Modi Comes to America
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Here we go again. Supreme Court decision day, the rulings come down to 10:00 AM, which is now, so we are watching their feed for the major decisions, we're waiting on student loan forgiveness, affirmative action, and college admissions, denying business services to gay customers, and more.
We will let if anything comes down in these coming minutes, if anything does. We have Elie Mystal, Justice correspondent for The Nation, standing by again to explain and apine on, whatever comes down. He'll be on after he has a little time to read through a decision, a little later in the show if we get any of these big rulings, but I will read the details for you on any big decisions as soon as they come in, which should be any minute if today turns out to be the day.
The Supreme Court works in mysterious ways. They could tell us what decision they're going to release on what day, but they don't. Supreme Court decisions aren't the only high-stakes things happening right now. For many people around the world, there was serious cognitive dissonance you might say yesterday, seeing the pageantry, and extreme making nice that President Biden engaged in when he welcomed India's controversial leader Narendra Modi to Washington yesterday.
Modi who has widely been seen as a model for Donald Trump in the way he was leading India toward becoming an illiberal democracy and cultivating what you might call a majoritarian nationalism, Hindu nationalism in the case of India, helping show Trump how to rally white and Christian nationalists in this country to feel they are victims of racial and religious minorities.
Here, Biden hopes that he and Modi are forging an important alliance against economic and military threats from China, and also pushing back on Russian aggression, especially in Ukraine right now, obviously, but Modi yesterday to a lot of people's eyes, was kind of non-committal. Yesterday, the Prime Minister addressed Congress, took questions at a press conference, well, two, and dined with President Biden.
With a 76% approval rating at home, Prime Minister Modi could be said to be consistently the most popular leader in the world, according to comparative polling by Morning Consult.
On that illiberalism, many news outlets here in the US have reported on his crackdown against opposition leaders, the press in his country, and human rights violations against India's Muslim minority, also in the crosshairs.
On Tuesday, more than 70 Democratic members of Congress signed a letter to President Biden that reaffirmed support for India but also asked the President to raise questions about these areas of concern. Joining us now to break down the Prime Minister's visit, what the US hopes to gain from India as an ally at this moment, and how the US will deal with these concerns is Irfan Nooruddin, Professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Professional Nooruddin, welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for coming on with us.
Irfan Nooruddin: Thank you, Brian. It's good to be here.
Brian Lehrer: What is India getting out of this visit and what is the US?
Irfan Nooruddin: India gets recognition on the world stage that it has arrived and the mood in India is that this is India's moment. This in some sense is its coming-out party in Washington on the biggest stage available. For India, there's a lot in the announcements made over the last 48 hours that have been long-standing wishlist. The relationship with India for the United States has deepened and expanded and really been bipartisan.
It started with President Bush. Obama continued it. Mr. Trump continued it, and now President Biden has doubled down on what his predecessors had invested in. What India wanted all along was much more economic activity driven to India desperately in need of jobs, of new technologies. They've wanted to see America be willing to take additional steps in terms of the defense cooperation by providing technology transfer for some of the most sensitive military technologies, make some of America's fancier defense toys available to India, and a lot of that is on display over the last day and a half and I think we're going to continue to see some announcements coming out.
For the United States, what you have is a very tricky partner. India has 1.4 billion people, there's a tremendous people-to-people connection, a large influential Indian American diaspora that he's very keen to see the United States be more systematic and more multi-dimensional in its relationship with India, but India doesn't fall into the natural camps that the United States is used to. The US likes to paint the world in foreign policy, as you're with us or against us. The good guys and the bad guys, very old-fashioned Western movie kind of framing.
India historically was non-aligned. The current government prefers to call it multi-aligned. They're very big on what they call strategic autonomy. All of this, I think you should think of the United States as essentially saying, "Hey, we're going to fandom to the ego and to the sensitivities of the current prime minister of the Indian society at large right here. You want to be recognized as being a serious partner, we're going to roll out the red carpet, but behind the scenes, I expect that there's a lot of conversation saying, "Five years from now, where does this relationship go? If things come to a head with China, what exactly are you going to do?"
