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Comment by naughtyfinch | Hacker News Reader

I have been using Proton Mail and Proton VPN for over 3 years now. I firmly believe in the fundamental right of privacy online. Indian government has been taking steps like these for quite some time now. They previously asked VPN companies to log and gather every bit of information they could about their users including their name and address (effectively driving all VPN companies out of India) Sometimes, I question the meaning of freedom in India. On paper we are free citizens, but essentially we never seem to get the benefits of living in a free country.

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> On paper we are free citizens, but essentially we never seem to get the benefits of living in a free country

India has been mimicking Chinese and Gulf authoritarianism for a decade now. New Delhi is not truly authoritarian, but more an an elected federal government with autocratic powers, not dissimilar from the U.S. Both are mimicking China, to a certain extent, in ways good (industrial policy, moderating hyperindividualism like NIMBYism) and bad (suspending habeus, jingoism).

It's becoming an illiberal democracy like Turkey. Which is still a lot different than the US imo.

e.g.:

-After a decade of Modi rule, India now ranked 161 out of 180 in the world press freedom index: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/media/india-elections-press-f...

-Political opponents have been arrested on trumped up charges before elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_of_Arvind_Kejriwal

-Extrajudicial killings on Canadian soil and possible attempt on US soil before they were caught (despite extradition agreements between India and these countries): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/india-government-agent-as...

I saw an interesting interview from 50's by one of India's founders on the topic of democracy in India: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WyWUlIbcRH8 . It seems India still has a long way to go, and the current government is reversing the trend.

I really hope the west thinks long and hard about foreign investment in/free trade with India without preconditions (although these are doubtful from the US under the current administration, maybe the EU can step up). The west had this idea that opening up trade with China would make the country more democratic and free, but it had the opposite impact (the extra resources only made things worse in these areas at home and aborad, especially after Xi's takeover in 2014).

I'm unclear which of those things you don't think applies to the US as well?

It may not be as blatant, but the current administration is openly attempting to muzzle the press (i.e. banning the AP from Whitehouse), the last few US elections have been mired in law enforcement interactions (FBI investigation into Hilary's emails, Trump's various trials), and extrajudicial killings on foreign soil have openly been a thing since Obama's drone-strike-happy administration.

it's still no where near the same. Adani, india's richest man, has close connections to Modi and is under indictment by the US for bribery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_against_Gautam_Adan... .

He also bought one of india's last major independent traditional media outlets (NDTV) years ago. The comparison I can think of is if MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News were all run like Fox news in terms of alignment with Trump. In a country where 25% the population is illiterate this is especially concerning as a significant portion of the electorate can only access their news from traditional media (TV, radio).

oh i forgot to add, the internet penetration rate is around 50% in India, so 50% of the population can't even access youtube on demand.

The first point is completely invalid, here a lot of press, YouTubers berate Indian government in daily basis they do not suffer any setbacks except when netizens call out false propaganda in numbers for both pro and anti government media.

Second point the Indian leader arrested was involved in huge scams in liquor and policy, he used to live in a lavish palace and got called out by enforcement directorate. It's good he got arrested.

Canada has not provided even a single proof for Indias involvement in extrajudicial killings but instead harbor people who threaten Indians regularly. Despite extradition treaty Canada has become a safe harbor of terrorists and refused to extradite terrorists even after repeated requests by India.

Reversing the trend ? Are you kidding me, previous government imposed emergency rule when their position was threatened and commited human rights abuses.

> Despite extradition treaty Canada has become a safe harbor of terrorists and refused to extradite terrorists even after repeated requests by India.

This seems troubling. Can you share some examples of this?

> Canada has not provided even a single proof for Indias involvement in extrajudicial killings

I don't know about Canada, but did you read this about the case in the US?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/us-attorney-announces-c...

It's pretty comprehensive that the person hired was connected to the Indian govt.

Some examples:

https://www.opindia.com/2024/12/khalistani-terrorist-pannun-...

https://www.opindia.com/2024/12/we-take-threats-very-serious...

https://www.opindia.com/2024/11/us-supported-khalistani-terr...

