[Modi won a landslide reelection victory in 2019 that made him the most powerful Indian leader since the 1970s. But the country’s independent institutions — including the judiciary and the media — have rarely appeared weaker, experts say. Researchers who study democracy around the globe recently put India among a group of nations heading toward autocracy.]
By Joanna Slater and Niha Masih
In today’s India, that was enough
to make her a target. Over the weekend, Ravi was arrested. Police accused of
her of sedition and conspiring to “spread disaffection” against the state.
Ravi’s arrest is the latest example
of a disturbing trend in the world’s largest democracy. The government of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi is deploying the country’s legal machinery to suppress
opponents in a clampdown on dissent not seen in decades, critics say.
Modi won a landslide reelection
victory in 2019 that made him the most powerful Indian leader since the 1970s.
But the country’s independent institutions — including the judiciary and the
media — have rarely appeared weaker, experts say. Researchers who study
democracy around the globe recently put India among a group of nations heading
toward autocracy.
Freedom of expression is being
curtailed. A comedian was recently
kept in jail for more than a month for a joke he did not tell as
judges repeatedly denied him bail. The use of Internet shutdowns to quell
protests and disrupt communication has
soared under the Modi government. (India now uses the tactic more than
any other country, according to Access Now, an international advocacy group
that tracks such suspensions.) The Indian government this month ordered Twitter
to block hundreds of accounts linked to the farmer protests.
The filing
of sedition cases against people who criticize politicians or
governments has also jumped, shows a recent analysis by Article 14, a research
and reporting website focused on democratic rights. More than 95 percent of
such sedition cases over the past decade were registered after Modi came to
power, it found
Members of the ruling Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party reject any suggestion that there is a
crackdown on dissent. “India is the largest democracy that humankind has ever
seen, with an independent judiciary that routinely rules against the government
and free media that daily provides a platform to the government’s vocal
critics,” said Baijayant Panda, national vice president of the BJP. “These
allegations are instigated by the losers of elections in order to try and
maintain their own relevance.”
Experts say previous Indian
governments also targeted their opponents with politically motivated charges.
But some warn that what is currently unfolding goes much further and even see
parallels to an infamous period in the country’s history known as the
Emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ruled by decree and suspended
civil liberties.
“It’s a kind of smarter Emergency,”
said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s leading political scientists. There are
no mass arrests of Indian politicians, as the country saw in 1975, but the
ruling party has a “creeping stranglehold over all institutions” while
opposition parties are weak, Mehta said. “In some sense, I think it’s much more
insidious.”
Government pressure on journalists has intensified, and the mainstream media seldom
criticizes the government. Key agencies are headed by personnel considered loyal to Modi. India’s Supreme Court has
delayed rulings on the constitutionality of major government policies,
including changes to the status of Kashmir, an overhaul of campaign finance
laws and a new pathway to citizenship that some believe undermines India’s
secular founding ideals.
Tarunabh Khaitan, vice dean of the
faculty of law at Oxford University, recently wrote a paper describing
how India’s constitution is under assault from “a
thousand cuts.” India risks becoming a democracy in name only, he
said, one where elections continue but the opposition has little chance of
taking power.
“We are at the precipice,” Khaitan
said in an interview. “Do we jump, or can we slowly, cautiously walk back?”
One case that is considered a
harbinger for where India is headed began
in 2018. More than a dozen activists were arrested and accused of plotting
to overthrow the government, charges
they denied. All of the activists worked with India’s most disadvantaged
communities — including tribal people and Dalits — and were vocal critics of
Modi and his party.
Last week, an
analysis by a digital forensics firm in the United States concluded
that key electronic evidence in the case was planted on a laptop by a hacker
using malware. The findings of the forensic report help bolster long-held
claims by human rights groups and legal experts that the case was unfounded.
Defense lawyers have asked judges to dismiss the case against the activists,
although it is unclear when the court will rule.
