Tag Archive for: Narendra Modi

Will India reach its potential?

India is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous country sometime this year. And while China has already passed its demographic zenith and begun to age, India’s ascent will continue for decades.

To be sure, after abandoning its socialist model in 1991, India has struggled to boost its economic growth, whereas China’s four decades of ‘reform and opening’ have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and brought high-income status within sight. As a result, China’s economy is now six times larger than India’s, and the difference between the two countries’ basic infrastructure is glaring. But with Chinese President Xi Jinping moving his country back in a more statist direction, its growth has slowed substantially.

Meanwhile, India’s economy outpaced most others in 2022, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems determined to put his country on a path to close the gap with China. In 2021, India surpassed the United Kingdom to become the world’s fifth-largest economy, and recent estimates suggest that its current policies and growth rates will make it the third-largest national economy in a decade or so. While its projected growth rate for 2023 is below that of 2022 (5.9% compared with 6.9%), a rapid ascent up the global economic ladder remains well within reach.

China outpaced India in recent decades because it was much faster and more decisive in opening its economy and tapping into global trade. While China was establishing itself as ‘the factory of the world’, India was still harbouring suspicions about open trade and allowing protectionist tendencies to hold back rapid reform. Its ability to overcome old habits in the years ahead will likely determine whether it can fulfill its ambition to achieve sustained rapid growth and broad-based prosperity.

For now, global conditions remain favourable for India. China’s own success in advancing along the global value chain means that it is no longer the low-cost producer it once was. And with rising geopolitical tensions and many multinationals rethinking their supply chains, investors are increasingly turning their sights to India.

Globalisation may be changing, but it is hardly in retreat. In fact, global trade is stronger than ever. What is new is the push to locate value chains in more politically predictable places, so that geopolitical tensions and rogue actors don’t unduly affect the free flow of goods and services. India could fit the bill, but first it will need to resolve some outstanding questions.

One issue concerns India’s relationship with Europe. A free-trade agreement between the European Union and India used to be high on the agenda for both sides, but it was shelved in the mid-2010s. The EU wanted more than was achievable, India wanted far less, and the talks were going nowhere. Last year, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Modi decided, in a mutual leap of faith, to revive efforts to conclude an FTA.

Much will now depend on the outcome of these new talks, which follow a seven-year hiatus. The EU will have to recognise that it probably can’t achieve everything that it wants in one go. And India, for its part, will have to jettison a lot of political baggage. If it really wants to capitalise on the global rearrangement of value chains, it must open itself up in ways that it has resisted in the past.

Neither the negotiations nor the associated reforms will be easy. Progress ultimately will depend on political leadership in both New Delhi and Brussels. If trade negotiators are going to break new ground, as is necessary in this case, they will need a clear vision and consistent will from their respective capitals.

Indian leaders, in particular, should bear in mind what the policies of the past few decades have wrought. Divergent national approaches to the global economy explain why China now represents 16% of the EU’s foreign trade, whereas India represents only 2%. The latter figure obviously must rise in the coming decade, but the extent to which it does will depend heavily on the outcome of the new talks.

The rest of the world has much to gain from a more prosperous, confident and powerful India. In addition to being the world’s most populous country soon, India is also its largest democracy, and its voice will only grow in importance as its economy develops. But, ultimately, the soft power that it wields in the future will reflect the trade and economic policy choices it makes today.

India’s Ukraine tightrope

Russia’s war in Ukraine has exposed India’s strategic vulnerabilities as few other things could, raising fundamental questions about the country’s position in the world, its regional security and the wisdom of its long-term relationships.

India abstained in a succession of United Nations votes—in the Security Council, the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council—condemning the Russian invasion. In its initial ‘explanation of vote’, India didn’t even mention Russia or deplore the invasion. Instead, India merely urged a de-escalation of the conflict by those involved, as if both countries were belligerents, when in fact there is an obvious aggressor and a clear victim. India didn’t even object to Russia’s earlier recognition of the independence of the separatist Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

In subsequent statements, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has at least reiterated India’s longstanding principles, while calling for ‘concerted efforts from all sides to return to the path of diplomatic negotiations and dialogue’. In the face of mounting casualties—including an Indian student killed by Russian fire while queuing for food in Kharkiv—Modi’s government continues to call in vain for peace, while ensuring that no criticism, let alone condemnation, of Russia passes official lips.

The reasons for India’s reticence are easy to discern. For starters, Russia supplies India with about 50% of its weapons and defence equipment. And while India’s other commercial ties with Russia are much more modest than those it has with the United States, diplomatic relations with the Kremlin have been close since the days of the Soviet Union. Soviet vetoes at the UN frequently shielded India on Kashmir, and the Kremlin’s protection was indispensable during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, when the US and China supported Pakistan.

Russia’s increasing closeness to, and geopolitical affinity with, China has therefore been worrying Indian policymakers for some time. The Kremlin has also been visibly warming to Pakistan, China’s client state. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was in Moscow on the day Russia invaded Ukraine, and continued with his meetings, including with President Vladimir Putin—a clear sign that Russia’s calculations in the subcontinent have shifted. India seems to feel that it needs to cling to Russia’s goodwill in order to avoid losing it altogether.

But India has also been looking west in recent years, building a strategic partnership with the US that includes increasingly significant defence ties. It has embraced the US-led Quad (an informal four-country grouping that also includes Japan and Australia) as a useful counter to China. But Indian leaders realise that their continuing failure to join their Quad partners in opposing Russia’s invasion could jeopardise these links. The government thus finds itself on a tightrope, anxious not to fall to either side.

The war in Ukraine poses another strategic challenge for India. Until the crisis began to escalate late last year, the US seemed to be focusing on the global threat posed by China, and on the Indo-Pacific rather than Europe. But America may now revive its adversarial obsession with Russia. That could reduce US hostility towards China, India’s menacing northern neighbour, which has repeatedly encroached on Indian territory along the two countries’ disputed Himalayan border, even killing 20 Indian soldiers in an unprovoked attack less than two years ago.

