The demise of democracy in India
INDIAN claims of being the “world’s largest democracy” are being nullified by the ruling dispensation in New Delhi––the Bharatiya Junta Party (BJP). Ever since it came to power in 2014, despite its boasts regarding egalitarianism, under the stewardship of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, every nuance of human rights and secularism have been trampled under the sledgehammer of brutal oppression of its minorities. Prima facie, India’s founding fathers followed the British Westminster system, comprising a president as head of state; an executive headed by the prime minister; a legislature consisting of a parliament with an upper and lower house (the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha) and a judiciary with a supreme court at its head.
543 members are elected to the Lok Sabha through a first-past-the-post general election, held every five years. State representatives are indirectly elected to the Rajya Sabha on staggered six–year terms, so every two years around one-third are changed, elected by state legislatures. India’s constitution sets out the country’s political code, federal structure, powers of government and guarantees Indians’ rights, including to equality before the law and freedoms of speech, assembly, movement and others.
The system is complicated by India’s caste system, a hierarchical social structure that divides the Hindu majority into groups, with ‘Brahmins’ at the top and ‘Dalits’ at the bottom of society. Ironically, India’s Constitution, which was penned by a Dalit––Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, banned caste discrimination and early governments introduced quotas to provide fairer allocation of jobs and education, but caste remains a powerful factor in politics. In some regions political parties still court voters according to caste, who tend to vote as a block. The Constitution is secular in that it prohibits the persecution of individuals for their religious beliefs but it does not specifically separate church and state in the fashion of the United States constitution.
For more than a century, Hindu nationalists have called for the country to be redefined as a Hindu homeland but Modi’s India has turned his country into a nightmare for its minorities where havoc is wreaked on Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists and even Dalits according to the plan of establishing Hindu supremacy. Modi, an activist of the extremist militant Hindu organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is a champion of a ‘Hindutva-led’ exclusionist ideology. The rot that has set in the Indian system of governance guided by extremism and intolerance towards minorities, has not escaped the attention of international media organizations.
Some information gleaned from ISSI’s Issue Brief on “Democratic Backslide in Contemporary India” is presented here. Sumit Ganguly, in his hard-hitting opinion piece titled ‘Modi’s Party Deals Its Main Opposition a Final Blow’, published in the 7 April 2023 issue of “Foreign Affairs”, highlights the murder of democracy in India. The author observes that the opposition was a hallmark of parliamentary democracy; however, the expulsion of one of India’s most prominent opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi from parliament by the BJP undermined the important symbol of democracy in India.
The British daily “Guardian” in its editorial of 23 April 2023, titled ‘The Observer view on the growing threat to democracy in India’ depicts how the BJP Government had taken measures to reduce the influence of the Opposition and dismissed the playing-level field for democratic forces. The editorial mentioned the defamation case against Rahul Gandhi and stressed the biased role of courts in Gujarat in sentencing him, where the current Indian prime minister served as a chief minister from 2001-2014. The editorial stresses that the court’s verdict was ‘politically motivated’. Taking up the cudgel to expose Narendra Modi’s anti-Muslim agenda, in its Op-Ed ‘Narendra Modi’s brazen attacks are a catastrophe’, the “Guardian” sheds light on the rule of Mr Modi as Chief Minister of Gujarat during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom.
The daily quotes the BBC documentary that exposed Modi’s link to the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and how the BJP Government dismissed the BBC documentary as ‘propaganda and anti-India garbage’ and accused the BBC of ‘harbouring colonial mindset.’ The scathing opinion piece informs that the BJP government invoked emergency laws to ban the documentary and any online links to it in India. It is disturbing that beleaguered BBC’s offices in Mumbai and New Delhi were raided by the Indian tax department. The brave students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) tried to screen the documentary; however, the university authorities switched off the electricity to the whole campus. The Reporters Without Borders’s World Press Freedom Index 2023, published on 3 May 2023, focused on the heinous process of stifling media freedom in India.
World Press Freedom Index testified that press freedom in the world’s so-called largest democracy was in a ‘crisis.’ The report especially highlighted that the state of the media had been such since 2014 when Mr Modi’s BJP government came into power with embodied ‘Hindu nationalist right.’ Another highly critical article ‘India’s democratic backsliding’, published in “Financial Times” of 20 April 2023, stressed upon the Freedom Index in light of the common fear of speaking against Mr Modi in public life. “Washington Post” of 20 April 2023, in its opinion piece ‘India takes a distressing retreat from democracy’ takes cognizance of the BJP government’s major overhauling of school textbooks to scrap chapters that did not sit well with its agenda such as on ‘democracy’ and ‘secular’ history of India.
The French newspaper “Le Monde” published an editorial on 24 April 2023 discussing how the totalitarian regime of BJP has set its goal of redefining India as a purely Hindu Nation. It quoted the deletion of textbook chapters on India’s long history of Muslim Mughal emperors, who ruled the subcontinent between the 16th and 19th centuries. The future generations will also remain oblivious to the essence of the secular legacy of the country after official edits of why Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, mentioned in an article in “The Wall Street Journal” published on 22 May 2023. If the burgeoning practice of curbing freedom of speech and oppressing the minorities and political opposition continues, democracy in India will meet a painful death.
—The writer is a Retired Group Captain of PAF, who has written several books on China.
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