Two unprecedented events took place in India on this Valentine\u2019s Day. First, taxmen raided the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in New Delhi and Mumbai. And second, Air India, the state-owned airline privatized 16 months ago, ordered 220 aircraft worth $34 billion from Boeing in the third biggest contract ever for the American corporation.President Biden promptly hailed the Boeing deal saying it \u201cwill support over one million American jobs across 44 states\u2026 Together with Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi, I look forward to deepening our partnership even further as we continue to confront shared global challenges \u2013 creating a more secure and prosperous future for all of our citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Evidently, raiding news organizations is not a shared challenge. \u201cI couldn\u2019t say,\u201d US Department of State spokesman Ned Price said when asked at his press briefing if the BBC raid violated the spirit of democracy. \u201cI\u2019m just not in a position to offer a judgment.\u201d But others in the U.S. freely offered judgment. India\u2019s raid was \u201cjust its latest attack\u201d on the press, the Washington Post said, noting that it came three weeks after the BBC aired a film \u201cdrawing attention to Modi\u2019s alleged role in deadly sectarian riots that wracked his home state of Gujarat in 2002.\u201d Calling Modi \u201cnotoriously thin-skinned,\u201d the newspaper reported that India had \u201cembarked on an extraordinary campaign\u201d to censor the film by invoking emergency powers, banning the film on social media platforms YouTube and Twitter, and arresting students at one university and cutting power supply to another where the screenings were announced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The New York-based watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said \u201cIndian authorities have used tax investigations as a pretext to target critical news outlets before, and must cease harassing BBC employees immediately, in line with the values of freedom that should be espoused in the world\u2019s largest democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Washington must know that Modi\u2019s \u201cactions to suppress freedom of the press,\u201d as the New York Times Editorial Board wrote in an opinion published hours before the BBC raid, \u201care undermining India\u2019s proud status as \u201cthe world\u2019s largest democracy\u201d.\u201d If America\u2019s most respected newspaper says that Modi has \u201cfallen squarely in the camp [of] populist and authoritarian leaders\u201d whose \u201calarming hallmark\u201d was \u201cthe misuse of their powers to intimidate, censor, silence or punish independent news media,\u201d then the powers-that-be, both in the US executive and legislative branches, need to give a listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A million jobs to build airplanes may bring a \u201cmore secure and prosperous future\u201d to Americans. But it is unlikely that India\u2019s worsening authoritarianism will improve security and prosperity for its citizens. The West\u2019s deafening silence to India\u2019s years-long attack on press freedom has only served to embolden Modi to escalate his war on the press. Without Western acquiescence, India\u2019s foreign ministry could hardly have described the BBC film as a \u201cpropaganda piece\u201d made with a \u201ccolonial mindset,\u201d as it menacingly did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since Modi came to power in 2014, attacks on free speech have escalated, ranging from persecution of journalists to internet bans in Kashmir, which prompted the New York Times to say that India was \u201cthe world leader in shutting down the internet.\u201d Critics of the government often face harassment, prison and even violent death. The CPJ reported that in 2021, India was tied with Mexico for the most journalists killed in a country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Modi has used raids against independent media outfits in India, targeting The Wire, the Bhaskar Group, Newsclick, and The Quint, which have been critical of his regime. NDTV, one of India\u2019s rare independent television news outlets, was raided and its respected owner-editor, journalist Prannoy Roy, so harassed over years that he sold his stakes to Gautam Adani, a billionaire industrialist close to Modi. Last month, a New York-based researcher exposed Adani as running \u201cthe largest con in corporate history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reporters Without Borders, another global watchdog, downgraded India\u2019s Press Freedom Rank from 142nd place to 150th in 2022, putting it behind the authoritarian regimes of Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, South Sudan, the UAE, Nigeria, and Rwanda. For two years, Washington, DC-based research organization Freedom House has downgraded India\u2019s democracy from \u201cFree\u201d to \u201cPartly Free,\u201d citing \u201cnew rules that made it easier for authorities to compel social media platforms to remove unlawful content.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US is turning a blind eye to India\u2019s egregious behavior because New Delhi has emerged as a critical ally in its strategy against China. Through Modi\u2019s nine years in power, three US presidents \u2013 Obama, Trump, and now Biden \u2013 have ignored his escalating war on human rights, free speech and religious freedoms. In 2020, as Hindu mobs aided by Indian police carried out deadly violence against Muslims in New Delhi, barely ten miles away President Trump stood alongside Modi and praised India\u2019s religious freedoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Biden Administration has decided that Modi is a staunch ally and therefore must not be called out. Twice since 2021 has the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected a recommendation from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) to sanction India for its persecution of religious minorities. This is a mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout the 1980s, a period when Washington held substantial leverage over Islamabad, it refused to call out the increasing authoritarianism of the Pakistani government. Likewise, although then US President George H.W. Bush issued a public condemnation of the Tiananmen square massacre of 1989, he secretly continued business as usual with the Chinese government. Both China and Pakistan are now hostile to American interests and offer a tremendous threat to a rules-based order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
America\u2019s failure to hold Modi to account for India\u2019s free fall into undemocratic behavior will have significant negative long-term consequences for democracy, not just for India but for the entire world. As the US never stops pointing out, China\u2019s worsening despotism is bad for the world. Imagine, how much worse it will be both in ten years when both India and China, together accounting for nearly one-third of humanity, are rendered dungeons of hell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US rightfully took a strong stand against grievous attacks on democratic freedoms in Russia and China, not letting its substantial trade with either country prevent it from denouncing the two countries\u2019 violations of fundamental human rights. To not condemn Modi\u2019s authoritarianism would not only be a moral failing, but a serious miscalculation of our economic and security interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two unprecedented events took place in India on this Valentine\u2019s Day. First, taxmen raided the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in New Delhi and Mumbai. And second, Air India, the state-owned airline privatized 16 months ago, ordered 220 aircraft worth $34 billion from Boeing in the third biggest contract ever for the American corporation.President Biden promptly hailed the Boeing deal saying it \u201cwill support over one million American jobs across 44 states\u2026 Together with Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi, I look forward to deepening our partnership even further as we continue to confront shared global challenges \u2013 creating a more secure and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":4187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[130,123],"class_list":["post-4186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-democracy","tag-democracy","tag-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4188,"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4186\/revisions\/4188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saperspectives.net\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}