We don't have a lot of detail on that, Brian, and I think that's for me, really the proof of whether or not some of the transactionalism, of ignoring the human rights concerns, not talking about democracy pointedly, providing a lot of military hardware, how pressuring American companies to make announcements about big investments in India. Was all of that worthwhile? We'll only know from an American perspective if, in fact, they'll manage to get out of India a level of partnership that they haven't been able to do so so far.
Brian Lehrer: Well, what would that look like, if Modi were to return in kind what the United States is looking for, as you just described it? I think he is widely seen as not having done that yesterday in any of his statements. What is it that he would say? Or what is it that he would commit to, especially with respect to China?
Irfan Nooruddin: Let's start actually with the thing that they didn't talk about yesterday, which is Ukraine and Russia. They talked about it in the broadest possible terms. They talked about the need for diplomacy and peace, but Ukraine was a wake-up call, I think for a lot in Washington. For many in Washington, who had basically bought into the notion that India was going to be this big strategic partner, Obama referred to it as the defining relationship for the 21st-century language that has literally been copy-pasted into every presidential comment on India in the last decade. As a professor, I would call it plagiarism, but the other speech writers have a job to do.
The point is that, that has been the sentiment, and then comes March of 2022, Russia invades Ukraine in a unilateral act of aggression. India refuses to condemn it. It votes against [unintelligible 00:07:45] on resolutions in the United Nations. It does not join the sanctions regime that the United States and Western Europe cobbled together. It continues to buy massive amounts of Russian oil right out. The United States, essentially, I think there was a lot of pre-aggressive diplomacy in the first part of that in the spring of 2022, and the Indias basically told Washington, "No, not going to play along. Russia is a long-standing friend and partner. We're not going to jump ship at this point."
I think what the Biden administration essentially had to decide at that point was, let's not sweat the current moment, let's focus on the big picture. What would we want to hear going forward? I think we'd want to know, on a very concrete level, what assurances India has provided Washington, in terms of what it would actually do. It's one thing to say, "Okay, let's go buy a bunch of American weapons so that we are better prepared to deal with China in India's northeast, China's western border," but what happens in the Indian Ocean? What happens in the Pacific? Should there be a kinetic military confrontation between the US and China over say, Taiwan?
What exactly would India be doing? Would it be providing basing logistic support to the American military? Would it actually join over that? I'm not suggesting that any of these things are necessarily good. I'm not China hawk. I don't want us to be going to war with China, but in a world in which this is all being framed as being a defining partnership-- Modi yesterday addressed a joint session of Congress for the second time, joining just five other world leaders to have had that honor, including Winston Churchill.
If you compare the relationship to the United Kingdom, multi-dimensional on everything under the sun, really a clear notion that these are deep interests that are aligned, you don't even have to talk about them explicitly, we understand each other. If you're going to afford the same kind of rhetoric in terms of discussing the relationship with India, then the question is, are you actually getting those sorts of assurances that India will stop buying Russian weaponry, that India will begin, even if not publicly, privately begin to disengage with the Russian economy.
The truth is, we haven't seen any of those announcements. We get a lot of assurances that they're having serious conversations behind the scene. That's fine. Diplomacy works best when it's not on the front pages of the newspaper. In a democratic society, we have the right to ask such questions, and I'm glad we are.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we want to invite your calls on this, particularly if you are an Indian American or anybody else with a tie to India. Some of you heard the end of the show yesterday, heard us do one of our occasional call-ins for immigrants from anywhere, on news from your country of origin that you would like to share with a wider US audience. One of the interesting things we got yesterday was two opposite calls from Indian Americans about Modi as a leader, and whether he's a good leader and protecting India, from Islamist extremists, or whether he's a Hindu nationalist, trying to force discrimination on the Muslim minority there and pandering to hate and building his power and diminishing democracy in his country on the backs of that.
