Say, Here's A Surprise: Everything Sucks Everywhere

Amazing how this song is so widely applicable to your horrid, hate-filled species.

Why Does the U.S. Care More About Taiwan’s Democracy Than India’s?

The West’s urge to counter China shouldn’t mean ignoring democratic erosion among its own coalition members.

When a judge in India’s Gujarat state sentenced the country’s most prominent opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, to two years in prison last month for a remark personally offensive to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he was doing more than sanctioning speech in a narrowly censorious way. If it is upheld, his ruling, seemingly by design, would remove Modi’s rival from the parliament and dramatically marginalize his place in India’s politics.

In most democracies, speech in general, and political speech in particular, benefits from strong constitutional or legal protections not as a matter of coincidence, but because the ability to speak critically, even scathingly, of one’s rivals is almost universally seen as a bedrock of this form of government.

For many years now, the international media has formulaically spoken of India as the world’s largest democracy. But seldom have those who write such descriptions with almost function-key-like regularity taken the time to consider the healthiness or accuracy of this credential. Now, more than any time in recent decades, would seem to be a compelling moment for this.

In fact, under Modi, who has been prime minister since 2014, India has been inching ever more deeply into the murky intermediate zone between democracy and authoritarianism, without Modi ever losing any of his entrée in the West. He leads a political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, that has become increasingly dominant in the country and whose growing power has been marked by ever more extreme religious identity politics; the weakening of judicial independence; the erosion of academic freedoms; and, as the Gandhi case dramatically shows, the steady and dramatic reduction of space for criticism.

As this column will try to make clear in a moment, India’s direction is, of course, worth worrying about for India’s sake itself. But it is also of profound relevance to the legitimacy of Western democracies and the claims that they often make about their promotion of what they say are universal values.

One answer would be that it's much easier to confront an external military threat (and send plenty of money to Big Defense Donors) than to stop a mess of idiots known as a country from self-immolating. But that's just this ++cynical reporter, & really only applies to your elected representatives & their non-stop bullshit.

[Furrin Policy]