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ELECTIONS A changing India Salil Tripathi In this year of elections—when voters in more than sixty countries have, or will, cast votes to change national, regional and local governments—the biggest in terms of scale and size is the one in India. Beginning in mid-April, this exercise will take a month-and-a-half, with the final outcome known in early June. With nearly a billion people voting across the sub-continent, Indian elections are a logistical marvel, requiring mobilisation of immense resources and a vast bureaucracy. Journalists from around the world turn up to watch the democratic process in action. Tired clichés about India being “the world’s largest democracy” will sprout like bamboo shoots. There will be stories of superhuman efforts to bring a ballot box to a remote area to service a handful of voters. There will be allegations of malpractice, celebrities running for office, political parties changing alliance partners, leaders throwing tantrums and opinion polls that contradict one another. Cheap availability of data and the ubiquity of inexpensive mobile phones will make rumours fly faster than ever. There are legitimate concerns that deep fakes will be deployed, fake news will proliferate and hate speech will get transmitted at lightning speed. There will be violence, too. Why this election is more consequential than the seventeen previous ones is that the nature of Indian society and democracy has changed quite fundamentally in the ten years since Narendra Modi led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power. From independence in 1947 to 1977, the Congress Party, which led India’s freedom movement, ruled uninterrupted. But prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in 1975 and lost to a hastily put together opposition coalition in the 1977 elections. This coalition disintegrated in 1979 and Gandhi won again in 1980. After her assassination in 1984, her son Rajiv won an unprecedented majority. He lost in 1984 and, for thirty years, a series of coalition governments ruled India in a period marked by tumultuous changes: the collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of the Indian economy forced India to reorientate its political stance and economic policies. As India moved away from non-alignment in its foreign policy and from socialism in its economic policy, there was restiveness with the third pillar of the country’s Nehruvian ethos: secularism. In the late 1980s, the BJP embarked on a movement to ‘liberate’ a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya, North India; in 1992, the mosque was razed, fundamentally altering Indian secular order; and early this year, Modi oversaw the opening of a grand temple at the site where the mosque once stood. In the decade that Modi has ruled, he has shifted India’s master narrative: from being a liberal, secular democracy to an authoritarian, quasi-religious state. The country has become economically more powerful but income inequality has widened significantly. Swanky malls and gleaming highways cut through the countryside while nearly half of India’s young people are without jobs. India has more billionaires than ever, yet nearly 80 per cent of Indians need subsidised, rationed food to survive. Modi’s success rests on his profound understanding of a changing India: the power base is shifting from the old, English-speaking elite of the old major cities to smaller, brassy, noisy cities, where a generation of voters has grown up with no living memory of the stalwarts of the freedom movement and less awareness of the circumstances that forced India to make the choices it 4 did in the 1950s and 1960s. These voters weren’t born when the Ayodhya mosque was destroyed and many are too young to have detailed knowledge of the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, in which, by official count, more than 1,000 people were killed, the vast majority of them Muslim. Modi and his supporters have run an efficient propaganda machine of memes, videos, catchy slogans and billboards. His face is everywhere: on cooking gas, on Covid-19 vaccination certificates and in advertisements praising Indian athletes when they win medals. The renovated cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, now the world’s largest, is named after Modi. Such megalomania is cringeworthy but distracts from his grim democratic record. Religious minorities, women and Dalits (as the groups once referred to as “untouchables” are known) have seen a significant erosion of their rights. Many global indices that measure democracies rate India poorly. The country was previously described as an “electoral autocracy”, but the liberal democracy index compiled by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute now calls India “one of the worst autocracies”. More drastic has been the fall in the index that Reporters Without Borders provides, on which India ranks 161 of 180 countries for press freedom. Foreign academics find it hard to get visas to visit India for research; some foreign journalists’ visas are extended only for short periods. Civil society organisations