic.
With your point wrt Taiwan you seem to be saying that if anti-war protests are suppressed then that is evidence that the country is a dictatorship. But the problem is that many countries — even western ones — suppresses dissent once they enter a war. Heck Germany is not even officially at war but anyone voicing public support for Russia can be legally reprimanded.
You also seem to ignore the aspect of whether people can actually enact policy changes. People protesting against the Middle Eastern wars didn't prevent them. What use is the ability to protest when they don't change anything?
I really don't know why everybody obsesses about Xi's term limits as if that's some sinister sign. Observe that Xi has been around for about as long as Merkel and Kohl.
More generally, all this talk about "authoritarian regimes" is projecting something into China which does not fit. Observe the fact that the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China were extremely weak, and look where that got us: poor, exploited by foreign democratic powers. When you look at the past 2000 years of Chinese history then you see that prosperous times come when central government is strong. Conversely, when central government is weak, the people suffer. Whatever problems you have with Russia and Soviet Union should not be projected onto China. Whatever problems the west had with strong governments should not automatically mean that China's biggest problems are the same. We've had more problems with not having enough state power than too much state power.
I bring up Russia because it's the authoritarian government I'm most familiar with. An authoritarian government doesn't "reprimand" people when it needs consent for a given policy: it imprisons them or worse. You can see this happening in Russia today with anti-war protests, where dissenters are thrown into prison for years or even sent to the front. I believe similar things were happening to the protesters in HK when China took over. Are you saying people won't be imprisoned for protesting military action in Taiwan? I find that unlikely.
If I lived in Germany, no part of me would fear imprisonment if I voiced support for Russia. (Though it's likely somebody would kick my ass.)
> I really don't know why everybody obsesses about Xi's term limits as if that's some sinister sign.
Why did he do it if not to consolidate power?
> Observe the fact that the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China were extremely weak, and look where that got us — poor, exploited.
Authoritarian policies also got you the Great Chinese Famine, leading to tens of millions of lives pointlessly thrown away. Was anyone held accountable? The answer is no, because an authoritarian government's "strength" is also its weakness when fault lies with the strongman at the helm. (As an aside, Yang Jisheng is the author of perhaps the most comprehensive account of the famine, "Tombstone." Are there any universities in China teaching his work? Are his books even allowed to be published?)
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In Germany, displaying the letter "Z" in a way that is meant to show support for Russia can lead to up to 3 years in prison: https://www.rnd.de/politik/z-symbol-strafbar-bis-zu-drei-jah...
"Mehrere Bundesländer haben bereits angekündigt, das öffentliche Zeigen des Symbols zu ahnden. Grundlage ist der Paragraf 140 im Strafgesetzbuch zur „Billigung von Straftaten“. Demnach kann dies mit bis zu drei Jahren Haft oder einer Geldstrafe bestraft werden"
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The famine was a result of inexperienced governance in peace time, not "authoritarian policies". Just like the Irish potato famine was not a result of "democratic policies".
The Cultural Revolution was not a display of authoritarian power. Instead, it was mob rule fueled by revolutionary zeal. During the Cultural Revolution, the state was largely non-functional. Many people joined Mao's campaigns willingly, as opposed to Mao sending his army to force people at gunpoint to do things.
The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to fix a broken country, by leaders who had little experience with peacetime operations. Today, Mao's mistakes are officially recognized. Both good and bad came out of the Cultural Revolution: there was a famine, but life expectancy also rose by more than a decade. One also has to keep in mind that famines were a regular thing in China during previous rulers, so with this context one can say that that famine was the last one China ever had. Given all this, to then describe the Cultural Revolution and the famine as "authoritarian rule" is hugely reductionist and misleading.
The sort of reductionist rhetoric you employ can just as easily be applied to democracies. Nobody was accountable for when the British Empire put China on drugs. Nobody was accountable for the Iraq war. By your own reasoning, "democratic policies" lead to imperialism — a wrong conclusion due to reductionism.
The west is far bigger and more varied than the US.
I'd love to see a defense of China that doesn't immediately delve into "US also bad" or "US made us bad".
Yes the west is far bigger than the US. However the west is also broadly aligned with the US. Whereas e.g. western Europe condemns and even sanctions China for what it sees as human rights abuses, they look the other way when it comes to US abuses, giving no more than a "tssk". There has been no diplomatic sanctions against the US for its illegal Iraq invasion (amongst others). Worse, some of them even join the US, such as Australia who went to Afghanistan and then killed a bunch of children. The west is bigger but many are complicit.
