The foreign hand, again

In retrospect, we might look at the first weeks of 2021 as a watershed in India’s slide away from constitutional values. Such moments have arrived in many countries across the world that have elected populist governments over the past decades; for the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, it came in 2013 over protests in Istanbul against the construction of replica military barracks in a historic park, snowballing into demands for Mr Erdogan’s resignation. By the end of that year, Turkey’s ruling party — led by a man once celebrated by the credulous as a living example that Islamism and democracy could live in harmony — was blaming all sorts of foreign agitators for the chaos in his country. Including, memorably, Lufthansa. Yes, the airline.

Which is why it was profoundly disturbing when the prime minister himself claimed repeatedly this week that there is a giant conspiracy against India — including, he told a crowd in tea-producing Assam, against tea. Farmers, he said in Gujarat, were being misled by a “conspiracy”. NGOs, he said in Odisha, were conspiring “from morning to night, how do we finish Modi?” Once is rhetoric; twice is absent-mindedness; thrice is a trend.

India’s democracy has always had space for conspiracy theories. Indira Gandhi’s Congress, famously, used to blame every domestic problem on the “foreign hand”. (An obsession that was, we now know thanks to the Mitrokhin Archive, a triumph of KGB influence.) Yet there is an escalation in such magical thinking in the current establishment, which is deeply disturbing. When a government — no, when an entire ruling establishment — determines that a random few tweets from pop stars and well-connected activists in the West represent a grand attempt to keep India down, then you have to recognise that we are not just in “foreign hand” territory, we are well beyond it. Sadly, today’s leaders do not even have the originality of Indira Gandhi’s time, given that they have decided to slavishly follow the Trumpian template and blame everything on George Soros.

Conspiratorial thinking leads to tyranny. It means you imagine connections between disparate groups of dissenters, and thereby elevate in your mind their danger to the state. It means that you feel justified in reducing their rights, framing them for crimes they did not commit, and reducing liberties in the public sphere. In 2014, Mr Erdogan tried to ban Twitter, just as India’s government is considering doing today. It didn’t work in Turkey because the country’s supreme court overturned the ban. Over the next few years, Mr Erdogan purged the judiciary of those he saw as insufficiently loyal. We should expect to see attempts of that sort in this country in coming years.

The courts may not always have lived up to the faith that we perforce must repose in them. Mahua Moitra, a Trinamool Congress MP, pointed out recently in Parliament that the courts had allowed eminent activists to languish in jail. We now have learned, thanks to a report in The Washington Post, that the evidence against them was likely planted by hackers using malware to access their computers remotely. The Post’s report was based on an analysis by a well-known Massachusetts-based internet security company that identified these attacks as one of the most disturbing such operations it had investigated; the company’s analysis was read and confirmed by three independent groups of experts, including the Citizen Lab at the Munk School in the University of Toronto. What was the response to this damning report? Well, Soros — alongside a large number of other donors across the political spectrum — once gave money to the Munk School Lab. Ergo, this was all part of the “conspiracy”.

The government’s use of foreign contribution laws, and of the Enforcement Dire­ctorate, is indicative of this shift in how it operates. This week, an opposition-friendly news portal was raided by the ED; and we will see more such harassment in the future. Every organ of the state will be perverted because conspiratorial thinking from the top spreads faster than Covid-19. Comedians are in jail for — as Time magazine said about Munawar Faruqui — “jokes they did not even tell”. The Census is being used to drag the National Population Register in through the back door. State control of the financial system is being used to starve high-performing opposition-led states of resources — look at the changes to the priority sector lending rules recently. Authoritarians like conspiracies because their own failings could not possibly explain their failures; but it is also true that, once conspiracies take hold, countries turn to and embrace authoritarianism.

The only words I can offer here in response to this trumped-up fear of the “foreign hand” are those of someone whom even the current government would not dare traduce as a saboteur. “If there is someone who is really trying to vitiate foreign relations it is first and foremost, [then] Home Minister Zail Singh, who sees a foreign hand in everything, every disturbance ... If you cannot see the foreign hand, how do you know it is foreign or Indian? It is to cover up their failures that at times they talk of a foreign hand, at times put the blame on the opposition.” That was Atal Bihari Vajpayee, speaking in Parliament four decades ago. Does the BJP think Vajpayee too was on Soros’ payroll?