Ideas - Authoritarian vs. The Resisters

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Authoritarian politics continue to intensify. But so do acts of resistance. This podcast focusses on the resisters who are pushing for accountability as they fight against state violence. They are from Argentina, South Africa and India. Some work alone or in groups trying to stave off ever-encroaching authoritarian rule.Guests in this episode:Maria del Carmen Verdu is an Argentine human rights activist fighting against state violence.Fatima Hassan is a South African human rights lawyer and activist with the Health Justice Initiative.Bill McKibben is an American author, environmentalist, and educator. He is the founder of Third Act, which organizes seniors for action on climate and democracy.Siddharth Varadarajan is a founding editor of The Wire, a news website in India.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. We talk a lot about authoritarianism. We talk about the strongman, the authoritarian personality, the collapse of civil discourse, and the polarization of society. But in this episode of ideas, we're focusing on the resistors. My name is Fatima Hassan. I'm based in South Africa. I am a human rights lawyer and activist with the Health Justice Initiative.

Even though we weren't living in an illegally defined apartheid South Africa, the inequality persisted, spatial inequality still exists up until today. We have a dual healthcare system. We're one of the countries with the highest inequality figures in the world, high unemployment. They're pushing for accountability as they fight against state violence. The first alarm was soon after the end of, the last dictatorship, 1983, we started to notice, especially in humble neighborhoods and around workers' families, in shanty towns or in workers' areas, the police and other security forces

would still kill people unlawfully, would still practice unlawful detentions. Torture was a widespread practice in all police stations and jails. My name is Maria Del Carmen Verdue, and I am a human rights activist at Correpi, which is the coordinate against police and institutional repression in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Authoritarian politics continue to intensify, but so do acts of resistance. My name is Bill McKibben. I'm an author and environmentalist and education. educator, and most recently founder of Third Act, which organizes old people like me for action on climate and democracy. The authoritarian playbook always concentrates power into fewer and fewer hands, while increasing

the stranglehold on the free flow of information. There is no mechanism whereby newspaper people or media people can check information or get a quote from the Prime Minister's office. And that typifies the kind of media culture where Mr. Modi believes in sort of one-way transmission. So the government will say what it has to say and does not encourage questions, does not like people questioning them. My name is Siddharth Vardarajan and I am a founding editor of The Wire, which is a website, news website in India. We begin with the origin story of our guests, how they came to be active resistors to authoritarian rule in their respective countries. I joined the profession in 1995 as a leader writer in the Times of India, which was and is India's largest English language news daily, fairly sort of, you know, mid-level in terms of the food chain, my own position.

And from that vantage point, things, you know, seemed, things were fairly free. We could write whatever we wanted and, you know, within the constraints of what the editor wanted. and he, of course, was always mindful of what the proprietor's own point of view was. And that's quite normal, I think, around the world, that you would have, you know, a broad editorial position staked out by the editor. And so, you know, we never felt a constraint at that level as leader writers. Fatima Hassan remembers what it was like in the early 90s, working as a lawyer in the new post-apartheid South Africa.

Obviously, it was very exciting. It was a time at which we were practicing law during our first democratic dispensation, a time we never thought we would see in our lifetime during the anti-apartheid struggle. And it was exciting because it was an opportunity for us to shape jurisprudence and to use our new constitution, which at the time had guaranteed not just equality, not just freedom from unfair racial discrimination, but also a set of social. economic rights. Bill McKibbon's origin story goes back to his teenage years. In my high school days long ago, I was a tour guide on the battlegreen in Lexington, where

we had what you might call the first no-kings rally ever. And so I've come out of a kind of long tradition of dissent. Obviously, that's a little harder now when people are taken off the street in unmarked vans because the authorities didn't like the op-ed they'd written or whatever it is. But it hasn't stopped people from fighting back. And in some ways, of course, it's mobilized people precisely to fight back because they understand the depth of the stakes. Political violence is what first animated Maria del Carmen Verdu. When a teacher, Carlo Fuente Alba, was shot in the book. back of the head south in the Patagonia in Neuquen when he was leaving a demonstration that had been

already repressed. He was hitting the back of the head by a tear gas cartridge that exploded his head and he died a few hours later. The Minister of Security, Anil Fernandez, said, how terrible. police forces shouldn't act like that. How are they going to shoot at such a short distance and kill somebody with this tear gas cartridge? We are going to investigate up to the end, even though they supported the provincial government that had ordered the repression.

