The Atlantic: India Is What Happens When Rich People Do Nothing

 Laying the blame for India’s coronavirus disaster—hundreds of thousands of new cases and thousands of deaths each day, both of which are certainly a huge underestimate—at Modi’s feet would be easy. Certainly, much can be attributed to his government: After the virus landed on India’s shores, he imposed a brutal shutdown—one that largely hurt the poorest and most vulnerable—without consulting the nation’s top scientists, yet did not use the time to build up the country’s health-care infrastructure; his administration offered little in the way of support for those who lost their job or income as a result of restrictions; and rather than taking advantage of low case counts in prior months, his government offered an air of triumphalism, allowing enormous Hindu religious festivals and crowded sporting competitions to go ahead. Modi’s ruling Hindu-nationalist party has been accused of hoarding lifesaving drugs, and has held mass election rallies cum super-spreader events that would make Donald Trump blush. (This is to say nothing of how the authorities have used the pandemic to invoke a draconian colonial-era law to restrict freedoms, while Modi’s government has at various points blamed minority groups for outbreaks, arrested questioning journalists, and, most recently, demanded that social-media platforms including Facebook and Twitter delete posts critical of the authorities, ostensibly as part of the fight against the virus.) [...]

India’s economic liberalization in the ’90s brought with it a rapid expansion of the private health-care industry, a shift that ultimately created a system of medical apartheid: World-class private hospitals catered to wealthy Indians and medical tourists from abroad; state-run facilities were for the poor. Those with money were able to purchase the best available care (or, in the case of the absolute richest, flee to safety in private jets), while elsewhere the country’s health-care infrastructure was held together with duct tape. The Indians who bought their way to a healthier life did not, or chose not to, see the widening gulf. Today, they are clutching their pearls as their loved ones fail to get ambulances, doctors, medicine, and oxygen. [...]

Many things went wrong then, and many people were responsible: Safety systems that could have slowed down or partially contained the leak were all out of operation at the time of the accident; gauges measuring temperature and pressure in various parts of the plant, including the crucial gas-storage tanks, were so notoriously unreliable that workers ignored early signs of trouble; the cooling unit—necessary to keep chemicals at low temperatures—had been shut off; the flare tower, designed to burn off methyl isocyanate escaping from the gas scrubber, required new piping.What has happened since is perhaps more instructive. Indians have by and large forgotten the tragedy. The people of Bhopal have been left to deal with its fallout. Richer Indians have never had to visit the city, so they have ignored it. Yet their apathy signals a choice, a decision to look the other way as their fellow Indians suffer.

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Social Europe: Covid-19 in India—profits before people

 The incomprehensible decision to allow a major Hindu religious festival—the Mahakumbh Mela, held every 12 years—to be brought forward by a full year, on the advice of some astrologers, brought millions from across India to one small area along the Ganges River and contributed to ‘super-spreading’ the disease. Unbelievably, the last major ‘ritual bathing’ goes ahead today! [...]

India is home to the largest vaccine producer in the world and has several other companies capable of producing vaccines. Before the pandemic, 60 per cent of the vaccines used in the developing world for child immunisation were manufactured in India. [...]

Low uptake even among this vulnerable group could have resulted from concerns about the rapid regulatory approval granted to Covaxin, which had not completed Phase III trials. The Indian government also encouraged exports, partly to fulfil commitments by the Serum Institute of India to AstraZeneca and the global COVAX facility—partly to enhance its own standing among developing countries. [...]

The latest sign of this active encouragement of disaster capitalism by the Indian state is even more egregious. In the proposed opening up of vaccination to the 18-45 age group from May 1st, access is to be limited to private hospitals and clinics, and only on payment—with prices ranging from ₹1,200 to ₹2,400 (€13.25-€26.5) per dose! Obviously, the poor will be unable to afford the vaccines, and so the pandemic will rage on, the massive human suffering will continue and countless lives will be lost.

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WorldAffairs: Why Farmers are Fighting in Modi's India

 When India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced a series of agricultural reforms last November, India’s farmers launched what might be the largest protest movement in modern history. An estimated 250 million Indians went on strike in solidarity, and today, tens of thousands of farmers are camped just outside the nation’s capital. Modi’s government has responded by silencing journalists and detaining activists, raising troubling questions about the state of the world’s largest democracy. Then pop star Rihanna tweeted about the protests, causing an international incident, and all hell broke loose. In this episode, we talk with experts and journalists about India’s new agricultural reforms, why farmers don’t like it, and how platforms like Facebook and Twitter are playing a pivotal role in this conflict.

