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 round-up for August 1-15, 2024.
International media reports
The Economist, UK, August 1
“Indian cities are utterly unprepared for what is about to hit them” warns the Economist.
India’s urban population is projected to double by 2050, but with no recent urban census, “no one knows how many people live” in Indian cities today. Even with the anticipated mammoth urban population growth, the central government allocated a meagre 1.7% of the 2024 national budget to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
Rapid urbanisation is a major cause of climate change, accounting for “roughly 38% of warming in Indian cities”, for which “the poorest suffer the most”. Focusing on Mumbai as “the most extreme example of the myriad problems facing all Indian cities”, the Economist states that Mumbai “has a greater proportion of people living in slums than any other Indian city”. The city’s public transport system is in dire straits – “seven people” are killed “on average” on the commuter-rail system every day.
Monthly Review, USA, August 1
Jyotsna Kapur, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, analyses the Anant Ambani-Radhika Merchant wedding as “a new form of nationalism”, combining “aggressive market individualism” and “global aspirations” of the “Hinduized” Indian. She draws a parallel between the wedding and the Ram temple inauguration – “both had the same masala ingredients” including “lavish newly constructed sets” and “several costume changes”; unified by “Modi and the Ambani family” as “representatives of the state and capital”.
Kapur also reflects on the importance of images, “the impulse to join a totalizing reality” and makes connections with the posting of mob lynchings on social media. “If only images could be eaten, we’d all be full and not need any more!”
The Guardian, UK, August 1
In a long read, Rahul Bhatia writes on why Partha Banerjee, author of the book, In the Belly of the Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and the BJP of India, An Insider’s View, left the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after being a dedicated member for decades.
Banerjee was drawn to the RSS as a child because of his father, who like many others in the RSS, lived with a sense of “nobility in a voluntary renouncing of comfort” extending to the “purity of their hatred” as “the result of following their own doctrines honestly”. Banerjee says his father was “completely racist, Islamophobic and fascist”. Banerjee was recognized in the RSS as being “a rare worker”.
Working as an “education officer” tasked to get children to join the RSS, he tried to recruit with the message to families that their child “is a member of the RSS family” and will be in “good company with a bunch of kids who play together, sing together and talk about the country and the nation”. The recruits who joined and remained were “largely illiterate and unaware”. A mix of reasons, including exposure to other ways of thinking, led him to leave the RSS, a departure he describes in his book “as a cleansing”, akin to “a dip in the Ganges that absolved him of his sins”.
Looking back, he regards 90 to 95% of RSS members as “practically brainless idiots” who blindly follow commands “with folded hands”. His concern today is that the RSS is “turning India upside down into a fascist state.” Like Aldous Huxley’s ideal totalitarian state, he believes that Indians are “inside a prison whose walls they cannot see”.
Middle East Eye, UK, August 5
Pieter Friedrich writes about the growing movement in the United States to challenge US lawmakers for apparent connections to Hindu nationalist organisations, including taking considerable money from them. In April 2024, over 100 South Asian American leaders issued a statement naming and calling out several Indian American candidates running for elections for associating with Hindu supremacist organisations and espousing “divisive policy positions”.
Sunita Viswanath, executive director of Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) warned, “Those who say they represent Hindu Americans must contend with our entire community, including those of us who stand against caste and Hindutva, or face the heat if they don’t.”
Friedrich writes that one of the few voices critical of Hindu Nationalism is former Congressman Andy Levin who said, “I oppose Hindu nationalism [in America] just like I oppose any ethno-nationalist group in our country”. Yet Levin says most members of Congress are “afraid to say anything”, adding, “God forbid you come out and express yourself.”
Al Jazeera, Qatar, August 5
A report on “Kashmir’s clampdown” four years after the abrogation of Article 370 notes a range of policies “to tighten New Delhi’s grip” which are “being driven by a desire to increase their [BJP] vote bank, thus leading to a change in the demographic makeup”. Al Jazeera notes the rise in surveillance by investigative agencies, curtailment of the freedom of the press in the guise of acting against those seen as “anti-national” (with journalists facing “summons, raids, detentions, no-fly-lists, and now passport seizures”), as well as unemployment at 18 percent – which is “nearly twice the national average”.
New Lines Magazine, USA, August 5
Saurav Das in an investigative report about police shootouts in Uttar Pradesh reveals how the police often “exploit loopholes in the law and disregard forensic evidence”. The report raises “troubling questions about whether the killings were extrajudicial”. Human rights activists and victim families call these “fake encounters”, a term popularly used in India to describe extrajudicial killings.