All this is happening at a time when the security threat from Afghanistan is at its greatest since the Taliban were last in power two decades ago. China’s build-up of military infrastructure in the region, its financial patronage of the Taliban, its opening to Iran (which cooperated with India in countering the previous Taliban regime) and an increase in Pakistani-supported militancy in Kashmir have put India on the defensive. Russia, China and Iran recently conducted joint naval exercises in the Indian Ocean.

India’s traditional allies in the region can sense which way the wind is blowing. Nepal has allowed China to build major railway lines and highways across its northern border areas. Bhutan signed a border agreement last October that surrenders territory coveted by China, giving the Chinese an advantage in any future conflict with India. Most of India’s other South Asian neighbours have signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which India strenuously opposes.

China’s increasing influence over these countries undermines India’s diplomatic position in its own backyard. And to the east, the ruling junta in Myanmar has declared a ‘special kinship’ with China, whereas its predecessor had come to see India as a valuable counterbalance to China.

In short, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has placed India in an unenviable position. Ideally, India would have liked to continue strengthening its partnerships with Western democracies, especially Australia, France, Japan, the UK and the US, while maintaining its traditional closeness to Russia, in the hope of deterring China from further encroachment on India’s core security interests. Instead, India finds itself between a rock and a hard place. It could antagonise the West while still losing Russia to China’s embrace, even as Pakistan—with friendlier Afghan and Iranian neighbours—feels emboldened in Kashmir.

The conflict in Ukraine is posing a profound challenge to Indian grand strategy. Non-alignment is hardly an option for a country with antagonistic neighbours seeking to violate its borders. India’s traditional reluctance to choose sides on major international issues could prove highly costly in the not-too-distant future, when it wants other countries’ support. It will be either Hobson’s choice, or Modi’s.

Modi to unveil India’s innovation agenda

As the world rides the opportunities, and the disruption, of a rapidly rising wave of technological development, its most populous democracy has a vital role to play.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the Sydney Dialogue this week on the potential for his nation’s tech industry to produce answers for a range of critical global problems. He’ll be introduced by Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who will also deliver a keynote speech at the dialogue launched by ASPI to support a more stable rollout of the next wave of transformational technologies.

Modi will discuss this technological revolution and how his government is harnessing India’s entrepreneurial and innovation skills.

The head of ASPI’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge, said that over the past three years Modi had been central to a major strategic shift by India. Prior to 2018, Indian strategists and key thinkers cited its long history of non-alignment and stressed what India would not do.

‘They are now talking of the value to India of strategic partnerships and supporting its involvement as a prime participant in the Quad,’ Shoebridge said.

Modi was elected at a time of increasing pressure from China into the Indo Pacific and violent border disputes. He’d responded to that international environment because non-alignment was no longer in India’s interest, and he saw the value of partnerships. ‘Formal alliances remain too laden with encumbrances, but Modi’s India is a long way from seeing any strategic problem as best solved by non-alignment,’ said Shoebridge.

He also noted that while the Covid-19 pandemic had reduced opportunities for leaders to meet in person, virtual meetings had provided an unexpected advantage with more frequent opportunities to talk, and decisions coming faster.

That had fast-tracked the process, and accelerated leader-led cooperation, as we’ve seen with the Quad.

Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe will address the conference to develop his concept of the maritime democracies of Australia, India, Japan and the United States working together to ensure that the Pacific and Indian oceans became dynamically coupled as a zone of freedom and prosperity. This is now the central organising concept for a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific. Abe will be introduced by Australia’s former prime minister John Howard.

Abe has declared that the relationship between Japan and India is blessed with the greatest potential for development of any of the world’s bilateral relationships. He says he has put enormous effort into developing that relationship as a strategic priority under a common vision that a strong India is in the interest of Japan, and a strong Japan is in the interest of India.

Fergus Hanson and Danielle Cave, who run ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, conceived the Sydney Dialogue in the knowledge that major advances in technology have always been disruptive. But when they occur against a backdrop of great-power competition, the development and deployment of these technologies become fraught.

‘Few have grasped the enormity of the disruption coming our way as more and more new technologies, from increasingly sophisticated surveillance to quantum and biotechnologies, are deployed across the world,’ Hanson said.

While governments grapple with foreseeing the full impacts and setting policy directions, there is a growing realisation that emerging and critical technologies will be extraordinarily important for societies, economies and national security.

ASPI launched the dialogue to support a more stable rollout of the next wave of transformational technologies. ‘It is a forum allowing for frank debate about the rapidly changing strategic landscape, and a space for governments, business and civil society to come together to focus on solutions, cooperation and policy options,’ said Hanson.

‘We saw big gaps in forums on technology, especially in the Indo-Pacific. There were industry events that showcased the latest technological advances and products, but they tended to eschew policy debates, and did not encompass government and civil society.’

Important government multilateral discussion and policymaking forums usually lagged well behind technological advances, Hanson noted, and because they were primarily for governments, key global players, including those making the technology, weren’t part of the discussion. There were excellent civil-society initiatives, but they often focused on individual topics that were only one piece of a larger puzzle.

‘Few of these initiatives focused on or resonated in the Indo-Pacific, the region that incubates much of the world’s technological innovation and has become a hotbed of strategic technological competition.’

These gaps drove us towards a dynamic where all the key actors have been speaking past one another, while rarely all being in the same room. Tech companies are developing and deploying products that are revolutionary and hugely disruptive. A decade later, governments are scrambling to retrospectively legislate to address issues they did not foresee, and civil society is critiquing from the sidelines.

Hanson said three major problems must be addressed to ensure the stable development of advanced technologies.