We had those two opposite takes from callers. Let's keep having that conversation. Indian Americans, if you want to call in, or anything on the foreign policy aspects, that the Presidents Biden and Modi were more focused on yesterday, and the global implications of the US-India relationship, any of that. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer, or send a text or a call-in line as well as a phone call, depending on what you choose.
212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, or any question for Irfan Nooruddin, a professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. I want to play a clip of Modi from yesterday in DC. He took and some would say maybe dodged a couple of reporter questions. Here is his response to a question on his human rights record for India's Muslims.
President Modi's Translator: Our government has taken the basic principles of democracy. On that basis, our constitution is made and the entire country runs on that. Our Constitution and our government, we have always proved that democracy can deliver. When I say deliver, this is regardless of caste, creed, religion, gender. There's absolutely no space for discrimination. When you talk of democracy, if there are no human values, and there is no humanity, there are no human rights, then it's not a democracy.
Brian Lehrer: I should have said before that clip that that would be Modi speaking through a translator, his voice did not change that much in the last day. There you go. Professor, how would you unpack that answer? It's rare enough that he even takes questions from reporters? I don't think he does that at home, but he took a couple of questions yesterday because he was in Washington, and that's what we do in the United States. What about the content of that answer?
Irfan Nooruddin: On the positive side, I think it's important to get on the record every world leader saying that they will respect their country's constitution. I appreciate the reinforcement and reaffirmation of India's constitutional values. It is an important signal for Mr. Modi to say that there is no room for discrimination. The ground reality in India is that the situation for India's minorities is quite fraught.
This is not because of a particular government policy and look, at the end of the day, the challenge to democracy around the world, in the United States, in Western Europe, all around the world, I studied democratization for a living, is no longer a full frontal attack on elections. Those days of military coups are rare. There are pretty much gone except in a couple of isolated, Myanmar being one sad example. Outright ballot box stuffing and stealing of elections on election day, still rare.
What we're beginning to see in the playbook of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, of Erdoğan in Turkey, of Bolsonaro in Brazil, of Mr. Trump in the United States, and many would argue of the Modi regime in India is the use of lots of other ways of cowing your opposition. In India's case, India's World Press rankings has slipped to 161st in the world. The particular value is not important, whether it's 161st, or 150th, or 170th, but for a country that healing has been a democratic partner, it should not be in the bottom 20 countries out of 180.
Why is that occurred? It's occurred because the tax authorities have shown a willingness to go out and intimidate independent media houses. In March, they raided the BBC offices in Delhi and Bombay, for no apparent reason other than the fact that the BBC had had the audacity of airing a documentary that talked about the 2002 riots in Gujarat during which Mr. Modi was the chief minister of the state, the Indian equivalent, as it were for governor. That's a very sensitive topic for the current government.
Lo and behold, the BBC officers get raided two days of having their papers dumped all over the place. Then no particular charges filed, no follow-up. This has occurred over and over.
There are more journalists in prison. The former CEO of Twitter, did a count in an interview recently saying that the government told him that unless they would seek to take down requests for content the government found objectionable, Twitter would be shut down in India. The Indian government has denied that allegation. Nonetheless, we have a situation in which public record suggests that India now accounts for most of the takedown requests on content made to YouTube, and to Twitter, and to Meta Facebook. [crosstalk]
Brian Lehrer: A majority of those takedown requests worldwide?
Irfan Nooruddin: Yes, worldwide. We don't need false equivalence. Is this as constraining and as a liberal space as say, China? No. No one should argue that and I would definitely not argue that. India's aspirations as an exemplar of liberal constitutional multi-ethnic multi-religious democracy is one of its great calling cards and contributions to the world. India proved that liberal democracy can flourish, not just exist, but flourish, be consolidated in a very poor country at a time when every political scientist writing on democracy would have said, "Not a chance."
Democracy is the hallmark of educated, industrialized, Western, (white Christian societies). You guys don't have a chance of making it work, they made it work. The bar is high and should be high. Indian should be proud that the bar is high. Civil society is under duress. The government has used a long-standing law, they didn't pass it, but they use a long-standing law governing foreign contributions to NGOs, the lifeblood of NGOs all over the world. They have cracked down on these significantly.
