To note positive happenings is one way, I guess, of coping with a flow of hurtful news. Chinese and Indian troops ending their eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation at the northern and southern banks of Ladakh’s Pangong Tso Lake was a positive occurrence. Elsewhere in high-altitude Ladakh, rival soldiers remain not far from one another, but the relaxation around Pangong Tso is undoubtedly a huge relief.
I also welcome the evident decision of the government in New Delhi to target the handful of digital platforms that continue to throw light on India’s steady slide away from democracy. You read me correctly. I am welcoming the targeting. For it reveals the power of independence in citizens’ voices, even when only some are audible.
India’s print media (one of the world’s largest) has long been enlisted in support of the regime. Apart from a few brave newspapers that give space to dissenting opinion, most loyally project the regime’s line. The servility of most TV channels is worse; their patriotic shrieks compete well with ethno-nationalist or extremist counterparts in other lands.
Critical comment in India is thus largely confined to two spaces: digital platforms and social media. Evidence has now surfaced that New Delhi has been preparing to regulate both.
On February 25, the government issued a notification outlining a new set of rules for regulating digital firms, including social media platforms and streaming companies. And on March 3, Caravan Magazine gave online exposure to an extraordinary 97-page “Report of the Group of Ministers on Government Communication” that it had got hold of.
While proposing steps to extend the government’s influence over the media, the Report betrays unhappiness that a few digital platforms are persisting in their criticisms.
The steps planned by the regime are hurtful but the independence that forced the steps is a reality to be proud of.
Also significant is an appraisal from Washington DC. On March 3, Freedom House, the organization that has been measuring democracy for eight decades, downgraded India from a “free” democracy to a “partly free” democracy.
The Freedom House report said that instead of “serving as a champion of democratic practice and a counterweight to authoritarian influence from countries such as China,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party are “tragically driving India itself toward authoritarianism”.
In the report’s sobering assessment, “Under Modi, India appears to have abandoned its potential to serve as a global democratic leader, elevating narrow Hindu nationalist interests at the expense of its founding values of inclusion and equal rights for all.”
Surveying the Indian scene, Freedom House states: “India’s status declined from free to partly free due to a multiyear pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies have presided over rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population and pursued a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters.”
The report also speaks of the frequent use in India of the sedition law and other charges to deter free speech; restrictions on foreign funding of NGOs; the action against Amnesty causing it to shut its India office; “the unusual appointment of a recently retired chief justice to the upper house of Parliament”; and the “excessively harsh” lockdown that triggered the displacement of millions.
New Delhi was quick to challenge the report. “The Government of India treats all its citizens with equality as enshrined under the constitution of the country and all laws are applied without discrimination,” said a spokesman from the ministry of information and broadcasting.
Referring specifically to the Delhi riots of January 2020, which the Freedom House report also looks at, the official spokesman claimed that “the law enforcement machinery acted swiftly in an impartial and fair manner.” The argument is unlikely to convince those who know that while 15 Hindus and 36 Muslims were killed in those riots, almost everyone prosecuted by the government was a Muslim.
https://thewire.in/communalism/delhi-riots-identities-deceased-confirmed
That New Delhi felt obliged to respond to the Freedom House report is, however, a positive. Shouts in defence of life and liberty cross borders. Governments may possess vast resources and stern plans, but the world’s citizens are not voiceless.