#Janata Party Government

[easterneyenews]

Narendra Modi: Everything About The PM Of India

Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of India, is a leader who has left an indelible mark on the nation's political, economic, and social landscape. Known for his dynamic leadership, visionary policies, and charismatic personality, Modi has transformed India in numerous ways. This comprehensive blog delves into everything about Narendra Modi, offering insights into his early life, political journey, significant achievements, and influence on India and the world.

Early Life and Background

Narendra Damodardas Modi was born on September 17, 1950, in Vadnagar, a small town in northern Gujarat, India. Coming from a humble background, Modi's early life was marked by hardship and determination. He helped his father sell tea at the local railway station, an experience that shaped his understanding of grassroots issues and the common man's struggles.

Education and Early Interests

As per the UK Newspapers News Modi completed his schooling in Vadnagar and later pursued a degree in political science, earning an M.A. from Gujarat University in Ahmedabad. His early interest in serving the nation led him to join the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organization, in the early 1970s. Modi set up a unit of the RSS’s students’ wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, in his area, where he honed his leadership skills and ideological beliefs.

Political Journey

Modi's political journey began with his active involvement in the RSS, which eventually led to his association with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1987. Within a year, he was made the general secretary of the Gujarat branch of the party. Modi played a pivotal role in strengthening the party’s presence in the state, contributing to the BJP's success in the 1995 state legislative assembly elections and the formation of the first-ever BJP-controlled government in India.

Chief Minister of Gujarat

In 2001, Narendra Modi was appointed the Chief Minister of Gujarat, following the poor response of the incumbent government to the Bhuj earthquake. He entered his first-ever electoral contest in a February 2002 by-election, winning a seat in the Gujarat state assembly.

Modi’s tenure as chief minister was marked by both achievements and controversies. His role during the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat drew international criticism, with allegations of condoning the violence or failing to act decisively to stop it. Despite these controversies, Modi’s political career in Gujarat was marked by repeated electoral successes in 2002, 2007, and 2012, establishing him as a formidable leader within the BJP.

Rise to National Leadership

Modi's success in Gujarat laid the foundation for his rise to national prominence. In June 2013, Modi was chosen as the leader of the BJP’s campaign for the 2014 elections to the Lok Sabha. His campaign focused on development, good governance, and anti-corruption, resonating with millions of Indians. In the 2014 elections, he led the BJP to a historic victory, securing a clear majority of seats in the Lok Sabha.

First Term as Prime Minister (2014-2019)

Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister on May 26, 2014. His first term was marked by several significant initiatives and reforms aimed at transforming India:

Goods and Services Tax (GST): Launched in 2017, GST is one of the most significant tax reforms in India's history, simplifying the indirect tax structure.

Demonetization: In 2016, Modi announced the demonetization of high-value currency notes to curb black money and counterfeit currency.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan: Launched in 2014, this nationwide cleanliness campaign aimed to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management.

Digital India: An ambitious program to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.

Make in India: Aimed at making India a global manufacturing hub, this initiative encourages companies to manufacture their products in India.

Modi's foreign policy achievements included hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping and making a highly successful visit to New York City, where he met with U.S. President Barack Obama.

Second Term as Prime Minister (2019-2024)

The Modi-led BJP won a majority again in the 2019 general election. His second term saw continued efforts to promote Hindu culture and implement economic reforms:

Revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's Special Status: In October 2019, Modi's government revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, bringing it under the direct control of the union government.

COVID-19 Pandemic Response: Modi took decisive action to combat the COVID-19 outbreak, implementing strict nationwide restrictions and promoting vaccine development and distribution.

Despite facing protests and criticism for some policies, such as agricultural reforms, Modi's leadership remained influential. The BJP faced setbacks in state elections in late 2018, but Modi's charisma and a security crisis in Jammu and Kashmir boosted his image ahead of the 2019 elections.

Third Term as Prime Minister (2024-Present)

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 240 seats, and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) secured 293 of the 543 seats, allowing Modi to become Prime Minister for a third consecutive term. Although the BJP did not secure a majority on its own, the NDA's coalition support ensured their continued governance.

Personal Life and Public Image

Narendra Modi is known for his disciplined lifestyle, early morning yoga sessions, and simple living. Despite his high-profile status, he remains deeply connected to his roots and continues to draw inspiration from his early life experiences.

Communication and Public Engagement

Modi's communication skills are unparalleled, often using social media and public addresses to connect with citizens. His monthly radio program, "Mann Ki Baat," has become a popular platform for sharing his thoughts and initiatives with the nation.

Conclusion

Narendra Modi's journey from a small-town boy to the Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy is a testament to his resilience, dedication, and visionary leadership. His impact on India's socio-economic fabric, governance, and international relations is profound and continues to shape the country's future.

Whether admired or criticized, Narendra Modi's influence on India and the global stage is undeniable. His story is not just about a political leader but also about the transformative power of determination and leadership.

Stay tuned to our blog for more updates and in-depth analyses of Narendra Modi's policies, initiatives, and their impact on India and the world.

[jbk405]

Okay, so, either the trailer for Monkey Man was horribly put together, or I completely misunderstood what was presented, because I had NO IDEA what I was getting into. The entire plot took me completely by surprise several times.

This film is deliberately political. I can't recall the last time I saw an action film have such a clear focus on government. It's relatively common for the Big Bad to be a person in government -- that makes them an even bigger threat because in addition to the Criminal Thugs they employ they also have the Police and Media on their side -- but when this happens their actual politics don't matter. They're also a drug dealer, or human trafficker, and that's what the hero is fighting against. Usually we don't even learn what their politics even are. We may see them give a speech saying "Family values!" intercut with them doing drugs and having sex so we know they're a hypocrite, but that's the extent of it. In this film we know that the villains are part of the Hindu Nationalist movement, and are encouraging violence against religious minorities and gender-nonconforming people throughout India.

The condemnation is so direct that I'm not surprised Netflix backed out of distributing out of fear of the backlash in India. The only way the film could have been bolder would be if they used actual political party names instead of the "We're not actually saying 'Bharatiya Janata Party'" angle.

I was also completely unprepared for the inclusion of the hijra temple commune. I was already surprised just by the mention of crime against trans people on the news in the film, but then the main characters finds himself rescued and rehabilitated and welcomed into their society with open arms. They counsel him both philosophically and physically, and prepare him to resume his quest. And then they join him!

A literal army of trans women toppling the oppressive power structure was not on my BINGO card, I'll tell you that.

This movie was intense and an experience, and if you can see it in theaters I say you go right now!

[reasonsforhope]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, by some measures, the most popular leader in the world. Prior to the 2024 election, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held an outright majority in the Lok Sabha (India’s Parliament) — one that was widely projected to grow after the vote count. The party regularly boasted that it would win 400 Lok Sabha seats, easily enough to amend India’s constitution along the party's preferred Hindu nationalist lines.

But when the results were announced on Tuesday, the BJP held just 240 seats. They not only underperformed expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. While Modi will remain prime minister, he will do so at the helm of a coalition government — meaning that he will depend on other parties to stay in office, making it harder to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.

So what happened? Why did Indian voters deal a devastating blow to a prime minister who, by all measures, they mostly seem to like?

India is a massive country — the most populous in the world — and one of the most diverse, making its internal politics exceedingly complicated. A definitive assessment of the election would require granular data on voter breakdown across caste, class, linguistic, religious, age, and gender divides. At present, those numbers don’t exist in sufficient detail. 