In 2014 when Mr. Modi came to be Prime Minister, there was some 20,000 NGOs in India that had what are called FCRA licenses. Five years later, that number had shrunk to about 7,000. About 13,000 NGOs no longer had their licenses. Some chose not to renew it, some had to deny it. Major think tanks in Delhi, have had their FCRA license pulled down with no reason, there's no appeals process for this.
Then finally, we had a habit a very societal level, a level of religious polarization that should disturb all friends of Indian, Indian citizens, Indian Americans, and everyone else. We have cow vigilantism, we had a spate of horrible lynchings, we have regular accounts of Muslim being beaten up for the simple offense of dating a Hindu girl. We have shops being burned. None of this requires that the government is sanctioning it, that the government is even orchestrating it.
In a democratic society, we do expect that the government will step up and say, "You can't do this. We'll use the full force of the law to punish perpetrators." If you don't do that, you create a culture of impunity in which people think they can get away with it, and it creates a state of fear for the minority. Again, I would ask your listeners to just imagine a counterfactual in the United States in which the Proud Boys and the KKK could act without any interference or any fear of accountability from the local authorities.
Would it require that that order had come from the president's office and go do this? No. We would say, why isn't the government doing more? If the government doesn't do more, it does begin to erode confidence in the state and with that erode confidence and legitimacy of democracy. It's a complex topic. We need to resist false binaries. Is Mr. Modi an authoritarian? No. He's going to put his party up for re-election, and those elections will be free and fair.
They'll be competitive. They'll be noisy and messy. It's really beautiful thing to watch. That can coexist with concerns about how 200 million Muslims are increasingly marginalized. In Mr. Modi's party, which is the single largest party in India's Parliament. There is not a single Muslim member of Parliament with a BJP ticket. Not one. Again, even the Republican Party, which has members of the minority population in the United States has Republican members of Congress and of the Senate. The BJP has zero.
At a time when India is tremendously diverse, when the Muslim population number is over 200 million, there are fewer Muslims in India's Parliament today than at any previous time in India's independence. That is a slow but inexorable marginalization of a very large population. Again, the BJP government did not invent that playbook. No Indian government has a really spotless record. If we were talking 10 years ago during the previous government's regime, I hope I would have been consistent and been equally critical of how that population-- the muslim population, was the most marginalized, the most impoverished part of Indian society, along with the lowest caste communities of Dullets.
There's plenty of blame to lay around. Unfortunately, in this conversation, and you heard it, I suspect, yesterday, you're going to hear it today can often get a very defensive response to anything that sounds critical of India or the government. Criticism is a hallmark of democracy. It's a hallmark of respect. We don't criticize those for whom we have no expectations.
I would ask Indian American community more generally, but everyone else, to say it is possible to both see the value of a strong US-India partnership to invest in it, to be serious about making it as multidimensional as we can, and saying that if the United States is truly a beacon for democracy around the world, really thinks of it as defining its foreign policy that it has not just the right, but the responsibility to make sure that its partners stay true to those values and principles.
One last comment on this. The US, unfortunately, has a very troubled and checkered history on this. We are very good at the rhetoric, but even a second year, a sophomore in an IR class at Georgetown, can give you the litany of American partners that are not democratic. Egypt, Turkey, [chuckles] once upon a time in the Cold War, a horrible record of overthrowing democratically elected governments simply because they were seen as being pro-Soviet and installing dictators because they were pro-American.
Brian Lehrer: Also, Saudi Arabia. We were just talking about [crosstalk] got a line on the show the other day.
Irfan Nooruddin: Yes, that terrible image of President Biden fist-bumping MBS sort of thing. I think we just need to do the hard work of saying-- in a real politic world, partnerships matter, and those partnerships are defined by strategic interests. Let's not abuse the language of democracy and human rights as if it's just some convenient fluffery we can throw into a joint statement. Let's hold those values seriously. If you don't want to talk about democracy, don't talk about it at all.
