Today, Explained - Dinner and a Modi

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Despite US concerns over the decline of Indian democracy and human rights, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is getting a prestigious state dinner from the Biden administration. Sadanand Dhume and Irfan Nooruddin explain. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Washington, D.C. today to a very warm welcome from President Biden. Bands and an honor guard on the south lawn of the White House. Later, bilateral talks. Even later, a state dinner. The Biden administration calls this a meeting of two of the world's biggest and oldest democracies. But outside of the White House biggest and oldest democracies. But outside of the White House, protesters disputed that characterization. India is not the world's largest democracy. India is the world's most populated country that holds elections. That's

it. Democracy is dead in India. India under Modi is backsliding on things that democracies prize, like human rights and press freedoms and independent courts. So why has President Biden opened his arms to Modi? It's all coming up on Today Explained. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs.

And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, and here is Secretary of State Antony Blinken previewing Narendra Modi's visit. Simply put, we see this defining relationship as a unique connection between the world's oldest and largest democracies with a special obligation now to demonstrate that our governments can deliver for and empower all of our citizens.

Sadanand Dume is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Sadanand, Antony Blinken has spoken. What say you? Why is this visit so significant? It's significant for a few reasons. First of all, this is Modi's first state visit to Washington. This is only the third state visit that we've seen in President Biden's term. So the level of kind of ceremonial significance has been elevated. Prime Minister Modi is also going to

address a joint session of Congress. He has done that before. But this is the first time, you know, if you had to sum up, that the U.S. has really pulled out all the stops for Prime Minister Modi. The relationship between the United States and Modi has not always been simple. There was a point in relatively recent history when Modi was banned from visiting the United States. What caused that? So we have to go back in history to 2002 when Modi was the chief minister, which is the equivalent of governor, of the Indian state of Gujarat. And there were horrific Hindu-Muslim riots that occurred on his watch as chief minister in which Muslims suffered disproportionately.

They were basically anti-Muslim riots, I think would be a better way to describe them. And at the time, the feeling in the US was that Modi as chief minister had, at best, not done enough to curb the violence, and at worst, been complicit in it. And that led to them evoking a rarely used, in fact, I don't think it's ever been used before or since, law to revoke his visa. But all this was, you know, before he became prime minister. And once he became prime minister, things were smoothed over very quickly. Why then or how then did he get back in the good graces of the U.S.? I mean, quite simply because he's the prime minister of India and India matters a lot. Okay, fair enough. Leave the answer there. Why does India matter so much to the United States?

Well, for a few reasons. And I think the most obvious reason is that in Washington, many people view India through the prism of China. And if you look around Asia, you see only one other country with a comparable population. In fact, India recently overtook China to become the world's most populous nation. It has more than 1.4 billion people. It has a large and rapidly growing economy.

It overtook the UK not long ago to become the world's fifth largest economy at market exchange rates. It has a long disputed boundary with China. So not only does it have a border with China, but it also has a very tense and fraught relationship with China. There was violence on that border three years ago in 2020, which claimed the lives of 20 Indian soldiers and at least four Chinese soldiers. In the remote western Himalayas, there is little evidence of what led Indian and Chinese soldiers to the worst violence in decades. India and China share the world's longest unmarked border. Both sides have increased their military presence in recent months with tension rising over who owns what land.

And all this means that together the U.S. and India share an interest in ensuring that China does not emerge as the hegemon of Asia? If I had to point to one thing driving it, I would say the one-word answer is China. What does the United States want from India? What does it want India to do? It wants India to be a capable potential counterweight to China. And there are a couple of elements to that. Mr. Prime Minister, there's so much that our countries can and will do together. potential counterweight to China. And there are a couple of elements to that. Mr. Prime Minister, there's so much that our countries can and will do together.

And I'm committed to making a U.S.-India partnership among the closest we have on Earth. It wants India to be able to defend itself on its border with China. It wants China to feel that there is another important power in Asia with which it shares a boundary so that China can't simply move all its attention to the Pacific and to East Asia. It has to kind of keep one eye on its Himalayan border with India. It wants in an ideal world for India to be a kind of an example for other countries in the region to say that, look, you can have a fast growing economy in a democratic system. You don't need to become an autocracy like China. So for various reasons, the U.S. sees India's rise as being in its own interest. You cite India as a democracy, China as an authoritarian country. India is less of a democracy now than it was when Narendra Modi became prime minister.

If you look at the economist chart of democracies around the world, what you will see and what you've surely seen is that India has been sliding, sliding, sliding into less democratic territory. Can you tell me why, when the international community looks at India, it says over the last decade it has backslid into something that is different than a pure democracy. I'll tell you something that's a little bit interesting, Noel. Every time I write an article, which is, you know, fairly often about different aspects of India's democratic backsliding, I get an enormous amount of pushback from Indians on social media. And the reason for that is that if you look at India purely in terms of voting and in electoral terms, Indian democracy is actually quite robust. The last general election in 2019, there were more than 600 million people voted. It has a high turnout rate. The turnout rate is somewhere in the mid-60s. Governments change peacefully. So if your measure of democracy is the ability of people to go out and vote and change their

government, India's democracy, in fact, is and it remains quite robust. But when we're looking at democracy, what we mean really is liberal democracy. And by liberal democracy, we mean are the institutions that are designed to check government excesses. The media is weak. A large number of television channels I characterize as lapdogs more than watchdogs. A lot of the newspapers are too scared to be critical. You do see columns here and there. It's not as though you see no criticism. But I would argue that on Modi's watch, many journalists have been cowed and the quality of the public discourse has declined sharply.

