Week 25: Sweden's Midsommer and Modi's Manoeuvres
Week 25: Sweden's Midsommer and Modi's Manoeuvres
A weekend of festivities in Sweden, and India's prime minister makes a deeply consequential visit to the United States.
This week’s summer solstice meant it was the Midsommar festival in Sweden. Swedes are very enthusiastic about Midsommar. The long, cold and dark winters obviously make summer something to rejoice in, and there is a strong embrace of the traditional dances and folk songs. I spent the day with friends in the town of Klippan in the southern region of Skåne.
As someone who comes from a traditionless family and a virtually traditionless country (at least within the Anglo-Celt majority), being immersed in such a culture was very interesting, and helped me build a better understanding of Sweden. This involved overcoming my usual suspicion of having fun (I even went swimming at a lake this weekend).
Modi Goes to Washington
Until the very strange events in Russia, the big issue of the week was Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, travelling to the United States and addressing Congress. As you will see below with the articles I’ve curated from this week, there was a lot of commentary about the visit. And deservedly so.
I have written quite a lot about Modi’s party the BJP over recent years. Mostly being highly critical of the party’s authoritarian inclinations. However, despite this, I wouldn’t want to give the impressing that I have anything other than a deep love for India. Personal circumstances have taken me away from the country in recent years, with my last trip in 2016. But up until then I was making almost annual visits.
On my trip to Iceland several weeks ago I was staying with a friend – an Icelandic woman – who lived in Chennai and Pondicherry for 17 years. The chance to sit and talk with her about our mutual love for India was wonderful. So it should be acknowledged that all countries are far more than just their current governments.
Beyond this, serious political interest in India should recognise that the BJP are currently presiding over India’s move towards claiming its rightful status as a great power. Modi himself is a political actor that has a charismatic authority that gives much of the Indian public a strong sense of national pride. This is not something that should be cynically dismissed. There are positive elements to this national pride that are divorced from communal tensions and the BJP’s Hindutva ideology. Without recognising this there is an inability to engage empathetically with the Indian public.
Acknowledging and seeking to understand people’s relationship with charismatic authority is not the same as endorsing the behaviour of these political actors. We should also recognise that India’s move towards closer relations with countries like the U.S and Australia is overall a positive one. Despite the difficulties that may emerge engaging with a party like the BJP, there are deeper relations to have than just those between governments of the day.
Former U.S president, Barack Obama, caused a bit of a stir by stating in hypothetical conversation with Modi “…if you do not protect the rights of ethnic minorities in India, then there is a strong possibility India at some point starts pulling apart.” Obama’s choice of words could have been more delicate. I think he failed to understand the scars of Partition and how floating the idea of state break-up would prick at these scars.
That said, without minorities groups having an equal stake and sense of respect and opportunity in India there is the potential for social instability. This is true with every highly plural state, whether it be India, the United States or Australia. Countries like the U.S and Australia are far from perfect in this regard, but this shouldn’t preclude people within them from being able to critique issues within India (and vice versa), as India’s success as a flourishing society is globally consequential.
This Week’s Reading & Listening
For Biden and Modi, Interests Prevail Over Ideology
C. Raja Mohan – Foreign Policy
“Modi’s Western critics wonder why Biden is hosting the Indian leader with such enthusiasm. After all, the Biden administration’s framing of geopolitics as a contest between democracy and autocracy implies opposition to what the critics consider Modi’s democratic backsliding. And in India, an old elite nostalgic for the era of nonalignment are once again surprised at Modi’s pursuit of close relations.
The problem is a reluctance to correctly read the trends driving the United States and India into a strategic embrace. The main source of their convergence is by now familiar: Both nations feel challenged by China. After much hesitation and reluctance over the last two decades, the United States has finally come around to the clear proposition that China represents a persistent, long-term threat to U.S. interests. The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy affirmed that not even Russia’s war in Ukraine alters this strategic priority.
India, too, has zeroed in on China as its most important strategic challenge in the 21st century. Four significant military crises along the two countries’ common border in the Himalayas—in 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2020—have underlined the threat to New Delhi, as have Chinese policies that challenge India’s primacy in the subcontinent, Indian Ocean interests, and global aspirations.”
