India's Faltering Democracy

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world’s largest democracy and second most populous country.

But last March, Freedom House, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy organization, downgraded India from “free” to “partly free” in its annual Freedom in the World report. The assessment was in response to a steep decline in the country’s democratic and secular values.

The U.S. State Department’s human rights report on India, also released in March, cited “unlawful and arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings perpetrated by police,” and “restrictions on freedom of expression and the press,” involving the use of criminal libel laws to police social media.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned New Delhi not to backslide on human rights, amid mounting criticism that the Indian government is cracking down on dissent and discriminating against its Muslim population.

“Both of our democracies are works in progress,” Blinken said in his visit to India in late July. “At a time of rising global threats to democracy and international freedoms -- we talk about a democratic recession – it’s vital that we two world-leading democracies continue to stand together in support of these ideals.”

Following his first election triumph in 2014, many hoped Prime Minister Narendra Modi would become a populist reformer, focused on rapid economic development. Instead, critics describe a staunchly Hindu nationalist regime that has unsettled India’s minorities, not least its Muslims.

Every single one of India’s democratic and independent institutions, from the Election Commission to the judiciary to the media, has come under attack. Secularism, enshrined in its constitution after independence in 1947, looks a spent force.

Author and lawyer Suchitra Vijayan, the founder and the executive director of the Polis Project, a research and journalism organization, spent seven years travelling India’s 14,500-kilometre land borders to explore how its various peoples are faring.

In her newly published Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, she concludes that what has emerged is “an authoritarian India, deeply antagonistic to secularism, political dissent, and pluralism.”

The Indian state, she asserts, has always used excessive and extrajudicial violence on communities that resist, whether it’s the borderlands, peripheries, or mainland.

She was told that in many Muslim ruins and lesser-known shrines vandals place images and idols of Hindu gods and goddesses in them. Vijayan sees this as an attempt to exclude Muslims, India’s largest minority, from a shared history, and thereby to present the fiction that because India is a majority Hindu state it should be a Hindu-first state. “When we exclude them from our history, we can quietly exclude them from this land,” she writes.

Muslim Bangladeshis illegally crossing the border into India has become an increasingly fraught political issue. The two countries share a 4,096-kilometre border. The line runs through five Indian states: West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram. The Indian Border Security Force has identified half of the border as vulnerable to crossings either due to the lack of fencing or bodies of water.

Prime Minister Modi’s popularity should not be underestimated, however. In 2019 his populist campaign led to a massive majority in India’s 17th general election, decimating the opposition parties.

Emphasizing his plebeian background, Modi reiterated that his family belonged to a “most backward caste,” and in order to appeal to the poor, he projected himself as a potential victim of the former Congress Party rulers. He also stoked anti-Muslim feeling among the Hindu-majority electorate.

In their analysis of the election, published in the journal Contemporary South Asia last year, political scientists Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Verniers asserted that “The 2019 election campaign may remain in history as the moment when India transitioned from national-populism to political authoritarianism.”

Jaffrelot, a French academic at the Paris Institute of Political Studies known as Sciences Po, has now followed up with Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy. It relates how Modi’s government has moved India toward an ethnic democracy that equates the majoritarian community with the nation and relegates Muslims and Christians to second-class citizens.

At the moment, a return to an earlier era of liberal secularism, embodied by leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru or even Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan Singh, looks highly improbable.

 

Lebanon Has Become a Hollow Shell of Itself

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

Lebanon’s new Prime Minister Najib Mikati pledged on Sept. 10 to tackle one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns, saying he “will deal with anyone for the sake of Lebanon’s interest, with the exception of Israel, of course.”

When it comes to the country’s relations with its southern neighbour, his words hardly matter, of course, because the militant Shiite Muslim organization Hezbollah, which holds sway over state decision-making in Lebanon, decides how to deal with the Jewish state. Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun, though a Maronite Christian, is himself backed by Hezbollah.

Under Lebanon’s power-sharing system, the position of prime minister must be held by a Sunni Muslim. The president is required to be Maronite Christian and the speaker of parliament a Shiite Muslim.

Founded in 1982 by Shiite militants, Hezbollah fought a devastating war with Israel in 2006. Since then, its array of weapons has expanded in both quality and quantity. As well, there has been no real resistance to its role as the de facto power inside Lebanon. Its military power outmatches that of the state and dwarfs the other irregular military presences in the country. 

