The Narendra Modi government frequently posits India as a ‘Vishwaguru’ or world leader. How the world sees India is often lost in this branding exercise.
Outside India, global voices are monitoring and critiquing human rights violations in India and the rise of Hindutva. We present here fortnightly highlights of what a range of actors – from UN experts and civil society groups to international media and parliamentarians of many countries – are saying about the state of India’s democracy.
Read the fortnightly roundup for December 1-15, 2024.
International media reports
BBC, UK, December 3
Geeta Pandey reports that the Uttar Pradesh (UP) Police is seeking to arrest Mohammed Zubair, “the leading Indian fact-checker and journalist”. He is being accused of acts “endangering the sovereignty or unity and integrity of India”, among other offences. Zubair denies the charges against him and told the BBC, “I feel I’m being targeted because of the work I do”.
The present case against him stems from a video he shared on X “spotlighting hate speech” by Yati Narsinghanand, a Hindu priest who was jailed in 2022 for “Islamophobic and misogynistic comments” and has been known for “openly calling for violence against Muslims”.
After this, Pandey reports that Muslims protested and filed complaints against Narsinghanand, after which Hindu groups called for action against Zubair. The police registered a case against Zubair on a complaint by Uditya Tyagi, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politician and “close aide of the priest”. Pandey points out that the police first filed lesser charges and later added the heavier offence which Amnesty India calls the “new version of the colonial-era sedition law”. Pratik Sinha, Zubair’s colleague, said, “why are the police invoking more stringent charges against him nearly two months later? It’s not just Narsinghanand and his supporters going after him – this is actually the government going after him”.
Al Jazeera, Qatar, December 7
Reporting on the impact of Hindu-Muslim violence that took place in October 2024 in North Tripura, Arshad Ahmed highlights that violent conflict between Hindus and Muslims has risen sharply in Tripura since the BJP came to power in 2018. Ahmed points out there was no “history of clashes on religious lines between Hindus and Muslims” in the state before this. Local legislator of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Islam Uddin, says Hindu groups have incited “communal sentiments in about a dozen instances since 2018”.
These include lynchings of Muslim men by Hindu mobs and Hindu right-wing groups attacking Muslim-owned rubber plantations. Abdul Haque, formerly of the BJP’s minority wing in Kadamtala, the site of the violence in October, sees a broader shift, commenting “Hindus have changed here”.
Reuters, UK, December 7
Sakshi Dayal reports that the BJP has “accused the US State Department and ‘deep state’ elements in the US of trying to destabilise India” allegedly in collaboration with a group of investigative journalists and Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi. The BJP is publicly blaming the Congress Party and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) for highlighting connections between the Adani Group and the BJP government “to undermine Modi”.
On December 5, the party posted on its X account that it holds the US State department “behind this agenda”. A State department representative said, “it’s disappointing that the ruling party in India would make these kinds of accusations”. Dayal writes these accusations “come as a surprise” in light of the strong India-US relationship. This is coming a few weeks after Gautam Adani and others in the Adani Group were indicted on criminal charges in November 2024 in the US.
BBC, UK, December 9
Islanders of the Great Nicobar Island are fearing the “multi-billion ‘Hong Kong like’ development project” in the works by the Indian government, reports Janhavee Moole. On India’s east coast, the Andaman and Nicobar islands are an “ecologically-fragile region” made up of 836 islands, of which only 38 are inhabited. The Great Nicobar Island is one of the most secluded. The project includes “a transhipment harbour, a power plant, an airport and a new township, all designed to link the area to crucial global trade routes along the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal”.
The government projects that “some 650,000 people” will be added to the island’s population. Islanders are fearing “the loss of their land, culture, and way of life, with the project threatening to push them to the brink of extinction”. Thirty nine international experts have already warned that the project would be a “death sentence” for the indigenous Shompen tribe. Moole highlights environmentalists’ grave concerns of the loss of forests and unique marine life.
The Walrus, Canada, December 10
Sushant Singh analyses the “political and social implications” for India with special attention to Home Minister, Amit Shah, being named in the Canadian authorities allegations that the Indian government is targeting and attacking Sikhs. Singh writes that “Shah’s name is the most critical one to come up, because it draws a direct connection to the highest levels of the Indian government”. He points out the purported actions against Sikh activists in North America “involving diplomats, intelligence officials, bureaucrats, and criminal gangs” could not have happened without such a connection.
Police chief Mike Duheme has publicly said the allegations against Shah are based on “solid evidence” gathered through monitored communications, intelligence inputs which “could have come only from the US”. Singh highlights that “future indictments [in the US] could also possibly name Shah, further besmirching India by placing it in the same league as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel”.
New York Times, US, December 12
Alex Travelli and Abdi Latif Dahir report on the Adani Group’s deteriorating alliances after the group was indicted last month on criminal charges in the US. Kenya is backing out of two major Adani projects worth billions, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are critically reviewing projects, and the Opposition in India is demanding an inquiry into the allegations. Foreign funders are also stepping back. Travelli and Dahir describe the changed fortunes of the group that has been “the face of India-led development around the world” for the last decade, in tandem with Narendra’s Modi’s bid to expand India’s geo-political influence globally. On the BJP’s recent public accusations against the US State department and the “American Deep State” conspiring against India, they say this “extraordinary attack on the US” shows “how deeply” the BJP “sees its interests conjoined with Mr. Adani’s”.
Parliamentarians and public officials advocate
Reflecting on a conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has written in her recently released book, Freedom: Memoirs 1951-2021, that Modi “vehemently denied” that attacks on religious minorities (especially Muslims and Christians) by Hindu nationalists had increased in India since he took office. Merkel recounts that Modi said India remains a “country of religious tolerance”. Merkel disputes his denial, writing “unfortunately, the facts said otherwise” and expressed her concern about religious freedom in India.