‘First, there’s the large lag between the deployment of new technologies and regulation governing them. With social media, this lag was about a decade. As we’ve seen, this doesn’t lead to good outcomes for individuals, or for societies.

‘Second, there’s a delay between states’ use of new technologies and their consideration of the ethical questions raised by its use. Examples of this can be seen in the global surveillance industry, which has allowed its products to support some of the most egregious human rights abuses of our times.

‘Third, a tense relationship between governments and technology companies is playing out around the world. The negative dynamic that has taken hold is hindering progress and genuine cooperation, leaving democracies at risk of being left behind.

‘By bringing world leaders, tech company CEOs and the world’s top civil society voices together for an annual dialogue, we hope the roll-out of the next wave of revolutionary technologies over the coming decade can be better managed. Modi, Abe and Morrison are likely to understand this well.

The Sydney Dialogue commences tomorrow and will include the keynote speeches and panel sessions on social media, space collaboration, global technology governance, and critical technologies. Most sessions will be accessible to the public and available for catch-up viewing at tsd.aspi.org.au.

‘Next year,’ said Hanson, ‘we hope to meet at the Sydney Opera House for an in-person summit, and annually thereafter.’

India’s Covid-19 tsunami

It is humbling when a columnist must retract his words soon after penning them. Just two months ago, after India rushed millions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines to over 60 countries, I praised the country’s ‘vaccine diplomacy’. India’s aspirations to be recognised as a global power had been given a real boost. Now, with more than 300,000 new cases a day and the death toll evidently much higher than reported, India is no one’s idea of a global leader.

In my own defence, I was worried that India had exported three times as many vaccines as it had administered domestically. The country was clearly lagging behind its own target of immunising 400 million people by August, after vaccinating some 3 million healthcare workers in a campaign that began only on 16 January. ‘[M]ounting concern about rising case numbers, the emergence of Covid-19 variants that may not respond to existing vaccines, and an economy that has not yet fully recovered,’ I noted, ‘will intensify the challenge India confronts in fulfilling its obligations to developing countries while also meeting domestic demand.’

At the time, I did not realise the scale of the challenge. The number of infections surpassed 17 million in recent days, and the official death toll now exceeds 190,000. Hospitals are now overflowing, oxygen supplies have dwindled, vaccination centres have run out of doses and pharmacies are unable to meet the demand for antivirals. India is reeling.

How did everything go so wrong so soon after India recovered from the first wave of the pandemic last year, resumed normal life and economic activity, and started exporting vaccines? The list of errors is long.

Begin with symbolism over substance. On national television, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged Indians to bang plates together. Two weeks later, he instructed them to light lamps at a specific moment. Superstition replaced science-based policies in confronting the pandemic.

Modi also enlisted Hindu nationalism in the fight against Covid-19. Just as the epic Mahabharata war was won in 18 days, he claimed, India would win the war against the coronavirus in 21 days. At no point was this based on anything more than wishful thinking.

Another error was ignoring the World Health Organization’s advice. From the start of the crisis, the WHO recommended a containment strategy that required testing, contact tracing, isolation and treatment. While a handful of states, like Kerala (which recorded India’s first Covid-19 case on 30 January 2020), initially implemented such measures successfully, the Modi government’s ham-handed response resulted in their uneven application in several states.

Then there was over-centralisation. From the first nationwide lockdown, announced by Modi in March last year with less than four hours’ notice, the central government managed the pandemic under obscure provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act and the Disaster Management Act, which allowed it to ride roughshod over India’s federal structure. Instead of delegating India’s 28 state governments the authority to design strategies tailored to local conditions, the central government tried to manage Covid-19 by decree from Delhi, with calamitous results.

And, no surprise, the initial lockdown was mismanaged. State governments, the public and even central government officials were caught unprepared. Chaos resulted, with some 30 million migrant workers, stranded without work in cities, forced to walk home, sometimes for days. It’s estimated that 198 people died along the way. Some 5 million micro and small enterprises closed, unable to recover from the shutdown. India’s unemployment reached the highest levels ever recorded.

As the crisis began to slip out of control, the central government, following US President Donald Trump’s precedent, passed off more and more responsibilities to state governments, without adequate funding. The state governments struggled to mobilise doctors, nurses, health workers, testing kits, personal protective equipment, hospital beds, ventilators, oxygen cylinders and medicines to fight the pandemic. The government mobilised a huge amount of funds for a new relief entity called ‘PM CARES’, but to this day there is no public accounting of how much money is in the opaque PM CARES fund and where its resources have been allocated.

When the pandemic seemed to have waned, the authorities settled into complacency, taking no precautions or preventive measures against a possible second wave that many warned could be more devastating than the first. Testing, tracking and isolation of infected people and their contacts fell rapidly into disuse by the end of 2020. And just when people stopped following appropriate behavioural guidelines, the virus evolved an extremely infectious variant. Super-spreader events proliferated: election rallies and religious festivals packed together unmasked throngs. The contagion raged.

Although India produces 60% of the world’s vaccines, the government took no steps to scale up production of the two Covid-19 vaccines cleared for manufacture in the country. Nor did it permit the import of foreign vaccines, help expand available manufacturing facilities, or license other Indian firms to produce doses. India launched its vaccination drive nearly two months after the United Kingdom, but by April, only 37% of health workers, and barely 1.3% of India’s 1.4 billion people, had been fully vaccinated. Only 8% had received at least one vaccine shot.

Here, too, the authorities initially bet on centralisation, and the government’s refusal to grant emergency-use approval to vaccines from abroad led to a nationwide shortage by mid-April. It was only at this point that the government delegated the vaccine roll-out to state governments and public and private hospitals, and permitted the import of vaccines approved by the United States, the UK, the European Union, Russia and Japan. Even then, the central government failed to distribute vaccines equitably to the states, resulting in some of the worst-affected (like opposition-ruled Maharashtra and Kerala) running short of vaccines as cases peaked.

