“Oh, the stool, the stool. My dear Pepys, the persistent excellence of the stool has been one of this disease’s most tedious features. When will you get it into your head, one can produce a copious, regular and exquisitely-turned evacuation every day and still be a stranger to reason?” says Dr. Warren to Samuel Pepys in an iconic scene from the Madness of King George.
One is reminded of this dialogue whenever India comes down on the side of authoritarianism to serve its own geopolitical ends with utter disregard for democracy – all the while calling itself the world’s most populous democracy, a democratic beacon and its elections a ‘carnival of democracy’. Many in the West also buy into this idea as they look for a more amenable country to counter the heft of economically and politically powerful, but dictatorial, China. One is tempted to respond, “Oh, the democracy, the democracy. When will you get it into your head, one can follow democracy within one’s borders, however tenuous that democracy may be becoming, and still scorn it abroad when it serves one’s purpose?”
India’s reaction to the recent Bangladesh crisis illustrates not only its plain indifference to what it claims to champion at home, but also the shameful parochialism of its vision and downright hypocrisy. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who decided to flee the country in the face of formidable protests on August 5th, won a third consecutive term in power this January. She had been ruling since 2009, improving the country’s economy, but later on suppressing dissent and hounding the opposition. The opposition boycotted the January elections, questioning their fairness, and Hasina retained her premiership undisturbed. Protests against a specific job quota bill in July snowballed into more widespread agitations against her rule. She put in a shoot-to-kill order and deployed the army to the streets. Around 500 civilians were shot dead
Throughout the escalation, India did what it usually does when something it doesn’t like happens – pretend it didn’t happen and pray that it goes away. Hasina maintained a close relationship with New Delhi, going back to the times when she took refuge there when her father, the founding father of Bangladesh, was killed in a coup. India tolerated her excesses so as to have at least one trustworthy friend in the region as China competes for influence (with much success) with all of its other neighbours. Ergo, no condemnation of the rigged January elections or the authorities’ brutal suppression of protests emerged from the ‘democratic beacon’. Instead, Prime Minister Narendra Modi received Hasina as the first foreign guest after he won his own third term in power in June.
As protests strengthened, the army decided it wouldn’t kill more people. Hasina decided to leave the country as enraged protesters planned to storm her palace. She took a helicopter to Delhi and India’s worst nightmare came to pass overnight. It was stripped of its most trusted ally in the neighbourhood. A day after she landed, India made its first official statement on Bangladesh, which reeked of its apathy for the plight of the killed Bangladeshis and its bitterness at losing a valuable friend in power.
Speaking in Parliament, the Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar talked as though the protesters didn’t have any genuine concerns at all and depicted them as violent troublemakers. “This underlying foundation aggravated a student agitation that started in June this year. There was growing violence, including attacks on public buildings and infrastructure, as well as traffic and rail obstructions,” Jaishankar said, apparently more concerned about interruptions to traffic in Dhaka than about the subsequent killings that followed. He did not mention the high-handed police response or the shoot-to-kill order a single time.
But that was not the most shameful bit. After addressing its evacuation of Indian students from Bangladesh, Jaishankar lamented that minorities and their “temples” had come under attack by crowds that managed to expel Hasina. This was a veiled reference to Bangladesh’s 13.1 million Hindu minority. Videos spread across the venom-filled Indian social media about supposedly Hindu villages being attacked by rabid crowds in their neighbouring country. The notoriously high-decibel yet sycophantic media picked up this issue and decried a “genocide of the Hindus”. The fact that India propped up an undemocratic leader that killed innocent people received almost no mention in the country’s public discussion. The media turned it into a routine domestic issue of Hindu victimisation against Muslim villainy.
Prime Minister Modi, in a greeting post on X to the new interim leader Muhammad Yunus, went the whole hog and said, “We hope for an early return to normalcy, ensuring the safety and protection of Hindus and all other minority communities.” There is nothing wrong in saying that per se. To be clear, Hindus were harassed in some parts of Bangladesh as they were seen as allies of Hasina and her Awami League party. But violence was also directed at others, including the police and Muslim members of the Awami League. To single out the threat to Hindus posed by rampaging crowds to the exclusion of all else including the breakdown of law and order across the country following the overthrow of a despot suggests something sinister.
