In December 2021, President Joe Biden hosted an event billed as a “Summit for Democracy”. Biden opened his address to the summit by describing his motivation for holding it: “in the face of sustained and alarming challenges … democracy needs champions”.
Since that time Biden has embraced, as allies, autocrats and would-be autocrats all over the world, including the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who US intelligence has said was responsible for the brutal murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. More recently, Biden invited Benjamin Netanyahu, who is presiding over the destruction of Israel’s democracy by targeting its judicial system, for an official visit to the United States.
Biden is right that there is an ever-larger club of backsliding democracies, with the US among them. And the American president is not the only openly hypocritical leader in this club. In fact, he is not even close to the worst offender.
This September, India is hosting G20 leaders under the banner of “One Earth, One Family, One Future”. As a part of the transition to India’s assumption of this position, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, has leaned heavily on these themes in promoting India as an inclusive, emerging global power.
Yet behind these lofty ideals lies a very different, and dangerous, reality.
Those in Modi’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), are hardline Hindu nationalists. Their ideology holds that India was originally a pure Hindu state, with minorities, such as India’s large Muslim population, the supposed result of colonization by outside forces.
The hallmarks of fascism are everywhere. School textbooks are being rewritten to reinforce the fake history behind BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda. Topics like the theory of evolution and the periodic table have been replaced with traditional Hindu theories, and academics have been silenced for calling out the BJP’s election malpractices. The government has weaponized education in the manner typical of fascist regimes such as Russia. There are other clear indications of India’s slide towards fascism. On press freedom, India ranks 161st out of 180 countries, sandwiched between Venezuela (at 159) and Russia (at 164).
Modi and the BJP have proven themselves to be fluent hypocrites on the world stage. Under the banner of anticolonialism, the party is replicating Britain’s colonial practices.
In 2005 Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, was denied entry to the US because of his role in ethnic violence that left over 1,000 people dead, the vast majority of them Muslims. According to a recently declassified report from the British Foreign Office, the Hindu mobs’ “systematic campaign of violence has all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing” and “Narendra Modi is directly responsible.”
He’s much more powerful now, but the playbook remains the same. India’s minorities face lynchings and the bulldozing of their homes, among other abuses. Ten percent of the world’s Muslims live in India, over 200 million in all; as Gregory Stanton, the founder and director of Genocide Watch, has warned in a US congressional briefing, we are seeing in India the beginning of what would be by far the largest genocide in history.
And it’s not just Muslims who are at risk. In Manipur, over 150 people have been killed since May 2023 in a vicious ethnic conflict pitting Hindus against Christians. More broadly, since Modi took over in 2014, hate crimes against minorities have increased by 300%.
History tells us that this is how it works. Fascism grants the dominant majority special status, targeting national minorities by threatening their equal citizenship. In 2019, India passed a Citizenship Amendment Act that granted a fast track to citizenship for non-Muslims who lack documentation as citizens. The National Registry Act, already implemented in the Indian state of Assam, is a seemingly contradictory effort to expel illegal immigrants. It demands that residents provide proof of their citizenship in India, essentially a birth certificate, or face expulsion. Yet 38% of Indian children under five lack a birth certificate.
This tangle of laws exemplifies the blatant hypocrisy of India’s ruling party, leaving India poised to disenfranchise much of its Muslim population.
Nor is the problem only domestic. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, India has become one of the world’s largest importers of Russian oil – essentially propping up Russia’s occupation and genocide of its peaceful neighbor. Genocidal regimes support one another, in an alliance of evil, and the rest of the world must stand against them.
So, has the US been listening? The answer is clearly no. In June, Biden gave Modi’s visit a red-carpet treatment. Jack Kirby, a US national security official, has made light of objections to Modi, declaring that “India is a vibrant democracy. Anybody that, you know, happens to go to New Delhi can see that for themselves.” With America’s help, the G20 platforms BJP’s transparently hypocritical embrace of humanitarian and liberal ideals.
The US public and their leaders are paying attention, at least somewhat, to Russia’s genocide in Ukraine. But the collective shrug at a potentially vast genocide in India (as well as the ongoing genocide in Sudan) raises an obvious concern: is the US public’s standard for this crime much higher when black and brown people face the threat?
Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and the author, most recently, of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