The Folly of India’s Neutrality
Sumit Ganguly & Dinsha Mistree – Foreign Affairs
“There is no doubt that both sides have in the past missed vital opportunities to transform the relationship. The exigencies of domestic politics, the imperatives of the Cold War, and fundamentally different policy orientations in both capitals prevented them from forging a strong, enduring partnership. Despite these errors, current circumstances are perhaps the most propitious for the future of the bilateral relationship. New Delhi, now more than ever, needs to shed its hesitation about adopting a pragmatic and forward-looking approach in its dealings with the United States.
The benefits that could accrue to both sides from a strong partnership are considerable. India could build up its domestic defence industrial base, access the most sophisticated defence technologies, and gradually reduce its dependence on Russia, an increasingly unreliable defence supplier. Most important, closer defence and security ties with the United States would enable it to ward off the inexorable threat from China.
A closer security partnership could also have significant spillover effects in other arenas. A secure, stable, and confident India would become a more attractive destination for American investment. At a time when the United States is increasingly concerned about the viability of important supply chains, India could become an important manufacturing hub for a variety of components in various industrial products. The United States, in turn, would be able to count on India as a bulwark against China’s growing assertiveness across Asia. Furthermore, Washington could be in a better position to eventually elicit and count on Indian diplomatic support on fraught issues such as the future of Taiwan.”
Lecturing India’s Leader On Human Rights Is Not The Best Path
Fareed Zakaria - The Washington Post
“But how Washington should handle democratic decay in a country like India is a complicated problem. Modi is extremely popular in India and, what’s more, his Hindu nationalism is also popular. Like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Viktor Orban in Hungary, Modi has tapped into an illiberal vein in India that scorns minorities, checks and balances, and liberal constitutionalism. In all these places, the nationalist-populist leader sets himself and his many followers against the old, secular, cosmopolitan elite that has ruled the country for decades. Truth be told, there is often much frustration with that elite, an establishment that seems disconnected from the heartland of the nation, from ordinary people and their ideas and emotions.
In any event, lecturing Modi on human rights is not the best way for the Biden administration to deal with him. That would backfire — not only with him but also with most Indians who would resent Western bullying. Far better to ally with India’s society itself, expanding ties with its businesses, press, nongovernmental organisations, cultural groups and others. India is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, something that is palpable when you are there. Companies, students, scholars, activists — all want closer ties with the United States.
This people-to-people alliance will inevitably strengthen the government-to-government relations. But more importantly, I believe that an India that is more deeply connected to the United States will be a country that will naturally seek to perfect its democracy at home. It will also give it moral authority in a fracturing world that could use more of it.”
Indian Dissidents Have Had It With America Praising Modi
Daniel Block – The Atlantic
“Washington has a reason, of course, for being so friendly. The United States is locked in competition with China, and it wants India’s assistance. India’s activists and journalists know—and largely accept—this reality. Almost no one I spoke with wanted Washington to stop cooperating with New Delhi over security issues. And they certainly didn’t want the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of their country.
But dissidents and journalists say there are ways for the United States to play a constructive role without being a bully or jeopardising the two countries’ security partnership. A few activists, for example, suggested that the United States might sanction select Indian politicians who engage in widespread abuses. Others argued that Washington should steer clear of direct action but lead by example, making a point of fixing domestic problems that are common to both states.
Mostly, however, Indian activists had a simple request for U.S. officials: Stop praising Modi, and instead tell the truth.”
HARDtalk – Shashi Tharoor (audio)
BBC World News
The latest episode of the BBC’s HARDtalk programme is an interview with Congress Party MP and hyper-prolific author, Shashi Tharoor. Although only 20-odd minutes long it covers a good amount of territory on both India’s domestic and foreign policy.
Tharoor is the fantasy Indian prime minister in most Western capitals, but he is unlikely ever to reach the position. This has as much to do with internal Congress Party politics as it does with the strength of the BJP. But Tharoor remains someone you could listen to all day (and I suspect he would have no problem talking all day), and he writes beautifully about India as well.
Kapil Komireddi - Unherd
“Congress, built by India’s most revered founding fathers, remains the only political organisation that can rival the BJP’s reach and recognition across India. But its ability to restore democracy to India is being fatally undermined by its preoccupation with preserving dynastic despotism within the party. Its recent victory in the statewide election in Karnataka in southern India — naturally credited to Gandhi’s leadership — has deluded some Congresspersons into the belief that their party is poised to defeat Modi in next year’s general elections, and given rise to an ever more militant contest to display loyalty to the Gandhi dynasty. The result: Congress is arguably more feudal today than it was before the leadership contest.
