Has Modi's India become autocratic?

The FT claims that 

 the world’s largest democracy is changing in fundamental ways, raising questions about whether it should even be called a democracy at all.

This is foolish. Democracy is the only way India can be ruled. The Communist Party conquered China. It previous ruler was a General. British India could have morphed into a loose confederation but, because a strong center was essential for Hindu India, it  broke up along religious lines.  The Army was not broadly enough recruited for it to have been considered a rival source of authority.

The reason  Hindu India stuck together is because Hindus could see that Muslims gained when Hindus failed to stick together and have a common Army. Also Hindu politicians liked gaining pan Indian recognition and either competing in elections or setting up as Saintly 'social reformers' of some sort. One important reason for this was because castes crossed regional boundaries and the prestige of one's own sub-caste rose if you gained recognition farther afield.

The FT highlights two recent books written by stupid outsiders.

Two new books underline the speed of that shift, giving subtly different but equally pessimistic accounts of the country’s trajectory. India’s democratic malaise is by now well documented.

By cretins. Nobody in India believes there is any such malaise. True, Rahul Baba is a moon calf. But this just means that the Congress is being displaced by other parties- e.g. AAP. The Labor Party made itself unelectable in the UK. This is not a 'malaise of democracy'. It is a malaise of a bunch of virtue signaling cunts who regarded the traditional Labor voter as a deplorable racist.

The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which

does not have a single expert on South Asia and is thus completely useless 

tracks data on the health of democracies,

but lacks access to any such thing 

recently reclassified the country as an “electoral autocracy”.

How foolish! COVID or some other sort of national emergency causes a wave of 'autocratization'. France suddenly becomes a 'flawed democracy' like America. This is utter nonsense. A democracy can act more cohesively than a Dictatorship during an Emergency. Furthermore, Democracies can do ethnic cleansing or impose majoritarian policies without becoming autocratic.  

Other indices tell a similar story of weakening institutions and declining civil liberties. Following his first election triumph in 2014, many hoped Modi would become a

Muslim just like Trump or Macron.  

populist reformer, focused on rapid economic development.

Manmohan was the guy who got the top job purely because he was seen as a reformer. In 2012 he tried to press for further reform as a response to credit downgrading. He failed but Rahul didn't step up to the plate either. This meant Modi became the only candidate for the Premiership. But root and branch reform was off the table.  

Instead, liberal critics describe a staunchly Hindu nationalist regime that has unsettled India’s minorities, not least its 200m Muslims.

But the Muslims had unsettled not just the Hindus but also the Europeans and the Chinese and so forth. One reason Modi won big in 2019 is that he retaliated against Pakistan for a terrorist attack.

There were plenty of Muslims in Germany and France and so forth who thought joining ISIS was a good idea. This led to a reaction. But Europe could crush its Muslim minority without endangering Democracy just like any other part of the world. 

Secularism, enshrined in its constitution after independence in 1947, looks a spent force.

The word was introduced into the constitution by Indira Gandhi. But the Indian constitution protects cows, not Muslims. In 1948, non-Muslim refugees were given citizenship while Muslims who had fled were stripped of it. All previous special provisions for Muslims were withdrawn.  

As its title suggests, To Kill a Democracy echoes this view.

Why? One of its authors is Bengali. Mamta's goons will kick the shit out of him if he isn't against Mamta's main rival.  

Rather than just criticising Modi, however, journalist Debasish Roy Chowdhury and political scientist John Keane describe a longer process of decay, often dating as far back as independence itself.

Why not go all the way back to the first Muslim invasions?  

“The surveys don’t capture the most concerning trend: the slow motion crumbling of the social foundations of Indian democracy,” they write.

Because those 'social foundations' never existed. If Muslims played up they were killed. That's why they didn't play up.  

“For many decades, the country has been suffering an undeclared social emergency.”

Why not say centuries instead of decades? Why pretend there was once a golden age? The biggest pogroms of Muslims took place after Nehru came to power. Muslims were forced to emigrate by the Custodian of Enemy Property through the Fifties and Sixties. There was a brief respite but Mrs. Gandhi licensed police massacres of Muslims if they showed any sign of voting for anybody else. The rise of Islamic terror led to a massive National Security crackdown. However, the Congress attempt to demonize the RSS and other Hindu outfits failed. This was because its own grassroots organization collapsed into corruption and thuggery. The same thing happened to the Communist party machine in West Bengal. If Mamta dies suddenly, the same may happen to her TMC. Still, wherever you look, there is Hindu consolidation because of perceived Muslim militancy. The Communists and the Church in Kerala get a lot of mileage by condemning 'love jihad'. The truth is no majority community anywhere in the world has any special tenderness for its Muslim minority. This may be unfair, but it is perfectly in keeping with Democratic functioning.  