After those initial and sometimes harrowing experiences, their commitment to resistance began to solidify. Things began to change in 2002 when the Gujarat killings, the Gujarat riots took place, when Narendra Modi was Chief Minister of Gujarat. And the Times of India covered the violence pretty boldly, unusually boldly for a newspaper of its size, and earned the ire of Mr. Modi and the Bharty Jantanth Party,

the BJP government at the center in Delhi. And various forms of pressure began to be exerted from 2000. 2002, 2003 onwards on the Times of India, which eventually led to my removal from political reporting in 2004, in the run-up to an election that the owners were convinced the BJP would win again. And that's when I sort of exercised, I mean, I decided to leave the Times of India and apply elsewhere. So that's when I applied to join the Hindu, which was a process of transition, which took a few months. when the same thing happened last year on June the 12th when a young independent photographer Pablo Grillo was also hit by a tear gas cartridge aimed at his head and fortunately he had to endure several surgeries he was unable to walk or talk for almost a year but now he's slowly recovering

the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, instead of saying we are going to investigate and sanction and apply the necessary accountability or whatever, she said the police officer shot absolutely lawfully. He did what he had to do, and the problem was that this photographer is a political opponent of the government and he decided to put himself in the way of the cartridge to get heat and to be able to talk nonsense about our government. So that's a huge difference.

So in 2004, I mean, the elections which followed in the summer of that year led to the defeat of the BJP government. And you had 10 years of Congress rule, which kind of altered the media terrain somewhat. the government was less fixated on critical coverage. So they were upset about it, but it never led to not being invited for a press conference or being threatened with the loss of job. It was a kind of different era. And that era came to an end in 2014. We asked anyone who was over 83 to do a video for us, because if you're 83, you've been

alive for one-third of the 250-year official history of America. And what people kept bringing up were, A, the McCarthy era of the 1950s, and B, for some of the really older members, they're kind of identification of what's happening in America right now with their earliest memories of watching fascism in Europe in the 30s and 40s. The current moment was providing flashbacks for people very much to those errors. Throughout my lifetime, we've taken it for granted that it was completely permissible to stand up to the federal government, that that was part of what being an American was about. Today, it's absolutely different to anything else that we've experienced before.

In the first place, because this administration has decided, to produce a huge transformation of the whole legal system in our country. Immediately after this government started, there was a long list of decrees and executive resolutions that were issued aimed at limiting the right to protest and to criminalize it with greater intensity and legitimacy. Most of this different decrees and executive resolutions changed and destroyed rights and a lot of things that we could use in order to defend ourselves after the fact and bring police force members to justice. Would you believe that there is no, if you're doing a story on the prime minister or a decision of the government or the prime minister's office, there is no official in the Prime Minister's office that you can call for a quote or to check some information on the record or even on background. And so there is no access, and it's not just for us,

we may be labeled as sort of critical or hostile media, but there is no mechanism whereby newspaper people or media people can check information or get a quote from the Prime Minister's office. So the, and that typifies the kind of media culture. where Mr. Modi believes in sort of one-way transmission, so the government will say what it has to say and does not encourage questions, does not like people questioning them. It creates as few opportunities as possible

for anybody to ask a question, certainly of the prime minister, but even of the government. So this shift in media culture is, I would say, the first thing that is very noticeable and makes life different. It's not that it makes it difficult. You know, frankly, if the government doesn't want

