My mother died last week. Without being able to say goodbye to a grandson she helped me bring up. He was a small boy when I was off covering conflicts and political turmoil in distant places, and it was in her house that I would leave my son. It would have been impossible to manage without her. In recent months, when she was very sick, I did my best to try and get my son an ordinary tourist visa to visit her and failed. One high official was honest enough to admit that he had to agree to never say another word against the government and there might be a chance. The rest never got back to me. My mother spent the last five years of her life wondering when she would see him again. Towards the end, I could not mention his name without her bursting into tears.
India was my son’s home until an act of extraordinary spite caused him to be exiled. When he wrote the article in Time magazine that caused this to happen, politicians at the highest levels of the BJP and its army of trolls on social media went out of their way to say that he was persona non grata not because of that article, but because he was anti-India. One very vocal BJP spokesman went to the extent of tweeting that he was a ‘trained ISI agent’. The Home Ministry has the capability to discover that this is rubbish, but chooses not to.
The withdrawal of the OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) of a French journalist recently comes as the latest proof that visas to India have been weaponised. She is married to an Indian and has lived here for twenty years but no longer can because the government saw her journalism as having ‘malice’ towards India. Who decides these things? Is there a press censorship wing in the Home Ministry?
The more important question is why a Prime Minister with the highest approval ratings of any world leader should be so thin-skinned? Narendra Modi likes to see himself as not just the leader of India but as a world leader of great influence and unusual power. A Vishvaguru. He appears not to have noticed that only those leaders who have democratic credentials can achieve this position. Men like Vladimir Putin, who recently killed Alexei Navalny in a penal colony above the Arctic Circle, will always only be seen as brutal dictators.
Modi also likes to boast in the high forums of the world that India is the ‘mother of democracy’. It sounds like no more than an empty boast every time dissidents are punished for their dissidence. It is not just dissidents from the ‘Khan Market gang’ that are now being silenced, but farmers and those who support their protest. It was revealed last week that X, once Twitter, was ordered to take down handles that showed sympathy for the protests. This newspaper reported that officials in X said that they were told that if they did not block certain handles, ‘the platform and its employees could face potential penalties, including significant fines and imprisonment’.
This kind of menacing tone damages not just the image of the Prime Minister as a Visvaguru, but the image of India. If India has earned the respect of the world, it is because while other post-colonial countries ended up in the hands of despots, tinpot dictators and religious fanatics, India managed to keep the light of democracy alive. If dissidence dies, then democracy dies. And dissidence in India has been severely endangered in recent years. Student leaders and journalists have spent years in jail without trial simply for disagreeing with government policies. And the whole machinery of the BJP has been used to malign them as ‘anti-nationals’.
So far, these dissidents have come mostly from the despised Khan Market gang, but if they now include farmers, then it is time for the Prime Minister to realise that he is entering dangerous territory. Every poll and every political analyst predicts that his winning a third term is a certainty. This has much to do with the feeble-minded ‘potted plants’ who stand against him, but that is a whole other story. This week, my mother died without being able to say goodbye to a beloved grandson. I want only to make a political point through my personal story.
Out of my personal loss comes the hope that when Narendra Modi becomes prime minister again later this year, he will choose to strengthen the roots of democracy in India and not crush them further. These roots will thrive only if dissidence is celebrated instead of being extinguished, as it has been under monsters like Putin. Navalny’s murder in prison has not had the attention in India that it got in other democratic countries. So may I suggest to all of you a documentary called Navalny on Netflix. It tells the story of a man who was killed because he chose, after surviving an attempt to poison him, to return to Russia to fight for democracy.
In India, we celebrate elections with fervour and festivity but too often forget that democracy is about more than elections. What it is fundamentally about are the rights that democracy gives ordinary people to speak out if they disagree with government policies. People who dare do this are heroes not criminals.
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We celebrate elections with fervour and festivity but too often forget that democracy is about more than elections
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25.02.2024
My mother died last week. Without being able to say goodbye to a grandson she helped me bring up. He was a small boy when I was off covering conflicts and political turmoil in distant places, and it was in her house that I would leave my son. It would have been impossible to manage without her. In recent months, when she was very sick, I did my best to try and get my son an ordinary tourist visa to visit her and failed. One high official was honest enough to admit that he had to agree to never say another word against the government and there might be a chance. The rest never got back to me. My mother spent the last five years of her life wondering when she would see him again. Towards the end, I could not mention his name without her bursting into tears.
India was my son’s home until an act of extraordinary spite caused him to be exiled. When he wrote the article in Time magazine that caused this to happen, politicians at the highest levels of the BJP and its army of trolls on social media went out of their way to say that he was persona non grata not because of that article, but because he was anti-India. One very vocal BJP spokesman went to the extent of tweeting that he was a ‘trained ISI agent’. The Home Ministry has the capability to discover that this is rubbish, but chooses not to.
The withdrawal of the OCI (Overseas Citizen of India) of a French journalist recently comes as the latest proof that visas to India have been weaponised.........
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