The Narendra Modi government wants you to believe all is well in India. It isn’t. The truth is, India, as a nation, is going through a great turmoil — economically, politically and socially. As the author and activist Arundhati Roy puts it, “an illness is upon us.”
The Indian economy, once the world’s fastest-growing economy, is now ill. As Arvind Subramanian, Modi’s former Chief Economic Advisor, wrote this month, the Indian economy is “headed for the intensive care unit.”
In a draft working paper entitled India’s Great Slowdown: What Happened? What’s the Way Out?, published by Harvard University’s Center for International Development, he writes:
Seemingly suddenly, India’s economy has taken ill. The official numbers are worrisome enough, showing that growth slowed in the second quarter of this fiscal year to just 4.5 per cent, the worst for a long time. But the disaggregated data are even more distressing. The growth of consumer goods production has virtually ground to a halt; production of investment goods is falling. Indicators of exports, imports, and government revenues are all close to negative territory. These indicators suggest that the economy’s illness is severe, unusually so.
India’s banking sector is in deep distress. The Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) amount to Rs 9.2 lakh crores, equivalent to 9.5 per cent of bank assets, “the highest ratio of any major economy in the world, by far.” Unemployment is at a forty-six year high, and household consumption is at a four-decade low. The agricultural sector, too, is facing a crisis.
And to make matters worse, in the last six years, about 30 million people have fallen below India’s official poverty line. Consumer food price inflation, which amounts to half of the inflation basket, increased to 7.89 per cent; pulses inflation shot up to 11.72 per cent, and vegetable inflation jumped to 26 per cent.
The Wholesale Price Index (WPI) food inflation shot up to a seventy-one month high; Onion price inflation shot up by 173 per cent in November. Unfazed, Modi’s finance minister, Nirmala Sitaraman, said she comes from a family that does not eat onion and garlic.
The Modi government has, with its asinine economic policies such as “demonetisation, ” decimated the world’s fastest-growing economy, and brought it down to its knees. However, Modi boasts of saving the economy from disaster.
It’s not just the Indian economy that is facing a crisis. India’s democracy is in peril, too.
Thriving on communal politics, Modi and his Home Affairs minister, Amit Shah, have turned the “world’s largest democracy” into an authoritarian state. Under this regime, India is no longer a liberal democracy but is holding on by the skin of its teeth to remain a liberal democracy.
In reality, the current situation resembles an undeclared “Emergency,” echoing the formal nationwide Emergency declared by former PM Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977, when she ruled by decree, political opponents were imprisoned, there were widespread human rights abuses, and the press was censored.
After their landslide victory in 2019, Modi and Amit Shah have pushed through —bulldozed— legislation in an authoritarian manner, suppressed dissenting voices with brutal state force, and locked up political opponents.
In Kashmir, for instance, after scrapping Article 370, the Modi government arrested three former ministers – Mehbooba Mufti, Farookh Abdullah and Omar Abdullah – (legitimately elected Members of Parliament) and placed them under detention for opposing the bill. They have effectively invoked “national security” to keep them under detention for months on end.
In the name of “national security,” they imposed a colonial-era law, Section 144, suspended the internet, blocked all telephone lines and imposed a total communications blackout in Kashmir. For months on end, the people of Kashmir have had to endure a great deal of suffering – but there is almost no free flow of information to the outside world, and therefore no way of holding the Modi government accountable.
Unfortunately, the Modi-Shah duo has not extended their concerns of “national security” to those accused of terrorism – if they’re proponents of the Hindutva ideology. Ironically, Modi, who repeatedly states that “terrorism is the biggest threat to humanity ” in international fora, chose to prop up a Hindutva extremist, Pragya Singh Thakur — accused in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast, facing trial under stringent sections of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in a Mumbai court— to become a Member of Parliament representing their Bharatiya Janata party. Today, thanks to Modi and Amit Shah’s support, Pragya Thakur, still on bail and charged with terrorism offences, is an “Honourable Member of Parliament.”
Recently, Pragya Thakur was also nominated to be a member of the Indian Parliament’s consultation committee on defence. Incidentally, Pragya Thakur is also a great fan of Nathuram Godse, the assassin who murdered Gandhi, and considers him to be a “patriot.”
The Modi-Shah duo is also systematically destroying institutions that are meant to ensure checks and balances on unrestrained executive power. Under the Modi government, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate have turned into weapons of mass harassment. In the recent past, industrialists have complained that “there is a climate of fear,” economically, socially and politically. The judiciary, the press and other institutions are also under assault.
