Prime Narendra Minister Modi’s authoritarian India is now looking like a raggedy knocked-off version of MAGA land with a billion + people. Along with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonario, Prime Minister Narendra Modi seemed to have caught a virulent load of the authoritarian MAGA-type virus that continues to propel him. Is there any surprise that in both Covid infection and death rate the United States number 1 while knockoff authoritarian India and Brazil sit at number 2 or 3 depending on selection criteria?
I am old enough to remember when his nationalist BJP Party was viewed as even too extreme to get into India’s governing coalitions. Now Mr. Modi’s BJP dominates the new authoritarian India’s landscape with its politics of intolerance. In the years since he gained power, Modi has obliterated everything, fancying himself as sort of demi-dictator in the world’s most populous democracy.
Modi’s Authoritarian India Targets Assam’s Ethnic Minorities.
In 2018, the BBC reported that Modi’s India had published a list that effectively stripped about four million people in the north-eastern state of Assam of their citizenship. India’s National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a list of people who can prove they came to the state by 24 March 1971, a day before neighboring Bangladesh declared independence.
Since then, more than 32 million people submitted documents to the NRC to prove they were citizens. But like Trump’s effort to strip millions of Americans from the census roll, the authoritarian Modi has excluded four million residents of Assam from the published list and this has spread fear in the region.
India says the process was needed to identify illegal Bangladeshi migrants. But it sparked fears of a witch hunt against Assam’s ethnic minorities. To quell the likelihood of violence, officials said that no-one would face immediate deportation, that a lengthy appeal process would be available to all – even if it meant millions of families would have to live in limbo until they get a final decision on their legal status.
As Donald Trump would have wished to do in America, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest move to make millions of people in India stateless overnight has sparked fears of violence in what is already a tinderbox state. Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the state, has insisted in the past that illegal Muslim immigrants will be deported.
Depopulate Muslims
Millions of people fled to neighboring India after Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan on March 26, 1971, sparking a bitter war. Many of the refugees had settled in Assam. The Assam Student Movement had decried an influx of Bangladeshi immigrants, claiming they threatened to overwhelm the local culture.
Under the Assam Accord, an agreement signed by then Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1985, all those who cannot prove that they came to the north-eastern state before 24 March 1971 will be deleted from electoral rolls and expelled as they are not considered legitimate Indian citizens.
Many Bengalis – a linguistic minority in Assam – are worried they will be deported en masse. Hasitun Nissa, who spoke to the BBC’s Joe Miller days before the list was published, said she had never known a home outside the state’s floodplains. This is where the 47-year-old schoolteacher spent her childhood, where she studied, got married, and had her four children. She said her family arrived in India before 1971, but she expected to be stripped of her Indian citizenship and feared her land rights, voting rights, and freedom would be in peril.
Like Hasitun, many Bengalis live in the wetlands dotted along the Brahmaputra river, moving around when water levels rise. Their paperwork, if it exists, is often inaccurate. Officials claim illegal Bangladeshis are enmeshed in the Bengali population, often hiding in plain sight with forged papers – and a thorough examination of all documents is the only way to find them.
Activists accuse Prime Minister Modi of using NRC as a pretext for a two-pronged attack on the state’s Bengali community by his supporters among Hindu nationalists and Assamese hardliners. A large portion of the Bengali community is Muslims – the frequent target of Mr. Modi’s authoritarian India’s hardline nationalists. The Indian prime minister has never been shy in expressing his preference for Hindu Bangladeshi migrants, whom he says should be embraced by India. In 2014 Mr. Modi told a crowd that other “infiltrators” would be deported.
Bengali campaigner Nazrul Ali Ahmed is adamant that the NRC is serving another agenda entirely. “It is nothing but a conspiracy to commit atrocities,” he told the BBC. “They are openly threatening to get rid of Muslims, and what happened to the Rohingya in Myanmar could happen to us here.” Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government dismisses those comparisons, emphasizing that the NRC is an apolitical task, overseen by India’s secular Supreme Court.
After human rights organizations began to express concern, the civil servant in charge of the NRC, Prateek Hajela, released a statement stressing that the law required him to make no differentiation based on religion or language in determining citizenship. Yet, the NRC posted a promotional song on its Facebook page that did little to assuage fears of a witch hunt by the authoritarian Hindu nationalists: “A new revolution, to defeat the alien enemy, is beckoning,” a young woman sings, “bravely let us shield our motherland.”
Siddhartha Bhattacharya, Assam’s law minister and BJP Party member, told the BBC that “Everyone will be given a right to prove their citizenship. But if they fail to do so, well, the legal system will take its own course.” That, he said, would mean expulsion from India. As neighboring Bangladesh will likely not accede to any request to repatriate the deportees, India will end up creating a new group of stateless people, raising the specter of a homegrown crisis that will echo the Rohingya people who fled Myanmar for Bangladesh.
Dilute Muslims
Across the spectrum, Prime Minister Modi has stoked India’s authoritarian nationalism to great success – targeting its Muslim population, even by dilution. A year later, in 2019, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) amended the citizenship law to enshrine the rights of Hindu migrants in law. It gave amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants (religious minorities) from three neighboring countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. This led to a period of protest, violence, and death.
Authoritarian India’s Propaganda Machine
Nowhere is authoritarian India more visible than on its state television. The propaganda apparatus make FOX News, OAN, and Newsmax look like choir boys. But watching them is funny as hell. The Indian Farmers’ protest continues to gain international support, including from prominent celebrities. This is driving Modi’s mules and poodles batsh*t crazy, further activating a full-on authoritarian dynamic, deployed against key pillars of Indian democracy.
Out of sight but no less odious than Donald Trump, Modi’s minions take to social media like heat-seeking missiles with hot targets in their sights. From local peasant farmers to the local police who allow them to exercise their right to protests. Now many among India’s opposition are calling for social media companies to deal Modi and his crew the treatment accorded Trump since early January. Of course, this is not going to happen, the big difference being that Donald Trump is no longer in a position to legislate. Narendra Modi still is.
Modi is now atop the list of politicians that global activists and progressives would like to see in prison or a nursing home. For an expanded look at the charges and sanctions being sought against him and his cronies, continue reading at -> Rest of the World.