Das highlights the police practice of keeping cases filed against unknown persons “in cold storage” and revived to portray chosen people as criminals. Most victims were poor and Muslim, accused of petty offences, not “convicted criminals on the run” as police narratives propagate.
Vrinda Grover, a senior lawyer, calls encounters “a public spectacle”. With unaddressed rising crime, Grover says the state “preys on” public safety concerns to “spin and sell the spectacle of encounters” to “distract us to believe that the swift elimination of criminals will lead to crime control.” Das also highlights the phenomenon of “half-encounters”, called “Operation Langda” (“Operation Lame”) by the state police, in which police officers injure someone very severely, “sometimes maiming them for life”. These are glorified by the BJP’s social media accounts.
Victims of “half-encounters” fear being killed by the police if they take action. In encounter death cases, failings of the legal system result in police officers most often cleared of any wrongdoing. The media and the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) have not helped. In response to the deferral of the NHRC’s reaccreditation for the second year in a row by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) in May 2024, the NHRC’s Secretary-General responded, “Who are the Europeans to question our police and India’s standard of human rights? We are a 5,000-year-old civilization”.
New York Times, August 6
Nitish Pahwa’s review of I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist’s Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, a book by Rollo Romig, describes it as “the story of one of India’s most vigorous protesters: Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken journalist from the southern state of Karnataka”. Lankesh was shot to death outside her home by two men on motorcycles in 2017, found to be acting on the orders of a Hindu supremacist group. Romig describes the life and context of a woman who fought for “the diversity of causes” – “from transgender women to Maoist guerrilla militants”.
He says the “hit list” was coined by “Indian progressives” after three prominent figures were assassinated in 2015. Lankesh “placed herself fourth on that list, as a joke”. Romig highlights “the impunity and permissiveness” granted by Modi and the ruling BJP which made possible Lankesh’s murder. He also lauds “the recent electoral checks on the BJP’s power (especially thanks to voters in her part of India)” as “proof of how the resistance she and other unyielding activists embodied has, finally, bit by bit, death by tragic death” meant that “there is still hope that the spirit of democracy can prevail in India”.
ESPN, USA, August 7
About Indian woman wrestler Vinesh Phogat, Sharda Ugra writes, “If Paris 2024 must find an exemplar in its push for gender parity, respect and inclusion they need look no further than this fighter of fire, ice and unshakeable belief”.
In her response to “brutality” from “the establishment and their police”, Ugra says, “when they went low, she went high”. In the Sport and Rights Alliance’s report titled “Sexual Abuse in the Indian wrestling federation” published in July 2024, Phogat says “Indian society normalises assault and harassment”. Making an analogy with wrestling to illustrate her point that assault is taken seriously “only when it is gruesome”, Phogat describes it as “whether we lost by one point or by ten, we lose. Whether the assault is big or small, it is an assault. An act against our will.”
Financial Times, UK, August 7
Benjamin Parkin, Chris Kay, and Josh Noble write on Nita Ambani’s (wife of “Asia’s richest tycoon Mukesh”) “publicity blitz” as “the face of India’s Olympic campaign” at the Paris Olympics “despite being neither an athlete nor a coach”. They report she is “lobbying” for India to host the 2036 summer games, in the Ambani’s “quest to dominate” India’s growing and lucrative sports sector. Her advocacy in Paris signals how “’Bollygarch’ tycoons are increasingly influencing public life in India”, criticised by some for “blurring the line between national good and private interest”.
While acknowledging that “Indian sports need money from wherever they can get it”, columnist Santosh Desai also says the investments of “tycoons” in public arenas is “dangerous” by “handing over more of our lives to business interests” whatever their altruistic motives. Although the Ambanis have portrayed themselves as “nation builders working to leave a cultural legacy” like the American “Carnegies or Guggenheims”, noted sports writer Sharda Ugra asks the question “who is going to criticise them if they own the team, they own the league [and] they own the TV channel?” since “ownership of everything takes away accountability.”
The Economist, August 8
The Asia Banyan column describes India’s government’s tendency to be in denial about national-level problems affecting the public. One is by questioning methodology – “Mr Modi’s government has never seen a methodology it likes”. Be it the Global Hunger Index, the environmental index, the World Bank’s human capital index, the World Press Freedom Index, the Freedom in the World Index, EIU Democracy Index or the V-Dem indices, the government debunks the methodology of each. It can then dismiss their concerning findings. The Indian government in denial also “shoots the messenger” by refusing permission to foreign journalists. It bans documentaries critical of it. It seeks to “tame” independent voices on social media through attempting restraints in law. Despite these many denials, whether youth unemployment, hunger or poverty, “India’s problems are real”.