But after looking at the information that is available and speaking with several leading experts on Indian politics, there are at least three conclusions that I’m comfortable drawing.

First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.

Understanding these factors isn’t just important for Indians. The country’s election has some universal lessons for how to beat a would-be authoritarian — ones that Americans especially might want to heed heading into its election in November.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024. Article continues below.

A new (and unequal) economy

Modi’s biggest and most surprising losses came in India’s two most populous states: Uttar Pradesh in the north and Maharashtra in the west. Both states had previously been BJP strongholds — places where the party’s core tactic of pitting the Hindu majority against the Muslim minority had seemingly cemented Hindu support for Modi and his allies.

One prominent Indian analyst, Yogendra Yadav, saw the cracks in advance. Swimming against the tide of Indian media, he correctly predicted that the BJP would fall short of a governing majority.

Traveling through the country, but especially rural Uttar Pradesh, he prophesied “the return of normal politics”: that Indian voters were no longer held spellbound by Modi’s charismatic nationalist appeals and were instead starting to worry about the way politics was affecting their lives.

Yadav’s conclusions derived in no small part from hearing voters’ concerns about the economy. The issue wasn’t GDP growth — India’s is the fastest-growing economy in the world — but rather the distribution of growth’s fruits. While some of Modi’s top allies struck it rich, many ordinary Indians suffered. Nearly half of all Indians between 20 and 24 are unemployed; Indian farmers have repeatedly protested Modi policies that they felt hurt their livelihoods.

“Everyone was talking about price rise, unemployment, the state of public services, the plight of farmers, [and] the struggles of labor,” Yadav wrote...

“We know for sure that Modi’s strongman image and brassy self-confidence were not as popular with voters as the BJP assumed,” says Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies India. 

The lesson here isn’t that the pocketbook concerns trump identity-based appeals everywhere; recent evidence in wealthier democracies suggests the opposite is true. Rather, it’s that even entrenched reputations of populist leaders are not unshakeable. When they make errors, even some time ago, it’s possible to get voters to remember these mistakes and prioritize them over whatever culture war the populist is peddling at the moment.

Liberalism strikes back

The Indian constitution is a liberal document: It guarantees equality of all citizens and enshrines measures designed to enshrine said equality into law. The signature goal of Modi’s time in power has been to rip this liberal edifice down and replace it with a Hindu nationalist model that pushes non-Hindus to the social margins. In pursuit of this agenda, the BJP has concentrated power in Modi’s hands and undermined key pillars of Indian democracy (like a free press and independent judiciary).

Prior to the election, there was a sense that Indian voters either didn’t much care about the assault on liberal democracy or mostly agreed with it. But the BJP’s surprising underperformance suggests otherwise.

The Hindu, a leading Indian newspaper, published an essential post-election data analysis breaking down what we know about the results. One of the more striking findings is that the opposition parties surged in parliamentary seats reserved for members of “scheduled castes” — the legal term for Dalits, the lowest caste grouping in the Hindu hierarchy.

Caste has long been an essential cleavage in Indian politics, with Dalits typically favoring the left-wing Congress party over the BJP (long seen as an upper-caste party). Under Modi, the BJP had seemingly tamped down on the salience of class by elevating all Hindus — including Dalits — over Muslims. Yet now it’s looking like Dalits were flocking back to Congress and its allies. Why?

According to experts, Dalit voters feared the consequences of a BJP landslide. If Modi’s party achieved its 400-seat target, they’d have more than enough votes to amend India’s constitution. Since the constitution contains several protections designed to promote Dalit equality — including a first-in-the-world affirmative action system — that seemed like a serious threat to the community. It seems, at least based on preliminary data, that they voted accordingly.

The Dalit vote is but one example of the ways in which Modi’s brazen willingness to assail Indian institutions likely alienated voters.

Uttar Pradesh (UP), India’s largest and most electorally important state, was the site of a major BJP anti-Muslim campaign. It unofficially kicked off its campaign in the UP city of Ayodhya earlier this year, during a ceremony celebrating one of Modi’s crowning achievements: the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of a former mosque that had been torn down by Hindu nationalists in 1992. 

Yet not only did the BJP lose UP, it specifically lost the constituency — the city of Faizabad — in which the Ayodhya temple is located. It’s as direct an electoral rebuke to BJP ideology as one can imagine.

In Maharashtra, the second largest state, the BJP made a tactical alliance with a local politician, Ajit Pawar, facing serious corruption charges. Voters seemingly punished Modi’s party for turning a blind eye to Pawar’s offenses against the public trust. Across the country, Muslim voters turned out for the opposition to defend their rights against Modi’s attacks.

The global lesson here is clear: Even popular authoritarians can overreach.

By turning “400 seats” into a campaign slogan, an all-but-open signal that he intended to remake the Indian state in his illiberal image, Modi practically rang an alarm bell for constituencies worried about the consequences. So they turned out to stop him en masse.

The BJP’s electoral underperformance is, in no small part, the direct result of their leader’s zealotry going too far.

Return of the Gandhis? 

Of course, Modi’s mistakes might not have mattered had his rivals failed to capitalize. The Indian opposition, however, was far more effective than most observers anticipated.

Perhaps most importantly, the many opposition parties coordinated with each other. Forming a united bloc called INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), they worked to make sure they weren’t stealing votes from each other in critical constituencies, positioning INDIA coalition candidates to win straight fights against BJP rivals.

The leading party in the opposition bloc — Congress — was also more put together than people thought. Its most prominent leader, Rahul Gandhi, was widely dismissed as a dilettante nepo baby: a pale imitation of his father Rajiv and grandmother Indira, both former Congress prime ministers. Now his critics are rethinking things.

“I owe Rahul Gandhi an apology because I seriously underestimated him,” says Manjari Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Miller singled out Gandhi’s yatras (marches) across India as a particularly canny tactic. These physically grueling voyages across the length and breadth of India showed that he wasn’t just a privileged son of Indian political royalty, but a politician willing to take risks and meet ordinary Indians where they were. During the yatras, he would meet directly with voters from marginalized groups and rail against Modi’s politics of hate.

“The persona he’s developed — as somebody kind, caring, inclusive, [and] resolute in the face of bullying — has really worked and captured the imagination of younger India,” says Suryanarayan. “If you’ve spent any time on Instagram Reels, [you’ll see] an entire generation now waking up to Rahul Gandhi’s very appealing videos.”

This, too, has a lesson for the rest of the world: Tactical innovation from the opposition matters even in an unfair electoral context.

There is no doubt that, in the past 10 years, the BJP stacked the political deck against its opponents. They consolidated control over large chunks of the national media, changed campaign finance law to favor themselves, suborned the famously independent Indian Electoral Commission, and even intimidated the Supreme Court into letting them get away with it. 

The opposition, though, managed to find ways to compete even under unfair circumstances. Strategic coordination between them helped consolidate resources and ameliorate the BJP cash advantage. Direct voter outreach like the yatra helped circumvent BJP dominance in the national media.

To be clear, the opposition still did not win a majority. Modi will have a third term in office, likely thanks in large part to the ways he rigged the system in his favor.

Yet there is no doubt that the opposition deserves to celebrate. Modi’s power has been constrained and the myth of his invincibility wounded, perhaps mortally. Indian voters, like those in Brazil and Poland before them, have dealt a major blow to their homegrown authoritarian faction.

