Politics of India

[human_murda]

On 12/27/2022 at 1:47 AM, Eiuol said:

I should add that India is the only country there that arouses my suspicion as not worth considering a dictatorship. But I don't know much about Indian politics, and that probably means their political system is worse than I thought. 

This question was asked in another thread ("About the Russian aggression of Ukraine"), but that thread's too big and I want to answer this question about what's going on in India (or at least prompt a discussion).

As an introduction: India is governed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu-nationalist party under the leadership of Narendra Modi. Before BJP, Indian electoral politics was dominated by pressure groups involving thousands of castes and ethno-linguistic groups who wanted their share of political influence and tax collections. BJP recently came to power in 2014 and got re-elected in 2019 (the next national election is in 2024 and they’ll probably win again). The principal opposition is the Indian National Congress (simply, Congress), considered to be puppets of Western leftists/elites by the BJP, under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi (the heir of the Gandhi dynasty), commonly referred to as Pappu (name associated with a child or a stupid person).

Modi simplified the electoral politics of India into “Hindus vs. Muslims” and sprinkled it with some utopian notion of a cultural revival of Hindu civilization after centuries of Muslim, European and leftist rule.

BJP sees East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China, etc as the ideal, especially in terms of their homogeneity (or domination by one group, in the case of Singapore). They think the lack of homogeneity in India is the reason for identity politics in India and the reason India is so poor compared to North-East Asia (they make exceptions for Hindu vs. Muslim politics).

BJP claims to dislike electoral battles between upper castes and lower castes and claims to want to end affirmative action quotas for lower caste Indians and minorities. In most states, around 50% of seats are reserved for various communities in most government institutions (educational or otherwise). Some states (like Arunachal Pradesh) has 80% reservation for some communities, with the rest of the population competing for the other 20%. BJP wants to make Hindi the national language of India (India currently doesn’t have any national language). They sort of want to create a pan Indian ethnic group. They claim that Indo-European migrations into India (esp. North India) did not happen and have their own Out of India conspiracy theory. Using this, they claim that there are no differences between North Indians and South Indians and that Aryans and Dravidians don’t exist/never existed (and any difference, if it exists, are gradual and doesn't suggest anything about history). They want to construct a narrative that Hindus (unlike Muslims and Europeans) did not invade any part of India and are indigenous to India and always has been. India has Sharia for Muslims which were implemented by previous leftist governments. BJP wants to introduce a Uniform Civil Code, a common personal law for Muslims, Hindus and everybody else.

BJP wants to make Hindus the dominant group in India. In 2019, they passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which gave citizenship status to non-Muslim undocumented migrants (this was partially inspired by Israel). This sparked protests all over India, resulting in 27 deaths. There are allegedly around 30million undocumented Bengladeshi migrants in India. BJP is in the process of creating a National Register of Citizens, which can be used to deport everyone not on the list, particularly Muslims. They have created detention centres to round up Bengali migrants. Another BJP policy inspired by Israel is the bulldozing of homes/shops primarily belonging to Muslims. Muslims suspected of being “anti-national” are accused of having no documents to prove ownership of their land/house and have their homes bulldozed by the government. In 2022, BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma called Prophet Mohammed a pedophile. This resulted in protests, some killings and a beheading (of Kanhaiya Lal). Modi presided over the 2002 Gujarat Riots as Chief Minister (of the Indian state of Gujarat). Rana Ayyub, who is a Muslim journalist from Mumbai claims that the 2002 Gujarat riots was a genocide and thinks more is to come.

Propaganda songs and movies are also on the rise. Songs asking Hindus to harm or kill Muslims have become more common. In 2022, a movie called ‘The Kashmir Files’ was released accusing Kashmiri Muslims of genociding Hindus in 1990. The movie was made tax exempt by the BJP in many states and became the third highest grossing Bollywood movie of 2022. In May 2023, a movie called ‘The Kerala Story’ was released, accusing Muslims in Kerala of converting Christian and Hindu women in the Indian state of Kerala to Islam and turning them into ISIS brides. It’s the third highest grossing Bollywood movie of 2023 so far. Another movie, ‘72 Hoorain’ just got released two days ago.

Regarding free speech, BJP has recently passed laws to give themselves power over what can be written online. In 2023, BJP banned the BBC documentary ‘India: The Modi Question’ which was about the 2002 Gujarat riots and later raided BBC offices in India, accusing them of tax avoidance.