Like India’s government, I was prematurely self-congratulatory about the country’s vaccine diplomacy. At a time when Indians were unable to access the vaccines that might have protected them, India’s ‘Vaccine Maitri’ program was not smart, but hubristic. Global leadership must begin at home, and today home is a country whose mortuaries, graveyards and crematoria are running out of space.

Modi’s war on the media

A flurry of assaults on freedom of the press in recent months has raised troubling questions about the state of India’s democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India has long had a free and often raucous press. But the situation has changed dramatically since Modi’s government came to power in 2014.

In late January, police filed criminal charges—including sedition, which carries a life sentence—against eight journalists who covered a protest in Delhi that turned violent. Their crime: reporting the claims of a dead protester’s family that he had been shot and killed by police. I face the same charges for having tweeted their claim when it was reported.

Six journalists and I (a Congress party MP) are accused of ‘misreporting’ facts surrounding the death. We face charges in four states ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The publisher, editor and executive editor of the investigative news magazine The Caravan face 10 sedition cases in five states for reporting the story, and the magazine’s Twitter account was briefly suspended by government order.

Ours is hardly an isolated case. In 2020, 67 journalists were arrested, while nearly 200 were physically attacked in the 2014–19 period, including 36 in 2019, according to a study by the Free Speech Collective. A journalist arrested on his way to report on the aftermath of a gang rape in Uttar Pradesh state has been in jail for six months, being allowed out briefly only to visit his ailing mother in Kerala state, more than 2,000 kilometres away.

Conversely, reporting that’s sympathetic to the government proceeds unchecked, even if it’s inaccurate, propagandistic or inflammatory, particularly in retailing bigotry against minorities or discrediting the political opposition. The mainstream media, whether print or television, has been cajoled and cudgelled into cheerleading for Modi’s government.

Once dominated by government programming, India’s visual media landscape is now brimming with numerous private offerings, with more than 100 24-hour television news channels broadcasting in multiple languages. My state of Kerala alone has 13 all-news channels in the regional language, Malayalam.

But competition has fuelled a race for eyeballs and advertising revenue that has steadily eroded the quality of Indian journalism. Whereas the fourth estate once placed a premium on editorial standards and journalistic ethics, it has morphed into a grotesque platform driven by sensationalism and vilification. The news must be broken—and so, it seems, must the newsmaker. The government and its stalwarts are almost never the targets: the opposition, civil society and dissenting individuals are.

As more Indians enjoy the fruits of literacy and the increasing affordability of smartphones and reduced data costs, India has witnessed a boom in print circulation as well as in social media as a news source, especially among young people. But newspapers are also conscious that they must compete in a tight media environment, where TV and digital media set the pace. They know that every morning they must reach readers who have watched TV and read WhatsApp already. So, newspapers feel the need to ‘break’ news in order to outdo their TV and social media competitors.

The result is that India’s media, in its rush to run a story, has fallen prey to predictable hazards, often becoming a willing accomplice of the motivated leak and the malicious allegation, trading integrity for access to well-placed government sources. In this environment, the BJP has undermined the free press through co-option and intimidation, thus ensuring that much of the press produces only news that is sympathetic to the causes the ruling party holds dear, or that distracts the public’s attention from government failings.

India’s news media ought to be holding the government accountable, not kowtowing to it. The good news is that not everyone has forgotten the watchdog responsibility that free media must exercise in a democracy. The Editors Guild of India has asked Modi to revoke the new media rules, arguing that they undermine press freedom.

The bad news is that such developments are a major reason for the recent decisions of democracy watchdogs Freedom House (which downgraded India from ‘free’ to ‘partly free’) and the V-Dem Institute (which now calls India an ‘electoral autocracy’) to express alarm about the health of the country’s democracy. ‘India, the world’s most populous democracy, is also sending signals that holding the government accountable is not part of the press’s responsibility,’ wrote Freedom House.

The Modi government’s weapon of choice is the colonial-era sedition law: an overwhelming majority of sedition cases have been filed in the seven years since Modi and his BJP came to power, according to data compiled by the website Article14. In a criminal justice system that has changed little since colonial times, detentions, charges, police investigations and trials ensure that even if actual convictions are rare, the process itself is the punishment.

Freedom of the press is ultimately the best guarantee of liberty and progress. It is the mortar that binds together a free society—and it is also the open window that, in Mahatma Gandhi’s famous metaphor, allows the winds of the world to blow freely through the house. If Modi’s efforts to de-institutionalise what used to be a dynamic and independent fourth estate persist, public confidence in the media will steadily decline, along with confidence in Indian democracy.

Modi’s Potemkin democracy

Indian legislators woke up in the new year to two realisations. First, the annual winter session of parliament, from which they should just have been emerging, had not taken place at all. And, second, New Delhi’s magnificent parliament complex, a tourist attraction since it was built in 1927, had been turned into a construction site.

These two facts sum up the reality of Indian democracy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). On the one hand, the government has shrugged off the very concept of accountability to the people’s representatives, the cornerstone of parliamentary democracy. On the other hand, Modi, an increasingly larger-than-life figure whose flowing beard and other-worldly air make him resemble the ‘Raj Rishis’ or emperor-sages of ancient days, is doing all he can to transform the republic physically as well as politically. A new, grander parliament building is to arise alongside the old one, as part of his determination to leave his visible mark on the national capital.

Modi’s ‘edifice complex’ includes plans to construct an array of new government buildings alongside New Delhi’s Central Vista, the grand sweep of which leads past parliament to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace. A new residential-cum-office complex for the vice president and the prime minister are also part of the plans. Environmentalists have obtained a stay on construction from the Supreme Court, but did not challenge the ground-breaking ceremony for the new parliament building to proceed.