that support marginalised groups find it impossible to raise funding from foreign sources. Domestic contributions to rights-respecting NGOs are also drying up, since potential donors fear that they will get raided for tax audits. The Enforcement Directorate, which investigates financial crimes, has become the handmaiden of the state, deployed to investigate (and harass) dissidents, critics and human rights defenders. The cases take forever to investigate— the process is the punishment. Nowhere is this more visible than in the continued detention of more than a dozen human rights defenders and activists in what has come to be known as the Bhima Koregaon case. Reportedly, evidence was planted on the hard drives of human rights defenders using sophisticated software, to implicate them in plots to assassinate leaders or spread chaos. Civil rights activists were arrested for allegedly being sympathisers of leftist ideologies and conspiring to undermine, if not overthrow, the state. Years have passed, but the charges, in most instances, have not been framed or filed. One of the detainees has died and a few have been granted bail after years in captivity. The majority remain in jail. The crackdown on dissent is serious and sustained. Laws of sedition are invoked to intimidate critics and a few journalists, such as Gauri Lankesh, have been murdered. The independence of the judiciary in India has also come under scrutiny. The appointment of judges to higher courts has been marred by allegations of government interference, leading to concerns about the politicisation of the judiciary. D.Y. Chandrachud, the Supreme Court chief justice, makes eloquent public speeches defending liberal values, but from the bench, with a few exceptions, the judiciary has deferred to the government. Minority rights have weakened severely. In many instances Muslims aren’t able to build mosques; their existing mosques are sometimes destroyed on charges of encroachment of public property; Muslims aren’t allowed in many cities to pray in public. There have been dozens of instances of Muslims being lynched and killed, ostensibly because of spurious charges that they were transporting cattle to kill cows. (Many BJP-ruled states have banned cow slaughter.) Sale of property across religions has been halted in one BJP-ruled state for three months. Fundamentalist Hindus want to ‘reclaim’ more mosques, claiming they have been built on land Hindus consider holy. Churches too have come under attack. The Citizenship Amendment Act provides a path to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants from neighbouring countries and has been widely criticised as discriminatory and in violation of India’s secular principles. The rise of Hindu nationalist rhetoric and the proliferation of hate speech targeting minorities have fuelled apprehensions about the erosion of secularism and inclusivity in Indian society. The government has also centralised many powers, seeking a significant portion of tax revenue from states and, if the state is an opposition-ruled one, paying back what the state is due slowly. India’s federal structure— which grants significant autonomy to states—is integral to its democratic framework, but the relationship between the central government and state governments has faced strain. The imposition of centrally mandated policies without adequate consultation has been met with resistance from regional leaders. The use of executive orders and ordinances to bypass parliamentary scrutiny has been criticised as undermining democratic norms. The lack of meaningful dialogue with opposition parties on key policy decisions has raised questions about the government’s commitment to inclusive governance. The decline of democracy in India under Modi’s leadership is multi-layered and a fractured opposition doesn’t help. With leaders of various parties vying to become prime minister, the impression persists that the opposition is not serious about challenging Modi. And yet, Modi is taking nothing for granted. Modi’s supporters claim he will win at least 400 seats (out of 547), which would grant him the kind of majority with which he can amend the constitution. Despite these optimistic projections, the government recently arrested the chief minister of Delhi and has become even more shrill in its criticism of the opposition, as if concerned that all the extravagant claims of achievement—such as hosting the G20 summit, landing a module on the moon’s south pole and maintaining a crisp growth rate—are not impressive enough for voters. The ruthless use of laws to crack down on dissidents can only mean two things: either the government is in panic and India might revert to a different kind of governance if the BJP’s majority is reduced significantly, or what we are seeing is merely a preview—the movie itself will be louder and brasher and not a pretty sight. A less democratic India is certainly bad for Indians, but also a great loss to the world. Addressing these challenges will require a concerted effort to reaffirm the principles of pluralism, inclusivity and institutional integrity. It will require a commitment to upholding constitutional values, strengthening democratic institutions and fostering a culture of dialogue and tolerance. In other words, we would need to rediscover the India of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore. Only such efforts could restore and revitalise Indian democracy. ☐ Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York. Author of four works of non-fiction, he is on the board of PEN International. He was born in India