Economically, BJP follows Dirigisme. In 2014, BJP promised to bring ‘Minimum Government and Maximum Governance’. BJP is planning to invest over 1 Trillion USD on transport and other infrastructure in the near term. They want to replicate the successes of North East Asian economies. In 2020, BJP tried to deregulate the agricultural markets in India with the Farm Bills, but millions of people protested and it was repealed. Air India was privatized in 2022. They have  a general policy of privatizing public companies which were nationalized decades ago. In 2016, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched by the government for easy digital payments (making up over 50% of digital transactions in India now and is starting to be accepted internationally, along with ‘India Stack’, a system for authentication and online identity). BJP has significant collusion with the Adani Group (a significant number of airports and sea ports in India were sold to Adani by BJP). When Adani shares crashed after the Hindenburg report, BJP made the public LIC Corporation buy Adani shares to prop up their market value. India plans to start manufacturing chips in the near future with US collaboration. India is projected to be the third largest economy by 2030. Goldman Sachs projects India to be the second largest economy (nominal GDP) by 2075, but such long term projections don’t have much meaning.

 

Now coming back to question of electoral autocracy and dictatorship in India: India has considerably centralized its powers since 2014. Some criticism of V-Dem’s characterization of India as an “electoral autocracy” has been provided by Salvatore Babones from the University of Sydney. Many leftists consider him to be on the BJP payroll. According to him, the reason India scores low on V-Dem’s democracy index is because its results are derived from opinion surveys of experts and he claims that the expert intellectuals in India are anti-India. He claims that the low score for Freedom of the Press in India is because they don’t normalize the deaths of journalists in India by the country’s population. If we did that, he claims that India is between Western Europe and USA in terms of journalist safety (and one of the safest countries in the world for journalists). Alternatively, according to the Economist’s democracy index, India gets a score of 7.04, the 46^th most democratic country in the world and the 7^th most democratic in Asia (including the Middle East). USA is #30. I’m not sure how India is among the freest quarter of the world in one index and a “dictatorship” in another index (I guess those are the perks of being one of the poorest countries in the world and where nothing really makes sense).

My personal opinion is that the BJP is definitely becoming more autocratic but they’re liberalizing India’s economy to some extent. They’re called “neoliberal fascists” for a reason.

 

[Doug Morris]

Has anyone compared the BJP to Pinochet in Chile?

 

[human_murda]

5 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

Has anyone compared the BJP to Pinochet in Chile?

I don't know about comparisons to Pinochet specifically, but BJP is often compared to populists worldwide who have attempted to consolidate and centralize power within the framework of a democracy. The general narrative I've seen is that political parties worldwide have "figured out democracy", in the sense that they've figured out how to consolidate power, with little to no challenge from opposition parties, within a democratic system and without significant opposition from the West (by paying some homage to neoliberalism).

Some comparisons could be made with Pinochet but the army does not interfere with elections in India and India is still functioning within the framework of a democracy (Modi hasn't really tried to topple democracy and doesn't need to. He has extremely high approval ratings, one of the largest in the world ).

[human_murda]

To elaborate on the two commonly cited indices:

These are the 2020 and 2022 Liberal Democracy Indices by V-Dem:

 

These are the 2020 and 2022 indices by EIU:

 

Contrasting the two 2020 indices, the V-Dem one makes no sense. They claim Myanmar is as democratic as Malaysia and more democratic than Thailand, which is total bullshit. They fixed Myanmar in 2022, but EIU’s index never had that problem. Another issue is that V-Dem claims that Bangladesh is less democratic than Nepal and Pakistan, which again makes no sense (and the issue doesn’t exist with EIU). Another discrepancy is that Iraq is more democratic than Turkey according to V-Dem, but that’s not the case with EIU.

Of course, one of the biggest discrepancy between the two indices is India (India is in the same sub-category as the US in one index and a dictatorship in the other).

 

Understanding why BJP actually uses Hindu nationalism is difficult to comprehend. To add more context, the last attempt to transition India into a more capitalist economy was in 1991. This happened after leftist governments nationalized major companies and banks culminating in the 1991 economic crisis. The 1991 reforms were incomplete because they didn’t liberalize banking and finance. Soon after, USA sanctioned India for trying to develop nukes but the sanctions didn’t work due to the growth spurt from the recent partial economic liberalization and were repealed. INC’s reward for the 1991 reforms was loss of votes (they lost the 1996 elections).