And that is something worth celebrating.

-via Vox, June 7, 2024.

[sivavakkiyar]

In June last year, Purola, a small town in Uttarakhand, was in tumult.

A campaign by Hindu right-wing groups demanding that the town be cleared of Muslims had made national headlines. At least 41 families left, with six of them permanently relocating to different parts of Uttarakhand almost overnight.

At the heart of this push by Hindutva groups was the allegation that two men, one of them Muslim, had tried to abduct a 14-year-old girl under the “ruse of marriage” and convert her to Islam.

The campaign kicked off an anti-Muslim frenzy across the Uttarkashi district, where Purola is located, as Hindutva outfits accused the two men – 22-year-old Uvaid Khan and his 24-year-old friend Jitendra Saini – of “love jihad”.

“Love jihad” is a conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of being part of an organised plot to trick unsuspecting Hindu women into romantic relationships to ultimately convert them to Islam.

Khan and Saini were not only booked for kidnapping and procurement of a minor under sections of the Indian Penal Code but also for sexual assault under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, or Pocso.

Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which governs the state, stirred up the communal pot with insinuations about “outsiders from a certain community” swamping the hills.

A year later, however, the case against Khan and Saini has collapsed. On May 10, a court in Uttarkashi acquitted both men after it found that the allegations against them were false.

[wherestoriescomefrom]

Seldom before has there been so much joy in the shadow of defeat. But as the results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections began to trickle in on Tuesday morning, the smiles and good cheer began to heat up an already sultry day. Not since the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 has India allowed itself what former US President Barack Obama described as the audacity of hope.

Of course, even though the Bharatiya Janata Party has fallen short of a majority, Narendra Modi has taken it close enough to the halfway mark to form the new government. However, in its enfeebled state, propped up by allies who know the precise cost of their support, the new BJP administration will be forced to temper its bluster and contain its malevolence against those it considers its enemies. Among those the BJP has considered its adversaries are independent journalists, several of whom have been jailed and prosecuted simply for doing their jobs.

This result will undoubtedly trigger a tectonic shift in the BJP. There is no telling how the pieces will fall. As long-supressed aspirations in the Hindutva party shoot to the surface, perhaps even more hardline leaders will assume prominence.

But as reports from the ground have pointed out, this mandate is a rejection of the illiberal agenda, both social and economic, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has advanced over the past decade. By ignoring Modi’s provocations of mangalsutras, machli and mujras, Indian voters – especially the most marginalised – have decisively rallied to the defence of the Constitution.

The battle to reclaim the idea of an equitable India is far from being won. But as Tuesday demonstrated, there are many who dream of reinforcing the foundations of a Republic based on the values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity. For now, India can breathe again.

— The Audacity of Hope, Scroll Editor's Note.

[mapsontheweb]

A more detailed Indian election results.

by u/Greedy-Rate-349

Bharatiya Janata party loses its majority after 10 years and has to depend on allies to form a government which wasn't predicted by any exit polls which were claiming that BJP will alone get over 350 seats and thus the result has been celebrated by the opposition despite its defeat and they also managed to capture many seats on BJP's strongholds specifically in UP

Translations

Bharatiya Janata party - Hindi for Indian people's party

Telugu Desam Party -Telugu for Party of the Telugu Lands

Janata dal United -Hindi for People's party United

Trinamool Congress - Bengali for Grassroots Congress

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam - Tamil for Dravidian progressive alliance

Samajwadi party -Hindi for Socialist party

Other parties include a long list as well some major NDA allies were - Lok Janshakti party(Ram Vilas), Shiv Sena, National Congress party, Janata dal (secular), Rashtriya lok dal,Asom Gana Parishad

Other major INDIA parties include- Rashtriya Janata dal Shiv sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) Nationalist Congress party (Sharadchandra Pawar faction) Communist party of India (Marxist) Communist party of India Communist party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation Aam Aadmi party Jammu Kashmir National Conference Jharkhand Mukti Morcha

Also two unaligned Chandrashekhar Azad of the Azad Samajwadi party (Kanshiram) and Pappu Yadav have announced that they will support INDIA bloc.

Parties like JDU and TDP have a history of love hate relationship with NDA and there is speculation that they might jump ship that can topple BJP, however no such news has come forward and we will have to see what comes next

[bfpnola]

definitely a longer piece so these excerpts are far from showcasing everything this piece has to offer! read the whole thing on your own time, and in general, just check out jewish currents, an educational, leftist, anti-zionist jewish magazine!

Every August, the township of Edison, New Jersey—where one in five residents is of Indian origin—holds a parade to celebrate India’s Independence Day. In 2022, a long line of floats rolled through the streets, decked out in images of Hindu deities and colorful advertisements for local businesses. People cheered from the sidelines or joined the cavalcade, dancing to pulsing Bollywood music. In the middle of the procession came another kind of vehicle: A wheel loader, which looks like a small bulldozer, rumbled along the route bearing an image of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi aloft in its bucket. For South Asian Muslims, the meaning of the addition was hard to miss. A few months earlier, during the month of Ramadan, Indian government officials had sent bulldozers into Delhi’s Muslim neighborhoods, where they damaged a mosque and leveled homes and storefronts. The Washington Post called the bulldozer “a polarizing symbol of state power under Narendra Modi,” whose ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is increasingly enacting a program of Hindu supremacy and Muslim subjugation. In the weeks after the parade, one Muslim resident of Edison, who is of Indian origin, told The New York Times that he understood the bulldozer much as Jews would a swastika or Black Americans would a Klansman’s hood. Its inclusion underscored the parade’s other nods to the ideology known as Hindutva, which seeks to transform India into an ethnonationalist Hindu state. The event’s grand marshal was the BJP’s national spokesperson, Sambit Patra, who flew in from India. Other invitees were affiliated with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), the international arm of the Hindu nationalist paramilitary force Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), of which Modi is a longtime member.

...

On December 6th, 1992, a mob of 150,000 Hindus, many of whom were affiliated with the paramilitary group the RSS, gathered at the Babri Masjid, a centuries-old mosque that is one of the most contested sacred sites in the world. Over the preceding century, far-right Hindus had claimed that the mosque, located in the North Indian city of Ayodhya, was built not only upon the site where the Hindu deity Ram was born but atop the foundations of a demolished Hindu temple. The RSS and its affiliates had been campaigning to, in the words of a BJP minister, correct the “historical mistake” of the mosque’s existence, a task the mob completed that December afternoon. “They climbed on top of the domes and tombs,” one witness told NPR. “They were carrying hammers and these three-pronged spears from Hindu scripture. They started hacking at the mosque. By night, it was destroyed.” The demolition sparked riots that lasted months and killed an estimated 2,000 people across the country.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid was arguably Hindu nationalism’s greatest triumph to date. Since its establishment in 1925, the RSS—whose founders sought what one of them called a “military regeneration of the Hindus,” inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts and Nazi “race pride”—had been a marginal presence in India: Its members held no elected office, and it was temporarily designated a terrorist organization after one of its affiliates shot and killed Mohandas Gandhi in 1948. But the leveling of the Babri Masjid activated a virulently ethnonationalist base and paved the way for three decades of Hindutva ascendance. In 1998, the BJP formed a government for the first time; in 2014, it returned to power, winning a staggering 282 out of 543 seats in parliament and propelling Modi into India’s highest office. Since then, journalist Samanth Subramanian notes, all of the country’s governmental and civil society institutions “have been pressured to fall in line” with a Hindutva agenda—a phenomenon on full display in 2019, when the Supreme Court of India awarded the land where the Babri Masjid once stood to a government run by the very Hindu nationalists who illegally destroyed it. (Modi has since laid a foundation stone for a new Ram temple in Ayodhya, an event that a prominent RSS activist celebrated with a billboard in Times Square.) The Ayodhya verdict came in the same year that Modi stripped constitutional protections from residents of the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir and passed a law that creates a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants, laying the groundwork for a religious test for Indian nationality. Under Modi, “the Hinduization of India is almost complete,” as journalist Yasmeen Serhan has written in The Atlantic.