Don't just reduce those terms to being sound bites, because the damage done to civil society activists, democracy promotion activists around the world is quite incalculable when they realize that America will talk the talk but will not walk the walk. It leaves them on an island. It empowers their own governments to say, "How dare you criticize me? I just stood shoulder to shoulder with the American President, and they were praising our democracy. What are you talking about?" I think that's an underexplored dimension to sort of the cynicism with some of this language is used.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, to reset. If you're just joining us, we're talking about all the pageantry and the imagery and the nice language yesterday in Indian President Narendra Modi's state visit to Washington with President Biden and all the complexities of the United States trying to cultivate India as a partner in international relations, especially to form a stronger alliance against Russia and china in various ways in exchange for Biden looking the other way on all the ways that Modi is turning India into an illiberal democracy, in the ways that our guest was just listing in great detail.
What a bill of particulars for an indictment against Modi for turning his country into an illiberal democracy from our guest, Georgetown University's Irfan Professor Nooruddin, who is a professor of Indian politics there. I think we have the kind of caller who you were just anticipating getting. Let's see what Jay in Somerset County has to say. Jay, you're on WNYC. Hello.
Jay: Yes, hi. Good morning. I just wanted to say, let's compare and contrast what your guest is saying. Let's talk about the positives. Let's talk about the Muslims in India that have the freedoms that no other Muslim countries offers. I'll just give you a couple of examples. What is Muslim women who are able to drive, who can let their hair free? We just recently, I believe just a few years ago, the Modi government stopped this triple talaq. I'm not sure, Brian, if you know about this, where the Muslim women were just--
I believe that the man can say, "I want to give you a divorce," and boom, the divorce would happen in their court. Let's compare and contrast some of the negatives and positives. We're going to talk about negatives here. The neighboring country of Pakistan. Let's talk about how many Hindus are there currently, how many Hindu temples have been destroyed that were centuries old. Okay, so let's not just go in and talk about all the negatives that are happening over there, because there's plenty of positive, and that's what happens in a democracy, doesn't it? There are positives and negatives too and that's--
Brian Lehrer: Jay, let me jump in and ask you a follow-up question because if it was the President of Pakistan coming to the United States, we'd be having that conversation. We certainly have had that conversation, because Pakistan is one of those countries. I think our guest would agree that he was in the category of what he was referring to before, that have major undemocratic and human rights issues, but that the US considers an ally in some important ways and has looked the other way big time.
The visitor is the President of India and the power that the Indian government and the very large Hindu majority have to oppress the Muslims in that country, no matter what they may be doing to each other in the way that you're trying to describe. Go ahead.
Jay: Then the other part about all this is that since the Modi government has come in, let's talk about the prosperity that the minorities have enjoyed in the past just six years. There are plenty of interviews. Just Google it, and you will see the jobs that have been created. Let's not talk about what your guest is saying, that this is all darkness and all of that. No, let's talk about some of the negatives. I urge your guest to bring up some of the positives.
This is not a man that's bringing the whole country down and making them Hindu. After all, this is a Hindu-majority country and in a democracy, again, I repeat myself, this is what happens. You're not going to have all beds of roses all the time. Let's talk about both aspect of this.
Brian: Jay, thank you. Thank you very much. Professor Nooruddin, what do you think?
Irfan Nooruddin: I appreciate Jay's question, and I appreciate the civility with which it was posed and asked. I apologize if I sound negative. I grew up in India. I have family in India. I love the country. Half my family is Muslim, half my family is Catholic. I have Hindu cousins, first cousins, who are Hindu. My family is an example of the tremendous diversity and love that exists in Indian society. Yes, I teach Indian politics at Georgetown. I take students to India. I work with companies that seek to go into India. I work with Indian companies.
I've hosted members of the current government, the Finance Minister of India, the External Affairs Minister of India, members of the BJP party who are in government. I've hosted them at Georgetown. I've hosted them at the Atlantic Council, where I have an affiliation. I meet with them when I'm in Delhi. Please avoid the binary of he's saying something critical, therefore, he thinks it's all darkness and terribleness. It's not that.
