India and the US in a Time of Democratic Erosion

[MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH BALDWIN: From the Watson Institute of Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Sarah Baldwin. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former US President Donald Trump got along pretty well in the last four years. Part of the reason, surely, is that they shared some political instincts-- promoting ethnic nationalism, suppressing free speech, and demonizing the media to name a few.

So on this episode, we wanted to look at two things. First, what can we learn from comparing how these two countries have struggled with democracy in the past few years. And second, what effect will a Biden administration have on their relationship.

There's no better person to talk about both of these issues with than Ashutosh Varshney. Ashu was a professor of International Studies at Watson and the director of Watson Center for Contemporary South Asia. He has a way of helping people see familiar politics in very unfamiliar ways. And, boy, does he help me do that in this conversation.

There's a little bit of background noise in a few parts of the interview, an occupational hazard of recording all these podcasts from our own houses, so sorry in advance. But we don't think it should be too big a deal. We started by comparing India's recent anti-democratic moves to another country with whom President Biden is looking to forge a new path, China. Here's Ashu.

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ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Despite the decline in India's democratic vitality, it's not China even now. One big difference is that elections determine who will run the government, who will be in power. And the electoral principle of democracy in India has not been violated even by Modi. What has been violated is the non-electoral side of democracy, especially freedom of expression, freedom of religious practice, and freedom of association.

The liberal critics not simply the Muslims but the liberal critics of Mr. Modi and the BJP have been targeted. The most recent arrest yesterday of a 22-year-old woman. She is a climate activist, and she doesn't want India's farmers to be treated the way this government is treating them. And this was her only fault.

She wants farmers to be treated better. She supported farmer protest. And she connected to Greta Thunberg. That's it. And she was arrested yesterday from the city of Bangalore and brought to a magistrate all the way to Delhi, and is now incarcerated. And let's see what happens. In Biden government's interactions with India, with Modi government, it is clear that unlike Trump who never raise human rights issues and issues of a democratic freedoms, Biden administration is going to raise them, do not I think publicly.

These issues will be raised behind closed doors because there's a sense in which Biden administration will have to and would like to separate itself from the Trump rhetoric both domestically and externally. Human rights and freedoms-- democratic freedoms-- these were not issues for Trump at all-- Trump foreign policy at all. They will be issues for Biden foreign policy. So there will be in other words, some stresses in the India-US relationship, which didn't exist during the four years of Trump.

SARAH BALDWIN: Yeah, I didn't realize that India leads the world in internet shutdowns even.

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: That's correct.

SARAH BALDWIN: So we're talking about the world's oldest democracy and the world's largest democracy. And so they're both democracies but they're quite different. And I wonder if you could sort of unpack the difference between a parliamentary and a presidential democracy. You've written that that had something to do with the failure of the attempted coup in Washington and in January. You said that a coup like that is inconceivable in a parliamentary democracy. Can you explain what you meant?

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Yeah, so the head of the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system comes from the legislature. It's the majority party in parliament, which forms the government. There is no separate election for the executive. Whereas in presidential system, the president is directly elected. He does not come from the legislature.

Mr. Modi is both the prime minister of India meaning the head of the executive as well as a member of parliament. He was elected to parliament. His party became the majority party in parliament, and therefore he became the prime minister. That being so, it is not easily conceivable and I'll qualify this in a moment.

But generally speaking, what I am saying is true. A prime minister whose political base is in parliament, is in the legislature, is not going to send vigilante forces or protesters to attack the legislature. That's where the base of his power is or her power is. Whereas in a presidential system, it has repeatedly happened. It's happened a lot actually in Latin America. And it happened once in Moscow when President Yeltsin sent the armed forces to surround the legislature. In a presidential system, this has happened quite a lot.

SARAH BALDWIN: Speaking of coups, this is something that I was going to ask you later on, but I might as well ask you now. You've written that a coup success or failure has a lot to do with the wealth of the country it's taking place in. I was thinking of this the other day looking at the thus far successful coup in Myanmar. I was wondering if you could just unpack this connection between coup attempts and the wealth of a country.

