Mukul Kesavan

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‘Majoritarian parties share with nazism a steadfast, sinister, obsession with minorities.’ Photograph: Kacper Pempel/Reuters

MundoAsia,

The problem with “fascism” as a description of any modern political tendency is that the term is a weapon of mass destruction that flattens the landscapes that it wants to describe. Fascism is so freighted with historically specific meaning that using it for other times and places can seem sloppy and excessive. And yet, juxtaposing the politics of contemporary south Asia with fascism, in its Nazi variant, serves a double purpose: it connects modern Indian majoritarianism with one of its ideological ancestors and it helps us name and identify the ideological kernel of fascism that survived to fight another day.

India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) is the political arm of a Hindu militia, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded in 1925, around the time Adolf Hitler began to find his political bearings in a routed, angry Germany.…  Seguir leyendo »

Journalists watch election results in a media room set up outside an election vote-counting center in Mumbai on June 4. Punit Paranjpe/AFP via Getty Images

MundoAsia,

For the last 10 years, India has been the site of a natural experiment. It’s as if a social scientist was testing to see how long it would take for a determined state to bring the mainstream media to heel in a large parliamentary democracy, where newspapers and broadcasters were privately and diversely owned.

The provisional answer to that question is less than a decade. In December 2022, almost nine years after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led by Narendra Modi won a majority in the general election of 2014, NDTV, the only English-language news channel that critically questioned the government’s narrative on a regular basis, was acquired by Gautam Adani, India’s second-richest man and close confidant of the prime minister.…  Seguir leyendo »

Sonali Pal Chaudhury/NurPhoto via Getty Images. Protesters holding signs showing the murdered journalist Gauri Lankesh, Kolkata, India, September 7, 2017

MundoAsia,

Gauri Lankesh was the editor of a weekly tabloid published in Kannada, the main language of the southern Indian state of Karnataka. She was murdered on the fifth of September at the gate of her house in Bangalore, shot in the head and chest at close range. Her killers got away on motorcycles. This gangland-style assassination of a journalist would have made a stir in any case, but coming as it did after a series of political murders, it resonated across India and beyond its borders.

From the moment she died, the press reported her death not as an individual event but as the fourth in a sequence of assassinations; to the names Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, and M.M.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia

There are moments in a republic’s life when its governing institutions choose efficiency over democracy. Dec. 10, 2015, when India’s Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a state law barring wide swaths of the population from contesting elections for village and district councils, was one such moment.

That day the court endorsed a law passed by Haryana, a small state bordering on Delhi, in September 2015. The Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act disqualifies from local political office citizens who have been formally charged with serious crimes, citizens who are behind on loan payments to rural cooperative banks, citizens who haven’t paid their electricity bills, citizens who don’t have a functional lavatory at home and citizens who lack certain educational qualifications.…  Seguir leyendo »

Indian, Liberal and Anxious

MundoAsia,

Earlier this month in the state of Bihar, India’s ruling coalition, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, was routed by a provincial “grand alliance” that won nearly three-fourths of the seats in the state legislative assembly. Given that most published exit polls had predicted a close race, this was a massive defeat for the party.

More pointedly, it was a humiliating personal defeat for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, Mr. Modi’s consigliere from his home state of Gujarat. Since Mr. Modi became prime minister in May 2014, Mr. Shah, the president of the BJP, has run the party’s state election campaigns as though they were presidential contests between the prime minister on the one hand and Antagonist X on the other.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia,

Why should a high-court judgment about the ownership of the site of a provincial Indian mosque razed 18 years ago resonate across India? Because more hinges upon the just resolution of the Babri Masjid dispute than the fate of a mosque. The real estate in dispute is not the site on which the mosque once stood but the constitutional ground on which the Indian republic is built. This is an argument about India.

In December 1992 the mosque, which Hindus believed had been built on the birthplace of their deity Ram, was torn down in a single day by a crowd of Hindu activists.…  Seguir leyendo »