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Vox: India's huge farmer protests, explained

In November 2020, thousands of farmers marched from the northern states of India to Delhi to protest farming reforms passed by Prime Minister Modi’s government. Those protests have continued throughout the month of December and show little sign of letting up. The farmers have set up camp in and around the capital city to pressure the government to repeal the laws, but the government won’t budge.

The government says these new laws will modernize farming by liberalizing the industry, but India’s farmers say it will be their downfall. Under these new policies, farmers will have fewer government protections and will likely lose the government-regulated markets and prices they have relied on for decades.

To make matters even more difficult, all this is happening as India’s farmers grapple with a shrinking share of the economy that has contributed to a suicide crisis around the country.

To understand the three farming reforms and why they have driven so many farmers into the streets, as well as the history behind the problems farmers have been facing for decades, watch the video above.

The Guardian: The last of the Zoroastrians

 The Parsis promised their Hindu hosts they would not proselytise, and over the centuries this morphed into a dogmatic aversion to conversion. The rigorous tribalism kept the small community alive and distinct for more than a millennium, but in today’s world, the same intransigence is killing it off. “You’ve seen four weddings and a funeral – well, for Parsis, it’s four funerals and a wedding,” says Jehangir Patel, who has edited the community’s monthly magazine, Parsiana, for almost 50 years. When he finally retires, he fears the magazine will simply close, as more of its readers are dying off each year. India’s Parsi population shrank from 114,000 in 1941 to 57,000 at the last census in 2011. Projections suggest that by the end of the century, there will be just 9,000 left. [...]

I started to ponder the idea of having a late-in-life navjote, egged on by many of the friendly co-participants in the tour, who thought it would be a fun excuse to all meet up again. I floated the idea with Sherry, but as we got chatting on the bus, I quickly realised I had been mistaken to infer from his bleached hair and carefree demeanour that he was a reformer and would approve of the idea. In Zoroastrianism, there is no need to be ascetic or severe in order to be conservative. Sherry told me that if either parent was not a Parsi, he would not perform a navjote. He did not accept the century-old ruling allowing navjotes for those children who have just a Parsi father. It seemed odd, given that Sherry was clearly devoted to the community’s survival, and spoke with visible passion about his work as a priest. Wasn’t this kind of attitude hastening its decline? “We want to focus on quality, not just quantity,” he said. [...]

Dastoor told me that nowhere in the Zoroastrian texts does it say children from mixed families should not be allowed to be Zoroastrians. When I asked him about Mistree’s assertion that people like my grandfather who chose to be cremated would go to hell, he became irate. “This is where we’ve gone wrong as a religion,” he said. He told me that while he would personally prefer to be consigned to a dakhma, adherence to ritual and dogma was a secondary concern: “The improvement of your soul, ideas, the kindness you show to people, to help educate and show charity to your family, your whole community and all of society – this is how we should measure a good Zoroastrian.”

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The Red Line: Who is India's Biggest Strategic Enemy?

 India is fast becoming one of the world's great powers, set to take the number 2 or 3 slot by 2050. This is unless another country were to derail India's current path, and the list of potential derailers is fairly long. So this week we take a look into who will be India's great strategic threats over the next 3 decades, and where India sits in the power struggle for leadership of South Asia today. This weeks guests are Swaminathan Aiyar (CATO Institute) Dhruva Jaishankar (ORF/Brookings) Harsh V Pant (London School of Economics)

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The Guardian: How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart

The group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded 94 years ago by men who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding company of Hindu supremacism: of Hindutva, as it’s called. Given its role and its size, it is difficult to find an analogue for the RSS anywhere in the world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative theology is its hierarchical, centrally organised clergy; that theology is recast into a project of religious statecraft elsewhere, by other parties. Hinduism, though, has no principal church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. The RSS has appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning and the architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills. [...]

The 90s were a decade of disillusionment with socialism and communism, and so too in JNU. Mahapatra’s opponents, he said, “were always talking about abstract things – what Mao had said, or what Marx had said”. The ABVP, for its part, mined the same faultlines on campus that the BJP exploited in Indian society. “We talked about Kashmir, about the Ram temple, about the Hindu nation.” These were all crucial items on the RSS wishlist: to take full possession of the disputed region of Kashmir, defeating Pakistan in the process; to build the temple in Ayodhya; to give Hindus primacy in India. Dust-ups and brawls between student parties, Mahapatra said, were common. Once, while speaking on a stage, he was injured by stones hurled at him by his opponents. [...]