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: So there's two points here to note. First, because the military did not support the vigilante forces on January 6 and what would be called an attempted coup fail. It was not in a technical sense a coup.

The military did not support the vigilantes. And a few days before January 6, 21 former secretaries of defense sensing danger wrote a famous Op-Ed in Washington Post saying that the armed forces are sworn to the constitution and not to the president. They were expecting some trouble.

They were sensing some danger. That's why they wrote that. They didn't want the armed forces, any wing of the armed forces, to support President Trump's attempt to overturn the election and interfere in the certification of the election process-- election result, state election results on the hill.

So one difference is clearly that in Burma, in Myanmar, the military did not like the election results. And on the day the new government was going to take power, it basically arrested all senior members of the winning party including Aung San Suu Kyi, the most famous of them all, and announced a one year emergency and another election at some point in the future.

So what happened in Myanmar was technically speaking a coup. And what happened on January 6 in Washington was an attempted coup, which failed primarily because the military did not support. The plan of the powers that be at that time to overturn an election result.

SARAH BALDWIN: And are those-- is that success and failure tied to what you've written about richer and poorer countries?

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: That's right. So the reason coups are more frequent in poorer countries is that the government is a very dominant player in the economy and society much more so than in a richer country. So if you're thrown out of power in a rich country, you can start a consulting company. You can start-- you can join a firm. You can-- you have lots of sources of independent non-governmental or corporate activity, which can keep you going. And you can also perhaps come back to power four years from now, eight years from now, et cetera.

So the government does not control virtually all sectors of the economy or all sectors of society. Even if it wants to, it cannot. That's the way richer economies and societies are set up. In poorer societies, the government is the not only the most important player in society and politics but also in the economy. If you lose power in a poor country, your sources of employment could dry up, your sources of income could dry up, and your supporters could be by force snatched away from you. So that's why we say that in poorer democracies, politics is do or die affair.

SARAH BALDWIN: That's so interesting. But turning back to the US and India, how is the growth of ethnic nationalism similar and different in the two countries in your view?

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Both Trump and Modi have what we political scientists call ethnic majoritarian or racial majoritarian base. The most ardent supporters of Mr. Trump were White supremacists who believe that America has to be viewed as a White country and non-White minorities have acquired too much power and White supremacy must be reestablished. Modi's base is not racial. Modi's base is the religion majority of India, the Hindus.

Racially, there is no distinction between Muslims and Hindus, right? It's a religious distinction but it works roughly the same way as racial majoritarian views or White supremacist views in the United States. The claim is that India is a Hindu country and Hindus should have supremacy over the polity or the society. And minorities have been given too much power by the constitution and or by the polity the way a political party is a function, especially Congress Party, which has ruled India for most of its independence.

If you look carefully at what Modi project is vis-á-vis Muslims. It's something that I'm writing about now. It is scary to learn that the anti-Muslim project of the BJP and especially under Modi is not terribly different from the Jim Crow project. The attempt of the BJP regime is to redefine citizenship in such a way legally, in such a way that Muslims become second class citizens like Blacks became in Jim Crow South.

Second, it is not possible for India to send 190 million Muslims to Bangladesh, to Pakistan, the Muslim majority countries, and Afghanistan. You can't even create internment camps for that many people. So what is the project? Project can only be disenfranchisement. That is the only practical possibility if the project were to come to fruition. That would be the only practical thing they could do, disenfranchise Muslims of India.

They have an equal right in every sense of the term and by the constitution just as after Reconstruction. How did disenfranchisement come about? Legally, you can challenge their citizenship but by developing literacy criteria, by imposing poll taxes, right? And by developing a notion that if you had any incarceration on your record, you would not be allowed to vote. Primarily through these three methods, a huge majority of Blacks were disenfranchised. That is what BJP government if it had its way would like to do, not to these three methods but by taking citizenship away from most Muslims of India.

SARAH BALDWIN: Which they did with the Citizenship Amendment Act, not too long ago.

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Citizenship Amendment Act was the first step towards that. It alone can do that but it was the clearest signal. The clearest political signal that was what the BJP government wanted to do, take away citizenship from Muslims of India-- most Muslims of India.

