Polgreen: Wow.
Mehta: In the Indian Parliament, a senior B.J.P. leader. He has not been rebuked by his party. He has been rewarded with more respect. So you are now empowering a set of people, an ideology, and sending out a signal that if you want to move up in this political system, you have to engage in acts of hate or violence or commit yourself publicly to this project. I mean, this is completely unprecedented. It’s a shattering of norms.
Polgreen: It’s really striking to me that we’ve gotten to this place now, where you have India emerging on the global stage as such a critical player, because there are big, powerful countries, like the United States but also others, that are seeking India to take its place on the global stage as a counterweight to China. And what recommends it for that role is precisely the fact that it is seen as a secular, pluralistic democracy. So there’s this tremendous irony that at precisely the moment you’re seeking a democratic counterweight to China, the obvious candidate for that role — its democracy seems really deeply imperiled.
Mehta: No, it is. And if you look at India’s projection abroad, one of Mr. Modi’s favorite tropes these days, “India is the mother of all democracies.” I mean, that’s the tagline to the world. But it is a performance. This government’s diagnosis — and Donald Trump’s election may have something to do with it, the way in which the world changed post-Trump — is that there is not going to be any penalty for India’s actions domestically. And to be fair to them, their reading of the international system has been just right, that somehow they think, in the end, the United States’ strategic imperatives, rather than its imperatives in democracy and pluralism, will actually trump their engagement with India.
It’s also happening in a moment where the exemplarity and authority of almost all democratic countries around the world is also at its lowest. I can’t remember a time where the prestige and authority of American democracy was so low. Many Indians are willing to say, “Oh, now we can talk back to the United States.”
And this goes to one of the fundamental tenets of Hindu nationalism as an ideology. I mean, this is a party that openly celebrates Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, right? And there is almost this sense of embarrassment that somehow this whole talk of nonviolence actually made us weak, it made us less respected in the world. America took Pakistan more seriously because it created trouble in the international system. We never were taken seriously, which I think is a pretty bizarre reading of history, but it is a kind of political style whose core is defined by a certain kind of fascination with violence and aggression. The other has to be created in order for this Hindu existential crisis to actually reap political dividends. So it can be Muslims, it can be secular intellectuals, it can be liberals, it can be George Soros. God knows why George Soros in the Indian context, but ——