Lebanon has long been a loose arrangement among competing sects and factions who failed to create a national entity that superseded other loyalties, and now an economic crisis threatens to push what remains of the state toward genuine collapse.

The country had been led by a caretaker government since former Prime Minister Hassan Diab resigned last year amid protests demanding accountability for the horrific Beirut explosion of Aug. 4, 2020, blamed on a stockpile of highly explosive ammonium nitrate stored improperly at Lebanon’s most vital port.

 At least 215 people died in the blast, which caused billions of dollars in damage and added to the country’s already dire economic situation. 

Mikati, a billionaire, was endorsed by most of Lebanon’s political parties, including Hezbollah and the other major Shiite party, Amal. He also gained support from former Sunni prime ministers including Saad Hariri, who abandoned efforts to form a government earlier this year.

 The formation of a new government brings to an end the 13-month gridlock in Lebanon.

Mikati, who hails from the impoverished northern city of Tripoli, was tasked with forming a new government in July. He was twice prime minister, in 2005 and again from 2011 to 2013, and is part of the same political class that has brought the country to bankruptcy.

The currency has lost 90 per cent of its value to the U.S. dollar since October 2019, and annual inflation in 2020 was 84.9 per cent, plunging more 75 per cent of the population into poverty.

Lebanon’s foreign reserves have been running dangerously low, and the central bank in the import-dependent country said it is no longer able to support the country’s $6 billion subsidy program. In August it ended subsidies for fuel imports.

Crippling shortages in fuel and medicine have threatened to shut down bakeries and the country’s internet. There is friction, sometimes violent, in the long queues that start the evening before to fill up vehicles at gas stations the following morning.

Beirut’s International Airport has ceased to function normally, and hospitals and clinics have had to close. To cover the gaps left by the state power supply, residents rely on privately owned, diesel-powered generators. All but the wealthiest Lebanese have cut meat from their diets. Unprecedented numbers of people are trying to leave the country altogether. 

Lebanon’s gross domestic product has plummeted from $55 billion in 2018 to $33 billion in 2020, according to a World Bank report. “Such a brutal and rapid contraction is usually associated with conflicts or wars,” the spring 2021 report states.

How far this country has fallen. For the first three decades of its independence, granted by France in 1943, Lebanon enjoyed a reputation as the “Paris of the Middle East,” and was both a top tourist and cultural destination. But it became embroiled in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and was plunged into its own 15-year civil war between 1975 and 1990, devastating the country. It hasn’t been the same since.

The government is expected to resume negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a rescue package. It can’t come too soon.

 

How Is France Faring Under Macron?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

A year before he faces re-election for a second term, Emmanuel Macron’s chances to retain the French presidency remain no sure thing.

There is no denying that his is a personalist presidency, in the tradition of Charles de Gaulle. After beating the main old parties in 2017, Macron has governed by concentrating powers in his hands. He controls his own party, La République En Marche, in the National Assembly.

However, even apart from his less than stellar handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, he has fumbled other files.

In the autumn of 2018, public discontent unfolded in provincial and rural France in opposition to a new fuel tax supported by Macron’s government. By mid-November tens of thousands of people were protesting across France, and in early December there were violent clashes in Paris. A contrite Macron announced a withdrawal of the new levy and pledged that he had heard popular demands for change.

His approval ratings are mediocre and more than two-thirds of the electorate still regard him as an arrogant “président des riches.” French citizens see their public services in a depleted state, partly due to Macron’s reforms and budget cuts. The term déclinisme has become part of the French political discourse. Indeed, a majority of voters does not want him to run again in 2022.

The president retains one potential advantage: the fragmented political landscape which contributed to his election in 2017 remains largely unaltered. The Parti Socialiste and the Républicains, the old governing parties of the left and right, are still struggling to offer credible alternatives in terms of policies and leadership.

The Républicains have until late September to decide whether to hold an open primary vote to choose a candidate. Michel Barnier, the former EU chief negotiator on Brexit, has declared he will run.

Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, will decide about her candidacy later this month. Even if she runs, she will have a hard task uniting the left unless the Greens throw in their lot with her as a unity candidate. As well, the radical progressive Jean-Luc Mélenchon is expected to run again and he performed well in 2017.

On the right, the main challenger to Macron will again be Marine Le Pen. Her Rassemblement National has rebranded itself as a champion of the welfare state and a defender of French secularism, as a means by which to galvanize anti-Muslim voters. 

