What do Hungary, Turkey and India have in common? Not much. But they do have one shared characteristic, and it is not a positive one. Sadly, what these three once promising liberal democracies share is the fact that they have all been transformed into illiberal regimes run by autocratic tyrants.
In the case of Hungary this is perhaps somewhat less of a shock. It had barely emerged from the Iron Curtain and begun its transition to a liberal democracy in the 1990’s when its progress was cut short, less than twenty years later, by the emergence of the Fidesz Party of Victor Orban. Since then Orban’s anti-democratic, xenophobic authoritarianism has turned back the clock and made Hungary a pariah in Europe.
The sad state of present-day Turkey is another matter entirely. Under iconic leader Kemal Ataturk Its early conversion to a liberal democracy — and a determinedly secular one – occurred more than 90 years ago. Turkey’s stability and progress had long cast it as a role model for regimes in the Middle East. As a result, the election of a Muslim extremist and longtime political agitator –Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — as prime minister in 2003 was both unexpected and worrisome. Although he initially pledged to pursue moderate objectives, his position on various issues hardened rapidly. By the time he was first elected as president in 2014, having muzzled the media, interfered with the judiciary and modified the constitution, Turkey was well on its way to becoming an illiberal democracy with forced Islamization, rampant nationalism, routine violations of human rights and a return to armed conflict with its Kurdish minority. [i]
Which brings us to the sorry case of India, another once promising example of a secular liberal democratic regime established by revered political leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. For nearly 75 years it continued to command respect from both western democracies and third world regimes for its progress, despite the many challenges posed by its massive and diverse population. All this changed, however, with the collapse of the moderate Congress Party and the ascension of a blatantly pro-Hindu nationalist party led by the fiery Narendra Modi.
It is worth noting that even before Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014 his actions as a government official and state-level politician had already been highly controversial. Both the UK and the US had even denied him an entry visa, primarily because they considered him complicit in the murder of more than 1,000 Muslims in the so-called Gujurat Riots, a fact he has tried hard to conceal.[ii] Since his election in 2014 he has spent a decade promoting the Hindu religion and “values” through legislation, political propaganda and misinformation, while simultaneously demonizing and disenfranchising the large Muslim minority and vigorously promoting the image of a violent, terrorist Sikh diaspora to the general Indian populaton.[iii]
As in Hungary and Turkey, control of the media and manipulation of various democratic institutions has played an important role in Modi’s successful transformation of the regime into an illiberal autocracy. But while the downfall of Hungary’s democracy has negative implications for the EU, and Turkey’s democratic decline is a problem for the west and especially NATO, India under Modi has gone much further and is effectively a threat to all liberal democracies. He has moved India into the category of rogue regimes such as China, Iran and Russia that now seek to interfere aggressively in the activities of other sovereign states, often through their migrant communities abroad, and are willing to use violence to achieve their ends.
It is in this context, then, that the recent exposure of the direct involvement of the Indian government in a string of planned assassinations, blackmail and violent intimidation targeting Canadian and American citizens must be seen. This is not simply a case of inept (and, according to numerous experts, largely unsuccessful) attempts to influence the results of local elections or party leadership races, as we have seen in the case of China, unacceptable as this behaviour may be. Instead, Modi’s government has taken foreign interference to an entirely new level. Both the FBI and the RCMP have identified several individuals in the employ of the Indian government whom they consider to be directly involved in various criminal activities including murder, as well as several high level officials and diplomats whom they consider to be complicit.[iv] As prime minister Trudeau told a parliamentary committee, these actions by India’s agents are an unprecedented violation of international law and Canadian sovereignty, made even more significant because they have been launched by an allegedly liberal democracy.
Modi’s response to these accusations is even more extraordinary. In the face of all of this evidence, which Canadian officials and US law enforcement agents have outlined publicly and shared with their Indian counterparts, the Indian government continues to deny all wrongdoing and refuses to cooperate with investigations.[v] Even more astonishing, Modi has personally launched a disinformation campaign through the government-controlled media in India to demonize prime minister Trudeau among Indian citizens. Modi also continues to insist that Canada is a hotbed of conspiracies by violent Sikh separatists, apparently referring to any Canadian citizens who support the concept of a separate Khalistan state carved out of the existing Punjabi state, many of whom his government has arbitrarily classified as terrorists. (The irony of Modi accusing Sikhs of promoting a substate based on religion, after his decade of promoting India as a whole as a Hindu state, has not been lost on many critics and commentators.)
Many analysts have suggested that Modi’s increasingly angry response to all American and Canadian accusations, and his decision to whip up anti-Sikh along with anti-Muslim sentiment among his Hindu nationalist supporters, was directly connected to his sinking political fortunes in advance of the June 2024 national election. In the end his party was returned but with a minority, despite his numerous predictions of a landslide majority, thereby greatly embarrassing the increasingly autocratic Modi.[vi] At the same time, the resurgence of the National Congress Party, which doubled its support in June over its previous showing in 2019, suggests that Indians themselves may be tiring of the illiberal extremism of Modi’s government and its focus on ethnic nationalism over economic progress and positive international relations.
In addition, although the perceived role of India as a counterbalance to the very real threat posed by the economic and military strength of China may have allowed Modi some leeway to continue to ignore criticism of his regime in the past, as other western liberal democracies were loathe to alienate his government over his behaviour, this fig leaf appears to be disappearing. Both the UK and the US have publicly criticized India’s refusal to cooperate in the investigations, and it would appear that Modi’s position will become increasingly untenable as revelations about these unacceptable activities continue to mount and all members of the Five Eyes group become increasingly concerned. [vii] As the prime minister indicated in testimony before a parliamentary committee, India has made a “horrific mistake” and one that may hasten the demise of the Modi autocracy.
[i] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-liberal-democracy-in-turkey-implications-for-the-west/
[ii] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/21/india-asks-youtube-twitter-to-block-links-of-bbc-film-on-modi-gujarat-riots
[iii] For more details see https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/hindu-nation-india-citizenship-act-legalizes/
and https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/modi-hundred-days-democracy-by-shashi-tharoor-2019-09
[iv] https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/rcmp-alleges-indian-officials-in-canada-connected-to-extortion-homicides-1.7073330
[v] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/14/india-furious-as-diplomats-declared-persons-of-interest-in-canada-probe
[vi] https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/india/indias-modi-stays-power-weakened
[vii] https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/extremely-serious-british-u-s-officials-call-on-india-to-co-operate-with-canadian-criminal/article_0ba13330-8bc3-11ef-ae7f-074141e7f550.html
