India Under Modi: Threats to Pluralism

Sumit Ganguly

Journal of Democracy, Volume 30, Number 1, January 2019, pp. 83-90 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2019.0006

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/713724

Access provided at 21 Dec 2019 09:34 GMT from Panjab University

 India Under Modi

Threats to Pluralism
Sumit Ganguly

Sumit Ganguly is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and

Rabindranath Tagore Professor of Indian Cultures and Civilizations at
the Indiana University. His essay “India’s Democracy at 70: The Trou-
blesome Security State” appeared in the July 2017 issue of the Journal
of Democracy.

Is India, the world’s largest constitutional democracy, faltering in its

commitment to a liberal, pluralistic democratic order? There is reason
to fear that it is. Since the 2014 election brought the Hindu-nationalist
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power and made its leader Narendra
Modi prime minister, the country has witnessed a spate of ominous de-
velopments in the areas of minority rights, press freedom, and the au-
tonomy of cultural and intellectual institutions.
The worst previous breach of the liberal order came in 1976, when
the Indian National Congress (INC) government of Prime Minister In-
dira Gandhi declared an “emergency” during which personal rights and
civil liberties were violated, the press was muzzled, and state agencies
were politicized.1 That episode ended in 1977, but Gandhi would go on
to wield power dubiously in efforts to suppress an insurgency in the
state of Punjab. Her decision to launch a bloody military assault against
a Sikh holy site in that state would lead to her own assassination at the
hands of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Following this murder, a pogrom
against Sikhs erupted in Delhi while the Congress government stood
aside and watched the violence.
Indira Gandhi’s son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, also undermined lib-
eral-democratic norms with venal measures in Jammu and Kashmir that
contributed to sparking an ethnoreligious insurgency there.2 More recent-
ly, the INC-led United Progressive Alliance government that held power
from 2004 to 2014 committed its own derelictions. It failed to support
India’s most noted modernist painter, M.F. Husain (1915–2011), when
Hindu bigots hounded him from the country and forced him to flee to

Journal of Democracy Volume 30, Number 1 January 2019

© 2019 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
84 Journal of Democracy

Qatar in 2006. And it did nothing when a Hindu-nationalist ideologue

sued Penguin India as part of a (successful) campaign to make the pub-
lisher withdraw and destroy all copies of University of Chicago professor
Wendy Doniger’s 2009 book The Hindus: An Alternative History on the
specious ground that Doniger had defamed Hinduism.
Since the BJP took power almost five years ago, matters have dete-
riorated further. The ruling party, which came to power on the strength
of its vows to fight corruption, restart the economy, and end political
drift, has tacitly supported illiberal tendencies and furthered a parochial
agenda. Prime Minister Modi’s BJP government has been too quiet as
vigilante groups have attacked minorities. The BJP has moved to muzzle
and control the media while seeking to subvert a range of academic and
cultural institutions.
There are also signs of a crackdown on human-rights activism. In late
August 2018, police arrested five activists, including human-rights law-
yer Sudha Bharadwaj, who is known for her work defending Dalits, in-
digenous people, and labor activists in the impoverished state of Chhat-
tisgarh. The police accused the five, along with five others arrested in
June, of involvement in a Maoist plot against Modi’s life. Kumi Naidoo,
the secretary-general of Amnesty International, takes a different view,
decrying an official effort to “[crush] dissent by demonizing and crimi-
nalizing activists, lawyers, and journalists working for some of the poor-
est and most marginalized communities in India.”3 Amnesty Interna-
tional India has itself been targeted: Its bank accounts have been frozen,
and police in Bangalore have accused it of sedition.
Whereas earlier breaches of civil liberties, such as Gandhi’s “emer-
gency,” seemed to have been driven by short-sighted political calcu-
lations (however cynical), the BJP’s program of media and cultural
control is all too firmly of a piece with its long-held Hindu-nationalist
ideology. The INC nominally leads the opposition, but its complaints
about all this have been feeble. India’s chances of remaining a secular,
pluralistic, and liberal polity are looking dim.

Initial Portents
Signs that the new BJP government planned to press an ethnonation-
alist agenda came soon after Modi assumed the premiership in 2014.
Some of the earliest effects were felt by elite cultural and intellectual
institutions. While their affairs may seem far removed from the daily
concerns of most of Indian society, the speed with which the BJP set
about changing their personnel or otherwise working its will on them
both presaged rising illiberal trends and suggested that Hindu national-
ists take these institutions very seriously indeed and see claiming con-
trol over them as a major goal.
For years, left-leaning but intellectually supple historians had domi-
Sumit Ganguly 85