To achieve its goals, the RSS has worked via a dense network of organizations that call themselves the “Sangh Parivar” (“joint family”) of Hindu nationalism. The BJP, which holds more seats in the Indian parliament than every other party combined, is the Sangh’s electoral face. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) is the movement’s cultural wing, responsible for “Hinduizing” Indian society at the grassroots level. The Bajrang Dal is the project’s militant arm, which enforces Hindu supremacy through violence. Dozens of other organizations contribute money and platforms to the Sangh. The sheer number of groups affords the Sangh what human rights activist Pranay Somayajula has referred to as a “tactical politics of plausible deniability,” in which the many degrees of separation between the governing elements and their vigilante partners shields the former from backlash. This explains how, until 2018, the CIA could describe the VHP and Bajrang Dal as “militant religious organizations”—a designation that applies to non-electoral groups exerting political pressure—even as successive US governments have maintained a warm relationship with their parliamentary counterpart, the BJP.

...

The most extreme figures in the Hindu nationalist and Zionist movements were especially frank about the nature of their partnership: “Whether you call them Palestinians, Afghans, or Pakistanis, the root of the problem for Hindus and Jews is Islam,” Bajrang Dal affiliate Rohit Vyasmaan told The New York Times of his friendly relationship with Mike Guzofsky, a member of a violent militant group connected to the infamous Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane’s Kach Party.

...

In 2003, Gary Ackerman—a Jewish former congressman who was awarded India’s third-highest civilian honor for helping to found the Congressional Caucus on India—told a gathering of AJC and AIPAC representatives and their Indian counterparts that “Israel [is] surrounded by 120 million Muslims,” while “India has 120 million [within].” Tom Lantos, another Jewish member of the caucus, likewise enjoined the two communities to collaborate: “We are drawn together by mindless, vicious, fanatic, Islamic terrorism.”

[andmaybegayer]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/29/india-assassination-raw-sikhs-modi/

cool cool cool

(full text below the cut)

An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India

Greg Miller, Gerry Shih, Ellen Nakashima

The White House went to extraordinary lengths last year to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a state visit meant to bolster ties with an ascendant power and potential partner against China.

Tables on the South Lawn were decorated with lotus blooms, the symbol of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. A chef was flown in from California to preside over a vegetarian menu. President Biden extolled the shared values of a relationship “built on mutual trust, candor and respect.”

But even as the Indian leader was basking in U.S. adulation on June 22, an officer in India’s intelligence service was relaying final instructions to a hired hit team to kill one of Modi’s most vocal critics in the United States.

The assassination is a “priority now,” wrote Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s spy agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, according to current and former U.S. and Indian security officials.

Yadav forwarded details about the target, Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, including his New York address, according to the officials and a U.S. indictment. As soon as the would-be assassins could confirm that Pannun, a U.S. citizen, was home, “it will be a go ahead from us.”

Yadav’s identity and affiliation, which have not previously been reported, provide the most explicit evidence to date that the assassination plan — ultimately thwarted by U.S. authorities — was directed from within the Indian spy service. Higher-ranking RAW officials have also been implicated, according to current and former Western security officials, as part of a sprawling investigation by the CIA, FBI and other agencies that has mapped potential links to Modi’s inner circle.

In reports that have been closely held within the American government, U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that the operation targeting Pannun was approved by the RAW chief at the time, Samant Goel. That finding is consistent with accounts provided to The Washington Post by former senior Indian security officials who had knowledge of the operation and said Goel was under extreme pressure to eliminate the alleged threat of Sikh extremists overseas. U.S. spy agencies have more tentatively assessed that Modi’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval, was probably aware of RAW’s plans to kill Sikh activists, but officials emphasized that no smoking gun proof has emerged.

Neither Doval nor Goel responded to calls and text messages seeking comment.

This examination of Indian assassination plots in North America, and RAW’s increasingly aggressive global posture, is based on interviews with more than three dozen current and former senior officials in the United States, India, Canada, Britain, Germany and Australia. Citing security concerns and the sensitivity of the subject, most spoke on the condition of anonymity.

That India would pursue lethal operations in North America has stunned Western security officials. In some ways, however, it reflects a profound shift in geopolitics. After years of being treated as a second-tier player, India sees itself as a rising force in a new era of global competition, one that even the United States cannot afford to alienate.

Asked why India would risk attempting an assassination on U.S. soil, a Western security official said: “Because they knew they could get away with it.”

The foiled assassination was part of an escalating campaign of aggression by RAW against the Indian diaspora in Asia, Europe and North America, officials said. The plot in the United States coincided with the June 18 shooting death of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C., near Vancouver — an operation also linked to Yadav, according to Western officials. Both plots took place amid a wave of violence in Pakistan, where at least 11 Sikh or Kashmiri separatists living in exile and labeled terrorists by the Modi government have been killed over the past two years.

The Indian intelligence service has ramped up its surveillance and harassment of Sikhs and other groups overseas perceived as disloyal to the Modi government, officials said. RAW officers and agents have faced arrest, expulsion and reprimand in countries including Australia, Germany and Britain, according to officials who provided details to The Post that have not previously been made public.

The revelations have added to Western concerns about Modi, whose tenure has been marked by economic growth and rising global stature for India, but also deepening authoritarianism. A recent report by Freedom House, a human rights organization, listed India among the world’s practitioners of “transnational repression,” a term for governments’ use of intimidation or violence against their own citizens — dissidents, activists, journalists — in others’ sovereign territory.

India is part of an expanding roster of countries employing tactics previously associated with China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes. It is a trend fueled by factors ranging from surging strains of nationalism and authoritarianism to the spread of social media and spyware that both empower and endanger dissident groups.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs declined to respond to detailed questions submitted by The Post or provide comment for this article. Responding to questions raised by a Post reporter at a news briefing last week, spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said that India was still investigating the allegations and that the Pannun case “equally impacts our national security.”

Jaiswal referred reporters to previous ministry statements that targeted killings are “not our policy.”

For the Biden administration, which has spent three years cultivating closer ties with India, the assassination plots have pitted professed values against strategic interests.

Last July, White House officials began holding high-level meetings to discuss ways to respond without risking a wider rupture with India, officials said. CIA Director William J. Burns and others have been deployed to confront officials in the Modi government and demand accountability. But the United States has so far imposed no expulsions, sanctions or other penalties.

Even the U.S. criminal case reflects this restraint. Senior officials at the Justice Department and FBI had pushed to prosecute Yadav, officials said, a step that would have implicated RAW in a murder-for-hire conspiracy. But while a U.S. indictment unsealed in November contained the bombshell allegation that the plot was directed by an Indian official, it referred to Yadav as only an unnamed co-conspirator, “CC-1,” and made no mention of the Indian spy agency.

