It is hard to believe that there is a single government in the world, including the British government, that secretly would not want to do what the Indian government did on Monday this week: raid the BBC offices. The British Broadcasting Service got on the nerves of many politicians.
The tax inspectors of the Indian government of course only applied the law, because as we know, no one is above the law. But they did so to the most famous journalistic institution on earth; And they did so after the BBC screened an unflattering documentary about the all-powerful Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. One had to try hard not to notice the connection, and if anyone did, a spokesman for the ruling party in Delhi dismissed doubts.
“The BBC has become the most corrupt rotten corporation in the world,” Gaurav Bhatia declared at a press conference. “Unfortunately, the BBC’s propaganda serves the agenda of the Congress Party (the main opposition in India),” he declared. “The BBC’s coverage of India is dripping with poison,” he added and explained that “India is currently reaching unprecedented heights thanks to Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, and there are some groups that don’t like that.” Of course, he also hastened to point out that the BBC is allowed to operate in India, as long as it obeys the country’s laws.
A dangerous team
In January, when the BBC screened the aforementioned documentary in Britain, the Indian government simply censored it. Indians were not allowed to watch it on websites. It is not easy to censor the Internet for 1.4 billion people, but India today is a technological power. In January, the police A meeting of Muslim students at a famous university in Delhi (the one named after Jawaharlal Nehru), who tried to watch the film together, was sent to disperse.
A security man during the raid on the BBC offices in Delhi / Photo: Associated Press, Manish Swarup
Teams can be dangerous in India these days. The ruling religious-nationalist party (known by its acronym BJP, “People’s Party of India”) has never excelled in its tolerance of criticism and political opponents. It is now at the beginning of an election year for the national parliament, and in the midst of election campaigns for a number of individual countries (there are 28 of them in India, and one of them is as big as Brazil or Germany).
India has a democratic constitution, and democratic mechanics. It has a free press, at least nominally. It has freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But all of these are gnawing away and falling under a government characterized by the cult of personality and the deification of the strong man.
This man is, of course, Narendra Modi, who has been in power for nearly nine years, and is, according to most indications, going to win the next election without difficulty (April-May 2024. Voting in India lasts six or seven weeks). His followers treat him the way most Hindus treat their ancient mythological heroes. They ceased to be mortals, and became gods. There has never been an Indian politician closer to this status than Modi.
No Adani, please
Modi advocates majority democracy, a view that in itself has no flaw. But he tends to believe that majority status gives him immunity from criticism. He delivered a speech in Parliament last week in which he attacked the opposition for daring to criticize him when a large majority of Indians support him. By the way, the opposition is throwing interjections at him, demanding that he talk about the owner of Haifa Port, Gautam Adani. He refused.
The dispersal of the students who planned to watch the BBC film / Photo: Associated Press, Manish Swarup
The attack on the BBC followed a documentary, in which Modi’s role in a mass massacre of Muslims in the city of Ahmedabad (the Hindi pronunciation of the name Ahmedabad), in the state of Gujarat, in western India, was condemned in 2002. Modi was then the Prime Minister of the country. No legal authority ever held him criminally responsible for the massacre, but he came back and was accused of not doing enough to prevent, or stop, it. About a thousand Muslims were murdered then, by Hindu religious fanatics.
In recent years, the frequency of using the police of all kinds against political opponents and critics has greatly increased in India. Disturbing is the ease with which people are arrested and thrown into jail without trial. Last June, a 60-year-old political activist who dared to criticize Modi’s conduct in 2002 was arrested. She was arrested at her home by members of the Anti-Terrorism Unit. Last July, the founder and editor of a critical web site was arrested for a four-year-old tweet.
The police are sent to deal with political rivals all over India. The impression given is that simply belonging to an opposition party is developing into an informal criminal offense. The ruling party goes out of its way to overthrow the governments in the few countries that are still in the hands of its opponents. It does so through elections, and if it loses the elections, it further does so afterwards by recruiting defectors for votes of no confidence. Since the Ministry of Home Affairs in Delhi appoints all the governors of the states, the governors openly cooperate with the representatives of the ruling party, in order to get rid of the opposition governments. They recently succeeded in two of the largest countries, without new elections.
Indian newspapers on the raid on the BBC offices: “Valentine’s revenge for the BBC”
Narendra Modi has a new formula. He calls on the countries to choose his party, so that they can have a “two-engine plane”; That means they will be hired if his party, which holds the central government, also holds the local government. It is not necessary to make an effort to guess what will be the fate of a country, if it prefers to leave the local engine in the hands of the opposition.
illiberal twins
India is now a clear case of illiberal democracy. Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey is very close to it: it too has democratic patterns with very little democratic content. Erdogan will stand for re-election in May. He and Modi use remarkably similar means to narrow the opposition’s strides. The prison, or the censorship, or the libel trial, or accusations of treason are the weapons of the authoritarian leader who wants to extend his rule. In Modi’s case, his opponents are weak and lack credibility; Erdogan is facing serious difficulties.
Amit Shah, India’s No. 2 man, has spoken specifically about “25 years of rule” and adding more members to India’s ruling party than China’s Communist Party has. This is a breathtaking comparison. It is hard to think of a single democratic country where such an ambition openly guides its ruling party.
India’s claim to be “the world’s largest democracy” is repeated and questioned. Democracy indicators in the West have reduced it in recent years to the status of “damaged democracy”, or “partial democracy”. It is easy to imagine what the Indian tax police would have done to the editors of these indexes, if they had offices in Delhi and Mumbai.
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