At JNU, the ABVP’s influence swelled. Che claimed that faculty and administration positions were filled with people who had RSS or ABVP connections. At one point, he said, the “wardens” – or supervisors – of nearly every residence hall were shunted out and replaced with ABVP sympathisers. Beyond the campus, Hindu nationalists felt so empowered that they formed gangs to lynch Muslims and lower-caste Hindus, on flimsy suspicions that their victims were smuggling cows or in possession of beef. (In Hinduism, the cow is revered as sacred.) Since 2014, at least 44 people have been murdered and 280 injured. The gangs acted with impunity, sometimes filming themselves, as if they’d never be prosecuted – and they were proven correct. In one Uttar Pradesh town, a Muslim man, beaten so badly that he would eventually die, was dragged injured along the ground. A photo showed a policeman clearing a path through the crowd as the mob hauled the body behind him. [...]

The end game isn’t to rinse 180 million Muslims out of India. It can’t be, for practical reasons. Where would they go? Even those speculatively identified as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants cannot be sent back home unless Bangladesh accepts them. What the BJP is aiming for is what its founders have always wanted: a country that is Hindu before anything else. In the 1940s, both Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and Vinayak Savarkar, a leading RSS ideologue, were proponents of a two-nation theory. “The only difference,” says Niraja Jayal, a political scientist who studies Indian democracy, “was that Jinnah wanted the territory of undivided India to be cut into two, with one part for Muslims. Whereas Savarkar wanted Hindus and Muslims in the same land, but with the Muslim living in a subordinate position to the Hindu.” That unequal citizenship was what the RSS considered – and still considers – right and proper, Jayal said. “So you get a graded citizenship, a citizenship with hierarchies. You don’t need genocide, you don’t need ethnic cleansing. This does the job well enough.”

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Psyche: How to interpret historical analogies

Historical analogies can also be invaluable and enlightening, as long as we remain wary of those using them, and of their reasons. If we are conscientious about the past, we want to learn from it, pay respect to our predecessors, and derive proper lessons from how they might have dealt with their own challenges and hard times. One of the intuitive ways we react to a confusing, frightening present is to reach back into the history we know to find ways to render the current moment legible. All this is normal and natural. [...]

Historical analogies are not the same as historical comparisons. A comparison might be more direct or straightforward, between two events that are inherently similar. Natural disasters such as earthquakes can happen at varying moments in history and aren’t necessarily dependent on human activity. But they will interact differently with society given changing social circumstances, political leadership and economic development. In that sense, a hurricane ravaging a medieval landscape will be different from the exact same-sized and same-speed hurricane hitting a modern city. We will be comparing between the effects of, and response to, an otherwise similar pair of events. (Of course, we can also compare between the frequency and strength of hurricanes today and those of hurricanes in the past, establishing a link between natural disasters and anthropogenic global warming.) Likewise, when the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, the influenza pandemic of 1918 emerged as a tool to help us think through the challenge. The diseases are different, but the human body is pretty much the same, and pandemics, by their nature, have repetitive features. A comparison between the two health crises will focus on the changes in the world – and perhaps specifically in public health policy – that have taken place over the past century. [....]

So historical analogies, done in good faith, can make crucial points about the present and help to clarify where we stand on moral and political issues. The problem begins when we begin to substitute historical analogies for historical analysis – or, even more problematically, when we come to believe that history ‘repeats itself’. This sort of cliché has become a bane of our public discourse, especially regarding the sorry state of the US. [...]

We need to recognise the limitation of all analogising from the past. History does not repeat itself; and this means that everything that happens is new in some fundamental way. Analogies are good in so far as they are useful in helping us begin to think historically, rather than trying to formally define whether, for instance, Trump, or Bolsonaro, or Modi, or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, are fascists. If we came to the conclusion that these current-day wannabe autocrats are not fascists, would that mean that the imperative to seek out better leadership would become less urgent? If we conclude that they are fascists, would that make a real difference in terms of how people experience this era or what we can do? In all likelihood, the necessary political action remains the same, either way. Thinking historically is not about finding discrete past events that might resemble things happening today, but rather trying to understand how the world came to be what it is – and how it could be different.