nated one of the country’s most influential educational bodies, the Indi-
an Council of Historical Research (ICHR), an organization designed to
promote historical scholarship. Their ideological propensities aside, few
aspersions could be cast on their professional standing. In July 2014, the
BJP government named as head of the ICHR a virtually unknown histo-
rian from an obscure university, Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, with no
peer-reviewed publications to his name. Established historians, fearing
for the integrity of this significant cultural institution, were not comfort-
ed to learn of Rao’s belief that the two great Hindu epics, the Ramayana
and the Mahabharata, should be read not as works of legend, poetry,
and spirituality, but as objective historical documents.
Controversy has also marred appointments to other government-fund-
ed educational institutions. The highly regarded Film and Television In-
stitute of India (FTII) in Pune, Maharashtra, counts among its graduates
many stalwarts of Indian television and cinema. Early in Modi’s term,
the government dismayed students and alumni alike by placing actor
Gajendra Chauhan in the FTII’s directorship. Best known for having
appeared in a late-1980s television adaptation of the Mahabharata, he
mostly played minor roles in unexceptional Bollywood productions af-
ter that. The FTII community and a number of public intellectuals there-
fore wondered what, other than his BJP connections, Chauhan would
bring to his new post.4 He resigned in 2017.
The atmosphere at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is left of cen-
ter, but the school is one of India’s most prestigious places of higher
learning. When the leader of the campus’s main student union (an af-
filiate of the Communist Party of India) gave a controversial speech
in February 2016, it brought a BJP attack on the institution. Kanhaiya
Kumar used the address to go after the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), the large and militant Hindu-nationalist organization tied to the
BJP. He also criticized the education minister for budget cuts. The oc-
casion was an on-campus meeting to commemorate the execution of
Mohammed Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri separatist who had been hanged in
2013 on charges of involvement in the December 2001 terror attack on
the Indian Parliament.
Left-wing intellectuals may have lauded Kumar’s florid harangue,
but a careful reading reveals its banality.5 Ruling-party acolytes dug in
on the other side of the issue, however, condemning Kumar as unpatri-
otic. The New Delhi police arrested him and two of his associates on
sedition charges. As of this writing in November 2018, they are out on
bail, and the charges are pending.6
Since Kumar’s speech, JNU itself has faced a number of onslaughts.
A court order barred students from holding protests in the campus space
unofficially known as Freedom Square, which was physically blocked
off. Food-vendor stalls that had long served as student gathering plac-
es were also shut down, sparking widespread protests. Later in 2017,
86 Journal of Democracy

the central government announced cutbacks in student fellowships. All

these actions suggest that the BJP is targeting JNU as a bastion of left-
ism.
In November 2018, news came out that Ramachandra Guha, a distin-
guished historian and biographer of Mohandas K. Gandhi, was denied
a post at the decade-old, privately run Ahmedabad University in Gu-
jarat (Gandhi’s home state) after RSS-affiliated students complained.
The students called Guha a “Communist” and charged him with being
“anti-national.”7

Media Freedom at Risk

Along with cultural institutions, the press has come in for trouble
under the BJP. The 2018 World Press Freedom Index published by Re-
porters Without Borders ranks India 138th of 180 countries—worse than
Afghanistan (118th), Zimbabwe (127th), and Burma (137th). According
to UNESCO, from the beginning 2014 through June 2018, twenty jour-
nalists were killed in India.8 If we add the two journalists who were
killed in separate incidents in late October, the total rises to 22.9 The
UNESCO report records that fewer journalists (nineteen) were killed in
India across almost the entire two decades before 2014. According to
the International Federation of Journalists, the figures are even worse: It
claims that nine journalists were killed in 2015 alone, with an additional
five in 2016.10
In several high-profile cases, the BJP government has proven wrathful
toward journalists deemed ideologically hostile or too critical of the rul-
ing party’s ties to corporate interests. Perhaps the most dramatic incident
was the July 2017 resignation of Paranjoy Guha Thakurta from his post
as editor of the prominent, left-of-center Economic and Political Weekly.
When the magazine ran a critical article about the Adani Group, a ma-
jor business conglomerate widely thought to be close to Prime Minister
Modi, there were threats of legal action for defamation. Thakurta hired a
lawyer, but his failure to consult the journal’s trustees before doing so was
used to force him out. The article, which appeared online but not in print,
was retracted at the time of his resignation.11
In March 2018, Harish Khare resigned as editor of the Tribune with-
out explaining why. This North Indian newspaper is a leading regional
daily, and Khare had spent several years as press advisor to Manmohan
Singh, Modi’s predecessor as prime minister. The timing of Khare’s
resignation was highly suspect: The paper had just published an inves-
tigative story about possible data breaches compromising the Aadhaar
program, India’s massive, decade-old effort to give every citizen a se-
cure, biometrically based national identity card.12 Officials had reacted
with fury at the Tribune’s reporter, filing a criminal complaint against
him for allegedly having used fraud to obtain privileged information.
Sumit Ganguly 87

