India is facing an ominous turn towards totalitarianism under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his powerful home minister, Amit Shah. The current parliamentary democracy is deemed obsolete for India as the government pushes towards a monolithic Hindu Rastra, sidelining the country’s multilingual and multi-religious roots. This has been made evident with the recent inauguration of a new parliament house in Delhi where Modi was surrounded by saints and religious figures, and the exclusion of India’s Dalit woman president from the ceremony.
The Modi government has handled any voices of dissent, from farmers’ protests to sexual assault victims, with heavy-handedness and disregard for democratic solutions, further pushing the country towards authoritarianism. The privatization of nearly every sector, from railways to insurance, healthcare and agriculture, has shattered the longstanding fabric of India’s plurality.
The Hindu right-wing, led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its grassroots organization, the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), is intricately connected. With RSS priding itself in its India is for Hindus slogan, it espouses Muslims, Christians, and socialists as India’s three primary enemies. Its ideologues, including M.S. Golwalkar and V. D. Savarkar, idolized Hitler and Nazi Germany and envisioned a social model where India’s Muslims would be purged like Hitler purged the Jews.
Since independence, India has experienced numerous Hindu-Muslim riots, with RSS and its offspring groups often found responsible for inciting these riots. Modi himself has been implicated in several instances of religious and social persecution, with thousands of Muslims losing their lives under his leadership during the 2002 Gujarat riots.
The BJP government has imposed civil rights laws that have stripped off India’s citizenship from religious and ethnic minorities, and human rights groups have noted the jailing of thousands of innocent people in private prison camps. A Trump-like personal-megaphone-style administration is in vogue, with the prime minister refusing to hold any press conferences except with his favorite channels.
India is now a country where economic, gender, caste, and environmental inequalities are at a historic high, health care and education are in a precarious situation, and BJP government has failed to bring justice to victims of religious and social persecution. Rapes and other forms of violence against women and minorities rank as some of the worst in the world. The country is spiraling down the path of religion and race-based supremacy, further eroding its fundamental constitutional principles of justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Muslims in India are living in fear, while people worldwide are increasingly alarmed by what is happening in the country. As a Hindu Indian-American, I too feel that the people in power are hijacking my birthplace and religion. India is at a historic crossroads, and nowhere else today are democracy, social harmony, and free speech under such peril.