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Aeon: The fruits of anger

The philosopher Amia Srinivasan at the University of Oxford is an advocate of anger’s merits. Her work makes the case for anger by drawing extensively on fields ranging from political science and sociology to feminist epistemology. Among the many arguments in her seminal article, ‘The Aptness of Anger’ (2018), she notes that anger can be productive epistemically – that is, in the production, shaping and organising of our knowledge and understanding. It better enables victims to make sense of their oppression by heightening their emotions and allowing them to focus on specific features of their victimisation. Victims of injustice or circumstance are often told by their oppressors to blame themselves; consider, for instance, the black single mother blamed for ‘choosing’ to become a ‘welfare queen’, or those languishing in caged homes in Hong Kong, who are told that their socioeconomic circumstances are their own fault. Gaslighting and dismissal of their lived experiences are part and parcel of everyday life for the voiceless. Anger supplies those who are wronged or slighted with the resilience to say: ‘No! It is not my fault.’ It clarifies the injustice that befalls them, enabling individuals to make sense of their situations by access to their authentic feelings. [...]

The philosopher Maxime Lepoutre at Nuffield College in Oxford argues that anger – as expressed through speech or nonverbal cues – can direct attention to the most morally pressing features of particular situations. For instance, victims of domestic abuse, through spontaneous anger, articulate publicly the extent of violation and pain they experience at the hands of their abusers. Thunberg’s angry speech reminds us of the extent to which we are actively, presently complicit in the persistence of climate change. Communicative anger helps us understand what is at stake, and what is most important to those with whom we are speaking.

Anger can motivate people, too. Malcolm X’s anger found voice in his call for violent self-defence and active resistance towards both the institutionally racist police force and the tacitly racist American middle class. His advocacy epitomised a willingness to subvert established legal structures and social norms in advancement of African American interest. Anger mixed with symbolic or psychological violence – as opposed to the non-violent, non-confrontational methodology for which Martin Luther King became known – was the driving force behind those who found King’s methods too conciliatory and inefficacious. Regardless of how one assesses the moral legitimacy of Malcolm X’s methods, his radical activism reshaped public discourse, rendering King’s advocacy not only more palatable, but even honourable in the eyes of the fundamentally shaken American public. As Srinivasan notes: ‘It is historically naive, after all, to think that white America would have been willing to embrace King’s vision of a unified, post-racial nation, if not for the threat of Malcolm X’s angry defiance.’ [...]

Anger is an overriding emotion – it is, by its vindictive and impulsive nature, uncontrollable and blinding. It wages war against cool and steady consideration of all reasons in decisionmaking, by amplifying disproportionately our thirst for what we take to be justice. At its worst, anger is what propels terrorist ideology and mass violence, committed by psychopathic individuals to exact revenge and attain justice under their ideological conceptions. More mundanely, anger causes us to shut out dissent and take pleasure in inflicting pain upon others – it transforms others’ suffering into something we take to be right and warranted. We can be easily skewed by our biases and pre-existing views to project our anger on to the wrong individuals, thereby undermining our ability to act upon our considered judgments.

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The Atlantic: The Callousness of India’s COVID-19 Response

Yet even as India was gripped by demonstrations and violence, the coronavirus was making inroads into society here. The country reported its first case on January 30, but authorities steadfastly insisted that cases were one-offs and no local transmission was taking place. In recent weeks, though, India has seen exponential growth in the number of cases. Today, we are three days into a three-week nationwide lockdown, a heavy restriction on a nation of 1.3 billion people that Modi and his government have insisted will help defeat the virus.

The government is offering little in the way of a safety net. Only after the lockdown came into force, and amid growing outrage, did the finance minister finally announce an aid package. Yet its $22 billion value is a pitiful amount compared with what governments elsewhere have provided: Whereas governments in Britain, Spain, and Germany have offered stimulus plans of up to 20 percent of GDP, India’s amounts to less than 1 percent of its GDP. It provides no help for day laborers or other workers in similar unorganized sectors. It contains no measures for migrant workers. The actual amounts of support—five kilograms of rice or wheat, and one kilogram of legumes, per person for the next three months, coupled with cash transfers, in some cases of 500 rupees, or $7, a month—have infuriated voters. Here in Goa, a lawyer has petitioned the high court to direct the state government to provide essential goods to the people, especially those who are living below the poverty line. [...]