Regarding extrajudicial killings if I remember correctly arrested person was Indian, not sure if it was proved that he was connected to Indian govt. And for Canada yes they didn't provide any proof but instead had to backtrack on their statements:

https://www.opindia.com/news-updates/canadian-pm-justin-trud...

Wait, all your links are from opindia

From wikipedia -

OpIndia is an Indian far-right[2] news website known for frequently publishing misinformation.[11][12][28] Founded in December 2014,[18] the website has published fake news and Islamophobic commentary on numerous occasions.[37][43] OpIndia is dedicated to criticism of what it considers liberal media,[14] and to support of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)[47] and Hindutva ideology.[3] According to University of Maryland researchers, OpIndia has shamed journalists it deems to be in opposition to the BJP and has alleged media bias against Hindus and the BJP.[13]

Did you get a chance to read the US attorney's indictment and alleged connections to the Indian govt?

Opindia has no hesitation on declaring itself as a right leaning site but frequently publishing misinformation? That's exaggeration. It backs whatever it writes with independent research, attached videos documents, cctv footage, other news houses as best as it can. Sure it made its mistakes but not so much as other media houses in India.

There are much worse media houses that opindia especially on the left.

And Wikipedia? That's neither reliable or consistent. It itself has been shown to be edited by whimsical propagandists to serve their own means in past.

The articles sources can be checked and not only opindia other news houses have reported on Gurpreet Singh Pannu

Hey, you didn't answer my question about whether you read the indictment or not

I didn't get a chance to read but will surely will, thanks for pointing that

My man, you are trying to reason with a person who follows opindia, just move on with your life.

> they do not suffer any setbacks

hmm: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/13/india-arrests-raids-targ...

> Second point the Indian leader arrested was involved in huge scams in liquor and policy.

unproven, and the timing could not have been more suspicious:

"Amnesty International, an international human rights group said that the arrest of Kejriwal and the "freezing of Indian National Congress’ bank accounts", a few weeks before India's general elections showed "the authorities’ blatant failure to uphold the country’s international human rights obligations".[45][46]"

> Despite extradition treaty Canada has become a safe harbor of terrorists and refused to extradite terrorists even after repeated requests by India.

How about despite an extradition treaty, India has never submitted a claim against these so called terrorists and like normal democracies use the courts to argue their case for extradition. In Canada the courts are generally far more independent than those in India. Note - speech calling for a separate state by itself is not terrorism in any country that values free speech (heck half of Quebec regularly does this), only calling or acting for violence means crossing that line, i haven't seen any evidence for the latter (but I'm open to be proven wrong - from independent credible sources unlike those you listed).

> Reversing the trend ? Are you kidding me.

Yes, according to the article I originally cited and others, India has become less democratic. Caste violence and religious tension (i.e. chants of "love jihad") seems to have gotten worse - true to India's founders video in the 1950's I shared of democracy in India.

The first link you shared of hrw...in one of the incidents it showed the arrest of newsclick.

The problem with international media houses is that they don't report why someone has been arrested on what charges and with what process. Newsclick offices has been raided for allegedly taking funding from CCP for propaganda and also inciting Delhi riots.

The second instance when the hrw is saying that Delhi police arrested 'peaceful protesters', there were RIOTS! A police offices was stabbed in two digits, a boy' limbs were amputed while being alive and left to burn in his shop. They were not peaceful protests in any case.

Amnesty international did the same thing. It did not report why Kejriwal was arrested. Kejriwal's lavish mansion made with money of tax payers has been a topic of mockery by Indian public. His party lost elections badly because people knew that the arrest was not whimsical.

I won't comment on topic of court more, as I don't know you can be right.

Independent credible sources :p. Name any media house and I can show how they have repeatedly used media as a propaganda page with full of fake news whether left or right(except reuters maybe). The only thing credible is reading from multiple sources to know fully about an incident. What I like about Opindia is that it provides a very comprehensive coverage of every incident with sources and proofs at every line and has even corrected itself in past for mistakes.

India has not become less democratic that is just a farce by some parties who neither have any agenda, neither consistent neither in touch with what people want, they are just envious that they are being repeatedly loosing elections in multiple states of India. They only cry India is less democratic when they lose elections.

