The Narendra Modi government frequently posits India as a ‘Vishwaguru’ or world leader. How the world sees India is often lost in this branding exercise.
Outside India, global voices are monitoring and critiquing human rights violations in India and the rise of Hindutva. We present here fortnightly highlights of what a range of actors — from UN experts and civil society groups to international media and parliamentarians of many countries — are saying about the state of India’s democracy.
Read the roundup for September 15-30, 2024.
International media reports
The Economist, UK, September 16
Despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s public stance that the recent general elections result, which saw the National Democratic Alliance return to power for a third term, was a vote for “continuity”, the Economist Asia desk explains why he is a “weakened strongman”.
Even before completing 100 days on September 16, Modi withdrew several “politically important initiatives under pressure from an emboldened opposition and from pressure groups”, the piece states. Some of these “climb-downs” include referring a new legislation on Muslim charitable endowments to a joint parliamentary committee unlike other laws in the past decade that were simply “rammed” through parliament.
There was also a “U- Turn” on the Broadcasting Services Bill as well as the withdrawal of “an advertisement seeking applicants for senior bureaucratic posts from outside the civil service”. Such reversals “come at the expense of Mr. Modi’s public image as a muscular, infallible leader the article stated.
The New Statesman, UK, September 16
Shruti Kapila, professor of history and politics at the University of Cambridge, analyses sexual violence against women in India in light of the August 8-9 rape and murder of a junior doctor in Kolkata’s state-run R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital, which triggered state-wide protests including a strike by doctors.
Kapila connects modern legislation against rape to public outrage that accompanied specific instances of violence and assault, from the 1972 case of a tribal girl raped by policemen to the 2013 case of a 23-year-old who died of her injuries sustained during a violent sexual assault in New Delhi. Kapila explains that sexual violence is marked by “impunity” and “social tolerance” and Hindu nationalism has only added a “sanctioned” dimension to sexual violence against Dalit and Muslim women. Furthermore, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s tepid response to the R.G. Kar incident has made rape a “divisive issue” and left the rest of us with an “unenviable choice” between opposing her and strengthening Hindu Nationalism, Kapila writes.
New Lines Magazine, US, September 18
Surbhi Gupta, the South Asia editor of New Lines Magazine, locates the problematic portrayal of rape as the act of an individual — “a monster” — rather than as a social issue, in her analysis of the rape and murder of a junior doctor in Kolkata’s R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital .
She points to several factors that underlie rape culture including the absence of sex education. Rather than ensuring it, she writes that the Indian government has “removed chapters on sex education as part of its recent National Education Policy in 2020”. Gupta underlines the need for the discourse on sexual assault to be “expanded” to see how “rape culture at large grants impunity to men”. Until rape is recognised as an epidemic that Indian society needs to deal with, “cases like the one in Kolkata will be discussed as an anomaly and not the norm,” she writes.
New York Times, US, September 18
The first elections to be held in Jammu and Kashmir in a decade — and five years after it was stripped of its special status under Article 370 through a constitutional amendment brought in by the second Narendra Modi-led government — will not fully restore the voices of the youth, as “a lasting chill has fallen over Kashmir,” writes NYT correspondent Sameer Yasir. He attributes this to India’s “criminalization of dissent and freedom of expression in Kashmir”. However, voters turned out in large numbers in the recent General Elections to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party “at bay”, he notes.
Engineer Rashid, charged with alleged terror funding, was elected as a Member of Parliament from Baramulla; his son, Abrar Rashid, also campaigned in the state elections. These are signs that in a context which locals describe as an “occupation administered mostly by outsiders”, the assembly elections, held between September 18 and October 1, “will restore some of the self-rule India took away in 2019”.
The Guardian, UK, September 18
Aakash Hassan and Hannah Ellis-Petersen report on the “palpable buzz” in Kashmir as the state elections were held between September 18 and October 1. This election “has not been met with calls for boycotts even by separatist and terrorist outfits”. Instead, candidates “from a multitude of parties” are taking part in the elections.
Voters appear to be favouring “independent candidates or those aligned with groups that have been critical of New Delhi’s Kashmir policies”. Political rallies have been “packed”.