to clarify, doesn't want to give a response before a story publishes, it's its own loss, right? But, you know, that typifies the approach of the government, which then, of course, has translated into a greater level of intolerance. Critical stories are seen as inspired by the opposition, inspired by foreign powers. And there is a whole new level of hostility towards independent reporting, you know, the legal cases being filed, attempts to take down stories. Fatima Hassan. So I think the promise of equality and the promise of dignity and non-discrimination gave

impetus to many communities and to many groups that were trying to articulate a vision for what a post-apartheid South Africa should look like and what a democratic and equal South Africa should look like. So I think the idea that we could use our legal system to advance a set of rights that we had never enjoyed and never experienced was something that was very enticing. It was something that was very promising. But over time, of course, like you would see in any other legal system, in any other progressive democratic system, even though we weren't living in and legally defined apartheid South Africa. The inequality persisted, spatial inequality still exists up until today.

We have a dual healthcare system. We're one of the countries with the highest inequality figures in the world, high unemployment. And so very soon it became evident that just having a robust legal framework or legal architecture or having a legal system that allows you to bring cases that you ordinarily would not have been allowed to during apartheid, does not necessarily translate into substantive equality or into dignity. After 2014 with Mr. Modi in the saddle, there's been a whole, you know, it's a sea change, really.

And I would say that whatever pressure we saw glimpses of during Vajzpies time, one has to multiply them, you know, many, many times over to reach the kind of intrusion and interference and repression that we see under Modi's guns. government. So today the terrain is very, very different. I think it has no bearing on the 10 years prior to his coming into power. And even though it resembles some of the pressure which occurred earlier, that now seems like a tea party compared to the kind of pressure there is today. So, you know, crossing one's T's, dotting one's eyes, takes on an entirely different sort of significance in the Modi regime because the consequences of not doing so is to open yourself and your reporters the risk of criminal prosecution. And that's something that's very, very new and which has

altered the calculation of a lot of editors, particularly those who are on the, were part of independent media. One trait authoritarian regimes share is that they often have close relationships with the business and corporate world, at least initially, and sometimes over the longer term. I wrote what's often called the first book for a general audience about climate change way back in the 1980s when I was in my 20s, a book called The End of Nature. And for the first 10 or 15 years after I wrote it, I just kept writing more. I think my theory was that as many writers and journalists and academics might want to think that if we won the argument, then our leaders would do what was necessary because why wouldn't they? And it took me that decade or decade

and a half to figure out that we were winning the argument, but we were losing the fight. It was very clear that climate change had become the gravest problem in the world our species had ever faced. And yet the fossil fuel industry was able to continue on with its business model because the fight wasn't really about reason and data and evidence. The fight was about money and power, what fights are usually about. And they had so much money that they were able to preserve their business model, even in the face of the science. When I started writing about this, everything we were talking about was in the future. This is what will happen. Now the things that we said would happen have happened are happening. In fact, they're happening faster and harder than we

would have suspected. We're seeing similar convergence of business and government interests in South Africa, as we've seen in other parts of the world. And I think that was to be expected. It's only 30 years since democracy. This was a feature of the apartheid regime as well. Apartheid was able to survive for so long because of the complicity of business interests, particularly mining interests in Southern Africa.

So we're seeing that intersection more often, and it's because we have a high unemployment crisis and, you know, really worrying levels of inequality. It's framed as this is the way in which we can attract investment, and this is the way in which we can build our economy. So let's forget about regulation, let's forget about labor and worker rights, let's forget about appropriate checks and balances, and, you know, let's let us proceed, let us get the licenses to do the mining

or the fracking or the extraction. So I think that is a concern for us in a way in which our politics is playing out. It was clear back in 2013, in fact, one year before Modi got elected, that in fact, Modi was going to get elected and that he was going to get elected, not necessarily because there was a great popular upsurge behind him, but because the captains of Indian industry to a man, and I'm using one man specifically here. I mean, all the bros, the sort of big business bros lined up behind Modi as early as 2012, 2013 and were committed to bringing Modi to power.