Justice Department officials who took part in the White House deliberations sided against those urging criminal charges against Yadav. Administration officials denied any undue influence. “Charging decisions are the prerogative of law enforcement alone,” said National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, “and the Biden NSC has rigorously respected that independence.”

The only U.S. charges made public to date are against an alleged middleman, Nikhil Gupta, who is described in the indictment as an Indian drug and weapons trafficker enlisted to hire a contract killer. Gupta, an Indian national who has denied the charges, was arrested in Prague on June 30 and remains in prison. He is awaiting a Czech court ruling on a U.S. request for his extradition.

Even in recent days, the Biden administration has taken steps to contain the fallout from the assassination plot. White House officials warned the Modi government this month that The Post was close to publishing an investigation that would reveal new details about the case. It did so without notifying The Post.

Laying a trap

For decades, RAW was regarded as a regional player, preoccupied by proxy wars with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. Under Modi, however, RAW has been wielded as a weapon against dissidents in India’s vast global diaspora, according to current and former U.S. and Indian officials.

The U.S. operation shows how RAW tried to export tactics it has used for years in countries neighboring India, officials said, including the use of criminal syndicates for operations it doesn’t want traced to New Delhi. It also exposed what former Indian security officials described as disturbing lapses in judgment and tradecraft.

After the plot against Pannun failed, the decision to entrust Yadav with the high-risk mission sparked recriminations within the agency, former officials said. Rather than joining RAW as a junior officer, Yadav had been brought in midcareer from India’s less prestigious Central Reserve Police Force, said one former official. As a result, the official said, Yadav lacked training and skills needed for an operation that meant going up against sophisticated U.S. counterintelligence capabilities.

Attempts by The Post to locate or contact Yadav were unsuccessful. A former Indian security official said he was transferred back to the Central Reserve Police Force after the Pannun plot unraveled.

The U.S. affidavit describes Yadav as an “associate” of Gupta who procured the alleged drug trafficker’s help by arranging for the dismissal of criminal charges he faced in India. Gupta had a history of collaborating with India’s security services on operations in Afghanistan and other countries, according to a person with knowledge of his background, but he had never been used for jobs in the West.

Petr Slepicka, a lawyer in Prague who represents Gupta, declined to comment on the case except to say that his client denies the charges against him. In court filings in India, Gupta’s family members described him as an innocent “middle-class businessman” whose arrest was a case of mistaken identity. They said he traveled to Prague “for tourism” and to explore new markets for a “handicraft” business, according to the court filings.

Yadav and Gupta spent weeks trading encrypted texts about the plot to kill Pannun, according to a U.S. affidavit filed in support of the request for Gupta’s extradition. To find a willing assassin, Gupta reached out to someone he had been in touch with for at least eight years and understood to be a drug and weapons dealer. In reality, according to the affidavit, the supposed dealer was an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The two were discussing “another potential firearms and narcotics transaction,” according to the affidavit when, on May 30, Gupta abruptly asked “about the possibility of hiring someone to murder a lawyer living in New York.”

From that moment, U.S. agents had an inside but incomplete view of the unfolding conspiracy. They orchestrated Gupta’s introduction to a supposed assassin who was actually an undercover agent, according to court filings. They captured images of cash changing hands in a car in New York City — a $15,000 down payment on a job that was to cost $100,000 when completed.

At one point, the indictment said, U.S. agents even got footage of Gupta turning his camera toward three men “dressed in business attire, sitting around a conference room,” an apparent reference to Indian operatives overseeing the mission. “We are all counting on you,” Gupta told the purported assassin on the video call, according to the indictment.

Yadav indicated that there would be more jobs after Pannun, including one “big target” in Canada. But a separate hit team got to that assignment first, according to the U.S. indictment, suggesting that RAW was working with multiple criminal elements.

Hours after Nijjar was gunned down in his car on June 18 outside the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara temple in Surrey, Yadav sent a video clip to Gupta “showing Nijjar’s bloody body slumped in his vehicle,” according to the indictment.

The message arrived as U.S. authorities were laying a trap for Gupta. Seeking to draw him out of India and into a friendly jurisdiction, U.S. agents used their DEA informant to persuade Gupta to travel to the Czech Republic for what he was led to believe would be a clandestine meeting with his American contact, according to officials familiar with the operation.

Gupta arrived in Prague on June 30 — 11 days after Czech authorities, acting at the behest of U.S. officials, had secretly issued an arrest warrant for him.

As he exited Vaclav Havel Airport, Gupta was intercepted by Czech police, who ushered him into a vehicle in which two U.S. federal agents were waiting, according to court filings submitted by Gupta’s family in India. He was questioned for hours while the car meandered around the city. His laptop was seized and his phone held to his face to unlock it, according to the family petition.

Gupta was eventually deposited in Prague’s Pankrac Prison, where he remains awaiting possible extradition. Seeking help, Gupta’s family tried to reach Yadav last year but could find no trace of him, according to a person familiar with the matter. After months of near-constant contact with Gupta, the person said, CC-1 had “disappeared.”

Engaging with the underworld

Though Yadav served as RAW’s point man, current and former officials said the operation involved higher-ranking officials with ties to Modi’s inner circle. Among those suspected of involvement or awareness are Goel and Doval, though U.S. officials said there is no direct evidence so far of their complicity.

As RAW chief at the time, Goel was “under pressure” to neutralize the alleged threat posed by Sikh extremists overseas, said a former Indian security official. Goel reported to Doval, and had ties to the hard-line national security adviser going back decades.

Both had built their reputations in the 1980s, when the country’s security services battled Sikh separatists and Muslim militants. They were part of a generation of security professionals shaped by those conflicts much the way their U.S. counterparts came to be defined by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Doval, 79, has claimed roles in undercover missions from the jungles of Myanmar to the back alleys of Lahore, Pakistan — tales that contributed to his frequent depiction in the press as the “James Bond of India.”

He also exhibited a willingness to engage with the criminal underworld. In 2005, after retiring as head of India’s domestic intelligence service, he was inadvertently detained by Mumbai police while meeting with a reputed gangster. Doval was seeking to enlist one crime boss to assassinate another, according to media reports later confirmed by senior Indian officials.

Before being tapped as national security adviser by Modi in 2014, Doval publicly called for India’s security apparatus to shift from “defense” to “defensive offense” against groups threatening India from other countries, especially Pakistan.

Goel, who was then rising into the senior ranks at RAW, shared Doval’s instincts. Police forces under Goel’s command in the early 1990s were tied to more than 120 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances or torture, according to a database maintained by Ensaaf, an Indian human rights group based in the United States. Goel was so closely associated with the brutal crackdown that he became an assassination target, according to associates who said he took to traveling in a bulletproof vehicle.

Former Indian officials who know both men said Goel would not have proceeded with assassination plots in North America without the approval of his superior and protector.

“We always had to go to the NSA for clearance for any operations,” said A.S. Dulat, who served as RAW chief in the early 2000s, referring to the national security adviser. Dulat emphasized in an interview with The Post that he did not have inside knowledge of the alleged operations, and that assassinations were not part of RAW’s repertoire during his tenure.

U.S. intelligence agencies have reached a similar conclusion. Given Doval’s reputation and the hierarchical nature of the Indian system, CIA analysts have assessed that Doval probably knew of or approved RAW’s plans to kill Sikhs his government considered terrorists, U.S. officials said.

