The New India: More clout abroad, strained democracy at home

On the margins of a summit meant as a show of force for a Russian leader seeking a turnaround on the battlefield, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India leaned in with a different message. “Democracy, diplomacy and dialogue” — not war — is the answer, he told Russian President Vladimir Putin as the cameras rolled on Sept. 16, before declaring that the two would speak more about how to bring peace in Ukraine. That assured interaction in Uzbekistan was the latest display of India’s rise under Modi. An ambitious and assertive power, India has become increasingly indispensable in the search for answers to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from diplomacy to climate change to technology and trade to efforts at diversifying supply chains to counter China.

It is India’s credentials as the world’s largest democracy that Modi rides on the global stage. But at home, diplomats, analysts and activists say, Modi’s government is undertaking a project to remake India’s democracy unlike any in its 75 years of independence — stifling dissent, sidelining civilian institutions and making minorities second-class citizens. While past Indian leaders exploited religious divisions and weaponised institutions to stay in power, Modi’s focus has been more fundamental: a systematic consolidation of power, achieved not through dramatic power grabs but through more subtle and lasting means, aimed at imprinting a majoritarian Hindu ideology on India’s constitutionally secular democracy.

Modi has bent to his will the courts, the news media, the legislature and civil society — “referee” institutions that guarded India’s democracy in a region of military coups and entrenched dictatorships. As he has done so, the country’s indispensability on major global issues, coupled with challenges to democracy in both the United States and Europe, has ensured little pushback from Western allies. The question for India and the world is whether the country can remain an engine for growth and a viable partner even as its heavy-handed marginalisation of minorities, particularly its 200 million Muslims, stokes cycles of extremism and perpetual volatility at home.

The contradictions of India’s rise were crystallised in Germany in late June, when Modi stood alongside the leaders of the Group of 7 major industrialised nations as his public relations team worked to document his seeming intimacy with his counterparts: a shared laugh with President Joe Biden, an interlacing of fingers with Justin Trudeau of Canada.

But just as Modi was joining his hosts in signing a statement urging the defense of democracies and affirming ideals like “freedom of expression” and the “independence of civil society,” his government was continuing a crackdown on dissent back home. Indian authorities arrested an activist critical of the prime minister’s past record on human rights and a fact-checker who had highlighted disparaging comments about Islam by a governing party spokesperson. Days earlier, officials had again rolled in bulldozers to raze the homes of Muslims as part of a campaign of “instant justice,” this time targeting activists accused of leading sometimes violent protests against the provocative remarks.

For now, Modi’s focus is on leveraging India’s strengths. As the global order has been disrupted by COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and an expansionist Beijing, Modi’s lieutenants have made clear that they see this as their moment to establish India, on their own terms, among the foremost powers.

India is a rising economic force, having just passed Britain, its one-time colonial overlord, as the world’s fifth-largest economy. It is well positioned to prosper with its improving trade ties, large youth population and expanding technological infrastructure — a potential alternative, in the eyes of some democracies, to a future dominated by China.

Modi’s diplomats are emboldened to overcome seeming contradictions, such as holding military exercises with both Russia and the United States and increasing purchases of Russian oil despite American and European pressure. India’s Western allies have shown little appetite to challenge the Modi government as it diverges from some of their professed democratic values.

A focus on trade and geopolitics has often pushed human rights to the back burner, analysts and diplomats said. With the European Union fast-tracking negotiations on a free-trade agreement with India, the talk is all “this deal, this deal, this deal,” one European diplomat in New Delhi said. The United States, which two years into the Biden administration still does not have an ambassador in New Delhi, is reeling from former President Donald Trump’s assault on its democratic system. Its seriousness about a foreign policy that prioritises human rights was questioned as the quest for cheaper oil took Biden this summer to Saudi Arabia, where he fist-bumped with the crown prince implicated in a journalist’s murder and dismemberment. “The U.S. also has lost some of its authority to criticise other countries on their records on democracy,” said Lisa Curtis, a former senior U.S. national security official who leads the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. In many ways, diplomats, officials and analysts said, India’s rise brings together two unique developments: a natural opening in the country’s often-uncertain post-colonial trajectory, and the emergence of a leader at the peak of his power who has spent half a century pursuing his vision from the ground up.

After India’s violent founding as an independent nation in 1947, the country remained consumed for decades with questions of whether it would remain intact and whether its economy could feed an enormous population. The moment to define itself, and its relations with the world, has come only after those questions have largely been settled.

Modi, 72, has spent his life in the trenches of a right-wing movement that calls India’s founding as a secular republic a grave injustice that accommodated minorities like Muslims and Christians at the cost of what they see as the Hindu majority’s rightful claims.

Modi’s political consolidation at the top, coupled with extensive welfare projects to maintain a strong voting base, has given India’s right wing its most effective formula yet to bring about the cultural and systemic changes the movement has long fought for on the streets. The country’s central investigating agencies have become willing levers of intimidation against dissenting voices, analysts say. Journalists and activists face frequent harassment, mired in lengthy court cases or thrown in jail under laws that make bail difficult. Independent institutions — from courts to parliament to the national human rights commission and the elections body — have been overwhelmed or have largely retreated, as the compliant are rewarded and detractors are punished.