The opposing party repeatedly wants a caste census and invites regularly people of different castes against other castes. In fact caste violence is at its lowest period, since from my parents times. Young generation have stopped believing in birth castes except to make Instagram reels. Love jihad, I can show you hundreds of cases when a member of a community (you can guess) has posed as member of other religious group for an affair to be finally have his identity revealed after marriage after which domestic violence and sexual exploitation of the victim arises. Now before you say that it is a 'Hindutva majoritian' agenda, well not when the church groups of Kerala raise the same issue in their community.

and Australia. Australian government tried making encryption illegal.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/australian-pm-calls-en...

> Indian government has been taking steps like these for quite some time now.

In this instance though, this is from the High Court of the state of Karnataka and not the Indian Government. Karnataka isn't ruled by the same party at the center (imagine California and the current US Government). Again, the Government of Karnataka had nothing to do with this case either - it's the High Court.

Indian courts have done similar things forever. YouTube/FB etc quickly comply with court orders here; because judges would simply issue a blanket ban order on the website.

Question the meaning of freedom in the whole world instead

> They previously asked VPN companies to log and gather every bit of information they could about their users including their name and address (effectively driving all VPN companies out of India)

in NordVPN (a paid mainstream provider without Mulvad-like conviction to privacy), you can connect to an Indian server without ever providing your personal details when signing in.

i wonder how much these rulings are enforced in reality. there is definitely no great firewall situation and outright jailing for breaching this law so far. but on the other hand, it is just a lower temperature setting in the frog-boiling process.

Does it work that way if you initially sign up from India? Your first VPN sign up is inherently from your real IP and that's enough to determine geolocation as India. They may require different data for different countries.

I'm not saying it does. Just that it's possible. Perhaps an Indian NordVPN user could provide input here

Add in Aadhaar.

People forget until how recently India was a socialist nation, and how easy it would be to slip back

Isn't it still socialist per the Constitution?

The word “socialist” was added to the Constitution by Indira Gandhi during the 70s.

This was during her “Emergency” when Parliament was essentially dysfunctional.

There have been campaigns to remove her changes, but nothing has come of it.

I found a copy of the text here: https://legislative.gov.in/constitution-of-india/

English version: https://cdnbbsr.s3waas.gov.in/s380537a945c7aaa788ccfcdf1b99b...

In the preamble (p32), I see this text:

    > WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a [SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC] and to secure to all its citizens:

That said, I don't know how constitutional amendments work in India. This text may have been amended at a later date, but the original text remains.

“Socialist” and “Secular” were added by Indira Gandhi when she had declared an Emergency after being disqualified by a high court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty-second_Amendment_of_the_...

Socialism is an economic policy. It has nothing to do with "freedom".

See Sanjay Gandhi's forced sterilization campaign at the behest of the World Bank and IMF. Tell me that reproduction is not a freedom. Tell me that Indira and Sanjay Gandhi weren't socialists.

There was also forced sterilization in the United States. Does that make the United States a socialist country? No, of course not. The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore all As do X" is nonsense.

edit: There was also forced sterilization in the United States. Does that make the United States a socialist country? No, of course not. The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore anyone who does X is an A" is nonsense. The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore all As do X" is similarly nonsense. It's also a very weird argument to make when you say it was done "at behest of the World Bank and IMF.", considering those are certainly not socialist organizations.

There’s a correlating factor:

Technocratic managerialism.

Communism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism are 20th century political systems based around technocratic managerialism — and all of them have attempted to control breeding in the population. That’s because technocratic managerialism is prone to such decisions.

Progressives in the US were behind both Great Society programs and forced sterilization — so it’s more or less accurate to say the US equivalent of socialists did also sterilize people.

> That’s because technocratic managerialism is prone to such decisions.

That's a nifty insight. Engineers want to engineer. If you place an engineer in charge of social policy they will likely try to engineer social and cultural changes.

Howard Taft was a a progressive/socialist? Interesting idea..

Eugenics were universally popular back in those days. Willson (hardly a progressive either) was a strong supporter of eugenics. Just like Theodore Roosevelt.

