[As India’s self-proclaimed “pub capital”, Bangalore seemed particularly upset at having to go dry for the weekend. “Can you get a beer anywhere round here?” I heard a couple of festival attendees furtively inquiring. In practice, there were no disturbances. Modi, who uses his Twitter feed far more sparingly than Donald Trump, had tweeted out a plea for calm. Had the ruling gone another way, which no one expected, Modi’s tone might have been different.]
By Edward
Luce
It was Viktor Orban, Hungary’s leader, who
coined the phrase “illiberal democracy”. India, as I have been rediscovering in
the past few days, is implementing Orban’s vision on a far grander stage.
I was based in New Delhi for the FT for five
years at a time when Narendra Modi’s predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee, was
turning the Hindu nationalist BJP into India’s natural party of government.
Modi has converted that legacy into a virtual monopoly: Congress, the BJP’s
main opposition, holds less than a tenth of the seats in India’s Lok Sabha.
With that kind of firepower, Modi lacks any serious opposition.
On this occasion I was in India as a guest of
the Bangalore Literature Festival, a wonderful forum that can rightfully claim
to be the only citizen’s book festival around. There is not a single corporate
logo to be seen. This is in spite of the fact that the festival was created by
leaders of Bangalore’s booming IT sector.
Among its main backers are Ramachandra Guha,
one of India’s leading historians, and Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys,
the Indian IT company. Nilekani was also the creator of Aadhaar — the unique
identification system for 1.4bn people that dwarfs any other project of its
kind. It is individuals such as Nilekani and Guha who give India its reputation
for tolerance, pluralism, dissent and love of argument. I was in Bangalore to
discuss the future of liberalism.
As it happens, my visit coincided with the
Indian Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that a temple should be built in
Ayodhya on the site of the Babri Masjid, a Moghul-era mosque that was
demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992, who claimed it was the birthplace of
Lord Ram. The issue has been festering since then. The night before the court’s
verdict, India’s big cities, including Bangalore, banned the sale of alcohol,
prohibited public meetings, and flooded major urban gathering points with
police.
As India’s self-proclaimed “pub capital”,
Bangalore seemed particularly upset at having to go dry for the weekend. “Can
you get a beer anywhere round here?” I heard a couple of festival attendees
furtively inquiring. In practice, there were no disturbances. Modi, who uses
his Twitter feed far more sparingly than Donald Trump, had tweeted out a plea
for calm. Had the ruling gone another way, which no one expected, Modi’s tone
might have been different.
During my session I was asked about the
biggest threat to the future of global liberal democracy. My answer was
Narendra Modi. His abrupt decision in July to cancel the constitutional
autonomy of Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state, cut off its
communications and place its political leaders under house arrest has not been
heard by the Supreme Court. India’s judiciary used to have clout. It is now as
tame as the courts in Hungary.
More ominous still is Modi’s decision to set
up a national registry in Assam that will result in up to 2m Muslims being
deprived of Indian citizenship. The move is seen as a dress rehearsal for a
similar exercise on a national scale. Assam was home to many refugees from
Bangladesh when it split from Pakistan in 1971. They, like tens of millions of
Indians, lack proof of citizenship. Selectively applied, such a Muslim purge
would make the voter suppression efforts in the US look like child’s play.
India’s march to illiberal democracy under
Modi is proceeding apace — and with alarming implications. India is home to
140m Muslims. None of them can feel confident about their future in the world’s
largest democracy. But it is not just the quantity of people affected that made
me choose Modi — it is also the quality of the movement behind him.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is the
“cultural” parent organisation to the BJP, has been working at remaking Indian
society along Hindu majoritarian lines since before Modi was born. It will
continue after he dies.
Whatever one thinks of today’s Republican
Party, or indeed of Donald Trump, they have got nothing on the RSS. The
movement understands that politics is an offspring of culture. Give me the
child, as Jesuits used to say, and I will give you the man. India is gradually
but steadily turning into a Hindu Pakistan. This is a tragedy for all those,
like Guha and Nilekani, and the country’s kaleidoscope of minorities, who
understand that India’s greatness stems from its secular pluralism.
