There will be bushels of embarrassment for India when Prime Minister Narendra Modi greets his G20 guests later this week.
Striking among them is the one caused by the hard-to-ignore democracy deficit, underlined most recently by the attack on the Editor’s Guild of India, the country’s premier professional organisation for editorial standards in the media, by the state government of Manipur run by Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party.
In today’s circumstances in the country, this would be considered routine cussedness by India’s sub-national authorities out to disrespect the media, were it not for the fact that Manipur’s current leadership is inordinately loved by the Modi regime, and shown every leeway, even after it has presided over a situation of near genocide-like dimensions of the state’s principal ethnic and religious minority for the past four months.
Disregarding pleadings by a section of the BJP itself in Manipur, and by the opposition in parliament and the wider civil society, the Modi government refuses to use the special powers it has to dismiss the state government. Such constitutional authority is tailor-made for a situation such as the one that prevails today.
The happenings in Manipur over the last four months are already hitting world headlines, bringing us instant disrepute, no matter India’s official rebuttals against international institutions concerned with state-sponsored violence and human rights violations.
If New Delhi were sensitive, this would be weighing on its mind. But it appears that the prime minister believes he can impress the world by wearing on his sleeve a well-worn cliché like “the world is one family,” and its derivative, that it has a common future.
This is a once-too-often repeated projection on the international stage by Indian leaders of an ancient Sanskrit saying with an exalted, philosophical, meaning which does deserve to be saved from being turned into a common advertising tagline at conferences.
But make no mistake. Many in G20 would be focusing on the state of democracy in India and the state of the press – and Manipur comes handy here – even as they go through the motions of trying to agree on a text for a joint statement covering the climate calamity, the energy crisis, and the severe post-COVID indebtedness of all but a handful of countries.
Evidently, the text is still proving elusive. The West’s heart is not in it. Russia objects to the political mention of Ukraine in the document. The vindictive Chinese would be happy if the New Delhi summit flopped. They even object to Sanskrit expressions being used.
Also read: Why M20? To Remind G20 Leaders That the World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Media Freedom
Beijing’s strategic purpose is to embarrass India not just amongst the western democracies courted by New Delhi, but also amongst the autocracies – and of course on the border in eastern Ladakh by militarily penetrating deep inside the Line of Actual Control.
The West says all the nice things when it is buying political influence, forming an axis, or selling defence goods to India, but tots up items on the dark side to be used when convenient to whip New Delhi with. The autocracies envy India’s democratic tradition (about which many have a chip on their shoulder) and are perfectly happy to see this slide. Then they can have the satisfaction to find an equivalence with India in political practice and governance, and need carry no complexes when India becomes like them in some ways.
By now it is confirmed that China’s president Xi Jinping is skipping the G-20 summit, the first time he has absented himself from one since manoeuvring into power 10 years ago (except during the years of COVID), in order to refurbish his negotiating position with the US.
But he has another objective too – one that is not necessarily subsidiary to his play in relation to America. In their heart of hearts, the Indian hosts would know that the leader of the world’s second most powerful country that is making us militarily and diplomatically restless, has also directed a well-aimed snub at Modi by not showing up.
Modi, of course, is a master of propaganda. He has already ensured that he has the bulk of the mainstream media running to please him. He would stomach the blows he is handed at the summit deliberations, perhaps carry a few grudges on this count, but in the end would be out telling domestic audiences how impressed the world’s leaders were with India, whose time they believe has come.
To make this stick, he has made sure that in New Delhi, the arrangements are slick on the surface. People can’t gather, so there won’t be crowds, or protests. The poor are shuttered out of the frame. The lighting dazzles, the roads look super clean and the fountains along the thoroughfares sprinkle cool water on the boughs. Nevertheless, the one thing that can dim the lights is Manipur, and the way the non-cowering sections of the media are treated, testifying to the rapidly diminishing state of democracy.
It does not help that among the 19 countries and the EU, which make up G20, India’s GDP per capita is the lowest and stands at a paltry level, way below not only China’s but other non-western nations, limiting India’s capacity for financial, trade, or investment intervention in any meaningful or long-term sense on the world stage, whatever the mumbo-jumbo of amrit kaal, and the promise of India becoming a “developed” nation in the next 25 years that the leadership weaves for its poor, poorly informed, gullible people.
Democracy was the one currency of popular appeal worldwide that India had possessed since it defeated colonialism through a non-violent movement of the poor for peaceful transformation to sovereign status. But democracy is a strictly endogenous variable, and is being calculatedly depleted. No foreign aid supplies democracy.
Manipur is a pointer to our deepening malaise. The Editors’ Guild of India had sent a three-member fact-finding mission to Manipur to report on the local media’s coverage of the (ongoing) ethnic violence after receiving representations in this regard and also, it says, a complaint from the Indian Army’s 3 Corps headquarters, which cited specific examples of the media in Manipur, and suggested that it may be playing “a major role in arousing passion and not letting sustainable peace to (sic) come in”.
Also read: Internet Ban a Mistake, During Conflict Manipur Media Was ‘Meitei Media’: EGI Report
It is clear the complaints about the role of the media in Manipur came from responsible quarters. The EGI would be remiss in its duty if it did not attend to them. As it turns out, the report on the situation put together by its team is a balanced one. It speaks of an unbiased approach. Blame has been hinted at, not hammered in. And yet the government of the state and the uncivil civil society representing the majority ethnic group, has retaliated in whiplash fashion.
Based on a laughable complaint from a so-called social activist, the police have registered criminal cases against the EGI president, Seema Mustafa, and the three members of its reporting mission – Seema Guha, Bharat Bhushan, and Sanjay Kapoor, all journalists of accomplishment and experience. The sections of the law cited are such as to invite arrest.
Shockingly, chief minister of Manipur, N. Biren Singh, who had remained blasé and unmoved when a few weeks ago a video surfaced of minority community women being paraded naked and sexually assaulted by a mob (to which they appear to have been turned over by the local police), called a press conference to condemn the Editors’ Guild report, and justified criminal cases being registered against the authors and the Guild president.
Although state governments have jailed journalists on false charges and for filing unfavourable reports (as when they reported facts on the ground when the COVID-19 pandemic raged), no head of a state government has before held a media conference to condemn journalists for their writing, leave alone pressing criminal charges against some of their leading representatives.
It is surprising that the Modi government has regarded these developments with detachment and cool composure instead of coming to the aid of a democratic civil society institution such as the EGI. But, is it, really so surprising, given the record?
G20 is narrowly about fixing the world’s economic woes by the leading members of the international community so that there is less unhappiness, less conflict, fewer crises or man-made disasters. But there is also the underlying instruction to the major countries to conduct their affairs responsibly.
Regardless of their reputation or unctuousness, potentially capable countries that foster inner social or political tensions, or look away from these, in the process injuring the spirit of democracy, cannot be expected to carry their load of international responsibility.