In her time, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, assassinated in 1984, ruled India with an iron fist, thanks to the unchallenged political domination exercised by the Congress party until the end of the 1990s. The balance of power is now reversed. Faced with an inept Congress, the no less authoritarian Narendra Modi, who came to power in 2014, carried by the right-wing populist wind that is sweeping the planet, represents everything Mr.me Gandhi was not: he is anti-secular, ultra-liberal and anti-Muslim, leaning on thehindutvathe dangerous hobbyhorse of Hindu supremacists.
With his white beard as a guru, Modi released hateful, if not even genocidal, speech towards minorities, Muslim first (15% of the population). There has been an increase in lynchings in recent years, committed in a climate of impunity. In February 2020, for example, intercommunal violence broke out in Delhi, obviously provoked by Hindu extremists, killing dozens — without the government finding fault with it. We have reached the point, notes the historian Romila Thapar, of expurgating from school textbooks the Muslim contribution to the history and culture of the country.
On the basis of an article of the Penal Code inherited from British colonization and which the authorities have invoked thousands of times, citizens have notably been imprisoned for “sedition” after having criticized the calamitous government management of the pandemic. In February 2021, a young environmental activist, Disha Ravi, found herself in prison for the same reason after relaying a tweet from Greta Thunberg…
India is going through a time when the muzzling of all critical voices is dangerously increasing. A drift that passes largely under the radar of our media. However, it is no exaggeration to say that the largest democracy in the world (1.4 billion inhabitants, soon to be more populous than China) is qualitatively attacked, in the same way as the United States. Same populist attacks.
With activist and essayist Naomi Klein and writer Margaret Atwood, Canadian and Quebec civil society figures sounded the alarm last week, mobilized by the arrest, at the end of June, of a leading activist , Teesta Setalvad, which came on the heels of a controversial Indian Supreme Court ruling. An arrest which was followed 24 hours later by that of a renowned journalist, Mohammed Zubair. Emblematic of the climate of intolerance that has settled in the country, their arrest has raised an outcry in India.
Mme Setalvad, 60, is secretary of Citizens for Justice and Peace, an organization created to defend the victims of the anti-Muslim pogroms committed in 2002 in Gujarat, a state of which Modi was the leader at the time. Mr. Zubair, 39, is a co-founder ofAltNewsa fact-checking site created in 2017 to fight against fake news. She was arrested without a warrant by the anti-terrorism police; he was accused of disturbing “religious harmony”.
One cannot really be surprised to see the social climate become what it is under Mr. Modi. The man remains suspected of having played a role in the pogroms of 2002 – he has, for this reason, been ostracized for a long time on the international scene. Leader of the Indian People’s Party (BJP, ultranationalist right), he comes from the ranks of the RSS, an organization created in the 1920s on the model of European fascist groups. The RSS celebrates the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, committed in 1948.
For the time being, served by its strategy of social and religious polarization, and driven in part by an economy which has resumed spectacular growth this year thanks to the revenge spending post-pandemic and hyperconsumer of the wealthiest, Modi retains a certain popularity with the Hindu majority. Everything indicates that he will be re-elected in 2024.
Yet India has greater existential threats to confront than the one fabricated and nurtured from the “other”. Starting with global warming. India experienced early spring heat waves, with temperatures approaching 50 degrees Celsius. With population growth, climate change heralds increasingly untenable shortages of water and food. And then, the fact is that the growth index (8.7% for a year) hides the cruelly unequal character of Indian caste society, while the pandemic has pushed millions of families back into poverty – fragile – middle class.
Mr Modi was elected and re-elected on promises of job creation for the 10 million young people who enter the job market each year. That the pandemic had not occurred and he would not have kept his promise either. Teflon politician, Mr. Modi exposes the Indians to increasingly problematic tomorrows.