Parliament itself barely met in 2020. The official reason, of course, was the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to the shortening of the year’s first two sessions and the cancellation of the third.

Parliament sat for only 23 days in the budget session that began the legislative year, before being adjourned in March because of the pandemic. The government then showed no desire to convene the monsoon session, which normally starts in late June or mid-July and continues until August. It might happily have ruled by decree were it not for the constitutional requirement that parliament convene within six months of the end of the previous session.

The monsoon session was belatedly called on 14 September to meet for just 18 days with no weekend breaks. But it was abruptly adjourned after 10 days, again because of the virus. And the winter session, which should normally have started in mid-November and continued until Christmas (on some occasions, it has even extended through the holiday session) simply never happened.

There’s no doubt about the current dangers of 750 MPs and hundreds of officials and journalists crowding into the parliament complex. Three ministers, two dozen MPs and several parliamentary officials tested positive for the coronavirus during the monsoon session; three MPs and a minister of state died after contracting Covid-19. But it seems absurd that a country claiming to be a world leader in information technology finds itself unable to connect its MPs virtually through videoconferencing, as so many other national parliaments have done.

A national crisis is precisely the time when parliament should be meeting to discuss its cause, in this case the pandemic and how policymakers are managing it. But that appears to be exactly what the government wants to avoid. As the truncated monsoon session showed, it sees the legislature as a mere rubber stamp for decisions it has already taken. Key legislation – including hugely controversial labor and farm bills – was pushed through both houses without significant debate.

The government imposed its own priorities, ensuring that the presiding officers took up its bills (mainly those ratifying previously issued executive decrees) while deferring debate on the issues that opposition parties wanted to raise. These included the border standoff with China, during which 20 Indian soldiers were killed in June, a controversial draft environmental impact assessment, the government’s new education policy, and financial and tax compensation to state governments.

Under the previous Congress-led government from 2009 to 2014, 71% of all bills were first scrutinised in parliamentary standing committees. Under the BJP government, that rate has decreased to 25%, and since Modi’s re-election 20 months ago, not a single bill has benefited from such scrutiny. This sorry record includes the three farm laws whose passage sparked major protests, with angry farmers besieging the capital for several weeks in late 2020.

The protests again proved the utility of thorough legislative consideration before bills are passed. But the government seems to believe that its electoral mandate is all the approval it needs, with parliamentary examination and debate being a mere formality.

Parliamentary committees have struggled to meet in recent months even after the easing of the initial draconian lockdown, because travel restrictions and quarantine rules in MPs’ home states have made it difficult to assemble a quorum. Pleas by committee chairs, including me, to connect some members virtually by secure videoconference have been rejected on confidentiality grounds.

The irony of conducting a ground-breaking ceremony for a new parliament building during the pandemic, while suspending the work that should have been taking place in the old one, was lost on the government. Even the confidentiality excuse doesn’t apply to regular parliamentary sessions, which, unlike committee meetings, are televised. The inescapable conclusion is that the government would rather dispense with the inconvenience of being accountable to the legislature.

Such tendencies were apparent even in the shortened monsoon session, when parliament dispensed with question hour, the one time when MPs can demand unscripted answers from ministers. I have previously noted the Modi government’s propensity to sidestep debate on important issues and use its majority to reduce parliament to a noticeboard for its decisions. This is an administration that does not like to be questioned.

India will eventually have a new building to showcase its democracy. Sadly, under Modi and the BJP, the spirit of deliberation and debate that animated the country’s old parliament will be left there.

India’s silenced parliament

After a nearly six-month hiatus, the Indian parliament reconvenes today in the midst of a deepening national crisis. But I fear that it may be unable to hold the country’s failing government to account.

Parliament is obliged to meet now, because India’s constitution limits the gap between sessions to six months, and the Covid-19 pandemic has forced all sessions to be suspended since March. With almost 4.5 million cases to date, India is now the world’s second worst-affected country, surpassing Brazil and Russia and behind only the United States.

And infection rates are rising, especially in rural areas where testing had not been adequately extended earlier. Fortunately, the Covid-19 mortality rate remains relatively low, at 57 per 1 million people, representing just 1% of deaths from all causes.

But if lives have not ended, livelihoods have, owing to draconian but ineffective lockdowns introduced in March. GDP collapsed by 23.9% year on year in the June quarter, making India the world’s worst-performing major economy. Unemployment is rife—some 21 million salaried jobs have been lost during the pandemic and millions more in the informal sector, especially among day labourers, who are now unable to make ends meet. Small and micro enterprises are being shuttered throughout the country. And the millions of migrant workers who trudged home in despair during the lockdown have found themselves no better off in their home villages’ stagnant economies.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government seems utterly helpless to stop the economic meltdown, as if paralysed by the plummeting indicators in every sector. A much-hyped fiscal stimulus turned out to be less than one-tenth of the size that Modi had claimed, and it failed to alleviate nationwide distress. The budget adopted just before the lockdowns is in tatters, its every assumption rendered irrelevant.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, a major crisis has erupted on India’s disputed border with China, where 20 Indian soldiers were brutally killed in June in the icy Himalayan heights of Ladakh. Talk of disengagement has failed to translate into withdrawals, and both sides have sent reinforcements to the tenuous Line of Actual Control that divides their forces. Last week, the two countries’ foreign ministers announced a new agreement to disengage, although it remains to be seen whether this will be realised.

Meanwhile, Pakistan has stepped up its cross-border militancy in Kashmir, which is seething with unrest following last year’s clampdown by Modi’s government. Many fear that India may be facing a two-front war before the year is out.

