Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
India is by far the globe’s most populous democracy. But, like so many other electoral near-autocracies, the country has also been steadily attacking its own democratic underpinnings. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has limited the democratic rights of India’s 205 million Muslim citizens (15 per cent of the country’s total population), refused to grant citizenship to Muslim refugees, and crippled the Indian Congress Party (or ICP, its main opposition) by sequestering its bank accounts; just last month, the Chief Minister of Delhi State, Arvind Kejriwal, who is one of Mr. Modi’s most influential critics, was arrested.
Mr. Modi’s all-powerful Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will likely win the country’s next parliamentary voting contest, which starts April 19. Mr. Modi is immensely well-liked, having in recent years zealously promoted Hindutva – an extremist, Hindu-nationalist political ideology that has served to cement his support among a segment of the 1.1 billion Indians who are Hindu religiously and linguistically. The ideology is more than a century old, but was revived by Mr. Modi for political purposes in 2014.
This emphasis on Hindu supremacy has successfully aroused northern India, whose inhabitants are more numerous (and growing faster demographically), but poorer on average, than those living in the southern states.
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India is a vast nation of 1.4 billion people representing numerous ethnicities and speaking multiple languages, but the federation of 28 states and eight union territories has been held together by the common use of the English language and a democratic ethos nurtured by its founders. Mr. Modi, by contrast, has obsessively sought to centralize his government’s control over non-Hindi speaking parts of the country, many of which prefer to follow their own traditions.
Mr. Modi became chief minister of the state of Gujarat in 2001 after several decades of adhering to the extreme Hindu nationalistic views of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a far-right, Hindu-nationalist paramilitary organization.
In India’s 2019 elections, wherein Mr. Modi vied for a second term as Prime Minister, the BJP won almost 38 per cent of the vote, growing its majority to 303 of the 545-member lower house. Its main opposition, the Indian National Congress party, only took 52 seats.
Ever since, India’s government has moved incrementally to strengthen Mr. Modi, to increase the reign of the BJP, and to marginalize anyone opposing him. Criticism has not been welcomed.
Advancing Hindu supremacy has led to attacks on Muslims, and many innocent people have been killed or maimed. Destroying a mosque in Ayodhya because it allegedly occupied the site of a pre-Mughal Hindu temple has been one of Mr. Modi’s great projects. Last month, Mr. Modi’s government announced that refugee and immigrant Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis and Sikhs from Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Pakistan could become citizens – but not Muslims.
The jailing of Mr. Kejriwal takes this mincing of democracy to another level. A thorn in Mr. Modi’s side for several years, Mr. Kejriwal gained power after preaching against corruption, propelling his Aam Aadmi (Common People’s) Party (AAP) to power in the union territory of Delhi. More permissive and less bureaucratic than most states and territories, Delhi has curbed black-market liquor sales by loosening rules around the control of alcohol, which angered Mr. Modi. His officials now claim that Mr. Kejriwal took US$12-million in bribes from the liquor industry. Mr. Kerjiwal has proclaimed his innocence, alleging that Mr. Modi is retaliating to prevent the AAP from winning the Delhi contest again in the national elections this month.
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Mr. Kejriwal – a former tax inspector who began battling government misconduct more than two decades ago and won the Magsaysay Asian Leadership Prize for promoting the “right to information” in India in 2006 – formed the AAP in 2012 to fight corruption. In 2013, the AAP surprised everyone by winning 67 of 70 assembly seats in Delhi. Mr. Kejriwal had campaigned vigorously against corruption and for housing for the poor, clean water, lower electricity costs, free WiFi and the protection of women. Delivering on those promises, Mr. Kejriwal and the AAP won again in 2020. He opposes Muslim persecution.
Mr. Modi’s triumphs have installed him as a world leader. But India’s remarkable recent GDP growth masks creeping authoritarianism, or what might be called “toxic majoritarianism.” India is far less fair, and just, to its non-majority inhabitants and, as the jailing of Mr. Kejriwal suggests, increasingly intolerant of anything or anyone that threatens Mr. Modi’s personalistic rule.
Ottawa and Washington can do little to influence Mr. Modi to be more tolerant and democratic, but speaking truth to power would help. India’s 1.4 billion people deserve so much more.