Fifty years ago, India was in the midst of the Emergency. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government had suspended civil liberties, censored the press and imprisoned tens of thousands of protesters.
Today, there is no formal declaration of emergency or suspension of fundamental rights under the constitution. But the parallels are hard to miss.
As we write this, a nationwide protest movement triggered by young people frustrated at the denial of their voices and the lack of opportunities has been met with brutal police action. A film about a human rights defender slain 30 years ago has inexplicably been taken off the streaming platform that had hosted it.
Provisions of the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act, introduced in 1976 during the Emergency, have been amended again to further tighten the state’s grip on civil society organisations that work to uncover high-level corruption, environmental degradation and human rights violations.
As during the Emergency, the state’s investigative agencies have been weaponised to go after dissidents, using the time-tested bogey of national security and fear of foreign influence to silence those not aligned with the ruling party.
Recent attacks on democratic dissent in India have not come out of nowhere. They fit a clear pattern of decline in civic freedoms under Prime Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party government, which first came to power in 2014. Since then, human rights defenders, journalists and members of the political opposition have faced extreme forms of harassment through misuse of state powers.
This is why the Civicus Monitor, which measures civic freedoms around the world. has rated India as “repressed” since 2019, indicating systematic civic space restrictions. This seriously weakens the country’s claim of being the world’s largest democracy. Other countries in the same category include Cambodia, Colombia, Libya, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.
This month, India is also being placed on the Civicus Monitor’s watchlist, which highlights countries experiencing severe declines in civic freedoms. It takes its place alongside Bahrain, which is ruled by an absolute monarchy, Burkina Faso, which is in the grip of a military junta, and Ecuador and Georgia, where legislation has been weaponised to seriously undermine civil society efforts to promote accountability.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here.