Experts say
In an episode of the Grand Tamasha podcast aired on December 3, Milan Vaishnav, Director and Senior Fellow, South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment speaks to scholar Hilal Ahmed, Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) about ideas Ahmed articulates in his recently published book, A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India. He describes the post-2014 “New India” under Modi as an “ideological, political doctrine”, coining the concept of “Hindutva constitutionalism” as a “rulebook of duties not rights” to establish this new doctrine. New India seeks to present minorities within a “Hindutva victimhood” narrative and promote a homogenised “one nation” concept. Ahmed describes the Muslim-led protests against the citizenship law from December 2019 as Muslims “reclaiming a legitimate public life”. Commenting on what he saw as challenges to the BJP in the 2024 national elections, Ahmed points to the Congress manifesto that offered a new “social justice narrative” and the Bharat Jodo Yatra which “resensitised the grassroots” away from Hindutva forces.
A two-member team of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) of Senior Protection Officer Tomoko Fukumura and Protection Associate Ragini Trakroo Zutushi, visited Rohingya Muslims living in slums in Jammu on December 11 after “renewed crackdowns on Rohingyas and Bangladeshis by the police”. Over the past month, it was reported that authorities cut off water and electricity in areas where the communities were living, and the police were “rounding up” Rohingyas. The ruling party National Conference (NC) of Jammu & Kashmir has appealed to the Centre for a “humanitarian approach”.
Manucheher Shafee and Christophe Jaffrelot offer their analysis on December 13 that “anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh is now at its peak” largely due to India’s actions post Bangladesh’s July Revolution being “perceived as an affront to the spirit of the revolution”. India’s willingness to take in Sheikh Hasina has enabled her “to continue fomenting instability through distorted and provocative statements at public events”. Shafee and Jaffrelot point to the dangers of “coordinated misinformation campaigns” by Indian mainstream media, backed by BJP leaders, which are projecting “exaggerated and false narratives about communal violence targeting Bangladeshi Hindu minorities”, including claims of genocide of Bangladeshi Hindus by the interim government. They write that the spread of false narratives fuelled from India are leading many in Bangladesh to feel that “the Indian government is actively working to undermine Bangladesh’s aspirations for reform and democracy in order to reinstall its preferred leader”. Shafee and Jaffrelot see India’s “apathy towards Bangladesh’s democratic aspirations” as revealing a major shift in Indian foreign policy in which India is “no longer interested in offering the world a “third”, Indian brand of moral leadership”.
Indian diaspora and civil society groups
For its 2024 Press Freedom Awards, Reporters Without Borders gave Indian journalist Ravish Kumar the “Independence Prize” on December 3, honouring Ravish for “standing firm against government repression by defending the country’s journalistic space”. RSF describes Ravish as “personifying the Indian media’s resistance to political pressure” and being “a true hero of journalism”. After being “ousted” from NDTV and hounded by “smear campaigns”, RSF notes that Ravish keeps up his work through his YouTube channel which has 12 million subscribers.
Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) and the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) condemned the attempt on November 30 by the Delhi Police to detain and intimidate Indian human rights activist Nadeem Khan in recent press releases (here and here). IAMC states that Khan was booked and questioned “in retaliation for criticizing human rights abuses under the Modi regime in a video”, with the police claiming that Khan “promoted enmity” through the videos by “portraying a particular community as oppressed”. The police failed to produce a warrant to arrest Khan. HfHR said “Khan and his family endured hours of coercion and intimidation” despite no evidence of any unlawful activity and described this as “part of a broader pattern of harassment against civil rights defenders in India”. IAMC Executive Director Rasheed Ahmed said “the police harassment of Nadeem Khan and the APCR is an unacceptable breach of India’s constitutional rights”. IAMC calls for the immediate dropping of all charges against Khan and for criminal charges to be filed against police “for intimidation and trespassing on Khan’s private property”.
Politicians, lawyers, human rights defenders, and academics from the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, and India strongly condemned the targeting of activist Nadeem Khan and fact-checker Mohammed Zubair through “audacious, hypocritical, and mean-spirited” criminal charges at an online event on December 6. Among these, David Shoebridge, State Senator from New South Wales, Australia, said cases like [Khan’s and Zubair’s] “reflect a broader pattern of state machinery being used by the BJP administration to target their critics and journalists in particular”. John Sifton, Asia Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch, said it is “hard to digest” the “absurdity, hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness” of the abuse of law “to go after critics” in India. Dr. Audrey Truschke, a prominent scholar of South Asia, located the “targeting of [Zubair and Khan] as “anti-Muslim”. Shoebridge called on the global community “to speak out against these actions”.
In the latest episode of the podcast, It’s Not You, It’s The Media by the Polis Project, Suchitra Vijayan, Bhakti Shringarpure and Madhuri Sastry give a detailed analysis of how the media promotes Islamophobia and the impact on marginalised communities around the world, within a conversation on the media being “woke”. They highlight how the mainstream media conflates Muslim identity with “terrorism”, and particularly media manipulations around Muslim women not only “stealing their agency” but also “to justify war, invasion”, thus “stigmatising and criminalising communities” across the board. Madhuri adds that the term Islamophobia “papers over the hatred that is stoked very intentionally and the continuous racism perpetuated and actualised” against Muslims by the media. On India, “a country so religiously bigoted”, Suchitra points to the example of institutions like the Supreme Court negating the inherent wrongs in the demolition of the Babri masjid. The conversation also emphasises how through the world there is “concerted efforts by the state, pop culture and media to dehumanise a particular community”, and “create and entrench this idea of the savage”. They say one way to counter is to do the work of “daily unlearning” doing away with “essentialising narratives” that unduly blame Muslims.
Read the previous roundup here.