There's a lot of really great things happening in India, and part of the reason that the United States is placing this long-term bet on India is because it recognizes the vitality and the vibrance of India's economy of that young population. A majority of India's 1.4 billion people is under the age of 30. This is a country where the best days economically are yet ahead of it.
Again, all of that can be true. I think one of the questions we have to ask ourselves, and we have conversations about democracy anywhere in the world is what is the burden on a democratic system to make sure that the most vulnerable and the most marginalized also understand their society and their government to be speaking for them? In the 1950s in the segregated pre-voting Rights Act America, there would've been a lot of people who would've said, America is a great country that's doing great things. It had just won World War II, and yet, America's democracy was not complete.
There were systematically millions of African-Americans who were denied their franchise legally granted to them but denied it because of the machinations of say the segregation of South. It took till 1965 when the Voting Rights Act to make good on the promises made. Even then, it was not complete. It remains incomplete. That doesn't mean that America's a terrible country. It doesn't mean that America's democracy wasn't a real thing in the 1940s.
It doesn't mean that America wasn't more democratic and more liberal than the Soviet Union, of course not. Please, Jay, hear me as saying, I agree with you. There's a lot of really positive things that are happening in India. I'm witness to them every time I go home. I'm witness to it every time I have a conversation with the leaders that you are talking about, including those I suspect you support quite a bit.
I am also aware that success and that prosperity is not equally distributed in the society. It is still the case that there are greater concerns for a minority in that population than for the majority. As you say, that is true of democracy but part of what a constitutional democracy does is try and level that playing field. The prime minister himself in his response to the journalist yesterday at the White House said there is no room for discrimination in India. Let's take him at his word and say, in that case, let's make that a reality because right now it is not a reality.
Brian Lehrer: Sure.
Irfan Nooruddin: Dalits are discriminated against systematically in the length and breadth of the country. Muslims are increasingly ghettoized and marginalized in the country. Hence, we have a lot of work to do and we should do it together but that doesn't start by saying, "Hey, there's no problems here. Let's only talk about the positives." Finally, I don't understand the comparison to Pakistan. Pakistan is not a functional democracy in the way that India is.
That's just a terrible bar. India should never compare itself to Pakistan on this particular dimension. Indian Muslims didn't come from Pakistan to India. They date their roots back as long as any Hindu Indian does, as any Catholic Indian does. Religious minorities are not in drawing the fruits of Indian democracy because India gives it to them. They enjoy the fruits of Indian democracy because they're Indian citizens. It is their right.
I think we just really have to keep that principle first and foremost. I also want to make clear that I'm not an apologist for attacks in the other direction. Muslim violence against Hindu populations should be condemned as fervently wherever it occurs in the world. The point is that the bar for having a democracy anywhere in the world is really high. It's super hard work. It's a daily reaffirmation of those principles.
It's much easier to ignore them. It just always sounds like you're the person being grumpy when everyone else is having a party, and you're the guy in the corner saying, "But, but, but--" and yet, I think that is part of what it means to want to believe in democracy and to just keep trying to make it better.
Brian Lehrer: Jay, thank you for your call. Let's get one more in here before we run out of time that I think is going to be from a very different point of view. Another Indian American caller, Rita. Rita, also in Somerset. Oh, Rita. Do you know Jay? Nevermind. You don't have to answer that question.
Rita: No. Actually, I'm an Indian American. I don't have any strong opinions about Modi. I disapprove of some of his actions. I'm aghast because when I left India 30 years ago, it was a very secular country and I find there is a growing change when I go back. When I went last year and I talked to people about this Ukraine problem and why India was supporting Russia law, and also, people turned around and also bought the fact that there is growing attacks against minorities.
A lot of people pointed out to me in India, including my relatives. They said, "Oh, at the time of the Bangladesh war when there was human right abuses by Pakistanis towards Bangladeshis, America supported Pakistan. It was Russia who came supported India because it was a blockade." I think the US had sent one of its destroyers. I'm not fully sure in the details but Russia stood by India at that time. That's one reason they say that India is reluctant to support America in this particular instance because Russia stood by them at that time.