It continues to appeal to entrenched French fears about their social and economic security, and what they see as the dilution of their national identity by European integration and “Islamism.”

In the presidential election, if no one reaches 50 per cent in the first round, the top two candidates face each other two weeks later. But that means that the first round suddenly becomes crucial. What if Macron, Le Pen, Mélenchon, and a Green-Socialist alliance candidate, are all hovering around the 20 per cent mark? Even a Le Pen-Mélenchon run-off is possible.

Faced with a populist challenge from Le Pen, Macron has move to the right himself. The National Assembly has passed a law against “separatism,” defined as threatening, intimidating or assaulting an elected official or a public-sector employee.

The bill was debated after three attacks last year by extremists, including the murder of a teacher. It extends the requirement of strict religious neutrality beyond civil servants to anyone who is a private contractor of a public service -- even bus drivers.

There is also some unrest in the military. Two open letters published in April and May in the conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles by more than 1,000 serving and retired French army officers denounced Muslim residents for fomenting “civil war” and trampling on France’s cultural heritage.

Warning that French authorities were conceding too much ground to “Islamism,” the texts hinted that the army would step in if politicians failed to restore order. The retired officers claimed that France was “disintegrating.”

This should be taken seriously. General de Gaulle himself came to power in 1958 during the Algerian Civil War with the support of elements in the armed forces. It was effectively a coup d’état. The Fifth Republic is 63 years old, but in France, constitutional longevity has been the exception, not the rule.

9/11 Started 20 Years of Failure in Afghanistan

By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, NB] Telegraph-Journal

On September 11, 2001, 19 militants associated with the extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against targets in the United States.

Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York City, a third plane hit the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and the fourth plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the attacks, which triggered major U.S. initiatives to combat terrorism.

Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta was the brains of the operation and might arguably be considered the most important person of the 21^st century thus far.

Virtually everyone on the planet who was older than 10 at the time remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing on that day. It was, in that sense, a “world-historical” event, similar to the start of the two world wars, and we had entered a new zeitgeist.

That morning, I had boarded an airplane in Winnipeg, en route to Toronto, in order to fly back to Charlottetown, following a three-day academic conference. About 40 minutes into the flight, the pilot announced that all aircraft in North America were being ordered to land at the nearest major airport.

He gave no explanation, but everyone realized something serious had happened. We touched down at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. We then heard the astonishing news.

We were put up at a Holiday Inn for the next three days and nights and provided with various necessities (because our baggage initially remained on the plane) by the Red Cross.

The international bridge connecting the city to its namesake on the upper peninsula of the state of Michigan was already closed, guarded by soldiers with machine guns. We all got to know each other while in the hotel and watched the unbelievable coverage on television.

Our local Charlottetown CBC radio station interviewed me by phone about how we “airplane people” were faring. On Sept. 14, I finally caught a plane to Montreal and returned home, having missed the first few days of the term.

The term “Islamism” was still not much in use at the time, but through a strange coincidence, I had published an article in a Calgary newspaper, dated August 30, about the rise and spread of this ideology, entitled “Fundamentalist Islamism: A Form of “Religio-Racism.” After all, there had been numerous terrorist attacks around the world for at least a decade prior to 9/11.

 “It is this fundamentalist vision, with its totalitarian theory of absolute truth and religious domination, which theorizes non-believers as ‘others,’ to whom no mercy need be shown,” I wrote. “Islamists support the idea of ultimate world domination through war: the non-Islamic world is identified as dar e l-harb, those areas still to be conquered.” I then described their activities in Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South America, the Balkans, and Western Europe. 

This paragraph, given recent events, stands out in particular: “Afghanistan itself is now ruled by arguably the world’s most repressive regime, the fanatical Taliban, who oppose all political rights to non-Muslims minorities, such as Hindus.”

As we know, because this regime was harboring Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda organization, the terrorist group behind 9/11, U.S. President George W. Bush launched an attack on Afghanistan as part of what would be termed the “War on Terror.” It would be followed two years later by an invasion of Iraq, based on questionable information that Saddam Hussein’s regime, too, was somehow involved with Islamists.

President Joe Biden’s ignominious abandonment of Afghanistan, which is now once again in the clutches of a Taliban stronger than ever, forms a sad ending to Bush’s “mission accomplished” in Afghanistan and Iraq. The dates 9/11/01 and 8/31/21 might be considered bookends. 