Khare chose to back his journalist, a stand that appears to have cost the
editor his job.
Disturbing as stories such as these are, they pale into insignificance
next to tales of lethal violence visited on members of the press. On 5
September 2017, left-wing journalist Gauri Lankesh was gunned down
outside her home in Bangalore in the southern state of Karnataka. She
owned and edited a small but influential weekly that her father had
started in 1980 to provide news and commentary in the local language,
Kannada. Lankesh was an ardent and unyielding critic of the rise of
Hindu nationalism. The three suspects in her murder, like suspects in
similar killings, belong to a radical Hindu-nationalist group known as
the Sanatan Sanstha.13 Although there is no evidence that the national
government was in any way directly implicated in her killing, it is fair
to ask if the BJP government’s sympathy for virulent Hindu-nationalist
organizations and their agenda has emboldened such groups to the point
of violence.

A Season of Lynchings
Journalists are far from the only the targets of radical Hindus. In
recent years, several BJP-governed states have imposed bans on both
the killing of cattle and the consumption of beef. These actions, in turn,
have spawned a series of vigilante groups who now feel free to act with
impunity.
The cases make terrifying reading. The first comes from Uttar
Pradesh (U.P.). Home to more than two-hundred million people, it is
India’s most populous state. In September 2015, allegations made in a
Hindu temple in the town of Dadri led a mob to drag Mohammed Akhlaq
from his home and beat him to death in the middle of the night.14 His son
was gravely injured. Local police eventually arrested six men in con-
nection with the murder. What had touched off this atrocity? A calf had
gone missing. The explosive claim was that Akhlaq had slaughtered it,
storing its meat in his refrigerator.
In 2017, the BJP won the U.P. state elections, and a firebrand Hindu
preacher named Yogi Adityanath became chief minister. One of his first
official acts was to shut down slaughterhouses, condemning them as il-
legal, unsanitary, or both. At the same time, he banned the transport of
cows and buffaloes across the state.15 Most of those who own and oper-
ate slaughterhouses are Muslim. As a result, thousands from this minor-
ity, many of them already poor, suddenly found themselves stripped of
any gainful employment.
As if the bans themselves have not been dire enough in their effects,
they have been seized on by vigilante groups that now operate across
northern India. These groups take it upon themselves to attack anyone
whom they decide is illegally transporting cattle across state lines. One
88 Journal of Democracy

of the starkest incidents was the April 2017 killing of a Muslim named
Pehlu Khan in the state of Rajasthan. A mob attacked him and his sons
on suspicion that they were illegally moving cows that they had bought
in Rajasthan to the neighboring
state of Haryana, ostensibly to
Whatever the failings of slaughter them. The Khans ran a
today’s Congress party, it Haryana dairy farm and insisted
must be recalled that its that they planned no slaughter,
forebears bequeathed to India but their avowals were ignored.
an explicitly pluralistic, Within months, and despite
videographic evidence, the Ra-
democratic, secular, and
jasthan police acquitted six of
liberal constitution. The BJP’s the attackers whom Khan had
sectarian vision challenges named before his death; three
the very constitutional remained to face charges.16 In
foundations on which the a twist, Rajasthan authorities
Republic of India rests. charged four survivors of the
attack with lacking the docu-
ments required for cattle trans-
port even though they had a valid bill of sale.17
More attacks by “cow protectors” have followed the Khan murder.
According to one analysis, there were 63 incidents of cow-related vio-
lence between the BJP’s May 2014 assumption of office and mid-2017.
More than half these incidents (32) happened in BJP-ruled states. Of the
28 people killed, 86 percent were Muslim.18 In the wake of opposition
criticism and public protests, Prime Minister Modi criticized the cow-
protection violence in August 2016 and again on two occasions in July
2017.19 His aspersions, however, had a nebulous quality: He decried
“fake” cow-protection activities, and lamented their contribution to un-
specified “tensions.” A stirring defense of liberal principles, the rule of
law, and unalienable human rights, this was not. It was distinctly muted
commentary from a man long known as one of India’s more outspoken
politicians.
Before mid-2019, India will again go to the polls. Illiberal forces ex-
isted before the BJP ever came to power, of course, but the party’s time
in office seems to have lent them new vigor. Explicit choices and tacit
support by those in authority have allowed malign trends such as cow-
protection vigilantism to flourish. It remains unclear if Modi’s govern-
ment will keep stoking these forces in order to rally its base, or if it will
return to the focus on good governance and economic prosperity that
underlay its 2014 win. Sadly, the INC is still struggling to articulate a
robust and muscular alternative vision. Its counsels remain divided, and
its criticisms of the BJP’s agenda and policies remain scattershot at best.
As the 2019 election looms, India’s future as a secular, pluralistic, and
liberal polity hangs in the balance.
Sumit Ganguly 89

There are at least two compelling reasons for concern about these
trends. Whatever the failings of today’s Congress party, it must be re-
called that its forebears bequeathed to India an explicitly pluralistic,
democratic, secular, and liberal constitution. The BJP’s sectarian vision
challenges the very constitutional foundations on which the Republic
of India rests. At another level, the collapse of political liberalism in
India could signal that a secular, liberal polity cannot be sustained in a
multireligious, polyethnic state, with all the attendant ramifications this
would have for other such states, and hence for the world.

