An SOS for India's Democracy and Media Full text of OP Jindal Lecture. Discussion between Ed Luce, Paula Chakravartty and Salil Tripathi – as well as Ashutosh Varshney. https://thewire.in/media/an-sos-for-indias-democracy-and-media As we face the very real danger of losing our democracy, it is important for us to believe that we can and will pull ourselves back from calamity.
New Delhi was not destroyed in a day. (The undeclared emergency is ) a milestone in the implementation of a project that has been in the works since 1925, the project of Hindutva.
We also know that the rhetoric that exhorts the righting of historical wrongs is part of the armoury of Hindutva, which believes India’s quest for freedom began not with the advent of British colonialism but of what they call ‘Muslim rule’ some eight centuries ago. .. Mr. Modi himself speaks of ‘1,200 years of slave mentality,’ which takes us back to the 9th century, some hundred years after the Arab conquest of Sindh.
to Blinken statement "We regularly engage with our Indian partners on these shared values, and to that end we’re monitoring some recent concerning developments in India, including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police, and prison officials.”
In response, Dr Jaishankar suggested that views of the sort his American counterpart had offered on India were driven by “interests, lobbies and vote banks” ..freedom should not be equated with poor governance. The message is that good governance is what the Modi government is providing, even if this encroaches on freedoms.
Last November, the intelligence czar in the Modi government – National Security Adviser Ajit Doval – expanded on this third point when he warned trainee police officers, “The new frontier of war – what we call fourth-generation warfare – is civil society.” It is civil society, he said, “that can be subverted, that can be suborned, that can be a divided idea, that can be manipulated to hurt the interest of a nation.”
Taken together, what Messrs. Doval and Jaishankar are saying is that the work of civil society activists, human rights defenders, environmentalists, farmers’ unions, Dalit and Adivasi activists, students and independent media can all be manipulated to hurt the interests of the nation. And that standing up to this subversion, this abuse of freedom, is what good governance and the rule of law are all about. In a nutshell, civil society is dangerously (and inherently) uncivil.