There is, unfortunately, good reason to believe that all of this will not be enough. For one, India is still not testing enough people, having conducted the fewest number of tests of any country with confirmed cases of the coronavirus, at just 10.5 per million residents (South Korea, by contrast, has conducted more than 6,000 tests per million residents). That private laboratories are allowed to charge $60 per test—remember, just $7 a month has been offered as income support for some residents—means significant barriers to confirmation and treatment remain in place. (The government argues that because of the size of the population, widespread testing is not feasible.) The authorities are also not meticulously contact tracing, people are fleeing isolation centers, and measures such as self-quarantines and social distancing are impractical in a country where much of the population lives in dense clusters in overcrowded megacities. Whereas the WHO recommends a ratio of one doctor for every 1,000 patients, India has one government doctor for every 10,000, according to the 2019 National Health Profile. A 2016 Reuters report noted that India needed more than 50,000 critical-care specialists, but has just 8,350. In short, the country’s health-care system is in no position to cope with an avalanche of patients with a contagious respiratory infection in the manner that China and Italy have been doing—India’s continued inability to deal with the epidemic of tuberculosis speaks to that struggle.

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The Guardian Today in Focus: India, Modi and the rise of Hindu nationalism

Narendra Modi has been grappling with continuing domestic unrest since his Hindu nationalist BJP government passed the CAA in December, which grants citizenship for refugees of every major south Asian religion except Muslims. In conjunction with a planned national register of citizens, it is feared the law will make India’s Muslim community aliens in their own country and undermine the secular foundations of the country by making religion the basis of citizenship.

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Caravan Magazine: Intimations of an Ending

Right now, seven million people in the valley of Kashmir, overwhelming numbers of whom do not wish to be citizens of India and have fought for decades for their right to self-determination, are locked down under a digital siege and the densest military occupation in the world. Simultaneously, in the eastern state of Assam, almost two million people who long to belong to India have found their names missing from the National Register of Citizens, and risk being declared stateless. The Indian government has announced its intention of extending the NRC to the rest of India. Legislation is on its way. This could the lead to the manufacture of statelessness on a scale previously unknown.

The violence of inclusion and the violence of exclusion are precursors of a convulsion that could alter the foundations of India, and rearrange its meaning and its place in the world. The Constitution calls India a secular, socialist republic. We use the word “secular” in a slightly different sense from the rest of the world—for us, it’s code for a society in which all religions have equal standing in the eyes of the law. In practice, India has been neither secular nor socialist. In effect, it has always functioned as an upper-caste Hindu state. But the conceit of secularism, hypocritical though it may be, is the only shard of coherence that makes India possible. That hypocrisy was the best thing we had. Without it, India will end. [...]

But what was bad for the country turned out to be excellent for the BJP. Between 2016 and 2017, even as the economy tanked, it became one of the richest political parties in the world. Its income increased by 81 percent, making it nearly five times richer than its main rival, the Congress Party, whose income declined by 14 percent. Smaller political parties were virtually bankrupted. This war chest won the BJP the crucial state elections in Uttar Pradesh, and turned the 2019 general election into a race between a Ferrari and a few old bicycles. And since elections are increasingly about money—and the accumulation of power and the accumulation of capital seem to be convergent—the chances of a free and fair election in the near future seem remote. So maybe demonetisation was not a blunder after all. [...]

In its latest report, released in October, the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. According to the Indian news site The Quint, there have been 113 deaths by mob violence since 2015. Lynchers, and others accused in hate crimes including mass murder, have been rewarded with public office and honoured by ministers in Modi’s cabinet. Modi himself, usually garrulous on Twitter, generous with condolences and birthday greetings, goes very quiet each time a person is lynched. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect a prime minister to comment every time a dog comes under the wheels of someone’s car. Particularly since it happens so often. Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the RSS, has said that lynching is a western concept imported from the Bible, and that Hindus have no such tradition. He has declared that all the talk of a “lynching epidemic” is a conspiracy to defame India.

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AJ+: Naomi Klein: Trump Is A Shock Machine & The Climate Crisis Can’t Wait

War with Iran, the climate crisis and supremacist ideologies: Naomi Klein explains how they’re all linked together – and how to fight them. Klein is the award-winning author of several books, including “The Shock Doctrine.” In it, she explains how natural and man-made disasters are used to impose unpopular economic policies. In this interview with AJ+’s Sana Saeed, she says President Trump is a constant ‘shock machine’ and talks about why she wants Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to win the next U.S. election.