Why? Because they knew that this was a guy who was business friendly, who would steamroller opposition to their projects, whether it's environmental, whether it's labor, whether it's media. And that, you know, he was the person. they were betting on to drive their profitability up. So it was clear to us, at least to me and my colleagues when we were launching them wire, that the, you know, Modi getting elected is going to lead to a great constraining of press freedom because many, many media barons would be only too willing to serve as cheerleaders

for Modi. And given the kind of track record of Modi as chief minister, this was a man who was Vindy vindictive towards his critics. So even if a business, even if a media baron didn't necessarily see eye to eye with Modi's project in terms of ideology or politics, he would be too scared of confronting the man, lest Modi use his investigative agencies and tax guys to go after him. So this, you know, this was pretty apparent to us back in 2013, 2014, when we began toying with the idea of starting an independent news platform. And for us, this got crystallized, this perception got crystallized in our decision to be a non-profit and to not rely on any investor

or any sort of big businessman to come up with funds because we knew that when the chips are down, the investor is a soft underbelly of press freedom. He's the guy who will then, they will lean on and he will then lean on the editor. So, yes, the fact that we were going to go this, This way was, I think, not a surprise. And Modi's own agenda, the Hindu nationalist agenda, which comes with all kinds of other awful things, attacks on human rights, attacks on minority rights. All of this was also known. So there is no great surprise in what Modi is doing. I think the surprise was only that the rest of the world took along.

I mean, in the early years of Modi, there were very few people around the world who, who were willing to understand and accept exactly what kind of a project Modi had underway. And that's what this episode is about, understanding both the dynamics of authoritarianism and how best to resist them. This is ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. What if I told you that most of history's underwear

wasn't remotely close to the underwear you're wearing right now? Hi, I'm Greg Jenner, host of the Your Dead to Me podcast, and we're back with a brand new season. And if you're a fan of fashion trends of the past, you'll love our newest episode on the history of underwear. We explore how our underwear has changed throughout history and whether TV depictions of Regency-era ladies in their lacy underwear are truly accurate. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. The years between 1974 and 1983 were dubbed the Dirty War by the dictatorship gripping Argentina. It was a time of sweeping state-sponsored violence,

with military forces and death squads killing and disappearing thousands of dissidents. Constitutional rule returned in 1983, along with general elections, but state violence remained pervasive and persistent. Activists like Maria del Carmen Verdu say the violence was a direct threat to the promise of democracy. She and her colleagues believed the only way to be effective in holding the state accountable was to be rigorously independent.

Very often to lessen up the critics from human rights organizations, smart governments offer you positions in the state or they offer money with different kinds of contracts or whatever. And so you become, in a way, conditioned by this link, this relationship with the state. Of course, if any part of the government asks us to discuss any issue, we are going to do it. In fact, as we are talking at this very moment, two of my comrades are in the National Congress with the deputies participating of a meeting that was called by the Human Rights Commission of the deputy's chamber and well they are there saying what we need to say without any problem but we don't have any sort of economic or political dependence with any part of the state or any other kind of organization. In fact, this is maybe important to make clear. We are using the word

work, but in fact, what we do in Gorepi is not work. Everybody has his job or her job, and everything is absolutely volunteered. And we put money into the organization to be able to, I don't know, pay the rent of the place where we meet or print. our leaflets and magazines and or travel when we have trials far away or face the courts fees because even though the lawyers of the organization don't charge for their work, there are taxes and things that we have to pay to the court service. So we face that with our own money. Maria Del Carmen Verdue believes it's vital to put local problems like state-sanctioned violence

into the global context of authoritarian policies. Well, we think that police violence issue is one of the most important human rights problems in Latin American countries. Not only brutality, widespread torture, disappearance and murders are everyday news. at least in this part of the world, police repression is not a problem related to inefficient police training to individual mistakes or accidents. It's not a collection of isolated episodes or deeds of a few psychopaths wrongly recruited. It's inherent to our restricted democracies and a very efficient way of social control needed by the system. But at this time, in Miles Argentina, this has escalated in a way that we never thought we would have to face during a democratic government. And this is really amazing even for us with our long tradition confronting police violence.

