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India
This Week in AsiaPolitics

Analysis | What’s killing India’s democracy? It’s not just Modi who’s to blame

  • As violence stoked by the BJP’s Hindu-centric rhetoric killed dozens in Delhi recently, opposition parties seemed content to roll over and play dead
  • The country’s treatment of its Muslim minority has even drawn comparisons to China from US-based democracy watchdog Freedom House

Reading Time:9 minutes
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Violent clashes erupted in the Indian capital last month. Photo: Xinhua
Debasish Roy Chowdhury
As sectarian violence engulfed parts of India’s capital last month, 60-year-old rag picker Ayub Ansari and his son went without food for three days. Trapped indoors by the violence, Ansari, who lived hand to mouth making barely US$4 a day selling the scrap he picked off garbage dumps, ran out of supplies and decided to chance it. His disabled son, 17-year-old Salman, warned him against going out. He left home early in the morning while Salman was still asleep.
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A couple of hours later, two men brought Ansari back on a scooter. They had found him lying in a pool of blood with his head smashed in. He told them that he had been spotted by a marauding Hindu mob that asked him his name and set upon him when they learned he was a Muslim. With barely any public transport available amid the rioting, Salman laid his father on a handcart he found by the roadside and pushed it for several kilometres to the nearest clinic. The staff there gave Ansari first aid but had little else to offer, so Salman pushed the cart to another clinic further down the road, which asked for a deposit he could not afford. Finally, he found an auto rickshaw that agreed to take him to the government-run Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital but, by the time they arrived, Ansari had died.

Women in Delhi mourn relatives who were killed in the communal violence. Photo: Xinhua
Women in Delhi mourn relatives who were killed in the communal violence. Photo: Xinhua

The hospital overflowed with patients as the violence outside raged for five days. Rickshaw puller Prem Singh’s family found him there the day after Ansari’s death. Singh had stepped out to buy milk for his three children and never returned. His was one of the unidentified bodies recovered from the roadside and placed at the mortuary. He was shot dead by a Muslim mob targeting Hindus in the area.

Heart-rending reports of human misery, and cruelty, have poured in from the neighbourhoods of New Delhi that were ravaged by groups of rioters even as US President Donald Trump was visiting the Indian capital last month. Armed with guns, petrol bombs, sticks and rods, they fought pitched street battles, attacked people and homes, set fire to shops, markets, schools and vehicles, and desecrated mosques and cemeteries. Large swathes of northeastern Delhi were laid waste in an orgy of violence that could well have been mistaken for war-torn Syria.
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People carry the body of a riot victim during a funeral procession in Delhi last month. Photo: Xinhua
People carry the body of a riot victim during a funeral procession in Delhi last month. Photo: Xinhua
Thousands have been displaced and lives and livelihoods destroyed beyond repair. The toll, which currently stands at 53 – including 33 Muslims and 15 Hindus – is being updated as more bodies are discovered, the grievously injured continue to die in hospitals, and corpses are identified, sometimes only from their half-burnt limbs. But there is one death that has long been suspected and is now unambiguously confirmed in the ruins left by the mayhem – that of the country’s opposition parties and their inclination or ability to mount any challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s monopoly over power and his vision of India.
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