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 fortnightly roundup for January 1-15, 2025.
International media reports
Foreign Policy, US, January 2
Foreign Policy features “10 conflicts to watch in 2025” describing them as currently “under the radar” but could become “full-blown” conflicts this year.
In India, Sushant Singh analyses the ongoing violence in Manipur which started in May 2023 between two ethnic communities, the Meiteis and Kukis. Singh describes the Manipur conflict as part of a “broader pattern of unrest in northeast India” which has spilled over into neighbouring states. He writes the conflict could “exacerbate tensions” in Myanmar and Bangladesh, with ties of ethnic groups involved in the Manipur conflict to these countries, “worsening an unstable regional situation”. Infrastructure projects and trade routes can also be affected, unless New Delhi shows “political will, administrative competence, and a rubric for regional diplomacy”.
TechCrunch, US, January 2
VPN apps, including Cloudflare’s widely used 1.1.1.1, have been pulled from India’s Apple App Store and Google Play Store, reports Manish Singh.
The Ministry of Home Affairs issued removal orders for the apps, according to a document reviewed by TechCrunch and “a disclosure made by Google to Lumen, Harvard University’s database that tracks government takedown requests globally.” Apple cited a “demand” from the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre, part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, which said that the apps contravened Indian law.
This enforcement action is the “first significant implementation” of India’s 2022 regulatory framework governing VPN apps, which requires VPN providers and cloud service operators to maintain comprehensive records of their customers, including contact details and transaction histories, for a five-year period.
Experts say
In their recent article ‘Disinformation and Calculated Care Beyond the Global North: Comparing Refugee Discourses in Australia and India,’ Sukhmani Khorana and Nisha Thapliyal examine how Islamophobia impacts Muslim refugees and asylum seekers to India and Australia.
According to them, both countries “cultivate an international image of themselves as plural, democratic nations that do their share to resettle “genuine refugees”. The reality is that in both countries “elected representatives”, “state-linked media” as well as “social media platforms” act as “agents of information disorder” which aggravates “existing suspicions, fears and feelings of hatred towards Muslims”. In India, Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are the focus group. The disinformation encourages “distancing and disconnection” such as “doubt, disgust, fear, and anger rather than empathy and care for the brutalised and dying refugees”. In both countries, such forms of disinformation “create and maintain the emotional distancing which permits some refugees to be treated as “less than” others”.
Christophe Jaffrelot, professor and research director at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, revisits, on January 9, claims made in the Sabarmati Report, a feature film that Prime Minister Modi and Cabinet ministers watched last year, that “claims that the fire on the Sabarmati Express, in Godhra, was the work of Muslim conspirators”. Modi endorsed this narrative in February 2002 when it happened, and after watching the film, he praised it for “revealing the truth”.
Jaffrelot lists events that underscore how Muslims in Gujarat were targeted and attacked by Hindu nationalists following the fire in Godhra, saying communal violence could not have spread as fast as it did “had well-organised actors not orchestrated” it and nor were they “a spontaneous reaction since they took place not more than 24 hours after the Godhra carnage”. He also lists the ways in which the so-called conspiracy has not been proved in court to date.
In a recent review of Rollo Romig’s I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, Manan Ahmed Asif (a historian of South Asia who teaches at Columbia University) writes that the book “probes the capacity of the state and state-adjacent – working on behalf of a virulent ideology – to commit murder”. While the book focuses on a “hit list” of recent assassinations in India of activists and journalists, with journalist Gauri Lankesh the “first-person subject of the title”, Asif highlights that Romig “asks us to think about India as a whole”, particularly its last 10 years. Asif takes forward the description of Lankesh’s home “where food, music, and joy brought people together” by naming such labour “political.”
Likening Lankesh to the Pakistani journalist Sabeen Mahmud who was also gunned down, Asif writes that their work of bringing together “political and social coalitions” made them “particularly dangerous to majoritarian states and actors alike who insist that exclusionary violence and militant acts are the only sanctioned modes of creating national community”. Asif writes that Gauri Lankesh and Sabeen Mahmud’s dissent was “the very act of creating intimate spaces that imagined a different world.”
Read the previous roundup here.