And this has to do with this kind of administrations. We have Millet, Brazil is on the verge of fighting away Bolsonaro again. You have, I don't know, Meloni in Italy and, of course, Trump and his repressive policies in the States. and in many South American countries, there have been switches to the right and to the far right in the latest elections, such as Chile or Peru. And it has to do with a period in time where I think one of the most important elements is the presence of Trump in the States, because in fact, Milay would have not won the midterm elections without Trump's help.

Well, I guess all of these guys learn from each other. You know, I think that what Modi is doing, you know, what he's pioneered, for example, I think he was perhaps the first world leader to use social media pronouncements as a substitute for any kind of democratic deliberation or any kind of transparency vis-à-vis the press. So in fact, one of his, one of his officials was recently asked why Modi doesn't do a press conference. And he said, well, Modi speaks directly to the electorate. And there was another a BJP MP who said, well, Modi uses social media. So he says whatever he has to say. So for them, in the eyes of Modi, the role of the media historically was only to communicate what the leader had to

say to the public. And if the leader now has another way of saying that through X or through truth social, then he's going to do that. And you have no business to ask questions. You have no right to ask questions. Having said that Trump does take on a lot of questions. And he has given interviews even to some media that have been somewhat hostile to him. But here, it's impossible to, if you are in any way critical of Modi, to get any sort of face time where you can put questions to him. So I think that, you know, what Modi is doing is very similar to what we see elsewhere.

and each country, of course, I think they mold each strong man molds their particular brand of repression to suit the legal, constitutional, political constructs of their own country. So here, for example, you know, as much, you know, the government has been able to very effectively strike down or take down social media content that is critical, that makes of the prime minister, you know, that that pokes holes in the government's narrative. It's quite easy for them to browbeat social media intermediaries and get them to delete content that may be not so easy in Canada or the United States. So every country has its own specificity, but I think they all learn from each other. And certainly, you know, the, when we did the Pegasus Project and investigated the use of spyware, along with, you know, media colleagues, in forbidden stories in France and Le Mans,

LeMont Guardian, the Washington Post. We saw how the Modi government was using Pegasus against, of course, the political opposition and human rights activists, but also in a big way against journalists. My own phone was infected with Pegasus, me and another colleague from the wire. And so, yeah, so the use of intrusive spyware,

the use of criminal cases, the use of defamation, and the ability to take down content. All of this is what Modi uses. And I think that we're going to see more and more strong men imitating each other, saying that, oh, if Modi can get, if India can get away with this, then let's try this in our country. For much of the last decade, the world has watched as the United States moved steadily toward its own version of authoritarianism.

Strong man talking points have seeped into media coverage, cultural and political discourse, and even policy itself. Bill McKibben America is obviously undergoing an experiment in authoritarianism right now. We have a president who has decided to disregard every norm that has informed American political life for the last, quarter millennium and who has acted in ways that are contrary to any of our ideas about how democracy should work, whether it's having his supporters storm the capital to stop the counting of

votes or whether it's unleashing Elon Musk to single-handedly destroy programs built up over generations by one Congress after another. So we have to figure out how to stand up to that. While we continue to have some semblance of a working electoral system, that's obviously completely crucial. And at Third Act, for instance, we're mobilized around these elections, not just to turn out the vote, but to protect that vote, train poll watchers, so on and so forth. But we also need to and have been organizing in lots of other ways. you may have seen these no-kings rallies that broke out across America in the last year. They've been enormous, the biggest demonstrations in American history, except for the first Earth Day in 1970. They've been dominated in many cases by people my age, older Americans, I think because we have more of a sense of just how outrageous in comparison to our long,

baseline the current moment is, and because we have lived experience of the fact that going to the streets in the 1960s and 1970s helped bring about big social, cultural, political transformation. But young people are now very much at the forefront of this fight as well, and it's a powerful coalition building, whether or not it's powerful enough to take on the militarized forces that the federal government is deploying, we will find out. I'm afraid it's going to require more communities and more people to have the same kind of courage that Minnesotans displayed this winter. And I would not be surprised if it required more people to lay down their lives.