Of course US crimes don't excuse Chinese crimes. But when double standards are so widespread, it's simply impossible to have any kind of honest or constructive discussion. The double standard must be destroyed first.
Citation needed.
Western policy changes happen all the time due to protests, all across the West.
Look around you. More and more people are disillusioned by the fact that they can't get meaningful positive changes.
Polling. How could you possibly know the opposite?
> I'm from an Eastern European country that was under dictatorship
Not every country criticized by Western governments is fungible. Your home country was not China. North Korea is almost nothing like China.
TLDR: heavy-handed anti-terrorism response, even if it deserves criticism, is not at all the same as "millions in concentration camps", "forced labor" or even "genocide". Many allegations you read in the media are grave distortions of reality for the purpose of geopolitical attacks and fostering consent for a war against China.
You're claiming that the Uighur women that got forcibly sterilized are terrorists? Modi similarly uses the terrorism bogeyman to suppress criticism. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/10/how-terrorism-...)
And why isn't it easy for western journalists to report from Xinjiang, if it is as you describe it, a benign situation?
And no, I'm not claiming that Uyghur women who got sterilized are terrorists. I'm claiming that the entire story of there being widespread, systematic, forced sterilization for the purpose of genociding a people, is a false. The source for the forced sterilization claim is Adrien Zenz, who in his "research paper" said that IUD usage in Xinjing accounted for 80% of the country. But when you go to his cited source for that 80% figure, you see that the source actually said 8%. Then when some people made a fuss about that, he... wait for it... changed the 80% into 8% but did not change the paper's conclusion, and tried covering up the fact that he changed the paper at all! Meanwhile, no media is interested in reporting this.
"Modi apologists" have got absolutely nothing with me, but by citing them you're making the claim that everybody who claims that the media is biased is nuts. Then pray tell, what do you call media who looks the other way while a "researcher" fudges his numbers like that? What part of me pointing out shoddy research is "nationalism"?
I dare you to read Adrien Zenz's paper and tell me that it's reliable.
I would love to see a statistic where China has more military casualties than let's say the USA, in total numbers and in % of population I think the USA will exceed China, not least because the USA has been at war ever since I'm alive, China, well not so much.
I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole with you. You can select metrics which will "prove" that the West cares more about its people than China or other Asian countries and equally you can pull metrics which will unequivocally "prove" the opposite. This is precisely what I meant in my original comment.
LOLNO.
This is very well documented, and even if you ignore all the Chinese civil wars, most of which had more casualties than regular wars. Heck, one of their civil wars had almost as many casualties as WW1.
The US has been in a lot of wars but their military casualties are very low overall. They generally beat the other guys up very badly but they're quite careful to not lose people, in comparison with other countries.
Also, it's not really thoughtful to compare 3000 years of Chinese history to the history of the US since 1898 (the US's first modern imperial war, against the Philippine population.)
At least 10 million casualties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
At least 20 million casualties.
Who said anything about 3000 years of Chinese history? You created a strawman and jumped with it from a bridge...
China has killed tens of millions of Chinese citizens in the last century and a half alone.
Just the Taiping Rebellion almost beats WW1.
The West has resources and well-oiled propaganda machinery in place to control the dissent that's why they don't need to use violence as openly as not-so-rich countries. When their monopoly is threatened, they act equally ruthlessly.
Can you elaborate on this? Resources I agree with - but that boils down to controlling dissent by just removing a source of it which is not the same as controlling dissent by cracking down
You will have to elaborate on how these two phrasings mean different things i.e. what's the difference between "cracking down" on the sources of dissent and "removing" the sources of dissent, and why you support one and condemn the other (if you do.)
Cracking down - the government suppresses dissent by force.
Removing the source of dissent - this means solving the underlying issue that would otherwise cause the dissent. This would be government/society providing for the needs and desires of it’s population.
I think most would agree that the first is much worse than the second.
Disregarding the fact that proving your angle is super hard.
So what? It sure beats beating and killing people.
> When their monopoly is threatened, they act equally ruthlessly.
Ok, but if they don't have to do that all the time, it <<still>> makes them better.
It's a tough pill to swallow, go check military casualties for wars. Get back to me after reading Wikipedia pages (so nothing super fancy) for 50-100, chosen randomly, and tell me how many have higher casualty rates for the Western party.
My back of the napkin analysis says that at most 10% of those wars have more Western casualties.
At the end of the day, that's what it boils down to. If you find ways to avoid violence and when you do have to become violent your stuff is better armorer, moves faster, shoots farther, flies higher, well, that's because someone ultimately, to some degree, maybe because they were forced by public consensus, respected citizens' lives.