Democracy is a collaborative enterprise: it cannot last if the opposition abdicates its duty. That’s why the prime minister does not wish to finish off Gandhi — his conviction will eventually be overturned by the higher courts — but wants to revive him, energise him with insults and help make him the sole face of opposition to Modi in the minds of voters. That is his path to winning a historic third term, and making secular democracy in India history. Gandhi, by refusing to vanish, is determined to help him achieve his goal.”
The Securitisation of Punjab’s Political Economy Crisis
Mahika Khosla - The Diplomat
“Both historically and today, the Indian government has deployed a common tactic in responding to unrest in Punjab – it has framed issues that are fundamentally political economy problems through the lens of national security. By using discursive means to transform ordinary political issues into security issues, the state convinces the public of an existential threat, which then justifies the government’s extraordinary responses, such as declaring states of emergency or deploying paramilitary forces.
It is the state’s paranoia that views non-violent civic agitations as threats to national security and sovereignty. In 2023, by emphasizing the fringe demand for “Khalistan” – the most extreme and marginal articulation of social, political, and economic discontent in Punjab – corporate media and the BJP securitized the issue and manufactured national alarm to ultimately curb dissent.
Notably, with the backdrop of India’s many real external security threats from China and Pakistan, branding citizen discontent as “national security issues” justifies the state’s militarised responses to political, economic, and environmental agitation. When a development issue is securitised, the targets of the state response are often vulnerable populations, and in India, this securitisation has historically occurred along ethnic and religious lines.”
The End Of Democratic Capitalism?
Daron Acemoglu – Foreign Affairs
“But UBI is the wrong policy aimed at the wrong problems. The trouble is not just that UBI will be costly but also that it will fail to provide people with the sense that they are contributing to society, which conflicts with the notion of citizenship on which democracy needs to be built. A 2022 study by the economists Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra shows the important relationship between psychological well-being and income. The study examined attitudes toward work among Rohingya refugees in southern Bangladesh. The researchers offered some participants weekly cash and gave others an opportunity to engage in paid work. The researchers found that those who worked reported significantly improved psychological well-being, while those receiving the cash payments without work did not. Despite their poverty and difficult conditions, when given the choice, approximately two-thirds of participants were willing to forgo the cash option to take up employment for lower pay.
UBI reflects a fundamentally defeatist view of the future. It accepts that a large fraction of the population cannot contribute to society, in part because of technological advances. Accordingly, the only way forward is for a small minority to earn all the income and provide crumbs to the rest—a demoralising conclusion.”
Charles King – Foreign Affairs
“Today, a mobilised segment of American intellectuals, politicians, and the voting public view themselves as part of an international coalition of the aggrieved, people whose core desire is precisely the “regime change” that Deneen advocates. It is commonplace to point out that Trump, Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and other authoritarian leaders are versions of the same political type, perhaps even the same psychological one. But what is even more worrying is that the United States has developed an ecosystem to produce future leaders of this sort: a party, a media space, a financial base, and now even an American school of illiberal thought. In this way the United States is in the odd position of being both the world’s most ardent champion of the liberal order—meaning a rules-based, cooperative system of states that themselves profess liberal values—and one of its potential threats. As never before, which way the country leans will depend entirely on the results of future electoral cycles.
The point of liberal values—the ones embraced by many progressives, classical liberals, and mainstream conservatives alike—is not that they are timeless or guarantee happiness. It is that they rest on the one thing in social life we can all be sure of: that we will encounter other individuals, different from ourselves, with their own preferences, ambitions, and worldviews. Put aside the complicated metaphysics and speculative theology, and what is left is human beings struggling to patch a ship already at sea: to find ways to live together peacefully—and even prosper—in a changing, plural world.”
The Age of Spectacle Is Upon Us
David Brooks – New York Times
“In a healthy society, the early-20th-century Dutch prime minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper observed, there are a variety of spheres, each with its own social function. There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc. Each of these spheres, he continued, has its own rules and possesses its own integrity and correct way of doing things. Each sphere is a responsible zone of flourishing. You can clarify what any particular sphere’s responsibility is by asking questions like: What is a school for? What is a science lab for? What is a baseball team for?