Sheikh Showkat Hussain, a Kashmiri political analyst notes that while “on the one hand, Modi has been treating the higher voter turnout as a referendum for his decisions of 2019, on the other, local parties see it as a vote against his policies”. The results of the elections will be declared on October 8.
Radio France International, France, September 18
An Agence France-Presse (AFP) report quotes the families of the miners who were killed in an ambush by the Indian Army after the Supreme Court on September 17 closed all proceedings in the pursuance of an FIR against 30 army personnel allegedly involved in the botched up operation. In December 2021, the Army killed six miners mistaking them for insurgents of war-torn Myanmar. Later, the Army also fired on protesters, taking the death toll to 13 civilians. At the time, Union home minister Amit Shah had promised “justice to the bereaved families”.
Though the state police had pressed charges, in areas like Nagaland, “New Delhi’s green light is required to prosecute soldiers operating”, the AFP report points out. Prime Minister Narendra Modi “refused to endorse the process,” the report states. The SC closed proceedings stating that there had been no government approval for prosecution. Relatives of the dead miners said that the verdict made them think that “only the lives of uniformed men matter.”
The Breach, Canada, September 19
Earlier this summer, Montreal’s Concordia University cancelled a talk on rising fascism in India and its diaspora organised by the South Asian Diaspora Action Collective and the Centre sur l’asie du sud, caving in to pressure from “far-right ultra-nationalist Hindu groups tied to the right wing Indian government,” an article in The Breach states. The piece offers other instances where progressive groups have been silenced pointing rather self-evidently to the rise of Hindu nationalism in Canada.
The writers draw a connection between the deployment of “Hinduphobia” with the manner in which certain groups equate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Semitism. Such “Israel lobby groups actively providing counsel and political support to right-wing Hindu organizations”, the piece states. It offers a pointed example: last November, a petition to recognize Hinduphobia in the Canadian House of Parliament was tabled by Melissa Lantsman, a Conservative MP famous for her staunch support of Israel. The resolution was not passed.
The Global and Mail, Canada, September 21
Senior journalist Robert Fife and parliamentary reporter Steven Chase report on a new Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) document that identifies China, India, Russia, Iran and Pakistan as countries that carry out foreign-interference activities in Canada. The report tabled at a public enquiry said that India and China were “deeply engaged” in attempting to influence the diaspora communities through “illicit funding and disinformation campaigns”.
On the Indian government’s role, CSIS claims that it has tried to “meddle in Canadian domestic affairs” to undermine the support for the Khalistan movement that seeks an independent Sikh state. “Gol proxy agents may have attempted to interfere in democratic processes, reportedly including through the clandestine provision of illicit financial support to various Canadian politicians as a means of attempting to secure the election of pro-Gol candidates or gaining influence over candidates who take office,” the CSIS document stated. However, it did not name any Canadian politicians.
E-Flux, US, September
Mila Samdub, a visiting fellow at Yale Law School, reflects on how the Modi government’s aggressive push for “maximum governance” and “New Digital India”, ostensibly to lure global capital, is deeply entrenched in Hindu symbolism and communal politics. This vision of a “technocratic future” is most visible in the various development and architectural projects undertaken by the Modi government. On one hand is the Central Vista redevelopment which promotes “efficiency”, “transparency”, “innovation” and “productivity”, on the other is the recently completed Ram temple in Ayodhya and the proposed Kashi Vishwanath Corridor project in Varanasi. “Both Hindutva and “maximum governance” are savvy strategies of political image-making, coming in and out of focus, projecting silhouettes but not details that could establish culpability,” the author writes.
Prothom Alo, Bangladesh, Sept 23
The Bangladesh Foreign Ministry on September 23 lodged a formal protest note against Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s remarks at a political meeting in Jharkhand. The note “strongly protested the highly derogatory remarks of Indian home minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Amit Shah regarding the Bangladeshi citizens”, the diplomatic correspondent states.
Shah reportedly told the gathering: “I appeal to you to let the BJP form the government in Jharkhand. We will hang every Bangladeshi infiltrator upside down to give them a lesson.” The interim government handed the note to the Indian Deputy High Commissioner to Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government further “called upon the political leaders of India to refrain from making such slanderous and unacceptable remarks”.
