In some places in our world, democracy votaries have savored pleasing news. On April 12, Viktor Orban lost in Hungary. As October was closing, Aleksandar Vucic conceded defeat in Serbia to the Students' List. In vast Brazil, incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received 51.8% of the vote, compared with 48.2% for Flavio Bolsonaro.
Even though it will only be a midterm verdict, what American voters pronounce on Tuesday, Nov. 3, will matter to the world’s millions. In certain parts of the world, however, people must be asking, in light of President Donald Trump’s typically ambiguous remarks, if American bombs will fall near them.
In Israel, according to the BBC, exit polls, which can be erroneous, indicate that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s challenger Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc has emerged as the largest group, just ahead of the ruling coalition but well short of a majority. Netanyahu’s Likud is set to be the biggest single party in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.
An estimated 600,000 absentee ballots — almost all from the military — and around 10% of the total, won’t be fully counted until Oct. 29. Once all the results are in, Israel’s president will invite the one he believes has the best chance to form a governing coalition. The process can take weeks.
In India, suspense surrounds a crucial opposition rally scheduled in Delhi for Nov. 1. Will Prime Minister Narendra Modi's regime attempt to block it or somehow interfere with it? Will people flock to the rally? Will they be allowed to?
Lula’s victory margin in Brazil of 4.4 million votes, close to 3.6% of the total, was not tiny. Bolsonaro supporters will find it hard to persuade any independent judge that counting was flawed. In his first victory remarks, 81-year-old Lula singled out his country’s youth and thanked them.
Evidently a key role was played by a nationwide WhatsApp team organized by Andre Janones, a federal deputy, i.e., a member of Brazil’s lower house. We’re told that people like Janones were determined that this time the right would not be allowed to dominate social media.
In fact, young activists around the world seem to be using social media to counter large TV channels and newspapers beholden to autocrats.
Power of Words
Words matter. And words can give pleasure, as you will likely find if you click on this link to read a short article in Kolkata’s The Telegraph by the Delhi-based Mukul Kesavan. “Books Travel” is his article’s heading, followed by this synopsis: “The fetishists will collect books while the rest of us will read in the normal way (whatever that normal is) because in the beginning was the word, not the means by which it was read.”
An unmistakable understanding of the power of words was revealed in Kolkata and elsewhere in West Bengal during a dayslong festival period (between Oct. 15 and 19) when, in the words of The Telegraph, “hoodlums allegedly linked to the Sangh Parivar (i.e., the family of Hindu nationalist organizations) ransacked Left-affiliated bookstalls.”
The rampage was welcomed by Suvendu Adhikari, West Bengal’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief minister from May of this year, who claimed that the state’s “manush” — people — “had spontaneously resisted the stalls.” “What [the Left] tried to do by setting up those stalls,” added Adhikari, “the people obstructed.”
Expanding his attack, the chief minister advocated an educational overhaul to counter opposition ideologies. “To turn students into nationalists, at least three days of debates, quiz competitions and extempore speech contests should be held every year [in schools] as cultural events,” he said.
After such an overhaul, added Adhikari, West Bengal “will not need [insecticide] sprays to eliminate these cockroaches, bedbugs, dimaagi Naxals, tukde tukde gang, the ‘Kashmir mange azadi’ crowd, all those acting like the coronavirus....”
“Cockroaches” was a reference to the new Cockroach Janta Party that is standing up to supremacist doctrines. “Dimaagi Naxals” (intellectual insurrectionists) is a recent phrase coined by Prime Minister Modi for critics of a Hindu-first state. “Tukde-tukde” gang (those who would “split India into pieces”) is the Hindu nationalist expression for defenders of free speech. The “Kashmir mange azadi (Kashmir wants independence) crowd” is the far right’s phrase for those asking for citizens’ rights in Kashmir.
Adhikari accused earlier West Bengal governments of destroying Bengal’s “heritage.”
“Thirty-four years of atheistic communists and 15 years of the Jamaatis (his phrase for Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, of which Adhikari himself was a leader for years) have finished the tradition and culture of the people of West Bengal,” the chief minister claimed. Signaling an imminent revision of school textbooks, Adhikari said, “You will see many changes from the next academic year.”
Unexpected Dissent
Interestingly, West Bengal’s finance minister and veteran BJP leader, Swapan Dasgupta, criticized the vandalism, saying, “I don’t know who [the vandals] are. But I must ask, how dare they? This is not acceptable. If one incident happens, one can say it was a stray incident, but I saw this has happened in three or four areas. I have ideological differences with the Left but I can’t destroy their book stall or display of books. I was ashamed after seeing such incidents.”
“Where the Mind Is Without Fear,” the famous short poem on freedom and reason written 125 years ago by India’s and Bengal’s great son, Rabindranath Tagore, can be accessed here. Poems and songs will not go away when book stalls are ravaged. They will only go deeper.
More than Disturbing
Some defenders of India’s Modi regime attempt to deny charges that the regime discriminates against the country’s Muslims and Christians. Others welcome the charges as confirmation that India is becoming a Hindu state. Their line is, “The world has Islamic and Christian states. What’s wrong with a Hindu India?”
