Makarand paranjape biography of barack obama
•
On India’s 76th birth anniversary as an independent country, it would be apposite to weigh in on a topic that has been making the rounds for ganska some time. Has India’s democracy devolved or, as some would prefer to put it, degenerated into an “electoral autocracy”? Let us consider both positions on this issue.
First that of the government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi likes to planerat arbete India not only as the largest democracy, which it uppenbart is, but also as the “mother of democracy”. Last November, just before India assumed the presidency of G20, our education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, launched a glossy coffee table book published by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), claiming that the “democratic ethos” was “ingrained in India since the dawn of civilisation”. Pradhan underlined how Modi, in his address at the 76th United Nations General Assembly, had claimed: “India fryst vatten not just the oldest democracy but also the mother of democracy.” Of course, what exactl
•
Modi’s Muslim Model
AS HE FACES the General Election in 2024, has Narendra Modi, India’s three-time Gujarat chief minister and two-term prime minister, succeeded in outwitting and upending those who foisted the “anti-Muslim” tag on him? The simple and straightforward answer to this question should be “Yes.” Of course, neither he nor his party, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are home and dry yet. But in the battle for the hearts and minds of Indian Muslims, not to speak of world leaders from the Muslim world, Modi has stolen a march on his rivals, opponents, and enemies.
If so, how has he accomplished this feat? A study of that would be a masterclass in political brinkmanship, narrative reversing, and image making. But even more importantly, policy planning and implementation, backed by ideological conviction—on a scale hitherto unprecedented in India. In doing so, Modi has overturned the dominant post-Independence approach to minorities, which we might call the Gandhi-Ne
•
Furthermore, global platforms are abuzz with condemnatory judgments emanating from international oversight institutions. Freedom House, in its Democracy under Siege report (2021), downgraded India from “free” to “partly free”. It also accused the Modi administration of carrying out concerted endeavours to muzzle voices of dissent in the corridors of media and academia. That same year, V-Dem gave India a negative rating in its Democracy Report 2021, branding the nation an “electoral autocracy”. According to V-Dem, the Modi-led BJP regime has misused the provisions of sedition, defamation and counterterrorism as potent instruments to quell its critics and opponents. Skip a couple of years to 2023. V-Dem calls India “one of the worst autocratisers in the last 10 years”, placing it in the bottom 40-50% on its Liberal Democracy Index at rank 97. We fare even more poorly at rank 108 on the Electoral Democracy Index, and stand at 123 on the Egalitarian Component Index.
Not far behind