The people in Argentina have a very long tradition of, fighting injustice and defending social and human rights. You can't forget that we are one of the very few countries throughout the world that took dictators and genocides to justice in our own justice system without having to concur to international courts. Though many cases are still ongoing and the present government is making it more difficult to accomplish, this was a matter in which we, succeeded. The people in Argentina also have a long tradition of confronting anti-popular state policies.

We don't wait for governments to allow a demonstration. We just go out into the streets and act. There have been many attempts throughout the decades to discipline popular protests, especially in two governments under Mauricio Macri, 2015 to 2019, and presently under the Javier Milay's administration. But they have failed. Even when repression hits hard, people endure in the street, and you can see that. For instance, nowadays, every Wednesday there is a demonstration backing up the retirees who are really in a very bad place in this moment because they literally have not enough money to eat

and buy their medication. And every Wednesday we have repression with tear gases, with rubber bullets, with blows, with lots of people injured. And the next Wednesday, the people are there. And of course, there are many other demonstrations. almost every day. I mean, yesterday there was a great demonstration in the center of the city,

where the Obelisco stands, the Obelisk, the most important avenue in Buenos Aires, 9th of Julio, to support science and technology because of the cuts in budget that are forcing lots of scientists to abandon the public area and go to work in private places or to migrate. And all the time there are demonstrations. I mean, there is a popular movement, very strong workers, women and diversities,

the demonstrations to achieve the legal right to stop unwanted pregnancy, for instance, which lasted more than a decade until we conquered it in 2017, were huge, I mean millions of people in the street. The same thing with retired people, students, and so on. Of course, the impact of repression is different because each government, even though all of them have used repression as a weapon against the protests, they don't apply it in the same depth. I mean, there are differences because all governments are different.

And that's why we stress that the worst one in the first place was the Macri administration. And nowadays, the Millie administration has gained every record. And we are facing now the most difficult time in all our democratic history. I think South Africans have learned from their past not to be civil and not to be nice. We need it when necessary. And I think that's how we've been able to hold sort of this, you know, minimal level of a state, of a democratic state for the last 30 years. So I think there wasn't a resistant people, and if there wasn't organizations and journalists

that were willing to do the hard work, including whistleblowers, many of whom have been assassinated in South Africa in the last few years for speaking out against capture and speaking out against corruption as one of the dark spots of post-democratic South Africa, then we wouldn't have been able to be in the situation that we're in now. But that doesn't mean that we're not going to face even more dangerous battles ahead. We have a long tradition of trying to get in contact with organizations in other countries. For instance, when the great police repressions in Chile in 2019, the students' revolts that ended up with a huge amount of mobilization in the whole country. We even were able to put up a little group of comrades that traveled to Chile to make a report and to meet with human rights organizations there.

and the same during the coup d'etat in Bolivia. I think it was in 2020 or 2021. And even in the States, we have been in touch with Black Lives Matter movement. But what we notice is that here we maybe comprehend in a wider way that it's not an isolate struggle. I mean, you don't have the families of boys killed by the police marching on one place and the retired people marching for their income on the other place and workers fighting for their salaries in a third place and women trying to fight patriarchy alone. All the fights flow together and we are in touch with each other at every time.

and we help each other, each one with its own expertise and knowledge. So maybe that's the experience that makes Argentina quite a different place in the world when it comes to this kind of things. I wouldn't dare advise journalists in Egypt or Peru or anywhere else where things are getting hairy for reporters. But speaking from our experience, I would say, you know, where we have, you know, still in place, very clear constitutional protections for freedom of press. And certainly at the higher levels of the judiciary, a certain willingness by judges to defend journalistic freedom. So I would say advice number one is to make full use of your legal and constitutional rights and to insist on them,

and to be a pain in the ass when it comes to filing cases. So if government does something that is ultra-virus of the constitution, something that violates the rule of law, something that violates fundamental constitutional principles. I think we should not shy away from taking the fight to them, going to court, raising this as an issue, and insisting that the judiciary hear us and rule in favor of the Constitution. So I think that's lesson number one. Lesson number two is to not stint in terms of showing solidarity with one another.