All this should normally make for a lively parliamentary session. But the legislature will itself meet in abnormal and straitened circumstances, reflected in the extraordinary measures announced in advance of the session. No MP may enter the premises without a Covid-negative certificate from a test administered within three days of the session. Inside, social distancing will apply in the usually cramped chambers, with MPs distributed throughout the upper and lower houses and the visitors’ galleries.

As a result, the two houses will take turns meeting for a half-day each in sessions lasting four hours instead of the usual six, and on all seven days of the week rather than the traditional five. Worse, the government and the presiding officers have decided that, given the shorter sessions, they will dispense with question hour, the only opportunity for MPs to demand unscripted answers from ministers on a variety of subjects. (In response to the outcry, the government has agreed to accept written questions two weeks in advance, to which ministers will provide written answers.)

Suspending question hour is typical of a government that abhors being questioned. Modi has not held a single press conference in India in his six years in office, and is notorious for granting interviews only when the questions are pre-approved. Protesters questioning the government in the streets are charged with sedition, and critics are denounced as anti-national. A prominent lawyer who tweeted his objections to recent Supreme Court decisions was convicted of criminal contempt. And the mainstream news media, far from interrogating the government’s performance, has recently been fixated on the lurid details of a Bollywood actor’s suicide and the conspiracy theories swirling around it.

In the meantime, the government stumbles on and tries to mask its ineptitude with a variety of public-relations stunts, including a bizarre recent photoshoot of Modi feeding peacocks in his garden. The official response to failure is denial, as with Modi’s recent claim that India had lost no territory to China, despite satellite pictures and evidence on the ground that clearly indicate otherwise.

China has gleefully seized on this statement to deny that it has encroached on over 1,000 square kilometres of land. China’s leaders are not the first to realise that they can get away with anything with this Indian government, as long as Modi can claim victory at home.

Parliament therefore has a vital job on its hands, but many MPs fear that it will be unable to do it. The government will use its crushing majority to pass the bills it wants, particularly those converting a dozen ordinances or executive orders issued during the last six months into law, while sidestepping debate on the issues that matter.

The government’s tendency to use its parliamentary majority as a rubber stamp was already apparent in previous sessions. And this session could be cut short at any sign of Covid-19—one MP has died from it since March.

The visible measures necessitated by the pandemic— face masks, greater distance between MPs and plastic partition screens—may not be all that is different about this parliamentary session. I fear that our democracy’s highest legislative body will be reduced to a noticeboard for government decisions. There is a genuine risk that while India will honour the outward forms of parliamentary process, the spirit of debate, discussion, disagreement and deliberation will be missing.

India’s friends can’t ignore its slide from democracy

In four days of madness from 23 to 26 February, rioters ran unchecked and destroyed entire neighbourhoods of northeast Delhi in the deadliest outbreak of violence since the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984. By 6 March, the toll was 53 dead and more than 200 injured. Although both Hindus and Muslims committed acts of violence, the primary perpetrators were Hindus and more than 70% of victims were Muslims. I was visiting India and watched Delhi go up in flames with mounting disbelief, horror and anger.

Commentators have likened the riots variously to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany in November 1938, in which rampaging mobs killed more than 90 Jews and burned and ransacked their homes, businesses and synagogues with the open incitement of Nazi leaders; Delhi in 1984 when 2,000–3,000 Sikhs were butchered; and Gujarat in 2002 when up to 2,000 were killed in anti-Muslim riots.

In Delhi, some police officers studiously averted their gaze from the criminality before their eyes and some abetted the violence. Leaders of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party who openly incited mobs to shoot the ‘traitors’ are yet to be arrested and charged. Neither Prime Minister Narendra Modi nor any minister visited the riot-hit areas. Home Minister Amit Shah was at best guilty of a grave dereliction of duty, and at worst he was the political mastermind behind the pogrom. On the fourth day of violence, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, himself a former top cop, finally went on a well-publicised tour of the smouldering neighbourhoods, but it was too little and too late to reassure terrified Muslims.

Modi’s first term was punctuated by hate speech and acts targeted at Muslims. The anti-Muslim agenda is being put into action through the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which passed in December, and the proposed national register of citizens and the national population register, which between them will enable authorities to declare that, in a document-poor country, millions of Muslims who can’t prove their Indian citizenship must be held in detention centres. The end goal is to marginalise them, denude India of Muslims and transform it into a Hindu Rashtra, or nation for Hindus.

I argued earlier that these measures are wrong in principle, infeasible in practice and anti-national in consequences. The Delhi riots are powerful proof of all three pathologies. The riots were manifestly state-sponsored. In the increasingly toxic political atmosphere under the Modi government, dissent is sedition and a dissenting Muslim is a traitor. Former Home Minister P. Chidambaram suspects that polarisation along religious lines is a deliberate strategy by Modi to consolidate the Hindu vote.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist supporters, known popularly as bhakts (worshippers), assert openly that having partitioned the country on religious lines, all Muslims should have left for Pakistan; that Muslims have several other countries to go to; and that Hindus, too, deserve a national homeland.

The core elements of the Hindu Rashtra project include Hindu primacy, where Hindus are more equal than others; alignment of laws and rules with Hindu sentiments and practices; religious diktats with respect to diet, dress and decorum; and an end to what is seen as pandering to minority fundamentalism, so that minorities know their place.

Modi and his army of bhakts have fallen into a fatal trap. Development, growth and the emergence of a large and prosperous middle class will provide the essential underpinnings to promote Indian culture and Hindu philosophy globally, much as a rising China has bankrolled the Chinese Communist Party’s network of Confucius Institutes. Conversely, Hindu–Muslim riots in the nation’s capital are a business risk and a disincentive to foreign investors. Economic stagnation will undercut India’s material capacity for cultural diplomacy, while religious fundamentalism will inflict substantial reputational harm. A return to persistent mass poverty under protectionist barriers and statist economic regulations will regenerate contempt for the ‘Hindu rate of growth’.