Society grows unhealthy, Kuyper argued, when one sphere tries to take over another sphere. In our country, the business sphere has sometimes tried to take over the education sphere — to run schools like a business. But if you run a school or university on the profit-maximisation mentality, you will trample over the mission of what a school is for — the cultivation of the student, the mission of pure research.
Today, the boundaries between spheres are collapsing. You go into an evangelical megachurch and it can feel like a political pep rally. Some professors now see themselves as political activists. You open your email and find corporations taking political stances on issues that have nothing to do with their core businesses.
Some days it seems every sphere has been subsumed into one giant culture war, producing what Yuval Levin described in Comment magazine as “a vast sociopolitical psychosis.”
I’d add only that it’s not just politics that has taken over everything — at least if you think about politics as arguing over policy. It’s more accurate to say that it’s politics as spectacle that has taken over everything.
Spectacle is the sphere that achieves public titillation through public combat. In Rome, gladiatorial combat was spectacle. Professional wrestling is spectacle. Reality TV is spectacle. Donald Trump — the love child of professional wrestling and reality TV — is spectacle. Tucker Carlson presented TV news as spectacle. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence perform activism in the form of spectacle.
The point of spectacle is not to resolve differences; it is to attract attention. In spectacle you thrive by offending people. Narcissism is rewarded, humility is forbidden. Inflaming hatred is part of the business plan.”
Ezra Klein - New York Times
“What Jonze understood in building his film around the anomic Twombly is that this technology will come in a particular context: America is lonely. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. surgeon general, recently released an 82-page report called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” From 1990 to 2021, the number of Americans who said they have five or more close friends fell by 25 percentage points. Young adults report being even lonelier than the elderly. America is, by any historical standard, unimaginably rich and powerful, and yet we’ve lost what matters most: community and connection.
That’s the America these A.I. companions will enter into. That’s the America they will upend. We worry about 12-year-olds today because they don’t see enough of their friends in person. We will worry about them tomorrow because not enough of their friends will be people.
What will this do to our relationships with one another? What happens if and when A.I. tuned to seem human to humans develops the appearance or the reality of an inner, autonomous life of its own? These are the questions “Her” asks but never answers. What follows here is a spoiler but not of anything that makes the movie interesting. “Her” ends abruptly, in a reverse deus ex machina. The A.I.s leave us behind to form a community with one another. The more troubling, and likely, question is one the movie dodges: What if they stay?”
America Is Waking Up From A Dream
Tressie McMillan Cottom - New York Times
“In retrospect, what did Ted [Lasso] ever really do to deserve all the credit we gave him? A moment in the third season called us on the carpet for not wondering just who this guy is. Ted asked Rebecca to hire a private detective to spy on his estranged wife and her new boyfriend. The move was a disembowelment of Ted’s positive masculinity, everything the show purported to oppose. It is harmful and controlling, if not violent. And the show asked us to empathise. The Cornell philosopher Kate Manne says ours is a culture socialised for undue sympathy with powerful men, especially as they enact violence against women. Maybe our little comfort show about positive masculinity was a cautionary tale about romanticising himpathy all along.”
Experts Say Catherine Kassenoff’s Family Court Case Should Alarm America
Amy Polacko – Ms Magazine
“They are not at all ‘courts of law’ as we conceive them. They have such wide discretion, coupled with total secrecy, that any abuse can happen and does,” she said, pointing out that most Americans would never believe the brutality that happens in prisons, which she has studied. “The same lack of oversight applies to family court—these kinds of human rights abuses have been ignored for a very long time and this level of violence would not be allowed if the public knew what was happening.”
Lee blames the family court dysfunction for developmental injuries and psychological impairments among children, a topic she knows well as a consultant for the World Health Organisation and helped author the United Nations’ chapter on “Violence Against Children.” She said these traumatised children grow up to be adults and are susceptible to cults, hate groups and authoritarian leaders—like Trump. Plus, what we see in family court is part of Trumpism’s capitalisation of white men’s fear of being “unmanned,” as Jackson Katz put it. So, Lee believes, this family court crisis affects the very fabric of our democracy.”