Reuters, Canada, USA, August 13
Sarah Lynch, Wa Lone and Jorge Garcia report on Sikh community leaders facing threats and harassment in the United States and Canada. This is happening over the last year since the killing of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada, and the foiled assassination attempt of another in the U.S. They are experiencing “online harassment; surveillance at their homes and places of worship; the release of personal details online or doxing, and false police reports”.
Seven Sikh activists told Reuters that the FBI or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police warned them last year their lives could be in danger. While the sources of the threats are still to be determined, at least six activists said they “suspect” that the Indian government or “its supporters” could be responsible, and that this would be “hard to prove”. Nate Schenkkan, senior director of research at the Washington, D.C-based Freedom House, which monitors global civil liberties, said the threats represent “a kind of worst-case scenario for transnational repression – when a major state acts completely outside the law using all the tools at its disposal to silence dissent in another country.”
The Diplomat, Asia-Pacific, August 14
Farhana Sultana highlights the “pervasive disinformation and propaganda that attempts to destabilize Bangladesh” in the wake of Sheikh Hasina’s regime’s ouster. Sultana finds that the “two main sources of this misinformation campaign are global Hindutva forces linked to India, and Awami League loyalists both outside and inside Bangladesh”.
The campaign has focused on spreading “misleading and exaggerated” allegations of persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh, in turn “delegitimising” actual attacks faced by Hindus. Alongside, the campaign is “stoking fears” of an “alleged Islamicist takeover” in the works. Sultana even includes a link to a “Bangladesh Hindu Toolkit” revealing the efforts put in to building false narratives. On the Indian involvement, Sultana finds that it is to “deflect” attention from violence against Muslims in India and amplify “Hindutva sentiments within India”.
NBC New York, USA, August 15
Kiki Intarasuwan and the Associated Press report on interfaith and Muslim groups protesting the inclusion of a float they regard as “anti-Muslim” in the 42nd annual India Day Parade, slated to take place in New York City over the weekend of 17-18 August. In a letter to New York City Mayor Eric Adams and state Governor Kathy Hochul, several organisations urged them to press to remove the float, depicting the Ram temple in Ayodhya. The temple, opened in January 2024 in Ayodhya after a long legal battle, was built on the site of a 16th-century mosque demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992.
Dr. Audrey Truschke, professor and scholar of South Asian history, tweeted, “it is a shame to see New York City allow Hindu supremacist groups to parade an anti-Muslim symbol. It’s a step backward for the city. Law enforcement should prepare. This imagery has been used, for decades, to foment targeted violence against Muslims.” Read more coverage of opposition to the float here, here, and here.
Experts say
Bangladeshi Barrister Aneek Haque, in an interview with The Wire on August 5, responds to the question of how India and Modi are perceived in Bangladesh by saying, “Our general people think she (Sheikh Hasina) was the puppet of Narendra Modi… and people are not at all happy with what Mr. Modi has been doing. There have been communal riots in India. In Bangladesh they are trying to start something like that. But the people of Bangladesh said no.”
The Global Opportunity Youth Network, Global Development Incubator (GDI), Transform Rural India and the Development Intelligence Unit (DUI) released the State of Rural Youth Employment Report 2024 on August 6. Based on interviews with rural youth from 21 states across India, the report finds that between 70-85% of currently employed youth in rural areas desire to change their jobs “with a clear majority across gender and age expressing interest in running a small manufacturing, retail, or trading business”. Across 21 states, rural youth do not want to work in agriculture, with 70% attributing this to “low productivity and insufficient profits”. Rural youth are also not veering towards self-employment/entrepreneurship due to, as voiced by respondents, the “lack of entrepreneurial skills and mindset, the lack of access to seed capital, and a lack of understanding on how to start”. Notably, the report also found that young people prefer to “stay within or close to their villages even with a lower income”.
Hindenburg Research published on August 10 its investigative findings, found through “whistleblower documents” that the current Chairperson of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Madhabi Puri Buch and her husband Dhaval Buch, held “hidden stakes” in several offshore “Bermuda and Mauritius funds” in a multi-layered fund structure which was also used by Vinod Adani (brother of Gautam Adani) “in the alleged Adani cash siphoning scandal”. Madhabi Puri Buch became a “whole time member” of SEBI in April 2017, and was appointed as the Chairperson in March 2022. SEBI has failed to expose “the holders of offshore funds” in its Supreme Court-mandated investigation into the Adani Group. Hindenburg “suspects” SEBI’s reluctance to act against “suspect offshore shareholders” could be because of Madhabi Puri Buch’s “complicity in using the exact same funds used by Vinod Adani”.