page 5
ECONOMY Illusions Ilaria Maria Sala ANNE STEVENSON-YANG Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy Bui Jones: 2024 In the 150 or so pages of Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy, Anne Stevenson-Yang, who has spent more than twenty-five years in Beijing, looks back at the recent economic history of China. She covers developments from 1979 to 2023, recounting both the heady giddiness of it all while concluding that what had once seemed to be able to last forever has turned out to be little more than an illusion. Stevenson-Yang analyses this recent history decade by decade (except for the last one, which goes from 2019 to 2023)—a somewhat arbitrary unit of measurement that proves very useful in presenting a coherent narrative of what has sometimes been an incoherent economical landscape. A major focus of the book is the trajectory from China’s early tentative gestures towards opening up, through the development of a seemingly full-blown desire to become part of the wider world, to the current withdrawal, as China makes it less easy and appealing for foreign industries and individuals to work in the country. China’s capitalist experiment began from the need to pull the country out of the disastrous situation the Mao years had put it in. This quickly generated a momentum that shifted lifestyles, turning what once seemed like extraordinary luxury into basic expectations for a new generation. But, as Wild Ride says, a change in course for China could pull things back to poverty and isolation. The book is highly readable, full of interesting facts and anecdotes, offering a very privileged perspective thanks to the author’s long engagement with China, both as an active entrepreneur and observer. What the reader comes out with, however, is not just an economic history but also a political one. At times, it feels as if StevensonYang is spilling all the beans, providing us with a tell-all of the absurd, amateurish, corrupt, incoherent and purely accidental in China’s economic rise. One constant in this rise has been the ability to lure foreign capital into the country. This has largely come down to a strong desire among foreign investors to pursue a ‘China dream’ and also to the ability of the Chinese authorities to give these investors the impression that their wishes could soon become reality. Stevenson-Yang is definitely not kind towards the endless stream of intoxicated foreign investors that flocked to China from all over: “China’s open arms for Western business created a permission structure whereby corporate managers, and later, bankers, could persuade the owners of capital to invest in China for ‘access’ and ‘growth’ rather than for profit,” she writes in Wild Ride’s introduction. “Their belief in China’s rapid progress was continually affirmed by the changing physical landscape [...] No one paid much attention to standards of health and education or to human rights: a rising tide floats all boats.” Nor does she have a particularly positive view of these investors’ understanding of the country before they poured their funds into its market: “China is led by a Party that cares little for ideology and a lot for power. Much of the framework through which the West has understood China has actually been a shadow play, a drama acted out inside a lightbox while the real events are taking place in the darkened area outside the illusion.” Li Yang on Unsplash Shanghai From 1979 onwards—at least until the outbreak of Covid-19—it seemed that China had accepted, and even liked, the idea of having the whole world coming and going for various purposes. Yet opening up was not the only novelty; when Deng Xiaoping decided the the economy had to be steered very quickly in a very different direction, he also began to introduce a series of reforms that were supposed to relax the tight political control on Chinese people’s economic choices. “The brilliant innovation of Deng Xiaoping was to turn this not-in, not-out system to China’s advantage by making it serve not the trading desires of foreign countries but China’s own need for export,” Stevenson-Yang writes. To this was added a “rural revolution” that allowed peasants a much larger role in deciding what to grow and what price to sell their produce at, and “the third and most radical prong of the Dengist reforms, one that had deep and unanticipated effects, involved letting energetic individuals take over the operation of state companies”. The whirlwind aftermath of Deng’s decisions has been at times so unprecedented as to leave observers rather confused; so much happened so quickly that many things that were obviously problematic ended up going unaddressed. The follies related to construction, investment