Students, activists, journalists
and nongovernmental organizations are among those who have come under
increasing pressure from the authorities. In Kashmir, the government engaged in
a months-long crackdown, snapping communications
and detaining mainstream politicians. Elsewhere in India, when anti-government
protests break out, law enforcement authorities repeatedly find alleged
conspiracies — and arrests follow.
In December 2019, protests erupted
across the country in response to a new citizenship law that critics say
discriminates against Muslims. Dozens
of people were killed in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, in the
ensuing crackdown. In February, riots
broke out in Delhi that left more than 50 people dead, most of them
Muslim.
In the aftermath, the police
charged Muslim students and activists who engaged in protests against the
citizenship law with conspiracy to commit violence. Among those arrested were a
pregnant graduate student who created a WhatsApp group to coordinate protests,
an activist who ran a collective to foster interreligious unity and members of
a student group working for women’s rights in university settings.
Harsh Mander, 65, is one of the
country’s most well-known activists who has worked for years on social justice
causes, including efforts to bridge divides between Hindus and Muslims. His
name has been mentioned in more than a dozen charging documents connected to
the Delhi riots, he said, suggesting he could be arrested at any time as part
of the alleged conspiracy.
“It’s like a dagger hung over you,”
Mander said. “The hope and expectation is that we would be silent.”
The government’s response to farmer
protests outside Delhi is the latest litmus test. Since November, tens of
thousands of farmers have blocked roads in opposition to major changes to
agricultural policy. While Modi has praised farmers, he has insisted the
protesters are being misled. He recently told Parliament that the country was
facing a class of professional agitators, whom he called “parasites,” and
warned of the need to protect the nation from “foreign destructive ideology.”
On Jan. 26, clashes
broke out between farmers and police officers. Authorities shut down the
Internet at the protest sites and made dozens of arrests. Police later
connected the violence to a “toolkit” tweeted by Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg,
without citing evidence and despite the fact that the document lists only
peaceful modes of protest. The police alleged that an organization linked
to the document — the nonprofit Poetic
Justice Foundation, based in Canada — had promoted a separatist
movement in the state of Punjab.
Ravi, the 22-year-old environmental
activist, belonged to a group of young people around the world who joined
Thunberg’s Fridays
for Future environmental movement. She completed a degree in business
administration at a prestigious university in Bangalore.
“Countries like India are already
experiencing a climate crisis,” she said in an interview with the Guardian newspaper last year.
“We’re not just fighting for our future, we are fighting for our present.”
Friends describe Ravi as a
hard-working young woman with a slightly goofy side who is the only breadwinner
in her family. She is passionate about animals and the environment, said Yuvan
Aves, 25, a fellow volunteer in the Indian chapter of Fridays for Future. The
message from Ravi’s arrest is, “if you ask difficult questions or decide to do
something for a good cause, you can be sent to jail,” he said. “For something
as harmless as a tool kit.”
On Sunday, Ravi reportedly told a
judge in Delhi that she had made minor edits to the tool kit document but did
not write it. “We wanted to support the farmers,” she said in court, according
to New Delhi Television, briefly breaking down in tears. A lawyer for Ravi
declined to comment.
Justice Deepak Gupta, who retired
from India’s Supreme Court last year, said the contents of the tool kit that
are in the public domain are “not seditious in any manner.” The use of sedition
cases in recent years is “a straight-up attempt to stifle the voices of
dissent,” he said.
The government has also demanded
that Twitter take down hundreds of accounts linked to the farmer protests. The
social media company blocked many of the accounts but refused to do the same
for handles belonging to journalists, media outlets, politicians and activists,
saying it did not believe the “actions
we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law.”
Meanwhile, police in Delhi say
their investigation of the tool kit will continue. Two other Indian
environmental activists with the climate change group Extinction Rebellion are
already facing arrest in the probe. Prem Nath, a senior police official in
Delhi, told reporters Monday that the activists’ intent was “to propagate the
tool kit worldwide,” spur protests at Indian embassies and “tarnish India’s
image.”
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