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.