A fierce crackdown

India’s shift to “defensive offense” was followed by a series of clashes between RAW and Western domestic security services.

In Australia, two RAW officers were expelled in 2020 after authorities broke up what Mike Burgess, head of the Australian intelligence service, described as a “nest of spies.”

Foreign officers were caught monitoring “their country’s diaspora community,” trying to penetrate local police departments and stealing information about sensitive security systems at Australian airports, Burgess said in a 2021 speech. He didn’t name the service, but Australian officials confirmed to The Post that it was RAW.

In Germany, federal police have made arrests in recent years to root out agents RAW had recruited within Sikh communities. Among them, German officials said, were a husband and wife who operated a website purportedly covering local Sikh events but who were secretly on RAW’s payroll.

In Britain, RAW’s surveillance and harassment of the Sikh population — especially a large concentration near Birmingham — became so egregious in 2014 and 2015 that MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, delivered warnings to Goel, who was then serving as RAW’s station chief in London.

When confronted, Goel scoffed at his counterparts and accused them of coddling Sikh activists he said should be considered terrorists, according to current and former British officials. After further run-ins, British authorities threatened to expel him, officials said. Instead, Goel returned to New Delhi and continued to climb RAW’s ranks until, in 2019, he was given the agency’s top job.

RAW’s record of aggressive activity in Britain has fanned suspicion that the agency was involved in the death of Sikh activist Avtar Singh Khanda, who died in Birmingham last year, three days before Nijjar was killed in Canada. British officials have said Khanda suffered from leukemia and died of natural causes, though his family and supporters have continued to press for further investigation.

A U.S. State Department human rights report released this month catalogued India’s alleged engagement in transnational repression. It cited credible accounts of “extraterritorial killing, kidnapping, forced returns or other violence,” as well as “threats, harassment, arbitrary surveillance and coercion” of overseas dissidents and journalists.

RAW’s operations in Western countries during Modi’s tenure have been overwhelmingly aimed at followers of the Sikh religion, especially a minority faction seeking to revive the largely dormant cause of creating a separate state called “Khalistan.”

That movement had peaked in the 1980s, when thousands were killed in violent skirmishes between the Indian government and Sikh insurgents. One brutal sequence beginning in 1984 included an Indian assault on the Sikh religion’s holiest site, the Golden Temple; the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by Sikhs in her security detail; and the bombing of an Air India flight widely attributed to Sikh extremists. A fierce crackdown quashed the insurgency, prompting an exodus of Sikhs to diaspora communities in Canada, the United States and Britain.

As Sikhs settled into their new lives abroad, the Khalistani cause went quiet until a new generation of activists — whose leaders included Pannun and Nijjar — sought to rekindle the movement with unofficial referendums on Sikh statehood and with protests that at times have seemed to glorify violence. A parade in Canada last year included a float depicting Indira Gandhi’s assassination, and Khalistan supporters have stormed and defaced Indian diplomatic facilities in Western cities.

The effort has seemed to gain little traction beyond a minority within the diaspora communit

[mariacallous]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya in the key northern state of Uttar Pradesh in January in hopes it would earn him a massive victory in the national election that concluded in June. That didn’t happen—at least not to the extent that Modi, his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and their ideological fountainhead Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) expected.

In what has widely been described as a shock result, the BJP won merely 240 seats in the 543-seat parliament, after setting a target of 400 seats. Modi has formed a government but only with support from other parties.

Like any election result, the outcome had multiple causes that will take time to fully sort out. But one thing is already clear: Modi failed in his long-running bid to homogenize India’s Hindus across castes and cultures and consolidate their vote for his political benefit.

In 2014, Modi came to power on the back of religious nationalism and security issues, and he continued that trend in 2019. This year, in the absence of any urgent security threat from regional rival Pakistan and rising concerns over unemployment, inflation, and authoritarianism, Modi banked on the RSS’s homogenization strategy.

The Ram temple was built on a site long disputed with Muslims, where a 16th-century mosque stood until December 1992, when a group of Hindu nationalists razed it to the ground allegedly on the BJP’s provocation. Experts said the BJP had envisaged the temple would instill pride in Hindus, feed their Muslim animosity, and bring them under the Hindu umbrella to choose Modi.

Even though, by and large, the Hindu community seemed to have been pleased with the inauguration of the temple, that didn’t translate into votes for Modi across the Hindu hierarchy. Instead, the results exposed the weaknesses of the homogenization exercise.

Hartosh Singh Bal, an Indian journalist and the executive editor of the Caravan, said there is “diversity in Hinduism” and the election results prove that it can’t be “papered over by directing attention and hatred outwards” toward Muslims. This election proves that “Hindus are not a monolith” and that “various segments of Hinduism have a successful chance of taking on the BJP,” he added in reference to tactical voting by lower castes in Uttar Pradesh against the BJP.

Karthick Ram Manoharan, a political scientist at the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, said that in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India with the second-biggest economy in the country, the BJP did not win a single seat out of a total of 39.

“Hindus are the absolute majority in Tamil Nadu, but they still mostly vote for the secular Dravidian parties,” Manoharan said in reference to local parties that have emerged out of social movements opposed to an upper-caste Hindu order that the BJP and RSS have been long accused of nurturing and propagating.

In March, just a month before voting began, I witnessed saffron-colored flags expressing support for Modi’s party jutting out from rooftops and windows in tightly packed homes in western Uttar Pradesh. Some people I spoke to said that BJP workers had decided to adorn the neighborhoods as they pleased, but underneath the flag-waving, a large-scale discontent was brewing over a lack of employment opportunities.

The upper-caste youth seemed confused, if not yet disenchanted, with Modi and in the absence of industry and strong local economies once again mourned the loss of government jobs to affirmative action. (The Indian Constitution reserves almost half of all state jobs for people from lower castes and others who confront a generational disadvantage and historical discrimination.)

Meanwhile, Dalits, who sit at the bottom of India’s Hindu hierarchy, in hamlets nearby who depend on the quota for their dignity and livelihood were quietly recalibrating their options. The mood was starkly different from 2014 and 2019 when I visited some of the Dalit-dominated parliamentary seats in Uttar Pradesh. Back then, Dalits I met were upbeat and decisively pro-Modi. They said they supported him since they believed that he might raise their stature in the Hindu hierarchy.

But 10 years later, they suspected the BJP was plotting to weaken the constitution, the only assurance of rights for marginalized communities in a country where upper-caste Hindus continue to hold social capital and economic power.

Recent comments by BJP leaders that if Modi won 400 seats, he would change the constitution spread anxiety among lower castes that the party intended to scrap the reservation system. The BJP repeatedly denied this, but the suspicion that it is first a party for upper-caste Hindus is deep-rooted among lower castes, and experts believe the comments were part of the BJP’s political strategy.

“They were testing the waters to see what would be the reaction,” said Sushil Kumar Pandey, an assistant professor of history at Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow and the author of Caste and Politics in Democracy.

“The opposition picked it up and campaigned on it, telling people a change in the constitution could mean losing your livelihood, your jobs,” Pandey added. “That worked at a time [when] people were also scared of privatization” and in government-run sectors.

For Dalits, it was about more than jobs. The Indian Constitution is nearly worshipped by the community and celebrated en masse on the birth anniversary of the Indian intellectual who wrote it. B.R. Ambedkar was no fan of Ram and advocated against the caste discrimination inherent in Hinduism all his life, even converting to Buddhism when he felt there was no escaping caste-based prejudice. While he couldn’t annihilate the caste system, he ensured that the constitution offered lower castes a quota in government jobs to gradually uplift them.