Post 1991 (especially, after losing elections), INC’s strategy was to drag out India’s transition to a capitalist economy over a period of a century or more and pray that leftist intellectuals don’t notice or call them out on it. BJP is much more blatant about their desire to transition into a more capitalist economy. They don’t try to hide it like INC. However, BJP has backed down from many economic liberalization policies because they’re afraid of losing elections. The more unpopular their economic policies become, the more they lean on Hindu nationalism for winning elections. BJP also receives a lot of negative press from leftist intellectuals within India as well as from the West. This partially explains BJP’s Hindu nationalism: it’s part of their election strategy (there’s no point in preaching about Capitalism if you can’t win elections).

 

Regarding the EIU index, from an opinion piece by a conservative Australian journal (written by Salvatore Babones):

Spoiler

The magazine itself was historically a classically liberal publication, but in recent decades it has taken on more of a liberal internationalist identity. The Economist has taken a strong editorial stance against India’s current BJP government, running collectively-authored articles under headlines like “Narendra Modi Threatens to Turn India into a One-Party State” (November 28, 2020) and “The Organs of India’s Democracy Are Decaying” (February 12, 2022). The EIU’s rating of Indian democracy reached an all-time low in 2021, when the organisation warned of “democratic backsliding under the leadership of Narendra Modi … whose policies have fomented anti-Muslim feeling and religious strife [and] damaged the political fabric of the country”. As primary evidence to support this claim, the EIU cited “the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 [CAA] … [which] introduces a religious element to the conceptualisation of Indian citizenship, a step that many critics see as undermining the secular basis of the Indian state”.

The CAA created a path to citizenship for non-Muslim religious refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. All three of these countries are Islamic republics in which Islam is the official state religion and non-Muslims face serious official and/or societal persecution. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the threats faced by non-Muslims are constant and extreme; in Bangladesh, they are episodic but nonetheless serious. Prima facie, it seems quite sensible for India to grant blanket protective status to non-Muslim immigrants from countries where non-Muslims are widely persecuted, but to continue to require Muslim immigrants from those countries to give specific evidence of persecution in order to qualify for asylum. It is hard to see why Muslim immigrants from officially Muslim countries should automatically qualify for refugee status upon immigration to India.

I oppose CAA but comparing CAA (which is temporary) to refugee laws in other countries, it doesn’t make sense why USA, Japan, European countries, etc aren’t considered dictatorships (when they don’t allow everyone to qualify for refugee status).

EIU slightly increased India’s score in 2022:

Quote

In its 2022 report, the EIU found a slight improvement in the quality of India’s democracy, citing “year-long protests by farmers [that] eventually forced the government to repeal the farm laws that it had introduced in 2020”.[7] This seems to show the EIU taking a political position on lawful legislation; an evaluation of the quality of democracy should be agnostic with respect to agricultural policy, wherever the sympathies of the evaluators may lie. The EIU explained that “the victory of the protesters, as well as some election defeats for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, showed that there are mechanisms and institutions in place to allow government accountability to the electorate between national elections”. This assumes that the protesting farmers represented the opinion of the national electorate, an empirical claim that is far from certain.[8] As for the implication that BJP electoral defeats demonstrate democracy in action, the EIU seems to be unaware that the BJP holds only 303 of the 543 seats in the lower house of India’s parliament (the Lok Sabha) and 91 of 245 seats in the upper house (the Rajya Sabha). India’s politics are highly competitive, and although the BJP is currently the country’s governing party, its proportional hold on power is in line with that of governing parties in other liberal democracies.

Thus becoming less liberal (but perhaps more democratic because BJP listened to farmer’s protests and repealed the farm laws despite having a parliamentary majority) has allowed India to be in the same sub-category (7.01-8.00) as the US in their 2022 index.

Because “the West” regularly (and potentially falsely) accuses India of being a dictatorship (because of the BJP), BJP has sort of taken an anti-Western stance (although they’re more pro-capitalist than leftist parties). Leftist political parties in India get more positive press (or at least, don’t get accused of being a dictatorship), which is part of the reason BJP considers them Western stooges. Leftist parties in India care about political freedom but don’t openly care about capitalism. Hindu nationalists think that leftists will destroy India’s economy to make the West happy.

Regarding foreign policy, US wants India to be subservient to them, which BJP won’t agree to (and they’re considered to be dictators without human rights by Western countries anyway, so there’s also no incentive to be allies with India from the side of Western countries as well). According to Irfan Nooruddin, the current sentiment from the West is that India should be grateful to the West (perhaps for not being bombed for being a "dictatorship") and that India owes the West because they haven’t made India their vassal state yet.