and production were all on display, yet every time anyone thought “this is too crazy to continue and something’s gotta give” the next batch of GDP numbers made any doubt seem wrong. China’s economy was growing and growing. The people were enjoying better and better living conditions. Foreign fortunes were made, as well as a number of extraordinary Chinese ones. To express doubt was to be the odd one out in an atmosphere of giddy optimism. In Wild Ride, Stevenson-Yang describes what she calls “The Gilded Age” (1989–1999) and “The Go-Go Years” (1999–2009) as a collective frenzied fantasy: those with access to high-level party cadres could also have access to plenty of resources that were then privatised and transformed into personal wealth. There was nothing more important than having connections that could open the door to all manner of riches—at the end of the day, no fortune could be made without the Chinese Communist Party. There was nothing more economically solid than that: despite the frequency with which the word “gaige” (“reform”) was repeated after the Mao era, the party was never invested in political reform. No matter what foreign investors and observers were eager to believe in, Stevenson-Yang shows how that type of reform was never the intention. But without that, no real economic growth can properly take root, she argues, as all will eventually wilt under an inherently stultifying system. Certain sectors benefit more than others under this system—for example, Stevenson-Yang points to the military, designated as the “escort and protector” of the economic growth in Shenzhen, China’s first special economic zone. A whole demographic turned out to have been graced with the proverbial silver spoon—“In China, accident of birth brings a rich social network and political prestige, and the business elite is a blooded one”—engendering an incestuous relationship between a “red aristocracy” and a business one. To adhere to mandatory growth figures, rural cadres decided to build and build and build. Farmers were expropriated, communities pulverised and agricultural land wasted, but that seemed like a small price to (have someone else) pay. There was a limit to this bulldozer approach. By the end of the third decade (1999–2009), many Chinese enterprises had been delisted from US markets after being exposed as frauds and the growing risks of the property bubble started to show. This is when the current crisis began. StevensonYang describes the whole Belt and Road project as one way of getting out of it: to continue growing, China had to print too much cash to “digest domestically” and it “stepped up its Going Out programme of overseas investment and renamed it the Belt and Road—a programme of soft lending to support acquisition of energy and mineral resources overseas, and the development of infrastructure to help carry those resources back to China”. Wild Ride describes the Belt and Road as a “mechanism for Chinese banks to invest in Chinese projects that happened to take place offshore. The Belt and Road is fundamentally an extension of China’s domestic economy, where high-level national targets require accelerating levels of commitment.” This is by no means a new The Coming Collapse of China, Gordon Chang’s 2001 book that very wrongly predicted a total collapse of the country and its economy by 2011. Stevenson-Yang argues, however, that the Chinese Communist Party is ready to do anything to stay in power—even to the point of risking the poverty and isolationism of the Mao era. Her description of the state of the Chinese economy is so disillusioned that one could end the book with the impression that no real wealth has been created at all over these past decades, and that even companies that have become household names around the world—like Huawei or Haier, for example—are merely part of a bubble. While this might not be her intention, Stevenson-Yang’s final analysis of the state of the economy and politics in China is definitely bleak, and so disenchanted as to be close to sour. Still, what Wild Ride illustrates very clearly is how the economy has now been “recaptured” by the state through a surge in available cash sloshing around and a greater determination to favour the state sector and state-owned enterprises over private capital. This was a process that began in 2009 and expanded during the period of total closure that China instituted during the Covid-19 pandemic. That ‘zero Covid’ period increased capillary controls which have not entirely been lifted— making it so much harder for society and the economy to reignite that vaunted “buzz” of years past. One extremely interesting point is Stevenson-Yang’s observation that the emergence of China as an economic power has coincided with the rise of billionaire oligarchs and the consequent crisis of faith in democracy that seems to be sweeping the world. These two contemporaneous events—which may not be entirely connected—have prompted some big questions for our collective political and economic future, and the answers are not yet clear. ☐ Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer, a photographer and ceramic artist based in Hong Kong 5

