For years, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attacked the foundations of his nation’s democracy. His authorities has rewritten election rules in its favor, assailed the rights of the Muslim minority, jailed anti-government protesters, and reined in the free press.

On Friday morning, it took one other main step in an authoritarian route: kicking Modi’s principal rival, Congress occasion chief Rahul Gandhi, out of workplace and disqualifying him from competing in future elections.

The pretext for this transfer was Gandhi’s conviction on defamation prices a day earlier.

In 2019, within the midst of nationwide elections, Gandhi made a joke about individuals with the final identify “Modi” being thieves — citing a wealthy fugitive, a crooked cricketer, and the incumbent prime minister as examples. In response, a politician from Modi’s BJP occasion named Purnesh Modi filed a felony grievance wherein he accused Gandhi of defaming the “Modi community.”

On Thursday, a court docket dominated in opposition to Gandhi, sentencing him to 2 years in jail for his try at marketing campaign path humor (a sentence that gained’t be carried out for no less than 30 days). The BJP-controlled Parliament moved swiftly to boot Gandhi and stop him from holding workplace once more.

If this all appears fishy, that’s as a result of it’s.

India’s defamation regulation is notoriously punitive, owing partly to the legacy of British colonial speech restrictions. Historically, Indian governments and different highly effective actors have used it as a tool to suppress speech they don’t like. Under Modi, these longstanding problematic legal guidelines have been deployed as a part of a scientific marketing campaign to strengthen their maintain on energy.

“This government has not invented any new tools; they’re just much more purposive and efficient in deploying them,” says Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They campaigned on a pledge to bring about a ‘Congress-mukt’ Bharat (Congress-free India). This is just one element of this larger strategy.”

It’s a dangerous transfer. India’s residents nonetheless have very favorable views of democracy; there’s a possible for one thing as nakedly authoritarian as kicking your chief political opponent out of workplace to backfire in opposition to Modi. But that’s very a lot nonetheless an “if”: Modi is extremely popular, and Gandhi shouldn’t be generally known as an particularly adept politician.

There’s an actual risk, then, that Modi’s authorities will get away with one more brazen assault on the nation’s beleaguered democracy.

What occurred with Gandhi

To perceive the significance of Gandhi’s disqualification, we have to first perceive the way it occurred and what it says about trendy India that it occurred in any respect.

The defamation provisions used in opposition to Gandhi, elements 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code, date back to the 1860s, when India was a British colony. Section 499 presents a reasonably free definition of “defamation” and what’s required to show it in court docket; Section 500 makes the crime punishable by as much as two years in jail.

While many advanced democracies retain criminal defamation laws, and a few even often use them, India’s regulation is strikingly broad and subject to abuse. After India’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of felony defamation in a 2016 ruling, legal scholars and political scientists warned that the legal guidelines would proceed to pose a critical risk to free speech within the nation.

“The law as it stands exposes India to ridicule; it is so out of sync with the law in the democratic world on all the major points in issue,” Indian lawyer and political commentator A.G. Noorani wrote in The Hindu newspaper.

In the years since, the political context has shifted in ways in which make these legal guidelines much more harmful.

Narendra Modi, who primarily campaigned as a principled financial reformer when he first gained workplace in 2014, has demonstrated more and more authoritarian tendencies. This has included a willingness to wield felony regulation to be able to silence his political opponents. One instance: a series of 2020 prosecutions concentrating on opposition politicians, civil rights activists, and lecturers beneath sedition and counterterrorism legal guidelines.

In its 2023 report, the pro-democracy watchdog Freedom House famous that such ways had develop into a constant characteristic of Modi’s more and more authoritarian rule — noting, for instance, information suggesting a 28 % improve in sedition prices between 2014 and 2020.

“Authorities have used security, defamation, sedition, and hate speech laws, as well as contempt-of-court charges, to quiet critical voices in the media,” Freedom House finds. “Activists, Muslims, and members of other marginalized communities are routinely charged with sedition for criticizing the government and its policies.”

A protest in Kolkata in February 2023.

Saikat Paul / Eyepix Group/Future Publishing/Getty Images

The case in opposition to Gandhi is a continuation of this sample. Though initially filed in 2019 within the metropolis of Surat, positioned in Modi’s residence state of Gujarat, it had been placed on maintain for years — solely to be revived in February of this yr. The timing is suspect: The Wire, an Indian on-line outlet, notes that the movement was filed by a Modi ally solely per week after Gandhi launched a serious assault in opposition to the prime minister’s ties to disgraced businessman Gautam Adani.

