India: Whose Fault?

INDIA

Whose Fault

Indian authorities recently arrested five activists on charges of inciting “caste-based” violence.

The activists, who included a poet, civil-rights campaigners and a law professor who is also a trade union organizer, were accused of spurring a public rally of Dalits, once known as “untouchables,” to turn into a riot that resulted in one death earlier this year.

But the allegations – which many saw as an exercise in distraction or false equivalency amid a more serious prosecution of far-right Hindus accused of murdering a journalist who crusaded against superstition – carried a hint of what British author George Orwell would call a “thought crime.”

“You know Maoist activities…the intellectual push that translates into violence,” a senior police official told the BBC.

The Indian Supreme Court was skeptical, ordering that the activists be placed under house arrest rather than jail and formally asking Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to explain why people were being locked up for speaking their minds.

“Dissent is the safety valve of democracy,” said Justice Dhananjaya Yeshwant Chandrachud, according to Al Jazeera. “If you don’t allow the safety valve, the pressure cooker will burst.”

Officials told the press that the activists were planning to assassinate Modi, the Times of India reported.

The case illustrates the ironies surfacing in India.

The world’s largest democracy is slated to overtake China as the biggest source of growth for oil demand by 2024, CNBC reported, a sign of how its economy is catching up with its mammoth population, the world’s second-largest. It’s planning its first manned space mission, the Times of India wrote. That will make India the fourth nation in the world to put a human in space. Not shabby. American tech giants Google and Amazon and Chinese tech giant Alibaba are competing for slices of the Indian retail market, the Economic Times reported. And this week, New Delhi inked a deal that strengthens its military partnership with the US, according to the New York Times.

Amid the heady climate, Modi recently told the World Economic Forum that climate change, terrorism (not only Islamists but also Maoists) and the backlash against globalization were the greatest threats to civilization.

But the arrested activists might point to other problems in India.

The central bank recently assessed Modi’s 2016 surprise “demonetization” – in which 500 and 1,000 rupee notes were removed from circulation in a bid to crack down on crime and corruption – in its annual report. It didn’t achieve its original goals, India’s Mint newspaper reported. And the economic chaos that resulted may have caused more than 1 million Indians to lose their jobs, Quartz reported.

India is also the most dangerous country for sexual violence against women, the Conversation said. A pattern of lynching – Hindu crowds have attacked and killed Muslims and Dalits suspected of eating beef, the product of cows that Hindus consider sacred – has also tarnished the country’s image, Tourism Minister K.J. Alphons said recently.

The fault lines that emerge in a changing society are hard to manage. But blaming someone for them doesn’t make them go away.

W