Human Rights Watch released its findings on August 14 that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s and other BJP leaders’ 2024 electoral campaign “frequently used hate speech against Muslims and other minorities”, “inciting discrimination, hostility, and violence”. After analysing the total 173 campaign speeches delivered by Modi “after the election code of conduct took effect on March 16”, Human Rights Watch found that in “at least 110 speeches, Modi made Islamophobic remarks apparently intended to undermine the political opposition, which he said only promoted Muslim rights, and to foster fear among the majority Hindu community through disinformation”.
Indian diaspora and other civil society groups
A coalition of human rights and interfaith organisations in the US – Indian American Muslim Council, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Council on American-Islamic Relations-New York, Hindus for Human Rights, The Federation of Indian American Churches of North America (FIACONA), Muslim Public Affairs Council, New York State Council of Churches, Genocide Watch, Center for Pluralism, India Civil Watch International, American Muslim Institution, and Association of Indian Muslims in America – sent a joint letter to New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams on August 6. It urges them to oppose the inclusion of an “anti-Muslim” float at the India Day Parade scheduled for August 18. The letter underscores that the event is organised by US-based far-right Hindu groups and they “plan to use” the parade to “propagate hate and instil fear among American Muslims”. This will be expressed through the parade’s centrepiece float which is a “blatant attempt to glorify the illegal demolition of the historical Babri Mosque and celebrate ongoing violence and terror against 200 million Indian Muslims”. The float will feature the Ram Temple which “stands on the ruins of the Babri Masjid” whose demolition led to “widespread riots and the deaths of thousands, predominantly Muslims”. The letter highlights concern about the Indian consulate’s partnership with far-right groups to display the float. It also mentions that the inauguration of the Ram Temple in January 2024 further fuelled religious tensions, resulting in violence and attacks on other places of worship.
In a statement dated August 12, the Interfaith Center of New York (a citywide grassroots network) called on sponsors of the India Day Parade, including the Indian consulate, to “reconsider the inclusion of the float celebrating the Ayodhya Ram temple”. They underlined their concern that “Muslim New Yorkers” will see the “celebration” of the temple “as a public display of Islamophobia”; and as “faith communities” there is a “special responsibility…not to inflame local divisions in New York City”.
Diaspora groups in the UK highlight global links between Islamophobia in Hindutva, in their responses to the recent far-right violence in the UK after 3 girls were stabbed in Southport on July 29. In a press release, Hindus for Human Rights UK, condemned the “growing alliance between Hindu supremacists and white supremacists”. They featured the example of the recent “platforming” of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson (co-founder of the English Defence League (EDL) characterised by scholars as “[reflecting] the fundamental characteristics of fascism”), by the Hindu supremacist PGurus channel. In their statement, the South Asia Solidarity Group, UK, highlight how Robinson’s racism and xenophobia does not extend to Hindus. He can be seen saying that Hindus and Sikhs have been “a shining example of how immigration can work” and that Hindus in the UK are facing “persecution” from” Islamists and extremists”. During the Leicester violence in September 2022, when Muslim homes and shops were attacked by Hindu supremacist mobs, Robinson attempted to mobilise his far-right supporters to join the attacks. The statement underlines the need for “challenging Islamophobia and its centrality to far right organising across interconnected global political and economic contexts.”
Five citizens of Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka – Firdous Azim, Kanak Mani Dixit, Lakshman Gunasekara, Manzoor Hasan and Sushil Pyakurel – write in The Wire on August 9 to the government of India in the context of “momentous changes in Bangladesh”, to demand that it “desist from interfering” in their countries. They assert that the Indian government’s “political, bureaucratic and intelligence operatives in Colombo, Dhaka, and Kathmandu” have “contributed to the unending political instability in our countries and has empowered autocratic regimes.”
On August 15, the Vaclav Havel Center announced that Indian writer Arundhati Roy and Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi are the winners of the 2024 ‘Disturbing the Peace’ Award. The award “recognizes writers who share Vaclav Havel’s passionate commitment to human rights and have suffered unjust persecution for their beliefs”. Roy was cited as being a voice for “the marginalised and dispossessed” in India.
Read the previous round-up here.