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ELECTIONS

A changing India

Salil Tripathi

In this year of elections—when voters in more than sixty countries have, or will, cast votes to change national, regional and local governments—the biggest in terms of scale and size is the one in India. Beginning in mid-April, this exercise will take a month-and-a-half, with the final outcome known in early June. With nearly a billion people voting across the sub-continent, Indian elections are a logistical marvel, requiring mobilisation of immense resources and a vast bureaucracy.

Journalists from around the world turn up to watch the democratic process in action. Tired clichés about India being “the world’s largest democracy” will sprout like bamboo shoots. There will be stories of superhuman efforts to bring a ballot box to a remote area to service a handful of voters. There will be allegations of malpractice, celebrities running for office, political parties changing alliance partners, leaders throwing tantrums and opinion polls that contradict one another. Cheap availability of data and the ubiquity of inexpensive mobile phones will make rumours fly faster than ever. There are legitimate concerns that deep fakes will be deployed, fake news will proliferate and hate speech will get transmitted at lightning speed. There will be violence, too.

Why this election is more consequential than the seventeen previous ones is that the nature of Indian society and democracy has changed quite fundamentally in the ten years since Narendra Modi led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power. From independence in 1947 to 1977, the Congress Party, which led India’s freedom movement, ruled uninterrupted. But prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in 1975 and lost to a hastily put together opposition coalition in the 1977 elections. This coalition disintegrated in 1979 and Gandhi won again in 1980. After her assassination in 1984, her son Rajiv won an unprecedented majority. He lost in 1984 and, for thirty years, a series of coalition governments ruled India in a period marked by tumultuous changes: the collapse of the Soviet Union and decline of the Indian economy forced India to reorientate its political stance and economic policies. As India moved away from non-alignment in its foreign policy and from socialism in its economic policy, there was restiveness with the third pillar of the country’s Nehruvian ethos: secularism. In the late 1980s, the BJP embarked on a movement to ‘liberate’ a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya, North India; in 1992, the mosque was razed, fundamentally altering Indian secular order; and early this year, Modi oversaw the opening of a grand temple at the site where the mosque once stood.

In the decade that Modi has ruled, he has shifted India’s master narrative: from being a liberal, secular democracy to an authoritarian, quasi-religious state. The country has become economically more powerful but income inequality has widened significantly. Swanky malls and gleaming highways cut through the countryside while nearly half of India’s young people are without jobs. India has more billionaires than ever, yet nearly 80 per cent of Indians need subsidised, rationed food to survive.

Modi’s success rests on his profound understanding of a changing India: the power base is shifting from the old, English-speaking elite of the old major cities to smaller, brassy, noisy cities, where a generation of voters has grown up with no living memory of the stalwarts of the freedom movement and less awareness of the circumstances that forced India to make the choices it

4

did in the 1950s and 1960s. These voters weren’t born when the Ayodhya mosque was destroyed and many are too young to have detailed knowledge of the pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, in which, by official count, more than 1,000 people were killed, the vast majority of them Muslim.

Modi and his supporters have run an efficient propaganda machine of memes, videos, catchy slogans and billboards. His face is everywhere: on cooking gas, on Covid-19 vaccination certificates and in advertisements praising Indian athletes when they win medals. The renovated cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, now the world’s largest, is named after Modi.

Such megalomania is cringeworthy but distracts from his grim democratic record. Religious minorities, women and Dalits (as the groups once referred to as “untouchables” are known) have seen a significant erosion of their rights. Many global indices that measure democracies rate India poorly. The country was previously described as an “electoral autocracy”, but the liberal democracy index compiled by Sweden’s V-Dem Institute now calls India “one of the worst autocracies”. More drastic has been the fall in the index that Reporters Without Borders provides, on which India ranks 161 of 180 countries for press freedom. Foreign academics find it hard to get visas to visit India for research; some foreign journalists’ visas are extended only for short periods.