Bloomberg, US, September 25
Political analyst Mihir Sharma writes about India’s position in light of the recent political transitions in South Asia and the subcontinent. Sri Lanka has chosen Anura Kumara Dissanayake as President, a political leader with a strong anti-India past. His predecessor on the other hand, used to be “distrustful of China and supportive of Indian investment,” Sharma writes.
Similar shifts have taken place in other South Asian countries too. “New Delhi began the year secure in its relationships with Kathmandu, Dhaka, and Colombo; now, however, the only neighbour it can “mostly count on” is Bhutan. According to Sharma, the main problem is that India sees these relationships “through a security lens” and when “political winds shift” India stands to suffer. India has also been wrong to expect “smaller countries to kowtow” to it. While “Indians like to remind people that theirs is the world’s largest democracy”, neighbours complain that “New Delhi doesn’t always promote and support democratic values in the region”.
Jacobin, US, September 29
Safa Ahmed, the director of communications at the Indian American Muslim Council, marks 16 years of the terror attack in Malegaon in Maharashtra, which was carried out by members linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu supremacist group and the ideological fount of the BJP.
“From the electoral endorsement of Pragya Thakur to the political pressure on the judiciary to acquit several Hindu-supremacist leaders accused of playing a role in the bombings,” the BJP has consistently provided a “soft” cover, Ahmed writes. Thakur, one of the main accused, received a BJP ticket to fight in the 2019 Parliamentary elections and won In light of the absence of justice, she urges the Biden administration to “use appropriate diplomatic tools to punish complicit RSS and BJP leaders.” The Indian opposition, too, must “call for these terror cases to be reopened, and sanction any parties or organizations that have used terrorism to gain power,” she writes.
Parliamentarians and public officials advocate
In public remarks during Islamic Unity Week, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, posted a message on X on September 16 naming India as a place where Muslims are suffering, ”We cannot consider ourselves to be Muslims if we are oblivious to the suffering that a Muslim is enduring in #Myanmar, #Gaza, #India, or any other place”. This prompted India’s Ministry of External Affairs to respond calling these comments “unacceptable” and that they “strongly deplore the comments made regarding minorities in India by the Supreme Leader of Iran. These are misinformed and unacceptable. Countries commenting on minorities are advised to look at their own record before making any observations about others.”
Experts say
Amnesty International issued a statement on September 18 demanding that Indian authorities end “their campaign of harassment and intimidation against dissenting voices in Jammu and Kashmir” on the eve of the first elections in ten years in J&K. They specifically called for “restrictive travel bans and arbitrary detentions” under anti-terror laws to cease. Amnesty cited their research showing a “seven-fold increase” in the number of habeas corpus petitions filed after 2019 to challenge detentions under the J&K Public Safety Act (PSA). Muslim-dominated Srinagar recorded “consistently more PSA cases” than Hindu-dominated Jammu. Finding that nearly 37% of all cases under India’s main terrorism law were registered in J&K, Amnesty said this signals it is being “misused to clamp down on human rights defenders”. They emphasised that the “people of Jammu and Kashmir must be able to exercise their right to fully participate in the decision-making about their future in the run up to, during and after elections.”
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an independent inter-governmental financial watchdog based in France, published an evaluation report on India’s measures to tackle illicit financing on September 19. While the report finds that Indian authorities understand “money laundering and terror financing risks”, the FATF points out critical gaps affecting the non-profit sector. It observes that amendments to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) in 2020 were implemented “without adequate consultation with non-profits”, “impacting their activity or operating models”. The FATF repeatedly notes that delay in prosecutions under terrorism and money laundering laws are resulting “in a high number of pending cases and accused persons in judicial custody waiting for cases to be tried and concluded”. As per the report’s review period, since 2018, 643 persons remain in judicial custody. The FATF states it is “critical that these delays are addressed by India while ensuring that due process of the judicial system remains respected”.