It doesn't much matter how you get to that respect if you do get there more than your perceived rivals.
Post cold-war there was maybe a few years or less of Fukuyama-esque optimism. The Arab Spring looked positive and ended with most places worse than they started.
So - not sure there was much of a window of invincibility. Unless of course you want to hark back to the Fin de siècle period. Imperialism was in full swing so that's controversial.
What liberal East India Company? There were a number of EICs, but all of them I can think of (certainly most especially the British) were mercantilist and parts of mercantilist national policies, not liberal.
The mercantilism of British policy and the British EIC were, actually, a quite important factor in both the US push for independence and its ideological connection with liberalism.
While liberalism might eventually have become a nearly consensus ideology in the West, but it certainly wasn’t in the late 18th Century and it certainly wasn’t the ideology of or behind colonialism.
That’s unsupportable with evidence because we don’t have a world to test the effects of liberalism in an environment where it isn’t a reaction against established mercanitilism in a number of empires, one of which alone controls a sizable fraction of the globe, but I’m going to say, no, its not.
(I will admit that one problem with economic liberalism is that it tends to entrench existing inequalities, including those produced by pre-existing mercantilist arrangements, but that’s very different than producing the same results.)
It’s the BBC. Also, India is drifting towards the American sphere of influence. It’s historically been between non-aligned and anti-American.
As far as I know, conscription is the major Muscovite danger talked up in the NY Times.
In 2022 there were 138 homicides in Brooklyn which comes out to 4.98 homicides per 100k residents. In comparison in Moscow Oblast there were 6.9 homicides per 100k residents (in 2017, which is the latest year I can find information for this stat).
So at least by homicides, Moscow seems more dangerous.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
The numbers clearly show that in general Moscow is much safer.
Index Brooklyn, NY Moscow
Crime Index: 45.75 36.86
Safety Scale: 54.25 63.14Pick a statistic that is a reasonable representation of danger (I think homicide rate is a reasonable one) and show that Moscow is lower on that statistic than Brooklyn.
On average, democracy is declining globally if measured with popular Democracy Index.
More on this The Economist article https://archive.ph/FJfMU
But Israel, Turkiye, and India are in a bad state. Netanyahu, Erdogan, and Modi are quickly tightening their grips on their respective governments.
Also I know China is not considered to be a democracy, but the past few leaders before Xi only lasted about 10 years each, while Xi is seeking a much longer rule.
I am not aware of any major changes in Europe, or the rest of Asia.
Israel, Turkiye, India, China, and Russia are heavy weights, though. So definitely something to watch for moving forward.
Russia had a "decade of democracy", which also failed quite spectacularly. It doesn't really have a long democratic tradition that you see in other countries.
- YouTube is removing dislikes from Modi's video https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342399
- Indian government wants total control of the Internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34774823
[1]: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/09/11/newslaundrys-statemen...
I love when famous people like politicians reveal their core personality under some stressful situation, that is otherwise well hidden underneath thick layers of PR and masks of politeness. Its always, almost without an exception, a very sad view.
Tells you something about what kind of people reach top politics, manage to not only survive among similar folks but thrive. And then people wonder why less and less people vote globally, choosing between 2 rotten apples and/or potato that has seen the winter of 1912 ain't motivating enough to waste much energy.
It's astounding how consistently they follow the same process. Ego is a powerful thing.
Feels weird but my last comment was about about things including a few times like this one. A few years ago(2019), WhatsApp and VPNs were outlawed and was a crime so I had my VPN toolkit behind panic apps so when I was searched a few times,once walking down a busy street and second while driving a car (was made to get out), duress password saved me.
bjp is hindutva
he should be proud about what the documentary showed… but then I didn’t actually see it
"It is estimated that at least 250 girls and women were gang raped and then burned to death. Children were force fed petrol and then set on fire, pregnant women were gutted and then had their unborn child's body shown to them. In the Naroda Patiya mass grave of ninety-six bodies, forty-six were women."
Also comparing anything going on in the US for the last 60 years to the genocide happening in Xinjiang is ridiculous on its face.
Indeed - the fact that black people are being killed and incarcerated for their skin colour in USA is well documented, whereas the “genocide” is mostly just a propaganda tool.
This is a total misreading of the situation. I'm not here to argue that the US has a perfect human rights record, but its an active topic of debate and reform are happening. Moreover, the idea that people are being incarcerated solely for their skin color is not "well documented" and strains credulity as a claim. If the claim is sentencing disparity, then sure there is an issue there, but your claim is wholly false.