Their list of concerns is long. Three decades after economic liberalisation began in 1991, more than 365m Indians remain stuck in poverty.

Because economic liberalization did not extend to labor and land laws. Instead of getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories, India muddled along though, no doubt, some States and Union Territories were able to rise up somewhat. 

If nothing structural about India's economy or society had drastically changed why should any Social Scientist- as opposed to virtue signaling cretin- think anything political could have changed?

Food and water scarcity are rife. Air quality has deteriorated. Institutions in areas such as the courts, policing and taxation show few signs of improvement. Caste injustice is still widespread. India’s health system is especially precarious, as the continuing pandemic has shown. The pestilence hadn’t gutted India’s health system, it merely showed it up for what it was “Two months into the Covid lockdown . . . many of India’s well-hidden secrets tumbled on to its highways,” the authors write, referring to near-biblical scenes of migrants fleeing big cities. “The pestilence hadn’t gutted India’s health system, it merely showed it up for what it was.”

But everybody in India knew exactly what it was because they had eyes in their heads.  

Roy Chowdhury’s and Keane’s is a searing and original polemic, albeit one that suggests India has made little economic or social progress over recent generations

why not centuries? What it all comes down to is that India turned to shit when foreign Muslims conquered large portions of its territory. The Nehru dynasty got its start in the early eighteenth century serving first the Moghuls as 'kotwals' and then John Company as 'vakils'. As power passes to non-comprador Hindus, Hindu India has begun to rise. Muslims are now worse off than Dalits by some measures. The South is an exception because secessionism was off the table for linguistic reasons.

— an argument that might make even Modi’s fiercer critics pause. Poverty rates have indeed risen during the pandemic. But, as the authors briefly admit, they had previously fallen by well over 200m in recent decades, an impressive achievement rooted in an admittedly faltering economic record. Meanwhile, it is true that India’s state apparatus is weak, with worrying signs of decline in institutions such as its parliament and central bank.

This is nonsense. A Parliament is only as good as the administration it provides. Since the administration is stable and has no fear of a vote of confidence, Parliament is doing its job better now than in the days of unstable coalition governments. There was a brief period when India was trying to trick the world into thinking it had an independent Central Bank. But nobody was taken in and so that pretense was quietly dropped. 

But there have been improvements in other areas, from energy market regulation to digital identity management.

The big improvement has been in terms of firm handling of Islamists and gangsters. If Yogi Adityanath wins in UP it will be only because killing gangsters is what voters want.  

A more focused account comes via Christophe Jaffrelot, a French academic at Sciences Po and doyen of south Asian scholarship, who aims more squarely at the prime minister himself.

Like that causes Modi to break a sweat! Jaffrelot is a cretin.  All academics are. Look at Prashant Kishore. He is a king-maker. Why? He has a good structural causal model of the polity and thus can process data to some good purpose. By contrast, Professors live in a fantasy world such that there was once a golden age of democracy and secularism and then some nasty Fascists took over everything. 

The ruling Bharatiya Janata party has never hidden its aims of building a Hindu rashtra — a government and nation dominated by Hindus.

Nor did Congress. Nehru and Gandhi presided over the biggest pogrom of Muslims the subcontinent had ever seen. Every single concession Muslims had previously got was ruthlessly stripped from them. No doubt, Congress protected a few of its 'show boy' Muslims but many of their relatives were emigrating to Pakistan during the Fifties and Sixties. Had India lost the '65 war, there would have been massive ethnic cleansing in North India. At that time political Islam, even in Pakistan, was on the backfoot. It was only after its revival that Muslims once again became a target.  

Modi pushed this aim relatively gently in his first term in office, but has since moved forward more forcefully after his second victory in 2019.

Quite true. Modi is the moderate who was fortunate in that he was seen as close to the more militant Togadia in 2001/2. Thus he benefited from the World wide anti-Islamic reaction after 9/11, the attack on the Indian parliament, Godhra etc. Things seemed to have calmed down by 2014 but then ISIS appeared and America started to give up on Afghanistan. Then, a Pak terror attack was avenged by a cross-border strike. Modi was rewarded at the polls. Still, it is the fragmented nature of the Opposition and Congress's prolonged death throes which make the BJP appear unassailable in 2024. However, that might change. Maybe AAP will get its act together. Perhaps, there will be some corruption scandal or anti-incumbency pure and simple will do its work. Who can tell? Democracies are unpredictable. We don't even know if the BJP's new CM in Gujarat can turn its fortunes around there. 