> more or less accurate

It would be more or less just as accurate to say that conservatives were the US equivalents of socialists following this silly logic..

Just like it's reasonable for America to worry about the group that conducted forced sterilization (Jim Crow racists) and worry about the slide back to them attaining power, it makes sense to do the same for socialists.

Ideologies that further concentrate power in the hands of a central state - in India's case, things like Hindutva nationalism and socialism - are risky, particularly in developing nations where liberty is less firmly-established, and should be given a stern eye when they appear.

And, just like "southern democrat" is a "bad word" in America for obvious reasons and doesn't imply "democrat from the south", "socialist" is a bit taboo in India.

> Jim Crow racists

There were forced sterilization programs in New York State in the early 20th century, and the victims weren't specifically black.

Sure, that's just less attributable to a coherent political faction; there were fewer than fifty that occurred in total on mentally ill women.

Snobs come in all colors and parties. Jim Crow racists there were plenty, but the eugenics ideas and projects of the 1920s in the North were horrible in their own right.

Eugenics and forced sterilization were a major progressive policy back in those days. It transcended political lines

e.g. in 1912 Wilson, Roosevelt and Taft all supported it.

> There was also forced sterilization in the United States.

Yes, in the 20s in New York State. It was quite rare by comparison to what happened in India. The point was not to say "this is what socialists do" but to say point out that they did it at the behest of capitalists, which is quite the incongruity -- an incongruity which you noticed yet you failed to make the connection that it made the Gandhis phonies. That should make you wonder how genuine they were as socialists.

specifically, The Population Bomb was the big book during the era, which was written by a Stanford professor. India's forced sterilization campaign was at the behest of the World Bank, and championed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, all of which were strongly influenced by the book. Fun fact: the author, Mr. Erlich, is still alive (at the age of 92!) and has maintained his correctness, instead saying he was "too optimistic" when his forecasted mass starvation failed to materialize.

Malthusian predictions have two parts, one of which is proven time and time again, and the other which has yet to be proven but on the basis of which horrible things are justified:

  1. population growth leads to food
     production improvements which
     enables more population growth,
  
  2. catastrophic failure must result
     eventually when we really run
     into the planet's human carrying
     capacity.

Malthusians like Paul Erlich are the boy who cried wolf. They are always wrong when they cry "wolf!", but who knows, maybe someday they might be right ("someday we will be right" is their message).

So far we've only seen the inverse of Malthusian catastrophes: population collapse.

We've seen population collapse twice in recorded history, perhaps more:

  - the Roman empire
  
  - now, almost everywhere

Malthusians like mr. Erlich might argue that the reason we're reaching population peaks (followed by collapse) is precisely due to their efforts. Perhaps. But population collapse is not all that fun either. Yet even today we have a great deal of political pressure from some quarters to do things that will speed up the collapse rather than slow it.

> is proven time and time again

It’s not though. That was only the case since the 1800s. Malthus was more or less correct about the preceding periods.

> collapse twice in recorded history, perhaps more

Not perhaps. Certainly more. If you want a clear cut and well documented example look at Europe between ~1000 and the 1300s.

Massive population expansion leading to overpopulation, very high food costs and mass starvation. The Black Death interrupted that cycle and limited population growth for the next 400 years or so (which resulted in significant increase in per capita productivity across Europe).

“Socialism” in the Indian context is associated with Indira Gandhi’s repressive policies from the Emergency she declared when she was thrown out of office in the seventies. The word “socialist” was added to the Constitution by her during that time when Parliament was essentially dysfunctional.

Sure, but the premise of the economic policy is we give up freedom for equality and shared ownership.

I think freedom is a continuum. Some things are regulated even in the West so for example you need permission to open a new hospital.

Sure, but on this continuum capitalism is a lot more free than socialism.

By definition, in socialism, I can't start and/or grow a business, and I'm not free to do with it as I please. Some socialist societies let people have small business, but the state comes in and takes it once it gets too big.

>Socialism is an economic policy

...that is not taught in any school of economics.

it's actually a political platform or set of political promises

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