A Resilient Democracy? The State of Modi’s India

Writing in Malayalam for readers of the Kerala news portal Azhimukham, Kappan often described the plight of Muslims in Modi’s India. Equating the reporting of atrocities with incitement, the police report accuses Kappan of writing stories that “incite Muslims,” of furthering the agenda of the Popular Front of India,[2] and of sympathizing with Maoists and Communists. As Samar Harlankar, journalist and editor of Article 14, notes, “Nothing in these accusations is, remotely or otherwise, a crime. Writing on a subject is called a beat or an interest…. Sympathising with someone or an organization – whether banned or not … is not a crime.” Denied bail by the lower courts, Kappan was finally granted it in the Hathras case by the Supreme Court of India on September 9, 2022, with new Chief Justice of India, U.U. Lalit saying, “Every person has the right to free expression. He is trying to show that victim needs justice and raise a common voice. Is that a crime in the eyes of the law?” While these words renewed the hope of some that India’s highest court might finally begin to redress the wrongs of Modi’s India, Kappan remains in jail pending hearings on charges by the Enforcement Directorate.

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"In a country where upper-caste Hindus are the normative national subject and upper-caste Hindu norms are increasingly hegemonic, Indian Muslims have differential citizenship."

In Modi’s India it is particularly dangerous for a Muslim journalist to critique the ruling party or to write about issues that reveal the grip of Hindu supremacy and violence. In a country where upper-caste Hindus are the normative national subject and upper-caste Hindu norms are increasingly hegemonic, Indian Muslims have differential citizenship. This is why Siddique Kappan was jailed for a story he may have written about Dalits, another community that has experienced the violent assertion of upper-caste Hindu supremacy. Hindu supremacy, differential citizenship, and violence are the logical outcome of Hindu nationalism, the ideology that India is a Hindu nation, one that must come to fruition, even through violence. This ideology predates the BJP, but has been critical to the work of the larger group of organizations of which it is a member – the Sangh Parivar (Sangh Family) associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The all-male RSS has worked painstakingly since the 1920s to make India a Hindu nation, establishing multiple organizations to lead different aspects of this project. While the RSS usually presents itself as a movement rooted in Indian (read: Hindu) ideas, it is also evident that leaders of the RSS have historically drawn inspiration from European fascists. Among other things, the second leader of the RSS, M.S. Golwalkar wrote, “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic Races – the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan [India] to learn and profit by.”[3] With these ideological roots, it is no surprise that a Muslim journalist who challenges the status quo is being harshly silenced in Modi’s India.

That the institutions of the state – the police, the judiciary, and the law – have been used to silence Kappan is also not surprising. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue, “The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it.”[4] And here it is critical to note that it is not just Modi’s supporters who have enabled this erosion of India’s democracy, but also the many nations who have resolved to embrace India as a “resilient democracy” in the face of ample evidence to the contrary. After all, Kappan’s story is just one among so many troubling and well-publicized news reports about the arrests and harassment of journalists, civil rights activists, academics, students, members of the opposition, and other critics of the ruling party. The arrests of Umar Khalid, a civil rights activist who has been in jail since  September 2020, and Fahad Shah, editor of The Kashmir Walla who has been arrested multiple times since February 2022, and the tragic death in custody of the ailing Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, illustrate how Indian authorities routinely violate the principles the government pledged to uphold in the “Resilient Democracies Statement,” namely “freedom of expression and opinion” and “freedom of thought, conscience, religion, or belief.” Indeed, the state of Modi’s India is an increasingly authoritarian one that has actively trampled over the democratic norms that underpin the Indian Constitution, even as it has been aided and abetted by the short-term geopolitical calculations of other nations that turn a blind eye to its excesses.