Jaffrelot suggests the result sees India “transitioning from a de facto Hindu Rashtra to an authoritarian Hindu Raj.”

This is silly. There has been no de jure change of any sort. What India was, de facto, it remains, de facto. Thus there has been no 'transition'. These books are worthless. They are premised on the notion that the West believed India was like Sweden- except the Muslims had more power. But the West did not really believe India was like Sweden. They thought it was a very poor country of the sort that Trump called a 'shithole'.  

Modi’s India is a masterpiece of careful research, albeit one requiring a patience for detail, with footnotes alone running to more than 100 pages.

Academics quoting other equally coprophagous academics. Meanwhile Prashant Kishor makes a lot of money and is regarded as a king-maker in India. Had he become a Professor of Political Science, nobody in India would know his name.  

Jaffrelot provides in-depth accounts of everything from the rise of vigilante violence against minorities

which previously was the job of the police and para-militaries. This does not mean they won't do the job with vim and vigor. It's just that the Government doesn't want to pay for the thing. Why buy the cow etc?  

to declines in judicial independence

There has been no such thing. Judges understand that there is a limit to what they can do. Anyway, they have to live in India after retirement so they can't make it ungovernable.  

and the financing of electoral corruption.

The problem is that those who finance electoral corruption themselves need financing. The Nationalized Banks can't keep corrupt cronies solvent forever. There has to be a shakeout.  

Yet rather than focusing merely on economics, or the religious chauvinism of Modi’s more extreme supporters, the author’s central task is to place caste back at the heart of India’s contemporary story.

This is where those fools fail. The fact is Dalits and Adivasis have always hated Muslims and vice versa. There is no way to artificially turn the majority into a minority. Look at West Bengal. The BJP displaced Congress and the Left thanks to Dalit votes.  

Indian history should be divided into three phases, Jaffrelot suggests.

Why? Was it coz Ceasar divided Gaul into three parts?  

First came a long spell of “conservative democracy” led by traditional elites, under its first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the family dynasty that followed.

No. In the Fifties, the Communists looked cohesive and had been given good advise by Stalin. American Aid and support for Land Reform and Village Development meant that there could have been a pro-peasant 'bourgeois revolution' (Stalin told the Indian communists that there was nothing Socialist about giving land to the tiller) in which younger Congress Socialists as well as older populist Communists could join hands. 

Sadly Nehru was not enthused and then JP decided to join Bhave's crackpot 'bhoodan' movement by which land was supposedly gifted away to the poor. This meant that 'kulak' type agriculturists had to rise up through caste-based, anti-elite (Ram Manohar Lohia had said the the English language was the true enemy) rural mobilization. This in turn meant that 'elites' had to try to bring in the 'other backward castes' as a counterweight. However, forward castes too could claim reservations and use their muscle power to hold the State hostage. This meant that Hindus needed Religion to contain caste based animosity because otherwise Ambedkar's dream of reducing the majority to a minority with a Dalit-Muslim- disaffected Forward Caste combine would have succeeded. Mayawati's success concentrated minds. Thankfully, she turned Ambedkar into a Hindu God by building giant religious complexes for him. Ordinary people who worshipped there felt that Hinduism had once again come together. The BJP which had just 2 seats in Parliament in 1985 was able to rebuild by promising to build a Ram Temple (though this would have benefited Rajiv Gandhi) Modi got his start at this time. 

Rajiv's assassination was unexpected and did mark a 'phase shift'. But it was the utter uselessness of the Communists which took everybody by surprise. After all, factionalism had decreased and the Commies had done land reform in Bengal in the early eighties. Why could Jyoti Basu not have become PM in a coalition government? Why should there not have been a Left alternative to the orphaned Congress party? How was it that Vajpayee, not any other Minister in the Janata Morcha, ended up as the one national figure with the stature to take the top job? The answer is that the Indian Left was ab ovo crap and remained crap for reasons Stalin had understood right from the start. These were guys who loved talking and hated each other only a little less than they hated poor people. 

Professors from France have a cockeyed view of things. They think elites did 'social reform' but then poor peeps bit the hand that fed them.

This was challenged in the 1980s during a second phase, in which social reforms gave greater power to lower caste groups, in part via affirmative action schemes.