In his honor, and as an ode to the progressive document, Dalits sing songs in praise of the constitution and hail it as the upholder of their dignity in a society where they continue to be belittled. Any change to the text was unacceptable. “Their cultural identity is linked to this book,” said Ravish Kumar, a journalist and the host of a popular YouTube news show.

In the south, too, there was a fear of culturally being subsumed by a Hindi-speaking upper-caste elite. Indian federal units, or states, were defined in the 1950s on the basis of language, and to this day south Indians identify themselves on the basis of the language they speak. The Ram temple had no resonance in the southern states, particularly in electorally significant Tamil Nadu, with the highest number of seats regionally. Tamils were wary that the RSS’s homogenization agenda would drown out their cultural ethos and impose a secondary status on the Tamil language.

Manoharan, the political scientist, said that in Tamil Nadu, it was “not so much religious but fear of cultural homogeneity” and “a language policy which will give importance to Hindi speakers over Tamil speakers and upper-caste Tamils over other backward castes.”

In a state where “88 percent people come from so-called lower castes” and “69 percent have jobs under affirmative action through a special act,” people were also extremely worried that the BJP may “water down” the employment quota promised in the constitution, Manoharan added.

The southern Indian states have a longer history of resistance to upper-caste domination, a higher literacy rate, better economies, and a tradition of secular politics. While the BJP maintained its tally of 29 seats from the last election, it is being seen as a poor result considering the inroads the RSS has made in the south.

For instance, in the southwestern state of Kerala, the RSS has more than 5,000 shakhas, or branches, second in number only to Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state—yet “despite the fact that the RSS has thousands of training grounds in Kerala, they are unable to get influence,” said K.M. Sajad Ibrahim, a professor of political science at University of Kerala. “That’s because while religion is important, communal harmony is more important to people here. BJP tries to create tensions, and that doesn’t work here.”

The BJP managed to gain one seat for the first time in Kerala, but that isn’t being attributed to its ideological success or expansion of homogenization project but to the winning candidate’s personal appeal. Suresh Gopi, the winning candidate, is a popular movie star.

In many states in the Hindi belt and even in the south, the BJP did well. The upper castes and urban voters are standing firmly behind Modi. Kumar, the journalist, said it would be foolhardy to dismiss Modi—and the bigger Hindutva, or Hindu nationalist, forces backing him—just yet. He said Hindutva hasn’t lost and only faced a setback. “The BJP was trying to dominate caste politics with Hindutva,” he said, “but the election result shows that dominance has cracked.” However, he added, “it has only cracked—the ideology still has wide-scale acceptance.”

Everyone else Foreign Policy spoke to concurred but added that Hindus are far too diverse to be homogenized. Manoharan said the results exposed the weakness of the homogenization agenda and its faulty premise. “Hindutva’s aim for homogeneity is confounded precisely by a structural feature of the religion-culture it seeks to defend—caste,” he said.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Hannah Ellis-Petersen at The Guardian:

Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party has lost its parliamentary majority, dealing an unexpected blow to the prime minister and forcing him to negotiate with coalition partners in order to return to power. With all votes counted early on Wednesday morning, it was clear that the landslide for the BJP predicted in polls had not materialised and instead there had been a pushback against the strongman prime minister and his Hindu nationalist politics in swathes of the country. The party lost 62 seats, bringing its total down to 240, below the 272 required for a parliamentary majority. It is the first time since Modi was elected in 2014 that the BJP has not won a clear majority on its own. Nonetheless, together with its political allies, known as the national democratic alliance (NDA), its win amounts to about 292 seats, which is enough to form a majority government to rule for the next five years and return Modi to office for a third term.

Meanwhile, the opposition alliance, which goes by the acronym INDIA, far outperformed expectations, collectively winning more than 230 seats. The alliance, formed of more than 20 national and regional opposition parties, had come together for the first time in this election with the aim of defeating Modi.

Incumbent Indian PM Narendra Modi and his right-wing BJP won the most seats, but not enough to gain a majority on its own in the recent election in India. Modi is likely to remain PM, as his coalition partners National Democratic Alliance are likely to cobble a majority.

[indizombie]

You may expect All We Imagine as Light to be an angry film—an indictment of the country from the eyes of those who have been marginalised. After all, Kapadia has a right to be angry. She is currently battling a police case that’s dragged on for the better part of the last decade, for participating in protests against the appointment of the actor-turned-politician Gajendra Chauhan as the president of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), where she was a directing student from 2015–2018. The protests against the appointment of Chauhan were part of a larger movement of resistance led by students against an attempt by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—the Hindu right-wing party—to curb the independence of educational and creative institutions by appointing compliant ‘yes men’ in positions of power when it came into office in 2014. After she was charged with rioting, Kapadia’s scholarship as a student was suspended. In her first full-length documentary film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), she relayed the truth of the protest movement at FTII and the brutality with which the State cracked down on students. Premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, the film won the Golden Eye award. It still hasn’t seen a release in India. And while her alma mater FTII and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi jumped at the opportunity to congratulate Kapadia on winning the Grand Prix this year for All We Imagine as Light, it’s highly unlikely that even this film will see a wide release in her home country, due to her history of dissent against this government.

Virat Nehru, ‘Review: ‘All We Imagine as Light’ is a Stunning Tale of Intimacy as Dissent’, Rough Cut

[reasonsforhope]

"It was widely described as the week that India’s beleaguered democracy was pulled back from the brink. As the election results rolled in on Tuesday [June 4, 2024], all predictions and polls were defied as Narendra Modi lost his outright majority for the first time in a decade while the opposition re-emerged as a legitimate political force. On Sunday evening, Modi will be sworn in as prime minister yet many believe his power and mandate stands diminished.

For one opposition politician in particular, the humbling of the strongman prime minister was a moment to savour. Late last year, Mahua Moitra, one of the most outspoken critics of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), found herself unceremoniously expelled from parliament and kicked out of her bungalow, after what she described as a “political witch-hunt” for daring to stand up to Modi.

The murky and allegedly undemocratic circumstances of Moitra’s expulsion from parliament was seen by many to symbolise Modi’s approach to dissenting voices and the steady erosion of India’s democracy. She was among several vocal opposition politicians who were subjected to investigations by government crime agencies.

But having won a landslide re-election in her home state of West Bengal, Moitra will return once again to parliament, part of the newly empowered opposition coalition. “I can’t wait,” said Moitra. “They went to egregious lengths to discredit and destroy me and abused every process to do it. If I had gone down, it would have meant that brute force had triumphed over democracy.”

While he may be returning for a historic third term, many have portrayed the results as something of a defeat for Modi, who has had to rely on coalition partners to form a government. The BJP’s campaign had been solely centred around him – even the manifesto was titled “Modi’s guarantee” – and in many constituencies, local BJP candidates often played second fiddle to the prime minister, who loomed large over almost every seat. He told one interviewer he believed his mandate to rule was given directly by God.

“Modi’s aura was invincibility, that the BJP could not win elections without him,” said Moitra. “But the people of India didn’t give him a simple majority. They were voting against authoritarianism and they were voting against fascism. This was an overwhelming, resounding anti-Modi vote.”