Media everywhere is pretty divided. And I would say that, you know, you have, you know, journalists of all stripes and Hughes, different ideologies, different political leanings. Even in the country like India, where you have some state governments that are controlled by the opposition, it's quite possible that a pro-BJP, a pro-Modi journalist might get into trouble in a state that is run by the Congress. And I think it's important for the rest of the journalistic community to stand by journalists who are under attack, who are subjected to lawfare, regardless of their political leanings. I think that an injury to one is an injury to all here. If we allow attacks

on journalists to pass, cases to be filed for what they've written. Then I think it exposes everybody in danger. There are, of course, extreme cases. If you have somebody who's openly inciting violence, inciting hatred, then the ordinary laws can and will apply. But I'm talking about where journalists are harassed or subjected to frivolous cases simply because government of the day doesn't like them. I think we need to stand with each other.

Third learning, I think, is to not give into the temptation of converting our independent journalism into activist journalism. I think that we need to stay firm. We need to stick to our own

trade craft and to report independently, report objectively, report fearlessly, ask questions of everybody to check, double check,

triple check facts before we publish them, not given to the sort of confirmation bias if there is a piece of news or a video during the

rounds that shows the government in bad light. There's always urge or rush to the press with that. I think we need to be ultra-cautious in terms of checking and cross-checking things. So I would say that's another learning. And at fourth, I think to also extend the concept of solidarity globally. So I think that if journalists in India are under a fact, then it helps us when colleagues abroad raise their voices. And similarly, you know, whether it's Palestinian journalists in Gaza who are being attacked, I think it's important for

Indians to raise their voice or to speak out in defense of journalists anywhere else in the world, whether that's in China or Russia, who are being harassed or intimidated or imprisoned for the work they do. So I think that these are broadly speaking some of the learnings that I would say we have internalized in India. I don't know if South Africa can offer any valuable lessons at the moment because I think we in such a complex stage of our own democratic journey. for the last 30 years. I think the one thing we've managed to do was to make sure

that the executive was not able to usurp authority of the judiciary. It attempted to, it tried, and the resistance, which I think is rooted in this anti-apartheid struggle idea where people can see the signs of either an authoritarian regime, or a fascist regime or an undemocratic regime quite early on. South Africans are very attuned to the warning signs of non-democracy, for want of a better word. And so it was able to resist and use civil society and use investigative journalists

and alert both people inside and outside of South Africa as to what was happening. So I think the critical thing there was to be able, to build a broad movement of resistance to this idea that the executive could be unaccountable or that the executive could make all decisions for all people living in South Africa without any kind of defense of its decision-making processes. And you particularly, I'm talking about corruption in procurement, right? because that was the first sign of of state capture and why we needed to basically resist. And so I think the idea of regulatory oversight, legislative oversight is so critical and so important,

but so to social movement mobilization and journalism, as the FOTS said, holding power to account. And in the absence of that, then it becomes really difficult to make sure that you don't land up in an almost authoritarian regime. So I would like to think that we have managed to avoid that for now. We don't know what will happen after our next set of elections for the first time in South Africa the ruling party lost its majority. So basically we have a government that is governing through a coalition of different parties. And so what that means for accountability of the executive, an executive of a coalition is something that will be interesting to see, I think, play out over the next few years.