The United States has lost trillions of dollars, more than 7,000 soldiers killed, and the destabilization of the entire greater Middle East and Central Asia, in this misguided mission. (Canada saw 159 troops killed in Afghanistan, the largest number for any single Canadian military mission since the Korean War.)

Not only did neither of these wars succeed in ending the terrorist threat, but they weakened America economically and politically, and led to the strengthening of her rivals – China, Russia, and, most worrisome, Iran. The Tehran regime now virtually calls the shots – literally -- in Iraq and will doubtless gain political advantages in Afghanistan.

The sad truth, often forgotten both by the idealistic left and those on the hawkish right, is that you can’t build democratic institutions (involving clearly dubious elections) in places where the indigenous political cultures don’t support the mission.

 

The Palestinian Territories are Far from Democratic

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

When the “squad,” that group of left-wing Democratic Party legislators in the U.S. Congress who in their heart of hearts would like to see Israel disappear, begin to criticize the PLO regime on the West Bank, you know things have become bad.

They censured the Palestinian Authority (PA) amid Ramallah’s crackdown on rights activists and critics. This came after 28 people were arrested in a crackdown on peaceful protest Aug. 21-22.

Among them was Fadi Quran, the local Campaign Director from Avaaz, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that promotes global activism. He called the Palestinian Authority “an illegitimate government.”

They had gathered to hold protests memorializing well-known PA critic Nizar Banat, who died in the custody of Ramallah’s security forces in June.

“Locking up peaceful protesters is a textbook human rights abuse and the hallmark of authoritarian regimes,” tweeted Rep. Ilhan Omar. Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib directed her disapproval at the PA’s leader. “Dear President Mahmoud Abbas,” she wrote. “Shame on you for suppressing Palestinian voices who are trying to seek liberation from not only the Israeli apartheid government, but from your corrupt leadership.”

Rep. Cori Bush added that “We stand with Palestinians against the violence of the Palestinian Authority’s authoritarianism. Freedom for political prisoners now.”

Nearly two dozen Palestinian civil society groups issued a statement on Aug. 23 warning of “a dangerous decline in rights and public freedoms,” and holding Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh responsible for “his failure to protect the rights of citizens.”

Why has this been happening? It appears that the status of President Abbas and the PA continue to deteriorate amid allegations of PA corruption. The PA is perceived by many Palestinians in the territories as unfit and bound to collapse.

On April 29, Abbas postponed elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, which were due to be held on May 22. Abbas has been wary of elections since 2006, when his arch rival, Hamas, defeated his Fatah faction of the PLO, winning 74 of 132 seats in the Council.

Palestinian analysts said the president baulked when it looked like his Fatah movement was heading for defeat. The cancellation exposed what many Palestinians regard as proof of the futility of the policy pursued by Abbas since he was elected president in 2005. He has described security cooperation with Israel as essential to the PA’s rule, but the Palestinian public now regards this policy as weak and submissive.

The death of Banat on June 24, under interrogation in a security facility, only aggravated the rage. Banat, an independent opposition figure who frequently disseminated video clips critical of the PA, attracted many followers. His family has described his death as an “assassination.”

In Palestinian popular opinion, Hamas is the main beneficiary of these developments. It is now regarded as a more authentic representative of the Palestinian interest than the PLO, and as unafraid to fight against Israel.

Pollster Khalil Shikaki reported that Hamas is currently perceived as capable of changing the asymmetric relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Abbas has in effect conceded leadership of the conflict over the holy sites in Jerusalem to his Gaza-based rivals.

One of the ways that Hamas has chosen to challenge and weaken the PA is by publicly associating with the “axis of resistance” led by Iran and its proxies, and by strident declarations of coordination between battlefronts against Israel in the south and the north.

But the PLO does have its supporters. The extensive construction in the West Bank in 2007-2013, when Salam Fayyad was PA Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, the Ramallah government constructed homes, expanded investments in the economy, and created thousands of jobs.

A fairly large middle class was created during those years, which enjoyed economic stability and regular income that enabled it to plan its future, obtain bank credit, and meet financial obligations.

Abbas is given credit for this, which complicates the task of those seeking to depose him. Also, Palestinians view the institution of the Palestinian Authority as a national achievement, but only as a preliminary stage on the way to an independent state. Even Hamas, which opposed the 1993 Oslo Accords that set it up, now regards the PA as an institution that should be preserved.