This week, President Joe Biden will host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a state dinner — only the third foreign leader to receive such an honor at the Biden White House, the other two being the presidents of France and South Korea. They have a lot to talk about: A White House statement on the meeting has a long list of discussion topics, including climate change and security in the Indo-Pacific region (read: countering China).
But there’s a word missing from the agenda that is, arguably, the most important of all: democracy.
Since Modi took office in 2014, and especially after winning reelection in 2019, he has systematically taken a hammer to the core institutions of Indian democracy. The prime minister’s government has undermined the independence of the election supervision authority, manipulated judges into ruling in his favor, used law enforcement against his enemies, and increased its control over the Indian press.
The prime minister’s anti-democratic behavior has accelerated over time. In the past year alone, Modi’s government has:
Being in power has become self-reinforcing for Modi. His Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has used its electoral dominance to silence critics and stack the electoral deck against his opponents, making the upcoming 2024 parliamentary election a significant uphill climb for other parties. That vote is shaping up to be critical for India’s democratic future.
“With every major election loss, the window might be closing” for the opposition, warns Pavithra Suryanarayan, a political scientist at the London School of Economics.
This assault on democracy is a deeply ideological project. The BJP is the electoral offshoot of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a radical Hindu nationalist organization to which Modi has belonged since he was 8 years old. Christophe Jaffrelot, a leading India scholar at France’s Sciences Po, told me that its ideology amounts to “an Indian version of fascism.”
You would think…
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