Because of pressure from below. First the 'Forward Caste' agriculturists- Jats, Patels etc- took power from the old elites- then the old elites struck back by getting in the Backwards- Yadavs etc. VP Singh,  who toppled Rajiv because of his corruption, was an actual Prince. He thought he could rule with the support of the OBCs and was prepared to take a tough line with the BJP which was afraid of utter eradication because without Hindutva, there is only caste- indeed, there is no Nation in the wider sense. Singh wasn't as smart as he thought and fell quickly. Had Rajiv lived he might have given the people the Ram temple they wanted (he himself looked like Ram while Sonia was a pativrata like Sita) while also backing economic liberalization. It may be that Rao, precisely because he had no personal support base, was able to push something more radical through precisely because of his weakness. Manmohan Singh- not Montek- became the public face of liberalization and Sonia brought him in when she unexpectedly won the 2004 election. But Singh was opposed by the 'activists' and 'public intellectuals' in 2012. At that moment, India turned its back on Professors and virtue signalers. They lived in a fantasy world as did many newspaper editors and journalists. India saw it was now a case of Modi or nobody. Hinduism has to be reconstructed as 'Hindutva'- i.e. an essence which transcends caste and gender and region. The alternative is an envenomed stasis with everybody fighting over quotas for jobs as clerks or sweepers. 

Modi has now moved to a third stage of “ethnic democracy”, meaning a Hindu-dominated system where minorities are second-class citizens.

But this has obtained since 1937. True, while the Brits were around, minorities did get reservations. But after Partition, that was scrapped. That's why so many Muslims emigrated to Pakistan in the Fifties and even the Sixties.

Jafflerot meanwhile lives in a fantasy world where ancient elites pull all the strings. Who invited Muslims into India?- elites. Who got the Brits to rule the country?- elites. Why am I writing nonsense?- elites are fucking me up with mind-rays innit? 

Yet Jaffrelot sees a power grab by the old upper castes — generally urban and middle-class Hindus who also often happen to be drawn from the upper reaches of Hinduism’s traditionally rigid hierarchical order — who dominate the BJP’s representatives in parliament in particular.

Very true. It is disgusting to watch the way they anally gangrape Members of Parliament from minority communities.  Elites should at least use lube. 

“Modi’s populism appeared to India’s elites as an antidote to caste politics,” he writes. “In that sense, it was a sort of counter-revolution.”

So, an 'antidote' is also a sort of 'counter-revolution'. Wow! Them Frogs be real smart! Their big Revolution was poison. Napoleon was the antidote. Then Louis XVIII was tje antidote to Napoleon and Louis Phillippe was the antidote to Charles X and so on.  

Although different in focus, the two books come to many common conclusions.

Shit tends to end up in a common sewer or septic tank.  

Both view India as part of what academics dub a new wave of global “autocratisation” hitting countries from Hungary to the US under Donald Trump.

In other words these guys have consoled themselves for their political impotence by pointing their finger at those they don't like and saying 'autocratisation' and then sniggering to themselves. Meanwhile we point our finger at them and say 'Onanization' or just 'wankers!' Actually, we don't bother. Why state the obvious?  

Both cite approvingly How Democracies Die, the 2018 book by Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which says democracies tend to decline in dribs and drabs, rather than suddenly collapsing in a heap.

This is nonsense. Democracies die, in the same manner everybody dies- i.e. when they collapse in a heap. But there are also cases where there was no Democracy but just the pretense that some decline in dribs and drabs was occurring- e.g. Yeltsin's Russia.  

India’s place in this wider story clearly carries huge significance.

This wider story is just some shite these guys pull out of their ass.  

Were New Delhi to shift permanently in a more autocratic direction, taking 1.3bn people with it, global democracy itself would shift back to become a fringe political pursuit.

No it wouldn't. Don't be silly. The fact is South Asia probably has no choice but to remain democratic. Even in Pakistan, the Army wants the fig-leaf of representative government.  

Inequality is a further common theme. Economic reform also spawned the rise of a new “billionaire Raj” dominated by so-called “Bollygarchs”, as local business oligarchs such as Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani are often known.

Fuck off.  Some FT journalist made up that ugly word. 

Most evidence suggests this trend is continuing, not least via the growing fortunes of men such as Ambani and Adani, both of whom keep rocketing up global tycoon wealth rankings, building vast fortunes in industries from technology to natural resources via a mixture of daring risk-taking and close connections to governing elites. Roy Chowdhury and Keane also stress the parallel rise of what they dub India’s “poligarchs” — meaning politicians who use state power to promote their own considerable business interests.

This is a regional phenomenon with a caste/sect dimension. 