That sinister thing is Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, the belief that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is wedded to. It views India as a fundamentally Hindu nation and Hindus as the rightful inhabitants of the land. People of other faiths are regarded as under the sufferance of the Hindus at best or as illegitimate encroachers at worst. Abroad, this ideology promotes India as a Hindu guardian, rather than as a secular country as its founding fathers fashioned it. Viewed from this lens, the fact that civilians were killed in cold blood by an Indian puppet mattered little compared to the danger faced by fellow Hindu kinsmen.
This pernicious ideology has pervaded Indian civil discourse so widely that even parties that don’t normally endorse Hindu nationalism end up mimicking the BJP line. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) said its “polit bureau expresses its serious concern at the reports of several attacks on Hindu places of worship and the minority community in Bangladesh”. No mention of the state’s violence, of course. This culture of flaunting concern for beleaguered Hindus extends beyond political parties. Yesteryear Bollywood diva Preity Zinta was not alone in feeling “devastated and heartbroken” over the violence against minorities.
“There’s outrage against the atrocities being committed against our mothers, sisters and daughters,” Modi said in his independence day speech in reference to attacks on Bangladeshi Hindus. No opportunity to gain domestic political mileage and burnish its pro-Hindu credentials from a real crisis abroad will be spared. It is worth recalling that while the BJP can’t resist caring about Hindus in Bangladesh, Amit Shah, Home Minister and Modi’s right-hand man, compared Muslim Bangladeshi immigrants in India to termites. Modi is not doing India any favours by disrespecting the Bengalis’ opposition to Hasina’s excesses and turning attention away to the plight of the Hindus. Many already view New Delhi as a wicked player that bolstered Hasina’s regime. Further narrow-minded, Hindutva-driven messaging will only weaken India’s image.
New Delhi played the same ‘Hindu guardian’ act when Hindu-Muslim riots took place in Leicester in the U.K. in 2022. As members of the two communities clashed, both sides assailed each other’s places of worship. The Indian high commission put out a statement denouncing the attacks on Hindu places of worship, shamefully disregarding the fact that mosques were also vandalised by Hindu reprobates. In fact, many Muslims in Leicester are of Indian background and not Pakistani and the high commission totally washed its hands of a significant proportion of its population. The diplomatic mission of a secular India, neglected the attack on one of its communities’ sacred places and attached greater importance to those of another. The reaction to Bangladesh is merely another episode of this reprehensible streak of Hindutva-driven posturing abroad.
India’s lecturing of Bangladesh to take adequate care of its minorities also smacks of hypocrisy. As author Kapil Komireddi wrote in the Times recently, “Its pleas for the safety of Bangladesh’s minorities are bereft of credibility, given the treatment of its own minorities over the past decade.” India’s Muslim-majority Kashmir remains heavily occupied by the military, and there isn’t a single Muslim minister in the Modi Government. Before the general elections in June, Modi ramped up anti-Muslim rhetoric calling Muslims “invaders”. India, therefore, has no moral high ground to lecture any country about protecting minorities.
Its appeal to protect Bangladeshi Hindus is also hypocritical because of the country’s aversion to having its flaws pointed out by foreigners. Any time someone from abroad calls attention to its dirty side, India’s first impulse is to bristle. For instance, when the BBC released a documentary about the Modi Government’s inaction during the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat state, India accused the broadcaster of “colonial mindset” and banned it in India. Jaishankar snapped at reporters when EU officials griped about India’s purchase of cheap Russian oil. India behaves petulantly when foreigners point to its failures in protecting human rights or supporting territorial sovereignty, but dispenses free lectures to other countries on protecting minorities.
As Perry Anderson wrote in his coruscating book Indian Ideology, “Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home.”
Aditya is a writer with a Master’s in International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE). Find him on on X.
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Modi turns a blind eye to the persecution of minorities in his own country:
https://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/latest-news/india-christians-persecution/
Hard to imagine the British govt would have behaved any better.
Sorry pal, but your expectations seem unrealistically high.
Hasina is one of the two legendary Battling Begums – the other went to jail for years but presumably the Bangladesh Nationalist party which she headed is still around. Whoever the trouble-makers really are just make sure they don’t bring their battles to Britain.
But don’t I recall that at partition, India was the Hindu homeland and Pakistan (along with Bangla Desh) became the Muslim homeland? So aren’t those campaigning for Muslims in India missing history and clearly in the wrong?