During his past decade in power, Modi and the BJP enjoyed a powerful outright majority and oversaw an unprecedented concentration of power under the prime minister’s office, where key decisions were widely known to be made by a select few.

The Modi government was accused of imposing various authoritarian measures, including the harassment and arrest of critics under terrorism laws, while the country tumbled in global democracy and press freedom rankings. Modi never faced a press conference or any committee of accountability for the often divisive actions of his government. Politicians regularly complained that parliament was simply reduced to a rubber-stamping role for the BJP’s Hindu-first agenda.

Yet on Tuesday [June 40, it became clear that the more than 25 opposition parties, united as a coalition under the acronym INDIA, had inflicted substantial losses on the BJP to take away its simple majority. Analysts said the opposition’s performance was all the more remarkable given that the BJP stands accused of subverting and manipulating the election commission, as well as putting key opposition leaders behind bars and far outspending all other parties on its campaign. The BJP has denied any attempts to skew the election in its favour.

“This election proved that the voter is still the ultimate king,” said Moitra. “Modi was so shameless, yet despite them using every tool they had to engineer this election to their advantage, our democracy fought back.”

Moitra said she was confident it was “the end of Mr Modi’s autocratic way of ruling”. Several of the parties in the BJP’s alliance who he is relying on for a parliamentary majority and who will sit in Modi’s cabinet do not share his Hindu nationalist ideology...

Moitra was not alone in describing this week’s election as a reprieve for the troubling trajectory of India’s democracy. Columns heralding that the “mirror has cracked” and the “idea of India is reborn” were plastered across the country’s biggest newspapers, and editorials spoke of the end of “supremo syndrome”. “The bulldozer now has brakes,” wrote the Deccan Chronicle newspaper. “And once a bulldozer has brakes, it becomes just a lawnmower.” ...

“This was not a normal election, it was clearly an unfair and unlevel playing field,” said Yadav. “But still, there is now a hope and a possibility that the authoritarian element could be reversed.”

Harsh Mander, one of India’s most prominent human rights and peace activists who is facing numerous criminal investigations for his work, called the election the “most important in India’s post independence history”, adding: “The resilience of Indian democracy has proved to be spectacular.”

He said it was encouraging that an “intoxication of majoritarian hate politics” had not ultimately shaped the outcome, referring to Modi’s apparent attempts to stir up religious animosity on the campaign trail as he referred to Muslims as “infiltrators” and “those who have more children”.

“The past decade has seen the freedom of religion and the freedom of conscience and dissent taken away,” said Mander. “If this election had gone fully the BJP way, then India would not remain a constitutional secular democracy.”"

-via The Guardian, June 9, 2024

[sivavakkiyar]

The demand for a caste census continues to gain popularity. After Bihar published the results of its case census in October, pressure is growing on the Karnataka government to release its findings. Andhra Pradesh has started its caste census and there are increasing calls for a similar exercise in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

With direct implications for reservations in education and public sector jobs, welfare provisions and political mobilisation, caste censuses could be decisive to uncovering power relations in the country.

The 2024 general elections are due soon and a caste census may momentarily seem to have diminished in importance, given the gains made by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance with inauguration of the Ram temple in January. But its significance will doubtless become apparent after the election when the challenges of poverty, unemployment and related issues of resource distribution rise to the fore.

So far, the focus in caste census discussions has largely been on ascertaining the populations of caste communities and tackling problems related to the multiplicity of jati names. How people identify themselves is shaped by a complex mix of tradition, personal beliefs political positioning and the influence of community organisations. Understanding identities is, therefore, a weighty task.

At the same time, equal attention must be paid to the opportunity presented by the exercise to measure land ownership by caste. Caste censuses can reveal crucial patterns in how power in India is enmeshed in land. Most importantly, the caste census has the potential to bring land reform back to political agendas.

[humanrightsupdates]

India: Renewed Ethnic Violence in Manipur State

Authorities Should Protect All Communities, End Divisive Policies

(New York) – Indian authorities should urgently intervene to address renewed violence between ethnic groups in India’s northeastern state of Manipur, Human Rights Watch said today. Both the Manipur state and central governments should take prompt measures to resolve disputes, investigate abuses, and appropriately punish those responsible.

Armed groups from the predominantly Christian Kuki-Zo community and the mostly Hindu Meitei community have engaged in deadly violence, which has reportedly killed at least 11 people. Students and others have protested the violence, and some have clashed with security forces and attacked government buildings. On September 10, 2024, the Manipur state government imposed a curfew in three districts and suspended the internet in five districts until September 15.

“The state government’s response to increasingly violent ethnic clashes in Manipur has just caused greater harm,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Right Watch. “Instead of protecting vulnerable communities and upholding the rule of law, the authorities have deepened longstanding anger and distrust among the communities through polarizing policies.”

Manipur’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government, led by Chief Minister N. Biren Singh, an ethnic Meitei, has replicated his party’s divisive policies used nationally to promote Hindu majoritarianism. He has publicly claimed without any basis that the Kuki were providing sanctuary to illegal immigrants from Myanmar and engaged in drug trafficking, deforestation, and militancy.

Since May 2023, over 200 people have been killed and hundreds injured. More than 60,000 people have been displaced and are living in cramped shelters. Several Kuki women have reported sexual violence and rape by Meitei mobs. Homes, businesses, villages, and places of worship, mostly targeting the Kuki community, have been burned down, attacked, and vandalized.

[tomorrowusa]

This is a good idea...

Ban fossil fuel ads to save climate, says UN chief

Tobacco ads were banned on TV and radio in the early 1970s in the United States. That began a process of denormalization of tobacco which has continued in the years since then.

Climate change likely played a role in India's national election.

The hidden story behind India’s remarkable election results: lethal heat

The Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), led by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has won more seats than the opposition alliance, and yet its victory tastes of defeat. Why? In the days leading to the election, the BJP’s main slogan had been Abki baar, 400 Paar, a call to voters to send more than 400 of its candidates to the 543-member parliament. This slogan, voiced by Modi at his campaign rallies, set a high bar for the party. Most exit polls had predicted a massive victory for the BJP – and now the results, with that party having won only 240 seats, suggest that the electorate has sent a chastening message to the ruling party and trimmed its hubris. [ ... ] People in Patna voted on 1 June, the last day of the seven-phase polling schedule. In Patna, the temperature had hovered above 40C. Local newspapers carried government ads exhorting voters to exercise their franchise, as well as half-page ads from the health ministry offering advice about how to avoid heatstroke. In the days leading to the voting in Patna, there were reports of personnel at polling stations dying from the heat. In the nation’s capital, Delhi, there were protests over water shortages. Last week, the temperature in Delhi hit 49.9C.

For the Celsius-challenged, 49.9° C = 121.8° F. That's just 0.2° F short of the all time record high temperature in Phoenix, Arizona which reputedly has "dry" heat.

As it turned out the ruling BJP did win the election but will be able to govern only with the help of electoral allies. The BJP had been boasting about getting 400 seats in the 543 seat Lok Sabha - the lower house of parliament. It ended up with just 240 with its allies winning 53 for a total of 293 seats. It is a modest working majority but is way down from the 353 seats won by the BJP & allies in the previous election.

Climate was certainly not the only issue in the election but experiencing a severe heat wave in which people were dropping dead at polling places is bound to have an impact. Politicians in India may now be more open to moving away from fossil fuels. The opposition would be wise to make climate change a bigger issue.