Xinjiang is a completely different situation. We know factually that millions of people have gone through reeducation camps, the CCP is trying to eradicate the Uyghur language and force Han culture on the Uyghurs. You can see these modern day concentration camps from satellite imagery. There are well documented cases of forced sterilization. There is no legal process for appeals if a Uyghur is arrested, and we know many of the arrests are for religious practice. The world saw what the CCP did in Tibet, and we're seeing an even more grotesque version in Xinjiang.
Same as in China.
>factually that millions
The highest estimates, by Zenz, only go up to a million. And it’s not factual at all.
>eradicate the Uighur language
I suppose that’s why you have official Chinese banknotes with Uighur text on them, and that’s why Uighur kids are being taught their native language in schools.
>well documented cases of forced sterilization
We have the same in USA.
Generally speaking: you’re repeating rhetorics (propaganda) instead of focusing on verifiable information.
What reforms are happening in China> They're still pouring people into camps.
> The highest estimates, by Zenz, only go up to a million. And it’s not factual at all.
The zenz estimate for 2020 is 1.8 million, but estimates are as high as 3 million over several years plus half a million in special boarding schools. A total of 3 million Uighurs is fully 1/3 of their population in Xianjang.
> We have the same in USA.
No, there it literally no forced sterilization in US prisons. You're making that up.
Everyone but China agrees that they are committing genocide, this isn't propaganda.
> I suppose that’s why you have official Chinese banknotes with Uighur text on them, and that’s why Uighur kids are being taught their native language in schools.
There seems to be a lot of evidence to the contrary[1][2]
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
[2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
[3] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
A global platform censored for you and I because a completely foreign entity doesn't like it.
But evidence beats all the gaslighting talk peddled by those who want to cover up the atrocities.
I mean that's telling in itself.
If an international news org gets an IT raid for what it's parent org did. How can normal citizens speak up without fearing retribution.
Modi has much, much, much more reason to fear that tolerating one scandal-raising documentary will lead to further scandal-raising documentaries, and much less reason to believe that ignoring the problem he already has will make it go away.
I don't think the Streisand Effect is a good analogy to try to draw here.
It's just about calling attention to something few people would have noticed by being really heavy-handed in trying to take it down.
It's totally on the map now.
Edit: Apologies, should have been in response to the sibling, rather than the parent.
It’s easy to stand outside a regime’s borders and say it can’t change your reality, and comforting to believe that the truth always comes out in the end, but I think reality is more harsh: “History is written by the winners.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-narendra-modi-was-banned-fr... https://archive.ph/Kf95r
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ3b01MvMJI&list=PL4Qp-WFXp5...
Quite a delight to watch
Who needs the SS when the BBC is around?
So I guess this amount of corruption between politicians and police is available to all politicians in germany not just PMs which seems much more fair.
[1] https://www.nw.de/nachrichten/nachrichten/23086941_Aufschrei...
Did the BBC publish anything like that?
Do the German police raid you if you write “[Politician X] is corrupt”?
Don’t get me wrong I prefer to live in a world where anyone can debase themselves by throwing insults at anyone, but I don’t see the paralels with the BBC raid.
> Don’t get me wrong
You haven't said anything to be wrong about.
Yes? There is no allegation that the BBC called anyone a penis. I don’t have proof that i can cite because how do you proove a negative?
I can prove that there are media who called a German politican corrupt.[1] I cannot prove that they haven’t raided them, all I can say is that if they did we haven’t heard about it.
> You haven't said anything to be wrong about.
And yet you understood me, didn’t you?
1: totally random article calling one german politican corrupt https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-conservative-politic...
If you're concerned about Germany, it ranks #13 in World Press Freedom Index (it slipped mostly because of attacks against the press by left and right extremists during COVID) and India ranks #150 (out of 180).
BBC is not above India's laws.
Why you say that and how can you? There are a lot of people in and outside India - that hate him with passion.
> Modi has one of the highest approval ratings
He has a dedicated machinery and apparatus to paint him clean and shiny. Look how he screwed up during Covid and post clean-up act.
These tax raids is the "only" tool up his sleeve that he has against his opposers. Would he raid Adani? Nope. Otherwise India and Indians - would not be this ashamed and looted today.
He's nothing but a low cost and offshore version of Trump; can't think straight. Listen to any of his speeches; it's all mumbo-jumbo. I can't get my head around it: how he continues to make fool of over a billion people on a daily basis? The greatest conman of all time. When the current generation of teenagers would look back after a decade - they are going to surely say - "Wtf was that era! <facepalm>".