In a statement responding to the FATF’s report issued on September 19, Aakar Patel, chair of the board at Amnesty International India, said the Indian government should not “conveniently downplay how they have been rapped for their partial compliance with measures to protect the legitimate activities of the non-profit sector”. Amnesty has previously documented how FATF recommendations “have been abused” by Indian authorities to “stifle” the non-profit sector by using harsh laws to lay terrorism charges that criminalize and “prevent organizations and activists from accessing essential funds”. Patel emphasises that while the Indian government has to take the FATF recommendations seriously, it must “calibrate its actions with a risk-based approach to stop the witch-hunt under India’s anti-terror and money-laundering laws of non-profit organizations, human rights defenders and activists who dare to dissent”.
Azad Essa writes on September 19 about India voting to abstain in the voting of a UN General Assembly resolution calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank within 12 months. The resolution was adopted by a two-thirds majority on September 18. To contextualise India’s responses on Israel and Palestine at the UN since 1947, Essa created a timeline. He lists seven entries between 1947-2012 in which India voted largely in favour of Palestine. In contrast, in the 11 entries 2014 onwards, India voted either in favour of Israel or abstained from resolutions which were critical of Israel. The only exception to this was in December 2023, when India voted in in favour of a resolution that called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. By this point, Essa says 18,000 Palestinians had already been killed by Israel.
The International Indigenous Peoples Movement for Self-Determination and Liberation (IPMSDL) issued a statement on September 25 condemning “the plans of the Indian army to take over Indigenous land in Abujhmad and drive out thousands of Indigenous Adivasis”. Abujhmad is a forest area in Chhattisgarh, “rich with untouched resources”. The army plans to build a maneuver range for training to “hone their skills in a realistic environment”. They would take over 53,000 hectares of land and displace 2400 families. IPMSDL says it is “preposterous that this is happening at the expense of Indigenous Peoples livelihood, their right to land, and self-determination”. They note that civilians are suffering “forcible displacement” in the region over the last 8 months in an anti-Maoist campaign by the Indian state, resulting in “explicit violation of International Humanitarian Law”. The statement appeals to “the UN Human Rights Council, international human rights watchdogs, and the global community to look into these crimes and violations of IHL.”
Indian diaspora and civil society groups
Rajiv Sinha, Director of Hindus for Human Rights, UK, highlights how Hindu supremacists and white supremacists in the UK are bound by Islamophobia, on September 17. He underlines that “it is time to pay attention to the growing alliance of far-right forces” globally. Although white supremacists “have a problem with brown people”, they come together with Hindu supremacists “to spread racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hate and violence”. Sinha gives collaborations forged by Tommy Robinson, founder of the English Defence League (categorised as a “racist organization”) as numerous examples. He cites reports by the US-based Savera coalition revealing the “growing collaboration between the Hindu far right and domestic far-right movements in the United States”. He expresses alarm at the reach of connections being made given “Hindutva activity in the UK during the general election campaign”, when more than 60 “Hindutva lobby organisations” put out a so-called “Hindu Manifesto” that got endorsements from around 25 candidates. Sinha emphasises the need to recognise that “all forms of racism are connected”.
On September 18, the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) and ReThink Media released a survey report of 950 Indian American Muslims assessing “their perceptions of Hindu nationalism and its impact on their lives in the United States”. The key findings highlight a strong sense of “discrimination and exclusion” from Hindu friends and peers. There is a significant “emotional toll” due to fear and hostility faced on social media platforms. Most respondents shared that “Hindu nationalism poses a threat to religious minorities in both India and the U.S.” and see the rise of Hindutva in the US as “a threat to democracy in the U.S”.
Reclaiming Democracy in India, a broad interfaith coalition of US-based and international human rights organisations, held a protest on 22 September while Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at a venue in New York. The IAMC and other coalition members condemned the “Modi regime’s attacks on Indian democracy” and persecution of marginalised groups. Lydia Tombing Khuptong of the North American Manipur Tribal Association (NAMTA) said, “More than 360 churches were demolished in Manipur, more than 7,000 homes and properties were burned and looted, and more than 41,000 of our people have been displaced. They do not have their basic rights. Modi was silent all this time.” Sonia Joseph, from the South Asia Solidarity Initiative, said, “In Modi’s India, Muslims are being lynched every day. We understand what ethnic cleansing means, what occupation means, and what genocide means. We see it every day with Israel. Make no mistake, we see it happening in India too.”
Read the previous roundup here.