The courts are often not willing to take unpopular stances that would challenge the government. And the bureaucracy has really become an instrument of the ruling party rather than standing apart as an independent party. If you take those three things together, the state of judiciary, the state of the media, and the state of the bureaucracy, it means that there are far fewer checks on Modi as a prime minister than there were on his predecessor, Manmohan Singh. And that's really at the heart of people's concern about the quality of Indian democracy. Why does India being less of a democracy than it was a decade ago seem to matter so much to the United States? Well, I mean, if you care about democracy, you have to care about India, right?

I mean, you're talking about one-sixth of the world's population. Let me put it this way. If India is a liberal democracy, it means democracy is a mass consumption good on our planet. It's like a Toyota. If India is not a democracy or not a liberal democracy, it means that democracy is a luxury good, like a Louis Vuitton bag. And that is a sort of, you know, it's a fundamental and profound difference for the whole bag. And that is a sort of, you know, it's a fundamental and profound difference for the whole planet. And that's why the U.S. cares about it. That was Siddhanand Dume of The Wall Street Journal. So India being a democracy may seem like a minor thing. There are a lot of democracies out there these days. But at one point, about a generation ago, India very nearly became something

else other than a democracy in a very dramatic fashion. And we're going to tell you about it coming up next. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself.

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, friend of the show. Irfan Nuruddin teaches at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. Irfan, what was Indian democracy supposed to be like? Was it supposed to be like the one we have here in the U.S.? empire, it immediately forms a constitutional democracy that is universal suffrage in a very

poor country with large amounts of illiteracy, a big urban-rural divide, but that was fundamentally multi-religious and multi-ethnic. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. And, you know, at the risk of being provocative, I mean, one should remember that in 1947, in large parts of the United States, African Americans' right to vote was still not fully protected. It wasn't in 65 and the Voting Rights Act that we really get to the same level of universal suffrage that Indians had enjoyed for 20 years prior to that. So what I would say the precious thing about India is that it was an example of a developing

country, a newly independent country, showing that electoral liberal democracy could survive and flourish in a country that was in many ways fighting against every order. It was a poor country. It was a multi-religious, multi-ethnic, a cacophony of beautiful languages, you know, 500 plus dialects. And yet elections became a festival. So that was what India's election symbolized for the world, that it wasn't just that democracy wouldn't just be something that could happen in rich European, North American, largely white countries, but could in fact be something that is truly global. And if we lose that, we lose an example that has served as an inspiration for people around

the world, that they too can create functioning democracies. In the United States, as you know, many people, a lot of mainstream analysts believe that the big risk to our democracy was Donald Trump, was his apparent belief that democracy was less important than his predecessors believed it was. And it makes me wonder about India. Is Narendra Modi the reason that India is backsliding? It is true that under Mr. Modi's majority BJP government, the last 10 years have seen, I would argue, an acceleration of some of the forces that undermine democracy, both in India, but would do so anywhere in the world. This larger majoritarianism, the notion, as with Mr. Trump, that there's a true Indian, right, in this case, a Hindu upper caste Indian whose voices are more important,

whose preferences are more important than other people. And maybe just to again draw that analogy of willingness to use and demonize when convenient the media, the bureaucracy, demonize it when it seems to be trying to be autonomous and independent, use it when it's willing to do its, you know, the government's bidding. For instance, you know, the current government has made it a talking point. They've introduced a whole new lexicon in which to discuss the media. So common terms often used by parts of the government and those who defend the government is to refer to independent journalists as prostitutes. We're all media people. Prostitute.

A term created to combine press with the notion of a prostitute, someone who sells themselves for money. Media houses have been scrutinized by the tax authorities, often with very unclear mandates. An explosive escalation amid the BBC Modi film Rao. The BBC earlier this year had its offices raided after it aired a documentary about the riots in Gujarat in 2002 when Mr Modi was the chief minister of that state. Tax officials aided by top financial department officials swooped down on multiple BBC India offices in Delhi and Mumbai. No clear reason for what the alleged fence was other than to send a signal that even someone like the BBC

was not immune to government interference for doing journalistic work. But Mr Modi didn't invent that playbook. India's real crisis with democracy arguably was in 1975 when long-time predecessor Indira Gandhi declared emergency, suspended the constitution. Who is Indira Gandhi and what exactly happened when she was leading India? Indira Gandhi was India's first female prime minister. She is also the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India's most prominent independence leaders and India's first prime minister. Democracy itself is different in every single country, even of the West. So each country