The riots were at their worst during US President Donald Trump’s high-profile first visit to India. Trump’s speech in the capacious Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad on 24 February pointedly praised India’s history of democracy, tolerance, diversity and pluralism. Yet later he merely said it was up to India to handle the anti-CAA agitation. But his potential (if increasingly unlikely) Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders has been sharply critical of India’s growing intolerance and illiberalism, as has Pramila Jayapal, the first Indian-American woman elected to the House of Representatives. So has the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Muslim countries including Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran and Turkey, as well as the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, have denounced the CAA agenda. India has also attracted criticism from MPs of all parties in the UK Parliament. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has requested it be made a friend of the court when the CAA’s constitutionality is adjudicated by India’s Supreme Court.

India’s official response, that this is a purely internal matter, won’t wash. With the steady universalisation of human rights norms and international humanitarian law over the past 100 years, and the growth of UN-centred monitoring machinery, the use of state violence either internally against citizens or internationally against other countries is subject to international normative benchmarks. The tiresome mantra of ‘internal matter’ is a self-indicting refrain deployed only by unsavoury regimes.

In 1938 other countries ignored the warning signs that preceded the full horror of the Holocaust. It would be a mistake, for reasons of values and prudential politics, to stay silent on the abhorrent trajectory set for India by the Modi government. The much-touted shared political values of democracy, freedoms, civil liberties and the rule of law are all under threat. Moreover, a stalled economy will mean India is no longer an attractive market and trade partner, and persistent mass poverty will also degrade its military potential as a geopolitical counterweight to China.

The irreversible alienation of disaffected Indian Muslims will destroy India as the geographical firewall against the spread of Islamist extremism eastwards. With 180 million Muslims, India itself could become the epicentre of Islamist extremists who export terrorism and the refugees who flee it to the Asia–Pacific.

Friendly democracies have little to lose in the medium term by criticising growing Hindu violence and much to lose in the long term by staying quiet. This is why they must make concerted representations to Modi to urgently correct his, and India’s, course.

The end of Gandhi’s India?

On 2 October, the world marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mohandas Karamchand ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi—the greatest Indian of modern times. In a New York Times op-ed for the occasion, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the most powerful living Indian, duly praised his country’s independence leader. Between recalling the admiration for Gandhi of Martin Luther King, Jr, Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein and others, Modi saw fit to tout his own government’s commitment to sanitation and renewable energy.

That’s a lot of ground to cover. Yet for me, the commentary was most striking in what it didn’t say. There was not a word about the cause for which Gandhi lived—and sacrificed—his life: interfaith harmony. From the 1890s, when he was an organiser for a small community of diaspora Indians in South Africa, to his death in 1948, by which time he was the acknowledged ‘Father’ of a nation of over 300 million people, Gandhi worked to build unity and solidarity between Hindus and Muslims. While he was in South Africa, many of the meetings he organised to protest against discriminatory laws were held in mosques. And when he returned to India, he fasted and embarked on several long pilgrimages to build trust between Hindus and Muslims.

Gandhi had fought the British, non-violently, for an independent and united India. In the end, he achieved independence but not unity. When the British finally gave up the subcontinent in August 1947, they partitioned it. Pakistan was explicitly created as a homeland for Muslims. But, owing to Gandhi’s efforts, India itself was established as a nondenominational state: the new constitution forbade discrimination on religious grounds; the Muslims who remained were to be treated as equal citizens.

For the first two decades after independence, minority rights in India were carefully safeguarded, chiefly because of the determination of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to prevent India from becoming a Hindu Pakistan. In more recent times, however, India’s large (and mostly poor) Muslim minority has come under increasing attack. This is partly because, after Nehru’s death, the ruling Congress Party shunned progressive Muslim voices in its efforts to cultivate the ulema (Muslim clergy) for votes. But it’s also because the traditional opposition party, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has emphatically rejected Gandhi’s and Nehru’s vision of political and religious pluralism.

From the mid-1980s, the country was riven by a series of communal riots in which Hindu mobs taunted their Muslim compatriots with the slogan ‘Pakistan ya Babristan!’ (‘Go to Pakistan, or be sent to the graveyard!’) The bloodiest riot was in 2002, in Gujarat, where Modi was then serving as chief minister. The episode badly tarred Modi’s image, and even resulted in his being barred from entering the United States for a while.

But having rebranded himself as a Vikas Purush (Man of Development) and devised a platform promising inclusive growth, Modi was able to prevail in the 2014 general election. That outcome led to another wave of hate crimes against Muslims, which Modi proved either unable or unwilling to prevent. His first term in office yielded nothing for the economy, so he and the BJP contested the 2019 elections on a platform of jingoistic nationalism. Pakistan was depicted as the ‘enemy without’, and Indian Muslims and secular liberals as the ‘enemies within’.

Notwithstanding Modi’s public posturing in the pages of Western newspapers, he and his party remain committed to the idea of a Hindu Rashtra: a state run for and by Hindus. There’s currently just one Muslim among the BJP’s 300-odd members of the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s parliament). Worse, senior BJP leaders routinely insult and intimidate Indian Muslims without provocation, demanding that they prove their ‘loyalty’ to the motherland.

It’s no accident that Modi failed to mention Hindu–Muslim harmony even when praising Gandhi. His silence speaks for itself. Meanwhile, on 1 October, Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, the home minister and current BJP president, offered his own implicit message to India’s Muslims. ‘I today want to assure Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist and Christian refugees, you will not be forced to leave India by the Centre’, he said in a speech in Kolkata. ‘Don’t believe rumors’, he added. ‘We will bring a Citizenship Amendment Bill, which will ensure these people get Indian citizenship.’