SARAH BALDWIN: That's a fascinating comparison. What is the mood in India now? And this is a terribly general question, Ashu. But what is the mood in India now? How much support does Modi have?

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: He's the most popular leader of India as it's true in so many strong leader populist democracies in the world. Mr. Trump maintained a base with-- had a base of 75 million voters and easily half of them-- up to half of them, maybe more, were diehard Trump voters. Now, the fact that so many senators and so many congressmen couldn't vote against him, should suggest that the proportion of diehard Trump voters is higher than we thought.

SARAH BALDWIN: Because their re-election depends on them.

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: That's right. And this is another interesting institutional feature of American polity. Not every polity in the world has a system of primaries. So what do primaries do? If you have a hold over your party's base, you are the most important player in the primary process.

So the first step towards running for senate, running for president, running for governor-- and an estimated 35 states also elect their judges. For a large number of these elected positions, first, you have to go through a primary before you can be in a general contest. Polities that do not have this feature will not easily generate a Trumpian kind of hold over a party.

So Trump lost so many Senate seats to Democrats, lost the White House for the Republican Party. And, yes, some more congressmen were elected to the House than before. But basically, the departure of Trump has coincided with the Republican Party losing both houses of the legislature and the White House yet his hold over Republicans continues. Senators are unable to rebel against him. Congressmen are not able to speak against him. Why? Because of this system of primaries.

Before I came to America, I did not understand the role of primaries. Then as a political scientist, I had to pay attention to American political institutions. And I realize what a remarkable difference primaries make to the way the political process works.

This is not true in much of Europe. This is not true in India. This is not true in many other democracies, right? It also seems that it will be very hard for the opponents of Trump in the Republican Party to wage a successful battle. It will be a long battle in any case. And it will be an arduous battle, a difficult battle.

So those seven who voted against, two of them are retiring. Five will have to figure out how to reconfigure this party, which essentially means how to change the way the primaries work. Will they still [INAUDIBLE]-- In the primaries, will the base still subscribe to Trump or to somebody else?

SARAH BALDWIN: Thinking back to India and China, how do you think Russia is watching the US-India relations and ditto leadership in China?

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: So until the Cold War ended, India actually was quite close to the Soviet Union, closer to the Soviet Union than to America. All the last three decades after the end of the Cold War, India and the United States have been coming closer and closer and closer. And there's a bipartisan consensus in Washington over American relationship with India. Now, it doesn't matter who is in power.

Regardless of who comes to power, India and the United States relationship only gets closer. And that Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, now we have Russia. Russia has watched this with realism. There are old military relationships that have gone on because India was reliant on Soviet military equipment. So those military relationships have now disappeared. But India-Russia relationship simply cannot compare with India-United States relationship anymore.

And with the rise of Indian-American community, Indian diaspora in the United States, this relationship is only going to get stronger. There will be a few bumps here and there but going to get stronger. You have Indian-Americans rising in power-- also Kamala Harris. The current administration has so many Indian-Americans in top positions including the second most important politician in the country, Kamala Harris.

So there's no comparison, I think. The main triangle, I think, in the coming 10 years could well become as Indian economy rises further, could well become India-China-United States. That prediction was easier to make five years ago when Indian economy was doing very well. It's not been doing very well of late. But nobody-- no serious economist says that Indian economy will not bounce back.

So India is a $2 trillion economy. It's the fifth largest economy in the world but, of course, it's only one fifth of China. And that is a very big difference that has emerged between China and India. They had the same size. The two economies, the Chinese and Indian, had the same size in Nineteen-Ninety, but China has just raised it.

But I think India-United States relationship will be closer and closer. I'm not sure whether an alliance will form. I'm not sure about that. But it'll be closer and closer partly because, of course, the Indian-American community-- partly because both India and the United States see China as the most important adversary for their geopolitics or geopolitical environment.

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SARAH BALDWIN: Ashu, it was so great to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time.

ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Thank you.

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SARAH BALDWIN: This episode was produced by Dan Richards and Ilina Coleman. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Sara Baldwin. If you like us, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Or if you have a friend who you think would like the show, tell them about it. We'll be back next week with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.

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