The second thing people always say is that when 9/11 happened, there was an overreaction by the US and we opened Guantanamo Bay where we kept a lot of Muslim minorities. People who had allegedly committed offenses, which we feel like they were terrorists. There is a surveillance of Muslims in America, and they feel that when America is threatened and it does these things, then it's okay so it's hypocritical on America's part to actually criticize another country for trying to protect themselves.
This is the argument that I got from a lot of people. There is some truth to that, and I felt like I didn't have too much of a defense. I know we do have strong systems in this country of law and order but there was some overreactions. They feel that America should not be the moral high ground preaching to other people when it doesn't practice what it preaches.
Brian Lehrer: Rita, thank you for all that. As we run out of time Professor, I guess Rita's surprised at how much support she's seeing for Modi, among the people from her country of origin. It goes back to a stat that I cited in the intro according to Morning Consult, that polling company, he's got more consistent, overwhelming support than maybe any leader on Earth, about 75% popularity, even with everything that you laid out before.
Maybe that's because he really has the support of the majority, the Hindu majority that he's representing even though if he's seen as oppressive by Muslims, and according to a listener who just sent us a text, he's also opressing Christians. I don't know if you back that up but somebody wrote that in. What do you say to Rita and how do you account for the overwhelming popularity that he apparently has in the country? In a way, it's not a good sign for democracy anywhere if a leader by appealing to the majority in his country can be that popular while degrading democracy that much.
Irfan Nooruddin: A lot of things to unpack over there, Brian, and thank you, Rita, for calling in and for your question, and for your other caller who's engaged enough to send you a text. The anti-Christian violence in India is very real. It has grown in the last decade but it's always been around. It is less visible and less accounted for than the anti-Muslim violence partly because it's a much, much smaller numerical number but it's a significant and longstanding population. I went to Jesuit school in Bombay where I grew up, and the priests over there like to point out that there were Christians in India as early as 4AD, four years after Christ.
One of the priests would say there were Christians in India when they were still being fed to the lions in Rome. The notion that Christianity is not an Indian religion requires some speculation but the point is that there are attacks on churches, on priests that are quite horrible. The US Congress has actually paid some attention to this. There were hearings in 2016, the international religious freedom commission of the United States, which is a quasi-independent body of the US Congress has issued annual reports documenting this quite a bit. Anyone wanting to learn more should look up the commission on international religious freedom and look at the reports.
Brian Lehrer: There are certainly Indian American Catholic priests here, for example.
Irfan Nooruddin: There's a lot of that. I think the broad question--
Brian Lehrer: We just have a minute left.
Irfan Nooruddin: The question about the popularity is that he is genuinely popular. One of the things that Mr. Modi has done very successfully, and to his credit is really taking his message to the masses. He has a weekly call-in radio show. It's more one-way than call-in but it's a weekly radio show that's very, very popular. He's used social media extremely well, and he stays above the fray
It's easy to keep saying the Modi government does this, but I would prefer that we think about this as being you have a large and complex society. The society has some very disturbing trends in it in terms of majoritarianism. It is not that the government is necessarily doing anything, but maybe the bar over here is not that we hold the government, any government, accountable for only the things it does, but also for some of the things that it doesn't do.
The condemnation of violence against minorities, the defense of independent civil society, the defense of independent press, if those are signals that the government was sending, then I think it would allay a lot of concerns that people have. When the government is silent on those things, even as it's happening in society, then you get accusations and allegations of complicity and of a deliberate undermining.
I think this is actually something that the government could do for itself. It could take a lot of these concerns off the table by making really aggressive defense of minority rights, aggressive defense of press freedom, aggressive defense of civil society. That's a signal from the government, from Mr. Modi, that would really, I think, take his popularity, which is already incredibly high, to stratospheric levels. As long as he stays silent on those things, the questions and concerns will continue to come up.
Brian Lehrer: Irfan Nooruddin, professor of Indian politics at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed having you on today.
Irfan Nooruddin: I appreciate the time. Thank you.
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