Notably absent from Shah’s remarks was any reassurance for Muslim refugees, including those from Bangladesh, whom Shah previously referred to as ‘termites’. The purpose of his speech was clear: Indian Muslims should be careful what they say, or they could find themselves stripped of citizenship and deported.

On 11 December, the bill amending the citizenship act passed the parliament, sparking massive demonstrations in Delhi and elsewhere.

As Gandhi’s biographer—and as an Indian citizen who is committed to pluralism—I am deeply worried about the escalating demonisation of my Muslim compatriots. The democratic, secular republic that Gandhi fought for is being transformed into a Hindu majoritarian state.

Yet as a historian, I have no illusions about what we are witnessing. India, once an exception, is now converging towards the South Asian norm. Sri Lanka and Myanmar are both Buddhist majoritarian states, and their minority populations—Tamil Hindus and Rohingya Muslims, respectively—are treated as second-class citizens (and much worse). Likewise, Bangladesh and Pakistan are Muslim majoritarian states, where Hindus (and sometimes Christians) have historically been persecuted.

As we enter a new decade, it is clear that Modi, Shah, and the BJP are committed to joining the club of ethno-nationalist states. In pursuit of that end, they have decisively repudiated the legacy of Gandhi and Nehru, inaugurating a dark new chapter in the history of modern India.

India–Pakistan relations: the dangerous drift towards militarisation

On 18 September terrorists came across the border from Pakistan, attacked a fortified army base in Indian Kashmir and killed 19 soldiers. While the dilemma India confronts in deciding how to respond hasn’t changed substantially since the Mumbai attacks in November 2009, the political cost of inaction with each new attack is higher for the Hindu nationalist party. After the 2009 attacks, I listed six changing India–Pakistan equations; five remain relevant.

First, the balance between military response and inaction is shifting towards the former. With each fresh terrorist outrage, the clamour for disproportionate punitive military strikes—‘a jaw for a tooth’—grows stronger.

Speaking in Kozhikode, Kerala on 24 September, PM Narendra Modi effectively reaffirmed India’s policy of strategic restraint. Addressing the people of Pakistan over their rulers’ heads, he simultaneously sent a strong message to Hindu hotheads itching for war: patience has paid big dividends. Instead of internationalising the Kashmir dispute, terrorist attacks point the finger of criminality at Pakistan. India grows stronger while Pakistan is increasingly isolated internationally.

Modi reminded listeners that in almost all acts of international terrorism, perpetrators either come from Pakistan or, like Osama bin Laden, settle there afterwards. He called on Pakistanis to ask their government why Pakistan exports terror, while India exports software. He challenged Pakistan to compete with India in the wars on poverty, illiteracy, infant mortality and unemployment. India’s hyper-jingoistic media and hardline nationalists were unimpressed. Modi’s bluster increasingly fails to appease the thirst for military vengeance and the policy of strategic restraint is damned as a cover for cowardice.

Second, India no longer has a critical interest in a stable Pakistan, which is part of the reason some are demanding a robust military response. As much as we’d prefer otherwise, the storylines of the two countries have diverged to such a pronounced degree over the last two decades that in public perception, India’s prosperity and security can withstand Pakistan’s implosion.

Born amidst the mass killings of partition in 1947, Pakistan has rarely escaped the cycle of violence, volatility and bloodshed. It lies at the intersection of Islamic jihadism, international terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the struggle for supremacy between democratic and military leaders. Previously India’s choice seemed to be between an intolerable status quo and the nightmare of a militantly Islamic, 180-million strong, nuclear-armed failed state at the strategic cross-roads of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. As Pakistan morphed into the world’s terror central, the choice has clarified and the incentive structure has steadily shifted away from a vital Indian interest in Pakistan’s viability.

Third, Islamabad’s record of double dealing, deceit and denial of Pakistan-based attacks has rested on four degrees of separation between the government, army, ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence directorate), and terrorists. By now the line separating them has become so fine as to be invisible. Crucially for India’s diplomacy, Western powers experienced the same syndrome in Afghanistan and have become far more India-sympathetic in consequence.

Fourth, to escape from the dilemma, Pakistan’s military must be brought under full civilian control and the ‘deep state’s’ links to the Islamist militants—including those directed against India and nurtured as such by the military-intelligence complex—must be severed. Besides, Pakistan’s terror toll from home-based jihadists has climbed much higher than India’s: it produces more terrorism than can safely be exported.

Fifth, if the establishment of civilian supremacy over Pakistan’s military–intelligence services proves impossible, India will have to acquire the military capacity and political will to destroy the human and material infrastructure of terrorism in Pakistan. On the one hand, recent incidents and allegations by Pakistan would suggest that India has indeed stepped up covert actions in Pakistan’s own troubled regions. On the other hand, it’s now clear that India has failed to invest in building full-spectrum capabilities to launch overt strikes and clandestine operations.

For success in such a strategy, India must acquire escalation dominance: the enemy should know that any escalation from the limited strikes will bring even heavier punitive costs from a superior military force at progressively higher levels of intensity.

To the extent that terrorism is used by Pakistan as a continuation of war by safer and less costly means, India has to fashion a robust response within a clear and hard-nosed strategy of turning terrorism back into warfare that imposes heavier penalties and damage. To walk away from any military option whatsoever in perpetuity is to give free rein to Pakistan to engage in serial provocations as a low-cost, moderate-value, long-term strategy.

But equally, India has proven it lacks the wit to resolve the Kashmir dispute through diplomatic negotiations and its long history of brutal rule has alienated large sections of the province’s population. Inflammatory statements by Hindu hardliners have added palpably to the sense of insecurity of Muslims and other religious minorities, which in turn is ground fertile for exploitation by domestic and external mischief makers.

Narendra Modi needs to exercise bold, firm and decisive leadership in both domestic and foreign policy to defuse the crisis, deter and defeat future terrorist attacks, and resolve the festering Kashmir dispute.