Peaceful protesters brutally beaten by police in the streets; dissidents arrested; curfews imposed, the press censored and the army deployed to assist in the crackdown: This is India — not in the mid-1970s under the ruthless Indira Gandhi, but today under Narendra Modi, who has added the 21st-century fillip of shutting down the internet and cell service.
The prime minister’s Hindu-nationalist party won nearly twice the support of its closest rival in elections this past May, but protests over his anti-Muslim laws have rattled Modi so badly, he’s turning the world’s largest democracy into a police state.
This week cops arrested one of the nation’s most revered historians, Ramachandra Guha — dragging the gray-haired, bespectacled intellectual off as he was calmly speaking to a journalist.
Tens of thousands of Indians have taken to the streets across the country since parliament passed a bill Dec. 11 that creates a path to citizenship for immigrants from neighboring Muslim-majority countries who are Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain or Parsi — anything but Muslim.
Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority area, has been under lockdown since August, when Modi stripped away its autonomy. With no internet, much of its population has been unable to work and essential medical supplies are scarce.
Hindus make up 80% of India’s 1.3 billion people, but it’s not just the country’s 200 million Muslims furious at the erosion of the nation’s secular constitution. Police have arrested so many protesters in Delhi that they’ve had to use a sports stadium as a jail.
Modi tried to change the subject in a speech Friday about aiming for a $5 trillion economy by 2025. It won’t work. Just miles away, protesters thronged Delhi’s iconic Red Fort with chants of “We want freedom!” and “The person who will walk the path of Hitler will die the death of Hitler!”
Indira Gandhi kept her martial-law rule, the Emergency, going for 21 months through early 1977 — and saw her party crushed in elections later that year. Modi is no Indira, and should expect no less a fall.