Edited July 18, 2023 by human_murda
Added link to quadrant article

[human_murda]

There are two additional indices about democracy: 1) Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” that changed India’s score to from ‘Free’ to ‘Partly Free’ after BJP won re-election in 2019. 2) Polity data series that gives a ‘Polity Score’ to countries:

On the polity index, India gets a near-perfect score, 1 point below countries with the highest score (and a 0 on autocratic score), ahead of countries like Belgium, South Korea, UK, US, etc which are less democratic than India:

 

 

All four indices are subjective indices that aggregate the feelings of experts (like Rottentomatoes, but with less number of “critics”. They don’t even ask the experts to rate anything on a scale). Extreme ends of the indices imply consensus. Countries that are in the middle are a result of disagreements among experts.

On one index, India is more democratic than South Korea, UK, US, etc; on another index, India is in the same category and sub-category as the US; on the third index, India is slightly less democratic than the US and on the next index, India is a dictatorship (and most Western media regularly preach about India’s score on this last index). Unless India is in a quantum superposition that collapses into a dictatorship when Swedes look and a democracy when Anglos look, these indices are objectively incorrect. There’s no way to look up what data they use to classify India as a dictatorship because they don’t use data. They publish some narratives to justify their scores but that’s done independently of the opinion survey and doesn’t mean much. BJP has also made a response to these indices (saying pretty much the same thing).

Western media and diplomats regularly bring up these scores when all it says is that “we’ve surveyed our opinions and determined that we don’t like you”. That’s not even paraphrasing, that’s literally all it is. “Freedom” and “Democracy” are meaningless buzzwords they use to describe their feelings.

A recent (2023) attempt was made to use real data to rank countries. Using actual data, India’s score slightly improved after BJP got elected. However, these people have extremely low quality data (and some countries with little to no data, like China, occasionally get perfect scores for democracy). Two months ago, V-Dem made a response to the previous paper. However, it doesn’t seem like they would change their methodology since that would make their 30 years of non-data obsolete.

Edited July 20, 2023 by human_murda

[DavidOdden]

This all underscores the futility of rankings by ill-defined criteria. I live in an oppressive dictatorship which is very democratic – the fascists are a voting majority in my state, this being a counterexample to Freedom House’s claim that “freedom flourishes in democratic nations where governments are accountable to their people”. I would like to see a well-conducted survey taken from a fixed view and limited view of rights – the Objectivist view – where the majority cannot exercise their “right” to require people to hold a particular religious or social view, or a “right” to wealth equal to that of all others. The main problem with all of these surveys of freedom (or democracy as a proxy for freedom) is that they weight criteria arbitrarily. How should we weigh “economic” rights against “lifestyle” rights? And how should we weigh existing violations of rights against probably future violations of rights.

This is clearly an issue with US politics, if you compare a Clinton-style regime with a future religious-right regime. Economic oppression is self-limiting, but religious oppression is not. The underpinning of economy policy is reason, typically polluted with misidentification. The underpinning of religion is the rejection of reason and the embracing of death. The appropriate question, which can be equally posed for the US and India, is whether the threat of a religious regime is palpably high. When it becomes a matter of official policy that “we are a Christian / Hindu nation”, it is too late.

[human_murda]

On 7/9/2023 at 9:47 PM, human_murda said:

Economically, BJP follows Dirigisme. In 2014, BJP promised to bring ‘Minimum Government and Maximum Governance’. BJP is planning to invest over 1 Trillion USD on transport and other infrastructure in the near term. They want to replicate the successes of North East Asian economies. In 2020, BJP tried to deregulate the agricultural markets in India with the Farm Bills, but millions of people protested and it was repealed. Air India was privatized in 2022. They have  a general policy of privatizing public companies which were nationalized decades ago. In 2016, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched by the government for easy digital payments (making up over 50% of digital transactions in India now and is starting to be accepted internationally, along with ‘India Stack’, a system for authentication and online identity). BJP has significant collusion with the Adani Group (a significant number of airports and sea ports in India were sold to Adani by BJP). When Adani shares crashed after the Hindenburg report, BJP made the public LIC Corporation buy Adani shares to prop up their market value. India plans to start manufacturing chips in the near future with US collaboration. India is projected to be the third largest economy by 2030. Goldman Sachs projects India to be the second largest economy (nominal GDP) by 2075, but such long term projections don’t have much meaning.

Here is S&P Global's August 2023 predictions for India's economy in 2031. They predict India's economy to be $6.7T by FY 2031. There's some policy uncertainty and potential problems associated with climate change (floods) but otherwise nothing remarkable. GDP capita PPP would be around $15,000 ($4,500 nominal) by 2031 (US is $80,000 currently).