There is no deflection. I was pretty clear about erosion of democratic norms being bad in both places. I made a comparison to provide a sense of perspective as to scale and then said the BJP wins fair elections to illustrate that conflating them with the right in America leads to bad misconceptions. The right wing in the US plays from a position of weakness. They only have institutional power due to the counter-majoritarianism in our system and their ideology is completely hollowed out. This is also what drives them to attack democratic or non-political institutions because they have no ability to retain power otherwise. They know they're a generation away from irrelevance and are desperate.
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.