Civil society organisations that support marginalised groups find it impossible to raise funding from foreign sources. Domestic contributions to rights-respecting NGOs are also drying up, since potential donors fear that they will get raided for tax audits. The Enforcement Directorate, which investigates financial crimes, has become the handmaiden of the state, deployed to investigate (and harass) dissidents, critics and human rights defenders. The cases take forever to investigate— the process is the punishment.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the continued detention of more than a dozen human rights defenders and activists in what has come to be known as the Bhima Koregaon case. Reportedly, evidence was planted on the hard drives of human rights defenders using sophisticated software, to implicate them in plots to assassinate leaders or spread chaos. Civil rights activists were arrested for allegedly being sympathisers of leftist ideologies and conspiring to undermine, if not overthrow, the state. Years have passed, but the charges, in most instances, have not been framed or filed. One of the detainees has died and a few have been granted bail after years in captivity. The majority remain in jail. The crackdown on dissent is serious and sustained. Laws of sedition are invoked to intimidate critics and a few journalists, such as Gauri Lankesh, have been murdered.

The independence of the judiciary in India has also come under scrutiny. The appointment of judges to higher courts has been marred by allegations of government interference, leading to concerns about the politicisation of the judiciary. D.Y. Chandrachud, the Supreme Court chief justice, makes eloquent public speeches defending liberal values, but from the bench, with a few exceptions, the judiciary has deferred to the government.

Minority rights have weakened severely. In many instances Muslims aren’t able to build mosques; their existing mosques are sometimes destroyed on charges of encroachment of public property; Muslims aren’t allowed in many cities to pray in public. There have been dozens of instances of Muslims being lynched and killed, ostensibly because of spurious charges that they were transporting cattle to kill cows. (Many BJP-ruled states have banned cow slaughter.) Sale of property across religions has been halted in one BJP-ruled state for three months. Fundamentalist Hindus want to ‘reclaim’ more mosques, claiming they have been built on land Hindus consider holy. Churches too have come under attack. The Citizenship Amendment Act provides a path to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants from neighbouring countries and has been widely criticised as discriminatory and in violation of India’s secular principles. The rise of Hindu nationalist rhetoric and the proliferation of hate speech targeting minorities have fuelled apprehensions about the erosion of secularism and inclusivity in Indian society.

The government has also centralised many powers, seeking a significant portion of tax revenue from states and, if the state is an opposition-ruled one, paying back what the state is due slowly. India’s federal structure— which grants significant autonomy to states—is integral to its democratic framework, but the relationship between the central government and state governments has faced strain. The imposition of centrally mandated policies without adequate consultation has been met with resistance from regional leaders. The use of executive orders and ordinances to bypass parliamentary scrutiny has been criticised as undermining democratic norms. The lack of meaningful dialogue with opposition parties on key policy decisions has raised questions about the government’s commitment to inclusive governance.

The decline of democracy in India under Modi’s leadership is multi-layered and a fractured opposition doesn’t help. With leaders of various parties vying to become prime minister, the impression persists that the opposition is not serious about challenging Modi. And yet, Modi is taking nothing for granted.

Modi’s supporters claim he will win at least 400 seats (out of 547), which would grant him the kind of majority with which he can amend the constitution. Despite these optimistic projections, the government recently arrested the chief minister of Delhi and has become even more shrill in its criticism of the opposition, as if concerned that all the extravagant claims of achievement—such as hosting the G20 summit, landing a module on the moon’s south pole and maintaining a crisp growth rate—are not impressive enough for voters. The ruthless use of laws to crack down on dissidents can only mean two things: either the government is in panic and India might revert to a different kind of governance if the BJP’s majority is reduced significantly, or what we are seeing is merely a preview—the movie itself will be louder and brasher and not a pretty sight. A less democratic India is certainly bad for Indians, but also a great loss to the world.

Addressing these challenges will require a concerted effort to reaffirm the principles of pluralism, inclusivity and institutional integrity. It will require a commitment to upholding constitutional values, strengthening democratic institutions and fostering a culture of dialogue and tolerance. In other words, we would need to rediscover the India of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore. Only such efforts could restore and revitalise Indian democracy. ☐ Salil Tripathi is a writer based in New York. Author of four works of non-fiction, he is on the board of PEN International. He was born in India

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