When a judge in India’s Gujarat state sentenced the country’s most prominent opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, to two years in prison last month for a remark personally offensive to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he was doing more than sanctioning speech in a narrowly censorious way. If it is upheld, his ruling, seemingly by design, would remove Modi’s rival from the parliament and dramatically marginalize his place in India’s politics.
When a judge in India’s Gujarat state sentenced the country’s most prominent opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, to two years in prison last month for a remark personally offensive to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he was doing more than sanctioning speech in a narrowly censorious way. If it is upheld, his ruling, seemingly by design, would remove Modi’s rival from the parliament and dramatically marginalize his place in India’s politics.
In most democracies, speech in general, and political speech in particular, benefits from strong constitutional or legal protections not as a matter of coincidence, but because the ability to speak critically, even scathingly, of one’s rivals is almost universally seen as a bedrock of this form of government.
For many years now, the international media has formulaically spoken of India as the world’s largest democracy. But seldom have those who write such descriptions with almost function-key-like regularity taken the time to consider the healthiness or accuracy of this credential. Now, more than any time in recent decades, would seem to be a compelling moment for this.
In fact, under Modi, who has been prime minister since 2014, India has been inching ever more deeply into the murky intermediate zone between democracy and authoritarianism, without Modi ever losing any of his entrée in the West. He leads a political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, that has become increasingly dominant in the country and whose growing power has been marked by ever more extreme religious identity politics; the weakening of judicial independence; the erosion of academic freedoms; and, as the Gandhi case dramatically shows, the steady and dramatic reduction of space for criticism.
As this column will try to make clear in a moment, India’s direction is, of course, worth worrying about for India’s sake itself. But it is also of profound relevance to the legitimacy of Western democracies and the claims that they often make about their promotion of what they say are universal values.
The move against Gandhi by a judge in Modi’s own native state, Gujarat, should be setting off loud alarm bells in Western capitals about India’s commitment to democracy and the health of the rule of law in that country, but they have so far generated little political or diplomatic response. It is not, however, as if this were the only big opportunity for the West to show some consistency of concern about a drift toward ethno-religious authoritarianism in India of late. The West has been all but unwilling to speak about the democratic erosion in the country over a period of years, and it is important both to think about why that is and to reflect on the potential consequences.
The elephant lurking obviously in the room on the first point is China. For decades, the United States has eyed India with longing in the hope that New Delhi will lean more and more in the direction of the West in the latter’s contest with China. But this desire has become both more intense and more explicit, as Washington has promoted a variety of formulas to encourage this, from a rebranding of the oceans (think “Indo-Pacific”) to the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, a forum for security dialogue among the United States, Japan, Australia, and India.
An underlying premise of these and other such diplomatic and security schemes is that democracies share fundamental interests and must work together to defend and promote a common value system, lest authoritarianism continue to strengthen and spread. But what if the West’s urge to push back against certain rivals—most obviously, the case of the United States and China—renders it numb to the sharp erosion of democracy among its own coalition members?
Modi’s India is a prime exhibit, but this cannot only be said to concern the West’s far-flung partners. Many Western countries are themselves facing major challenges to democratic rule, the United States perhaps most glaringly of all. Just in the last few weeks, in the latest of many recent examples, former U.S. President Donald Trump appeared to menace the Manhattan district attorney who filed charges against him and called to defund the FBI and Justice Department. The investigative journalism outlet ProPublica revealed that a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, has been receiving undisclosed gifts from a wealthy conservative acquaintance for years. A state supreme court candidate in Wisconsin who lost badly in an election angrily refused to call his opponent to concede defeat and instead delivered a blistering speech attacking her integrity. And in Tennessee, the Republican majority in the state legislature moved to expel elected members of that body for a violation of decorum in an anti-gun violence protest.
The uncomfortable—but so far largely avoided—question that news like this should leave people in the West with is: How long can one push for democracy elsewhere when one’s own democracy is increasingly tenuous and imperiled?
This question leads to one of the great global fault lines of the moment: Taiwan. Politicians of both parties in the United States have rallied with intensifying passion recently in support of Taiwan on the pretext that it is a precious democracy that needs to be saved from subjugation by Beijing. Lest there be any confusion, let me say here that I treasure democracy and hope for its survival and deepening wherever it exists, including in my own country, the United States. But if Taiwan’s democracy is worth going to bat for, even to the point of risking world war with China, why is what is happening in India today—a country whose population is 60 times larger than Taiwan’s—of such little evident preoccupation?
By asking this, I want to suggest that a country’s democratic credentials overseas are integral to its domestic democratic health. And when an ostensibly democratic power makes exceptions for its friends by passing over their democratic backsliding or anti-democratic behavior for reasons of convenience—as with Western attitudes toward India, say, or with Israel, which is routinely treated as an unambiguous democracy even though its Palestinian population does not enjoy equal rights—this degrades democracy everywhere.
As for India itself, scholars of the country’s history say that what we are witnessing in the surge of Hindu nationalism coursing through its politics is not only reminiscent of the rise of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century, but also that some of its intellectual roots actually stem from that continent. Vinayak Chaturvedi, a historian at the University of California, Irvine, told me that Modi’s Hindu nationalism clearly descends from the thought of an Indian intellectual born in the late 19th century named V.D. Savarkar, whom he called “the ghost father of India, who is now being resurrected.”
Chaturvedi, author of the newly published book Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History, said that one of Savarkar’s main ideas revolved around the claim that India’s Hindu majority had suffered from “colonization for thousands of years by Muslims, and the belief that the nation must go back to purely Hindu knowledge.” This carries an obvious echo of Nazi ideology about the supposed value of something called “Aryan purity” and the need to eliminate Jews.
This has prompted an ongoing intellectual ethnic cleansing, where the contributions of non-Hindus are being erased from the country’s history and school curricula. This, he said, goes beyond anti-Muslim provocations and even includes diatribes against Buddhists and Buddhism, a global religion that was born in India. Under the influence of Savarkar’s ideology, Hindu nationalists have blamed it for eroding the country’s martial spirit and making India passive and excessively nonviolent.
India has, of course, already had brushes with extraordinary communal violence pitting Hindus and Muslims against each other, as in the most notorious recent example, in Gujarat in 2002, under Modi’s governorship. When the BBC launched a two-part documentary on this history recently, the Indian government swiftly moved to ban it, and even allegedly turned off the internet on at least one university campus to try to prevent its screening.
Chaturvedi and others who specialize in Indian history warn that with the repression of Muslims, their erasure from history, and spreading restrictions on speech and criticism of the state, India’s current direction could destabilize the country on a far larger scale than even the 2002 communal riots did.
What, one might ask, are friends for, if not for easing those who are close to them back from brinks like this? What are other democracies willing to say to Modi and India in the face of a democratic decline like this?
India is certainly not alone. The same might be asked of the United States, where, just as India is removing information about the country’s history under the Muslim Mughal Empire from its textbooks, some Southern states are removing books about the Civil Rights Movement, making it all but impossible to teach even about a peaceful advocate of equality for all such as Rosa Parks.
The ominous lesson that too few democracies seem to be heeding these days is that what goes around comes around.
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