People have to be old, creative, courageous. And we see wonderful examples of that. The most important thing that's happened in America in 2026 was the remarkable two-month-long resistance. of the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul to ICE agents. They showed extraordinary discipline in the face of provocation right to the point of two people being murdered by federal agents in the street. They kept themselves together. They kept pushing and they won an important victory when ICE was forced to back down to some degree. It's a perfect. It's a perfect. reminder of what citizens can achieve and it has had extraordinary political import if the mega coalition loses the midterm elections a major reason will be that their momentum was broken in the streets

of minneapolis i think it's as beautiful and powerful a moment as the montgomery bus boycott 70 years ago last winter or Gandhi's salt march across India 95 years ago. These examples from the past illustrate how authoritarian policies can be challenged and overcome. Maria del Carmen Verdu There are some signs around the world that this kind of policies cannot endure forever. In fact, I think one of the most important human rights issues in the world nowadays, which is the Palestine genocide, is gaining visibility and is taking roots around the planet in countries that we thought they would never think about the Palestine people as something valuable to defend. And history is very difficult to predict, but I insist on this. Here we were able to survive the most brutal dictatorship in Latin America with 30,000

Disapparesidas, and the word Disapparecido is said in Spanish throughout the world because it was a concept that we were able to impose internationally with the hard work of the human rights organizations, especially mothers and grandmothers, Madres de Plaza de Mago. And here we have presently a very sad issue because most of mothers and grandmothers are dying. They are 94, 96, 97 years old. And so the people, younger people, my generation,

I'm about to be 68. I'm not the youngest, of course, but especially young people are very, they have the knowledge, they understand, that they have to take their place. And that keeps us going. I would say the big story of Indian journalism in the last decade has been the vibrancy on the digital front.

And here it's interesting that Modi's repression and authoritarian drive and his sort of tendency to intimidate and harassed journalists has not led to the freelancer and the small digital platforms getting bullied and spinking away. It's rather led to the online. opposite. I think there's been a there's been a thousand flowers blooming as far as digital news content is concerned. You have you have reporters who are purged from TV channels who set up their own YouTube venture. The more that Modi has bared his fangs, the greater has been

the willingness of digital media to to take him on. It's a difficult task. Cases have been filed. We've seen colleagues who've actually been jailed on false charges. We've seen you know, a pretty sweeping take-down orders against some platforms, a lot of content. But that hasn't deterred journalists in the independent digital space from carrying on doing the work they do. So I think the greatest lesson we've learned in South Africa is that you never give up your vigilance, right? That you never stop monitoring and investigating and reporting and mobilizing around the issues that affect your community, or your country, and that it's perfectly okay to challenge executive power. And it's perfectly okay to be critical of a legal system if it doesn't serve the poor.

And it's totally acceptable to ask the legislature to do their job. I think there was, you know, in the first few years of our democracy, with Mandela being the president of the country, it was this idea that you shouldn't be critical of a democratically elected black majority party because we fought so many years under apartheid. And the movement that I was part of at that time said, no, we are going to challenge you because your policy on HIV AIDS is irrational and it's killing people. And so quite early on the Treatment Action campaign was taking on executive power

an executive decision-making of the South African government, and many groups and many trade unions and many faith groups were shocked that you would have a civil society organization shortly after 1994 taking on President Mandela and then his successor, President Ibeki. But I think that's the point, right, of politics is that the work that we do can be seen as unpopular, but you have to do what is morally right and what is legally required of you, irrespective of who's in power, it's not personal, and irrespective of who's presiding over a case. That was Fatima Hassan, closing out this ideas episode

about authoritarian politics and how to resist them. Thank you to our guests. My name is Siddharth Vardarajan, and I am a founding editor of The Wire, which is a website, news website in India. My name is Maria Del Carmen Verdou, and I am a human rights activist at Correpi, which is the coordinate against police

and institutional repression in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My name is Fatima Hassan. I'm based in South Africa, and I am a human rights lawyer and activist with the Health Justice Initiative. My name is Bill McKibben. I'm an author and environmentalist, and educator.

This episode was produced by Nahed Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.