A clear-eyed analysis suggests Modi is likely to run and win again Finally, both books are united in their bleak outlook. After nearly 300 gloomy pages, Roy Chowdhury and Keane do at least manage a heavily caveated conclusion that lays out brief hopes for readers who dislike India’s new direction. With Modi due to fight another national election by 2024, voters do have time to rebuff the BJP, as they did recently in elections in the state of West Bengal.

Roy Chowdhury is from Bengal. He doesn't seem to notice that the BJP, from having no seats in the state Legislature, has become the sole opposition party. Congress and the Left didn't get a single seat though one crazy Muslim cleric did show his clout. But he'd have just as soon allied with the TMC. But how long will Trinamool hold together. If Mamta dies, it is not yet certain that her nephew can replace her.  

Covid-19 has dented his government’s popularity too, albeit from a high base. But a clear-eyed analysis suggests Modi is likely to run and win again. Meanwhile, his eventual successor may be an even more polarising BJP figure, such as Yogi Adityanath, the Hindu monk turned firebrand chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state.

Killing gangsters is what the voters want. The thing is cheap. Do it now.  

After all this, it is worth noting that at least two groups are likely to play down the arguments of books such as these. The first are Modi’s many supporters, who see him as a leader capable of ushering India into a new period of national greatness. Certainly the idea that Indian governance is suffering a slow, multi-decade collapse, as argued in To Kill a Democracy, will sit oddly with many of those watching the country’s steady rise into the ranks of top-tier economic and geopolitical powers — a path that looks set to continue on most reasonable assumptions, albeit perhaps at a slower pace than Modi’s admirers might hope. Many in India also see little to worry about in a future of “ethnic democracy”, pointing to the likes of Israel or Malaysia,

or France or post-Brexit Britain or Biden's more than Trumpian America First America etc.

whose democratic systems have some kind of state religion that reflects their dominant social group. Oddly, the second group most likely to play down India’s democratic direction are western democracies themselves, many of whom now view Modi as a critical partner in their common attempts to balance China. Typically western nations find it harder to deal with countries the more autocratic they become.

France has just recalled its Ambassadors to the US and to Australia. They aint happy with the UK either. BTW, France is now ranked as a 'flawed democracy'. This is because Macron is power-grabbing for the old elite and is punitively sodomizing Muslims and French Dalits.  

In India’s case the opposite has been true, with ties improving even as the country’s democratic rankings have ebbed. Much the same is true the other way. India could easily have become more sceptical of the west under a leader like Modi. But its ties to the US and other European countries are now stronger than at any time in living memory — again, because New Delhi sees them as useful friends given its own tussles with Beijing. 

It is Pakistan which needs to be watched very carefully. Them guys be kray kray.  

All of this suggests a conundrum for those such as Johnson or US President Joe Biden, who have by now almost irreversibly hitched their geopolitical fortunes to Modi and his eventual successors.

This is nonsense. Americans and Britishers and the French and so forth don't give a toss who rules far away countries. We just don't want them to send us refugees or jihadis or refugee jihadis.  

As India becomes more geopolitically important, so its governance looks set to become ever more complex.

No. Governance must get simpler and cheaper.  

The country’s future political model is far from certain, but a return to an earlier era of liberal secularism, embodied by leaders such as Nehru or even Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, looks highly improbable.

Nehru presided over ethnic cleansing. He sent troops into Kashmir.  Manmohan was a courageous Sikh, not a cowardly sickularist. He had the smart idea of cracking down on foreign NGOs which, as Edwin Lim of the World Bank said, were preventing India's development.  

Ultimately many of the world’s smaller democracies will hope its largest does enough to avoid losing that title.

They really don't give a shit. Nobody does. Indians would be perfectly happy with a Dictator who delivered ten percent growth for ten years. Sadly, because autocracy is greatly tempered by assassination- three people with the surname Gandhi have been killed despite getting a lot of protection from the State- nobody wants to be that Dictator. Modi is already looking forward to his retirement. If he can hand over in 2029 to Yogiji,  he will have achieved what Nehru did not- viz a secure place in the History books with time left over to work on what's really important- viz getting to be a Mahatma like Gandhi or a Boddhisattva like Ambedkar. Religion matters to the sanaatani. Politics is ephemeral. 

If not, western leaders will most likely talk loudly about fundamental values and democratic alliances, while quietly averting their eyes when India heads in a different direction.

Or they might just tell stupid Professors and 'woke' activists to fuck off. I'm kidding. They will avert their eyes from the utter collapse of 'Political Science' within the Academy. Apparently, there is a University in England which has asked its Professors to stop making students read texts- because most texts were written by white men- kids should get their education just by reading tweets. Meanwhile, China forges ahead by concentrating on STEM subjects.