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 December 15-31, 2024.
International media reports
New York Times, US, December 26
Alan Cowell recounts former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s legacy after his death on December 26. Cowell writes that Dr. Singh continually voiced concerns about where India was heading after 2014 “under its new Hindu nationalist government”.
In April 2018, he said at a lecture at Panjab University: “We need to ask ourselves whether we are losing patience with democracy and turning to more authoritarian alternatives that may well yield superior short-term results, but in the long term, will end up destroying our country and all the achievements of the last seventy years.”
Experts say
Sumit Ganguly, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, breaks down the “foreign policy realignment” India faces in its relations with Bangladesh in an analysis from December 16. With Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League party “all but discredited for the foreseeable future”, “India’s influence in Bangladesh could be at its lowest ebb in decades”. Ganguly says tensions are rising between India and Bangladesh on both trading accusations on ill-treatment of religious minorities, an unresolved water-sharing agreement, and misinformation spreading from Indian sources. He concludes that India’s “reliance on Hasina and the Awami League to the exclusion of other parties and Bangladeshi civil society” has put it in a difficult position.
Joshua Merfeld, KDI School of Public Policy and Management and Jonathan Morduch, New York University share their analysis and interpretation of what India’s poverty rate measures, on December 16. Conventionally “poverty rates have been defined as the fraction of the population living below poverty lines”, just as the poverty rate has been seen in India by government sources. Merfeld and Morduch argue that what India’s poverty rate actually measures is “to an approximation, the average fraction of the year that people spend below poverty lines”.
Different from the textbook definition of the poverty rate, they highlight that India’s poverty rate “captures poverty experienced temporarily” by people who may not usually be categorised as poor, and it also shows that “some ‘poor’ people are not poor for the full year”. This “de facto national poverty rate” captures fluid and dynamic conditions of economic status.
They argue that this more accurately reflects “the challenges of deprivation” than the conventional measure of poverty. While they conclude that both measures have “pros and cons” and they are not stating a preference, Merfeld and Morduch appeal to Indian statisticians and economists to consider redesigning their practices “to accurately measure the conventional notion of poverty”.
Shreegireesh Jalihal, an investigative journalist with The Reporters’ Collective, published their investigation on December 16 that reveals that the Indian government, led by the Prime Minister’s Office, has put in place a systematic approach that monitors 30 global indices and tries to influence them “to change their parameters-what they measure-if India is doing badly in their reports, which it often does”.
A “nodal unit” called the Global Indices for Reform and Growth has been set up to work as a “perception management agency” and the “at least 19 Union ministries and departments” are monitoring indices. While the government often publicly criticises the indices, Jalihal writes that its priority is exposed which is “massaging the data to make India look better at any cost possible rather than fixing the underlying problems”. He says the Modi government’s ultimate aim is to create its own indices.
In an episode of the Grand Tamasha podcast aired on December 18, Milan Vaishnav, director and senior fellow, South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment speaks to political scientists Adnan (Dann) Naseemullah, a reader in International Politics at King’s College London and Pradeep Chhibber, professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley about their new book, Righteous Demagogues: Populist Politics in South Asia and Beyond. They point to what they frame as Modi’s initial appeal as the promise of a “return of power to the people” as citizens felt disempowered feeling a “crisis of representation” with the belief that “there was a class of politicians/elites only interested in itself”. They go on to argue that the state under Modi has “failed to deliver that political equality”. Moreover, post 2019, Modi has shifted to a “darker Hindu majoritarian politics”. In promoting a “religious nationalism” propped by BJP alliances with “upper caste Hindus, aggrieved middle class, the business community”, “governance is not the point” for the “partisan, ideological formation that is the Hindutva project”.
Indian diaspora and civil society groups
Aisling Lynch-Kelly, advocacy and communications officer, and Dr Ritumbra Manuvie, the executive director, from The London Story, a diaspora-led civil society organisation focusing on human rights in India, call upon both India and the European Union (EU) to uphold their shared commitment to human rights in the run-up to the rescheduled EU-India Human Rights Dialogue. Finally slated for January 8, 2025, the dialogue was originally scheduled for August 2024, but the Indian government called it off just a day before.
In the context that a EU delegation of MEPs is set to visit India around the same time for talks on “EU-India digital innovation” towards securing tech and business deals, Kelly and Manuvie apprehend that the January 2025 dialogues will be a showpiece for the EU to simply tick “the human rights box”. Recounting the continuing human rights violations in Manipur, they point to the EU’s “conspiracy of silence on human rights”. They conclude that the EU and India “must centre their expanding relationship on human rights and discuss their human rights record” if not, the EU’s growing relationship with India will have “feet of clay”.
Recognising the lack of singular attention to the situation of Rohingya refugees in India, Refugees International and the Azadi Project released a report on December 16 focused on Rohingya “refugee detainees” in India. Based on visits and interviews with Rohingya families, their lawyers and to detention centres, the report finds “gross violations of constitutional and human rights” of the Rohingya people in India. Spouses are made to live separately in detention centres and older children are “forcefully separated from their parents”. Detention centres have poor sanitation, ventilation, lack health facilities, and offer no formal education or playgrounds for children.
There is “very limited access” to legal aid or to international organisations like the UNHCR, resulting in many Rohingyas being “arbitrarily detained” for over a decade with “no end in sight”. The report makes recommendations to several stakeholders (the UNHCR and others) beginning with appealing to the Indian government to “release all Rohingya refugees who have been arbitrarily and indefinitely detained” and “to stop any further arbitrary detention of Rohingya refugees”. Also, for “diplomatic discussions” between Myanmar, the United States, India, and ASEAN and SAARC nations for “ceasing genocidal violence on the Rohingya people”.
The Fetisov Journalism Awards 2024 have shortlisted Indian journalist Jatinder Kaur Tur in the Outstanding Contribution to Peace category for her story “Screams from the Army Post: The Indian Army’s torture and murder of civilians in a restive Jammu”, published by The Caravan magazine in its February 2024 issue. The story is based on allegations by people in districts of Jammu that the army was torturing and in some cases killing civilians suspecting them to be involved in terrorism. After its publication, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had ordered The Caravan to take down the story.
Read the previous roundup here.