has to find what is most suitable. Now we want a democracy which makes the people's voice heard. Mrs. Gandhi is installed as prime minister. She's a young woman. She's installed because the Congress party's leadership thinks that they can essentially use her as a puppet. But she proves to be quite stronger, harder to manipulate than they had hoped for. And what it does is that it breaks for her a trust. She doesn't trust those around her. And we see a steady centralization of power in the early 1970s, where she is really trying to accumulate power for herself, not necessarily

because she was authoritarian, but because those public institutions were no longer to her liking. The president has proclaimed emergency. It comes to a breaking point in 1975 when she declares what is called the emergency. This is nothing to panic about. I am sure you are all conscious of the deep and widespread conspiracy which has been brewing. Under a new development today, citizens lose their right to appear before courts of law if arrested under the emergency. A suspension of the constitution, a suspension of habeas corpus, an attack on the press that's quite vicious, unprecedented in India's history, widespread imprisonment of political opponents. These were the people who were destroying democracy.

Destroying democracy? Destroying democracy? Destroying democracy. How? Because, well, I'm sorry that you people have such short memories, but because they felt they could not win an election, they said we must take the battle to the streets. This lasts for a year and a half before she calls for elections and really critically loses those elections. It's a miscalcul half before she calls for elections and really critically loses those

elections. It's a miscalculation of epic proportions for her, where she thinks she's so popular that she'll win these elections. But in fact, the Indian electorate says, no, you're done. What you just did was a step too far, right? We take our democracy very seriously. She does come back to power in 1980 and begins to fuel some of this religious extremism again playing in a playbook that has been followed by her successors and tragically is assassinated in 1984. Mrs. Gandhi was apparently shot at her home in New Delhi by two members of her own security guard.

Reports are that she was shot eight to ten times with four bullets striking her in the lower abdomen. So a really complicated individual, for many a great leader, the first woman leader, the first woman defense minister of the country, right, but also with this really ugly stain of her work in undermining India's democracy, but also then maybe suggesting that India's democracy was more resilient than we worried it would be then and arguably is more resilient than we give it credit for being now. What you've just described, what Indira Gandhi did, is arguably worse than what Modi has done. Suspending the constitution is like a huge move. Indian democracy comes back from it. They vote her out of office. Democracy wins. It holds. And we come to today. And I must now ask you, having seen Indian democracy recover once very spectacularly, what happens if it doesn't recover this time? What do Indians lose? What does the

world lose? We lose, in the worst-case scenario, one true example of a developing country with a genuinely multi-religious, multi-ethnic, competitive multi-party system, right? So a lot of multi is in there, and that's deliberate, because India's true strength is its diversity. And there are very few examples around the world in which that kind of diversity coexists with a functioning electoral democracy. But the challenge today, and this is true around the world, is that today's challenge to democracy doesn't run through suspending elections, but runs rather by recognizing that elections can be won in a free and fair manner by appealing to very majoritarian tendencies, right? So you appeal to the majority religion, the majority ethnicity, and you use the institutions of modern democracy,

a legislature, the courts, to in fact instantiate a set of rules and laws that protect the majority and that subjugate the minority. So what does a future India that continues to have elections, that continues to even have competitive, noisy, messy elections, but in which 200 plus million of its citizens no longer feels welcome in society, no longer feels like they're safe in society, no longer feels like they can dress the way they wish, live the lives that they wish to live. It also strikes me that there's a lot at stake here, not just for India, but for the rest of the world. If Indian democracy fails under Modi, or even under whoever comes after Modi, what does it mean for the larger cause of democracy around the world?

Everything from undermining, in many ways, the rhetorical framing of the conflict with China. Mr. Biden has made democracy versus autocracy the organizing principle of his foreign policy. So what does a partnership with India as an increasingly important partner, but where democracy is not as protected, mean for the credibility of American foreign policy? On the flip side, it gives China a really powerful talking point. China wants to represent its form of governance as a legitimate way of thinking about what it means to be a functioning state in the developing world, sort of really frame this as being the West has a particular point of view, but ours is just legitimate. India right now is an inconvenient fact for the Chinese government as a developing country in the same region, but with a functioning democracy. A loss of that undermines that.

But maybe more importantly, one cannot underestimate the importance of India's legacy, 75 years of elections, of democracy, in being a beacon of hope for brown and black people around the world that were seeking their own elections. and the founding fathers here served as inspiration for Nehru and Gandhi and Mr. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution. India's constitution and elections have served as a beacon of hope for people in the African continent, throughout Asia, and around the world. And we need to think of that as being a global public good that India has served as, and as such needs to be protected. It's a world resource. And India should be justifiably proud of their democracy. But as is true around the world, we should also be asking hard questions so that we can preserve that legacy. Thank you. Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain, Mother of Two, Siona Petros, Patrick Boyd, and my co-host, Sean Ramos-Furham. Our supervising producer is Amina El-Sadi, and our EP is Miranda Kennedy.

We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder and Noam Hassenfeld. I'm Noelle King. Today Explained is distributed to public radio stations across these United States by WNYC in New York, and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.