PolyMatter: Why India Banned 86% of its Currency

Today in Focus: The crisis in Kashmir

Azhar Farooq and Vidhi Doshi report on the crisis over Kashmir, triggered by the Indian government’s decision to impose direct rule from Delhi. Plus Jason Burke on life in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.

A communications blackout means accurate, up-to-date information from Kashmir is extremely difficult to get. The reporter Azhar Farooq had to fly from its summer capital, Srinagar, to Delhi to file his dispatch as phone lines and internet connections are all down. He describes an eerie quiet on the streets as residents prepare for what they fear could be long period of lockdown.

On Friday, the BBC released a video appearing to show huge crowds marching through the streets of Srinagar. The footage shows people running for cover as police appear to open fire and use teargas.

The Guardian’s Vidhi Doshi tells Anushka Asthana that the history of Kashmir since it was given special status after Indian independence in 1947 has been that of a contested territory and the centre of tensions between India and Pakistan.

Mirza Waheed, a Kashmiri journalist and author, describes how his idyllic childhood in the 80s changed abruptly as his home town became a frontline for militants after elections widely seen to have been rigged by India sparked an insurgency.

Also today: Jason Burke reflects on life in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe where living conditions for millions have rapidly deteriorated.

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The Observer view on India’s aggression over Kashmir

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and the ruling nationalist BJP stand accused of acting without proper legal authority by unilaterally revoking article 370 of the constitution, which guarantees Kashmir’s special status. Delhi’s arbitrary bifurcation of the state into two union territories (Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh) is also legally contentious. Opponents say Modi has opted for “raw power” over legitimacy.

Modi also ignored UN resolutions on the internationally recognised dispute with Pakistan over sovereign control of the Kashmir region and, notably, the 1972 Simla agreement, which stipulates that its final status must be settled by peaceful means. That point was made last week by the UN secretary-general while appealing for “maximum restraint”. To cap it all, Modi failed to consult Kashmir’s political leaders, whether pro-independence or pro-India, or the Kashmiri people. Quite the opposite, in fact. Political leaders were placed under house arrest. The population was placed under curfew. Means of association and communication were cut. And massive army deployments have been used to enforce Delhi’s diktat. [...]

Khan has limited options. His country is severely indebted. Modi has been clever in strengthening ties with Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia that traditionally bankrolled Pakistan. None of them spoke up on Islamabad’s behalf last week. Meanwhile, relations with the US have become strained, not least over Afghanistan.

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The New York Review of Books: Absent Opposition, Modi Makes India His Hindu Nation

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s triumph on May 23 was conclusive. His Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won more than 300 of the 543 seats in the lower house of Parliament. But Modi had spent the last five years letting India down. Very little he had said on the 2014 campaign trail turned out to be true and virtually nothing he promised was delivered. [...]

These elections, reported the Centre for Media Studies, a non-partisan think tank in New Delhi, had been the most expensive “ever, anywhere.” In an election that was fought between six national parties, and many smaller ones, the BJP’s electoral juggernaut received an estimated 45–55 percent of the estimated 55,000 crore rupees (nearly $8 billion) that was spent on this election. Their main rival, the Indian National Congress (INC), accounted for an estimated 15 percent of the total spent. More than half of Modi’s war chest came from anonymous donors. Who these people are can only be guessed at, but since 2016 the BJP has received almost 93 percent of corporate donations, leaving the remaining 7 percent for the other national and state parties to fight over. [...]

The mainstream media, particularly cable news, amplified the BJP’s message and drowned out the opposition. They editorialized the news, started rumors, and spread lies. Truth was an illusion, and everything was propaganda. The INC’s leader, Rahul Gandhi, was denounced as a fool and even a foreigner, while Modi, in a tradition that will ring familiar to people in Russia and China, was glorified as the great leader. [...]

And while Gandhi was the obviously better choice, he wasn’t, necessarily, a convincing one. For years, Gandhi dithered about whether he would join politics, enjoying the unheard of privilege, in India, of deciding if he wanted to apply for a job. When he finally accepted, standing for election in 2004, he positioned himself as a foot soldier. He failed to do anything significant to change the country’s oldest party, his family’s party. The Congress was rotting from the roots upward, its representatives seen as incompetent, corrupt, and out of touch, yet Gandhi appeared to shrug and roll his eyes as though to say, Can you believe these people? He officially took over the party’s leadership in 2017, but it wasn’t until March 2019, less than a fortnight before voting was to commence, that he announced the main plank of his manifesto.

