I just finished reading a powerful piece in the New Yorker on Modi and the specter of illiberalism that hangs over the Indian subcontinent. I have two thoughts. The first is how eerie the political strategies of the BJP mirror that of the GOP in the U.S. Indeed, the warm reception Modi received from President Trump in Houston appears to be no accident. A Reactionary Internationale is forming, and friends of democracy and progressive politics can no longer sit idly by as our adversaries around the world engage in a systematic assault on the democratic institutions.
The second musing that I will entertain here is how superficially similar the BJP project to reject the special status granted to Kashmir is to the detention of Muslims in Xinjiang, China. In both countries, the stated aim of the repression is to combat state-sanctioned terrorism, but the real aim is to catalyze a grand rejuvenation of national greatness. Revealingly, both states are sponsoring migration of Hindu Indians and Han Chinese to these far-flung provinces to ensure that future generations will be more receptive to direct control by the state without any condition of autonomy.
Even more on the nose, Indian and Chinese leaders—in a strange twist of history—appear to have adopted the paternalistic mentality of their former colonizers. In India, only Hinduism can lift India’s minorities out of backwardness, according to Hindu nationalist organization where Modi got his political start, the RSS. Article 370, granting Kashmir its autonomy, has only stifled economic development and investment and must be lifted. Similarly, Chinese authorities’ brutal response to the terrorist attacks that paralyzed the region in 2008 has a paternalistic rationale. Quelling the violent protests must be achieved by any means necessary, including locking over a million Muslim Uighurs in camps, so as to not jeopardize the prized Belt and Road Initiative.
Both countries are applying the Shock Doctrine—using terrorism as a cover for a particular brand of blood and soil nationalism. That blood and soil nationalism engenders each regime with political legitimacy, but at the price of the norm-governed procedures that protect citizens against arbitrary tyranny. The New Yorker piece is therefore correct to wonder whether the project to Indianize Kashmir will backfire spectacularly Kashmirizing India. To the extent that Modi’s political movement has neutered the independent media and judiciary, engaged in systematic voter suppression of minorities in the Eastern state of Assam by stripping them of citizenship, and incited religious and ethnic animus, Modi’s rise has already Kashmirized India.
In these three prongs, Americans can find loud echoes to American politics under Trump. Voter suppression remains a key pillar of the GOP’s 2020 reelection strategy. The disinformation campaigns adeptly pursued by BJP ministers to spread religious and ethnic hatred ring close to home. Critical journalists, like one Muslim woman who uncovered Modi’s role in the Gujarat riots, have to endure abuse from hordes of Twitter mobs. It is worth quoting the frankness of Modi’s deputy, Amit Shah, on the role of these social media networks in the BJP’s election strategy, “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public —whether sweet or sour, true or fake.”
This realization surely first came to Modi when he was a minister in Gujarat that mobs care little about the veracity behind allegations so long as they align with preexisting worldview. Riding the current of illiberal democracy remaking the world, the BJP realized just how much they can shape that worldview. Independent journalists can no longer publish in India’s legacy publications due to relentless pressure from the BJP.
But perhaps the most salient point of comparison of Modi to Trump is their indifference in the face of great atrocities. Both Trump and Modi have presided over a surge of hate crimes in their countries. Neither leader condemns violent attacks against minorities, instead preferring to remain silent or reserving judgement. As Trump said in the aftermath of Charlottesville, “some very fine people were on both sides.” Their silence is the loudest sound, bringing new relevance to MLK’s famous remark that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.
That is why the highest obligation of the progressive Internationale that must emerge in every corner of the world to engage in a coordinated counterassault against the Reactionary Internationale typified in Trump and Modi is to take to heart that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere. Blood and soil nationalism, wherever it manifests, is always and everywhere a threat to justice because it seeks to exclude the voices of minorities as legitimate representatives of the nation.
As implied in MLK’s famous warning from the Birmingham Jail, the threat to justice is actually more fundamental than that in that the exclusions to minorities set precedents that extend outward affecting every person in every nation. As good progressives, we must climb that proverbial mountain and yell stop—stop to the stripping of rights, stop to the barriers to communication, stop to arbitrary detentions, stop to the unregulated use of social media to incite ugly passions, and stop to the assault against mediating institutions. But stop is not enough, we must offer an alternative that ends the insecurity so many face, breeding fertile ground for these merchants of hate.