NOTES

1. Henry Hart, ed., Indira Gandhi’s India: A Political System Re-Appraised (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview, 1976)

2. Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

3. Naidoo is quoted in “Crackdown on HRDs in India a Threat to Freedom of Dissent,”

Amnesty International, 31 August 2018, https://amnesty.org.in/news-update/crackdown-
on-hrds-in-india-a-threat-to-freedom-to-dissent.

4. Biswanath Ghosh, “Ideology vs. Stature,” The Hindu (Chennai), 25 July 2015.

5. For portions of the speech translated into English, see “Here’s What JNUSU President
Kanhaiya Kumar Said in His Speech,” IndiaToday, 16 February 2016, www.indiatoday.in/
fyi/story/kanhaiya-kumar-jnusu-president-speech-anti-national-308986-2016-02-16. The
speech itself may be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=21qExVVuhhk.

6. Krishnadev Calamur, “The Angry Debate over Sedition in India,” Atlantic, 18 Febru-
ary 2016, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/india-jnu-sedition/463131.

7. Ritu Sharma and Ritika Chopra, “After ABVP Calls Him Anti-National and Wants
Him Out, Historian Ramachandra Guha Won’t Teach in Gujarat,” Indian Express, 2 No-
vember 2018, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/after-abvp-calls-him-anti-national-
and-wants-him-out-historian-ramachandra-guha-wont-teach-in-gujarat-5430266.

8. “UNESCO Observatory of Killed Journalists—India,” https://en.unesco.org/themes/

safety-journalists/observatory/country/223728.

9. “India: Two Journalists Killed in Separate Attacks in Less than 24 Hours,” www.
ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-releases/article/india-two-journalists-
killed-in-separate-attacks-in-less-than-24-hours.html.

10. These figures are given in Siddhartha Deb, “The Killing of Gauri Lankesh,” Co-
lumbia Journalism Review, Winter 2018, www.cjr.org/special_report/gauri-lankesh-kill-
ing.php.

11. “Trustees Lost Confidence in Me, Says Former EPW Editor,” The Hindu, 19 July
2017. A note discussing the article’s retraction is at www.epw.in/journal/2017/24/web-
exclusives/modi-governments-%25E2%2582%25B9500-crore-bonanza-adani-group-
company.html.

12. “Harish Khare Resigns as Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune Newspaper Which Re-
ported Breach in Aadhaar Data,” First Post, 17 March 2018, www.firstpost.com/india/har-
90 Journal of Democracy

ish-khare-resigns-as-editor-in-chief-of-the-tribune-newspaper-which-reported-breach-
in-aadhaar-data-4394121.html.

13. Eeshanpriya MS, “Sanatan Sanstha: From Obscurity to Heart of Conspiracy,” Hin-
dustan Times (Mumbai), 6 September 2018.

14. Michael E. Miller, “A Mob in India Just Dragged a Man from His Home and Beat
Him to Death—for Eating Beef,” Washington Post, 30 September 2015.

15. HT Correspondents, “Adityanath Orders Closures of Illegal Slaughterhouses, Ban

on Cow Smuggling,” Hindustan Times, 30 April 2017.

16. Express News Service, “Alwar Lynching: Clean Chit to All Six Accused Named by
Pehlu Khan Dying Declaration,” Indian Express, 14 September 2017.

17. Press Trust of India, “Pehlu Khan Case: Court Declares Accompanied Men Guilty
for Cow Smuggling,” Indian Express, 1 February 2018.

18. Delna Abraham and Ojaswi Rao, “86% Killed in Cow-Related Violence Since
2010 Are Muslim, 97% Attacks After Modi Govt Came to Power,” Hindustan Times, 16
July 2017.

19. “Modi Slams Cow Vigilantes, Again: ‘Fake Gau Rakshaks Want to Fuel Tension,’”
Hindustan Times, 7 August 2016; Hiral Dave, “Modi Warns Cow Vigilantes, Says Kill-
ing People in the Name of Gau Bhakti Not Acceptable,” Hindustan Times, 15 July 2017.