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Foreign Policy: It’s Modi’s India Now

Between 1984 and 2014, no single political party could win enough seats to form a national government on its own. There were simply too many, it seemed, and new ones kept emerging. In 2014, 464 political parties competed in the national elections—up from 215 in 2004—with most representing narrow regional, religious, or ideological constituencies. The system gave meaning to the famous catchphrase: “Indians don’t cast their vote; they vote their caste.” [...]

The BJP’s 2019 campaign had to be different—after all, Modi was no longer the candidate representing change. Unemployment had hit a 45-year high under the BJP, and economic growth began to slow down. And so instead of Modi the reformer, Indians got to see Modi the performer this election season: He branded himself a chowkidar, or security guard, to emphasize his ability to keep India, and especially Hindus, safe. Across hundreds of campaign speeches, he carefully shifted the focus of his message to national security and identity politics. And it worked. The question now is what lesson the BJP will derive from its latest victory, and how those insights will guide it in the years to come. [...]

Meanwhile, as press freedom declines in India—Reporters Without Borders ranks India 140th out of 180 countries, and Modi declined to hold a single press conference in his first five years as prime minister—the media will struggle to challenge government reports of military action. For example, New Delhi has claimed that in a Feb. 27 aerial dogfight with Pakistan, it shot down a Pakistani F-16 fighter jet. As Foreign Policy reported at the time, a U.S. count of F-16s sold to Pakistan found no missing jets, calling into question New Delhi’s account of what happened. But an increasingly jingoistic mainstream Indian media didn’t follow up. Future Indian governments now have a template for appearing strong in public—irrespective of what they actually do. [...]

And the lines in that fight were drawn clearly in 2019. The BJP’s party president Amit Shah—the chief architect of Modi’s reelection campaign—referred to Muslim immigrants living in India illegally as “termites” on the campaign trail last September, and he repeated the phrase this year. In the eastern state of Assam, the BJP has created a National Register of Citizens, a database that excludes 4 million people in that state, most of them Muslims. Shah has promised that the BJP would implement a similar database across the whole country, ostensibly to force a mass purge of Muslims deemed to have immigrated illegally from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

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The Atlantic: Modi's New Challenge Is Embracing Urbanization

Five years later, the BJP has secured a new electoral mandate even more impressive than the last, a testament to Modi’s unmatched political prowess. Yet it has done so despite an economic record that can be described only as underwhelming. If Modi hopes to do more than simply stay in power, if he still aspires to bring his new India to life, he’d do well to heed the advice of a small clique of economists who’ve been calling on his government to more fully embrace urbanization. [...]

Modi and his advisers quickly came to understand that a combination of depressed demand in the mature market democracies and robust competition from other low-wage countries had essentially foreclosed the export-driven model of development, as Amy Kazmin and Lionel Barber report in the Financial Times. Instead, Modi reached for a grab bag of reforms and public investment, an approach one of his advisers described as “light many fires at once—to see if any of them would catch.” Modi’s policy mix has indeed succeeded in lighting many fires, though not all of them are burning quite as he might have wished. [...]

But all the latrines in the world won’t make India an economic dynamo. To pull off that feat, Modi must persuade Indians to embrace an urban future. Reuben Abraham and Pritika Hingorani, both of India’s IDFC Institute, a small but enormously influential think tank based in Mumbai, have made a convincing case that at present India’s state governments—which are each empowered to decide what qualifies as urban—systematically underestimate the urban share of their populations. According to the Indian Census, only 31 percent of the country’s population resides in urban areas. If, however, you were to adopt Ghana’s or Lebanon’s definition for what amounts to an urban area, India is almost 50 percent urbanized.

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Today in Focus: India is voting: will Modi win the world's biggest election?

The world’s largest ever election is nearing its conclusion in India, with voters in 20 states casting their ballots in the marathon six-week poll.

The election is being viewed as a referendum on the prime minister, Narendra Modi, a staunch Hindu nationalist who rode a wave of popularity five years ago to become the first leader of a majority government in decades.

The Guardian’s South Asia correspondent, Michael Safi, has been out on the campaign trail and tells Anushka Asthana that following the suicide bomb attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir earlier this year, Modi has focused his campaign fully on his national security credentials.

Also today: the Guardian sketchwriter John Crace on his day at Nigel Farage’s rally in West Yorkshire, where the Brexit party leader’s anti-establishment message was rapturously received.

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