The linked article would indicate otherwise? I think one's standards of democracy have to be fairly low, to not see that Indian state is at least proto-authoritarian.
From what I can see, India is doing pretty badly in most indicators, be it democracy indices, HDI, employment (The usual response to this from Right wing is that these are "western indicators", and the government doesn't have any data).
I don't think your nationality matters to witness the sequence of events and come to an objective conclusion.
The metrics you mention are not poor, but our data is poor. Furthermore, numerous research shows HDI and GDP are flawed (but legacy) metrics - this is exasperated by the poor quality data available in a chaotic country like India
So, at which phase of various intersecting elections and global obligations does the sweet criticism window open? (Note that the elections are upcoming in 15 months.)
IMHO a PM of the largest nation on Earth should be able to weather criticism night and day. People responsible for 1,5 billion souls cannot claim sanctuary against the press. And if Modi's domestic results are as impressive as other HNers claim, there will be no risk of him losing an election from a BBC documentary that the vast majority of the voting population won't ever see.
What a ridiculous and dishonest line of argument you have presented here. Just because you are not a supporter of a democratically elected government doesn't mean you are being drowned out and suppressed. If that were the case you would have disappeared like they do in China. What a hyperbole.
A) Sunak can't just "pull the BBC into line" as it's independent of the government.
B) The BBC regularly criticises the UK government and even the Royal family. If it could get a scoop on some new corruption it would air it as soon as it could.
C) We also have people like Led By Donkeys here who air as much dirt as they can on the government. (We are not short of scandals right now, although few involve genocide).
b) The BBC is biased against Labor and SNP as a growing number of Britons are coming to realise. Clearly towing the line in favor of the Tory party.
c) Plenty of nations have such advocacy groups.
The BBC might not like the Labour Party (especially under Corbyn) but you can't deny it is 99% pro-left.
Certainly Corbyn running around suggesting not arming Ukraine did nothing for my opinion on that front[0].
I agree though, that the BBC and the ABC in Australia both lean left as a rule, though still do their job of holding both to account.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/02/jeremy-corb...
Waah Waah Waah the BBC is massively left wing
Same old same old.
BBC Employees tend to be younger than average (as there are very few over 65s at the BBC), tend to be more educated that average (most jobs will require a college level degree), tend to be more metropolitan (most staff are employed major cities)
Of course there are very few tory or leave voters amongst BBC Staff, probably between 1-in-4 and 1-in-3 if they are demographically representative [1]
The question is how those views come across in the reporting, and generally it seems fairly balanced to me (I usually vote Lib Dem fwiw)
[1] https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-...
I don't think it's true though, as evidenced by the Tory media minister Nadine Dorries doing everything she could to de-fund the BBC for criticism of the Johnson government.
She wouldn't do that if the BBC was a Tory mouthpiece under her control.
Just saying that "a growing number of Britons are coming to realise" something doesn't really tell you much. That could be 3 people yesterday and 4 people today.
The BBC criticises both sides of the political fence and both groups complain about it being biased against them.
If it was truly biased to the Tories, people like Frankie Boyle wouldn't get BBC shows and Ian Blackford wouldn't regularly be quoted on the Today Programme or PMQs.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hailed Infosys and Sudha Murthy, chairperson of Infosys Foundation, as he expressed gratitude to them for their service to humanity."
The show itself adds nothing new in real evidence that can be taken to court, however there is a serious risk it create communal disharmony. Muslims and Hindus have found peace since the event, Indians see it as stirring the pot just before the 2024 elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_against_Muslims_in_In...
2. "An equivalent list could be made, just with the numbers of 400k Hindus that were exodus in Kashmir."
Thanks for proving my point.
[Edit]
"Muslims and Hindus have found peace since the event"
"In November 2022, at an election rally in Khambhat [Gujarat], Indian Home Minister Amit Shah boasted of demolitions undertaken by the BJP in Muslim areas. By emphasizing the issue of clearing out alleged `fake mazars (Islamic shrines or mausoleums)` [...] Salma Ben, 50, a resident of Akbarpur, has suffered for simply being a Muslim in Khambhat more times than she can remember. In February 2019, she recalled for The Diplomat, her house was burned down by a violent mob chanting Hindu mantras."
https://thediplomat.com/2023/01/how-gujarats-khambhat-became...
So the 2020 anti-muslim Delhi riots didn't happen? Neither did the everyday Muslim lynchings across the country?
Regardless, you still managed to prove my point that there definitely hasn't been peace between Hindus and Muslims since 2002
Elections are in 15 months, so the election cycle is in three quarters right now. That is not "just before elections", much like 9 pm is not "just before midnight".