Hindutva groups, dedicated to a strident and exclusive Hindutva nationalism, have been energised and empowered by Modi and Shah in their efforts to socially engineer communal hatred. Their modus operandi — fake news. Modi’s propaganda machinery, the BJP’s “IT CELL,” a euphemistic term for a fake news factory, routinely manufacture anti-Muslim religious bigotry and spread them through social media channels. Since Amit Shah became president of the BJP in 2014, he has actively encouraged the BJP’s IT CELL to create and spread fake news.
Unfortunately, the virus of communal bigotry is engulfing the country. Modi’s politics, which thrive on communal division, are destroying the country’s social fabric. Ever since he assumed office, in 2014, his government has systematically pushed through legislation that actively discriminates against Muslims. It is also a well-documented fact that, in almost every election campaign, Modi has used anti–Muslim rhetoric, framing Muslim communities as “anti-national,” or fifth-columnists, using explicit populist dog whistles to win elections.
It is not surprising that, in the last six years, the period that Modi has been in power, India has witnessed an unprecedented increase in hate crimes against minorities, particularly Muslims. Hindutva extremists have lynched Muslims on one pretext or the other. For instance, the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaq, in 2015, on suspicion of possessing beef in his fridge, is a point in case.
Far from chastising the perpetrators of the crime, a minister in Modi’s cabinet, Jayant Sinha (who holds an MBA from Harvard Business School with distinction) garlanded the convicts, an attempt to legitimise and appreciate hate. Senior members of the BJP downplayed the killing as “an accident, or “a mistake committed by children.”
None of the perpetrators of the crime has been brought to justice. They have been let out on bail. On the other hand, Instead, the police have filed an FIR on Akhlaq’s family on the pretext of killing a cow. Fearing further persecution, Akhlaq’s family has had to relocate to Delhi.
Today, with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens, India’s Muslims, over 200 million of them, are at risk. The act violates the fundamental principles of the Indian Constitution. Designed to discriminate against Muslims, it is an apparent attempt at disenfranchising the country’s minorities, to tighten Modi’s stranglehold on the world’s largest democracy.
As spontaneous country-wide protests erupted against the unconstitutional CAA, Modi, Shah and their cohort of ministers have mobilised their social media trolls and party cadres. They have unleashed an information war against protestors, calling them “Jihadists, urban naxals,[Maoist terrorists] and separatists.” Government officials call all those who criticise Modi as “anti-national”– acting against the national interest and national security, thus liable to censorship and severe charges of sedition and assisting terrorism.
As the protests have intensified, Modi himself has tried to cast aspersions on protestors and tried to brand them as Muslim arsonists setting fire to India: in one particularly infamous outburst, he declared:
Those who perpetrate violence can be identified by their clothes.
A minister of state in his government announced that protestors causing property damage should be “shot on sight.” Taking their cue, a BJP legislator has warned Muslims: “If the majority takes to the streets, imagine what your situation will be. Don’t test the patience of the majority.”
He went on to say: “Don’t forget Godhra.” That is a reference to a 2002 fire on a passenger train full of Hindu pilgrims; Muslims were blamed for setting the fire, and the pilgrims’ deaths were used as a pretext for deadly communal rioting in Gujarat against Muslims, also known as the “Gujarat pogrom,” in which thousands of Muslims were beaten up, raped and killed, and their property destroyed. The state’s Chief Minister at the time was none other than Narendra Modi.
Modi’s supporters, those who support the citizenship bill, openly incite violence. They are roaming India’s streets, shouting: “Shoot the traitors.” In the state of Uttar Pradesh, the radical Hindutva extremist turned Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, has vowed to take “revenge” on the protestors. The UP police have seized on the tactic of confiscating Muslim-owned businesses to recoup the costs of damage to public property, randomly sealing nearly 70 Muslim-owned businesses so far, even though there is no law that justifies this purely punitive act.
Parts of the state are under orders prohibiting public demonstrations; the state authorities have also cut internet access; so far, over 22 people have died across India so far in state-sponsored violence, 13 of them on one day in Uttar Pradesh alone.
In their book, How Dictatorships Work, the political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz argue that “in established democracies across the world, the slow but steady undermining of norms and institutions poses a greater threat than sudden coups.” In today’s India, with Modi’s rise to power and the slow strangulation of secular liberal norms, as well as the sudden imposition of unconstitutional and nakedly communal legislation, seems to prove that both dynamics can happen together.
Within six years, Modi and Shah have managed to do what India’s worst enemies couldn’t – set India at war with itself.
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