Even supporters of a Hindu republic may be disturbed by the findings, shared with the Associated Press, of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), a Washington-based think tank, regarding the treatment by the police of India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, of suspects accused of cow smuggling.
CSOH examined “around 650 cases of suspects accused of cow smuggling who have been shot and injured by Uttar Pradesh police since 2020,” says AP, adding that the think tank’s findings were shared with AP, “which independently reviewed a sample of more than 200.”
Written by Erika Kinetz and Piyush Rai, the AP story adds: “Police have publicized the shootings as part of a broad crackdown on crime and characterize them as acts of self-defense. Activists, opposition leaders and local judges, however, say the violence amounts to extrajudicial punishment and intimidation that disproportionately impacts India’s large Muslim minority, and undermines the rule of law in the world’s largest democracy.
“ ‘This is a dangerous situation,’ said Mangla Verma, a human rights lawyer based in New Delhi. ‘It’s become a routine police practice … Instead of investigating, police kill or injure a person and justice is done.’
“The overwhelming majority of cases involved Muslims, the center found.”
“In case after case, bullets struck the same part of the suspect’s body — the leg, most often below the knee. This reporting is based only on incidents police themselves publicized and almost certainly represents an undercount.”
This isn’t action against people violating a law. It’s an announcement of Hindu supremacy and a warning that Muslims live at police mercy.
Disallowing a Students' Union
Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, one of India’s premier universities and educational institutions, was established in 1920 in conjunction with the Non-Cooperation Movement, which was a major landmark in India’s freedom struggle. A resolve for Hindu-Muslim partnership had accompanied the creation of Jamia, which has tried to cater to the needs of young children as well. More than 60% of Jamia’s college-level students, currently totaling around 17,500, are Muslim.
Demands for elections to a students’ union having been denied, some Jamia students have been on hunger strike from Oct. 12. On Oct. 24, the university, which is regulated by the Modi regime’s education ministry, responded to the hunger strike by canceling in-person classes and announcing online teaching.
The All India Students’ Association alleged that the university administration began “assaulting students” during negotiations.
Jasim Ali Khan, who has been on hunger strike since the protest began, accused the administration of launching a “crackdown” and called for the restoration of the students’ union.
Along with the much older Aligarh Muslim University, Jamia is a symbol, for India and the world, of the state of India’s Muslims. The respect, autonomy and support that Jamia and Aligarh Muslim University receive, or fail to receive, are indicative of the community’s well-being.
Seven years ago, on Dec. 15, 2019, a morning protest by Jamia students against the Citizenship Amendment Act of the Modi government was followed that evening by the police entering the campus without the university’s permission, striking students with batons, and firing tear gas shells inside the library, scenes watched widely on TV. The then-vice chancellor, Najma Akhtar, protested strongly, and students launched an agitation that stopped only because of the COVID-19 lockdown three months later.
Since then the Modi regime has tightened its handling of Jamia.
Scared Community
A report by Ravik Bhattacharya in The Indian Express of Oct.23 speaks of alleged assaults on three Christian families between Oct. 18 and 20 in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district. One family was apparently forced to take a purification bath in public, and all were made to perform a ritual under a Hindu worship tent.
Speaking to The Indian Express over the phone, a 40-year-old woman said, “Around 3:30 p.m. on Oct. 18, the miscreants came to my house, dragged me and my husband out, and beat us up. I fell to the ground. They tore my clothes. Then they made me eat tulsi and bel leaves and poured water on me as a purification ritual. Everyone watched.”
The assailants allegedly entered the houses of two other families, beat up their members, took away 20,000 rupees (about $210) from the house, and threatened them not to approach the police.
What Teh New York Times Found
On Oct. 21, The New York Times published a story from its India-based reporters, Mujib Mashal, Suhasini Raj and Hari Kumar, quoting the opinion of more than one unnamed member of the Modi-led coalition governing India that “Mr. Modi has found himself in troubled waters that he has not experienced in his 12 years at the national helm.”
On Oct. 26, The New York Times carried a report from India by opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen where she quotes a student protester just emerging from detention who intended to join a fresh protest. “The moment you oppressed me, the fear was gone,” the protester told Polgreen.
Another student said she rejects the empty promises of Hindu nationalism: “People have gotten bored with Modi’s narrative.”
A Delhi rickshaw driver told Polgreen that the price of the natural gas that fuels his rickshaw had more than doubled. “You can’t name a thing which has retained its price,” he said. “Rice, cooking oil, mustard oil, cooking cylinders.” Adds Polgreen:
“Modi’s centralization — the very thing that seemed destined to consolidate his power — has become a booby trap. He captured and muzzled the mainstream press, especially television news, only for an enormous ecosystem of independent and influential journalists to rise up on YouTube and Instagram.
“Modi has also discovered that despite his efforts to project global leadership, his power quickly fades at the water’s edge. After promising to elevate India to great-power status, he has found himself stuck ... He has suffered a series of embarrassments on the world stage, especially at the hands of the Trump administration.
“But a new generation of Indians has risen up, insisting that the price of that trade is far too high. Armed only with witty slogans and astonishing bravery, these young people have revived their country’s glorious tradition of nonviolent dissent.”