The Wire additionally notes that the case has critical authorized flaws. In felony allegations {that a} group is being defamed — like individuals named Modi — it must be proven that the group constitutes a definite entity with collective pursuits and a gaggle popularity that could possibly be besmirched.

“[I]t is difficult to contend that those with the surname Modi constitute a community, which was distinct from others, and that Rahul Gandhi intended to defame such a community,” its evaluation concludes.

For this purpose, it’s fully doable that Gandhi’s conviction is overturned on attraction.

But to the Lok Sabha, the BJP-controlled decrease home of India’s Parliament, that didn’t matter. The chamber acted virtually instantly after conviction to kick Gandhi out of its ranks. The swiftness of the transfer was putting to Indian observers, successfully giving Gandhi no grace interval to contest the doubtful ruling.

“Despite the ridiculous conviction for defamation for 2 years by the Surat court, the sentence was stayed for 30 days for Rahul to appeal. But within a day, the Lok Sabha sect has disqualified him!” eminent Indian litigator Prashant Bhushan famous on Twitter.

“All to prevent him from speaking on Adani.”

What the Gandhi disqualification says about India’s democracy

Gandhi’s conviction and removing from Parliament illustrate, greater than the rest, the persevering with deterioration of India’s democracy and Modi’s and his allies’ authoritarian bent.

In 2021, V-DEM — the main tutorial metric of democracy world wide — discovered that India now not met its minimal requirements for qualifying as a democracy of any form, downgrading it to an “electoral autocracy.” In its clarification for the change, V-DEM famous the usage of sedition and defamation legal guidelines as integral to India’s anti-democratic slide.

“India’s autocratization process has largely followed the typical pattern for countries … over the past ten years: a gradual deterioration where freedom of the media, academia, and civil society were curtailed first and to the greatest extent,” V-DEM argues.

But even on this broader context, attacking the main determine within the opposition is unusually brazen. Rahul Gandhi leads the Congress occasion, the dominant political faction in India for many years after independence and the standard champion of Indian secularism and liberal democracy (with some glaring exceptions). He is the direct descendant of India’s most well-known post-independence leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

Though lengthy seen as an incompetent and out-of-touch chief, that popularity had reportedly began to alter in latest months. Between September 2022 and January 2023, he launched into a pilgrimage — known as the Bharat Jodo (“Unite India”) Yatra — throughout 2,200 miles of Indian territory. The demonstration, which evoked a tradition of political yatras in India, was designed as an act of protest in opposition to Modi’s politics of division and concentrating on of the Muslim minority. It appears to have executed actual work in rehabilitating Gandhi and his buckling Congress occasion on the whole.

In this context, then, going after Gandhi poses vital dangers for Modi. His regime has not formally repudiated democracy in the way in which that older authoritarian actions like fascism did. Like related trendy autocrats in locations like Hungary and Israel, he nonetheless depends upon assist from a public that believes within the primary beliefs of consultant authorities.

Therefore, he must promote his authorities as authentically democratic, not nakedly repressive. Kicking Gandhi out of Parliament doesn’t formally weaken Congress in any sense, and it creates a possibility for the opposition to spotlight the true nature of Modi’s regime.

“This is largely a psychological blow to the opposition,” Vaishnav tells me. “Rahul Gandhi can still command media and popular attention when he is not a member of Parliament,”

Yet for such a tactic to work, it requires Gandhi to translate it into extra than simply sympathetic protection. And observers of India are skeptical that he and his allies in Congress management have the facility to make that occur, particularly given the BJP’s more and more tight management over the Indian political system and mass media.

“He has the potential to exploit his ‘victimhood’ for political gain, but I am not confident he will be able to do this,” Vaishnav continues. “Even after his yatra, pundits said Bharat Jodo Yatra would be step 1 of a larger rehabilitation plan only if it was followed by additional steps to sharpen the opposition’s ideological positioning and build the Congress organization. We have not seen much headway on either of those fronts.”

Gandhi’s arrest has the potential to be a turning level at nighttime post-2014 story of Indian democracy. But Modi is a succesful and canny authoritarian, and placing an actual dent in his political armor shall be a troublesome problem for India’s weakened opposition.