A right wing authoritarian takeover is leading to the possible death of a democracy. The elections in India next month can mark the end of my beloved country.
The ruling government of Modi (BJP) came up with an "electoral bond" scheme a few years ago. This scheme would allow anyone to buy "electoral bonds" of a political party anonymously, without any income tax scrutiny. Basically, anonymous untraceable donations with no upper cap. As a result, the Modi party is swimming in money, as evidenced from the huge lavish buildings they have bought and constructed as their "party headquarters" all over India.
The supreme court of India squatted this bond scheme aside a few months ago, and ordered all bond data to be revealed. After delays caused by their failed tactics to try and postpone the compliance of the ruling till after elections, the banks were forced to provide it this month.
And not surprisingly, one entity had spectacularly massive intakes with bonds worth hundreds of millions encashed: the Modi party.
Their response? To speed up the arrest of opposition leaders (they were already doing it before) under frivolous charges to distract and instead blame them for corruption. They have monopolized the control of media. And they can spin things whatever way they want.
Today, the chief minister of India's capital Delhi was arrested; the case against him was based on hearsay and anecdotes obtained from a random dude who supposedly "admitted" to having illegally donated millions to the chief minister as kickbacks in exchange of a favorable "liquor policy" benefitting his company.
The opposition parties then dug out the fact that that this random dude was actually a donor to electoral bonds of the Modi party. And these donations came in barely days after he was "acquitted".
In other words, this was an extortion. That random dude was probably caught for something illegal, and was made to pay the excessively corrupt Modi party in exchange for being let off. Clearly, he was also made to give a statement against the Delhi CM (whose party had received next to nothing in electoral bonds). And the CM was arrested based on these mere statements. No other proof of any corruption by the CM has been presented so far.
Increasingly, the government of India has also being influencing the the election observers in India, who have on some occasions, attempted to declare legitimate votes of opposition candidates invalid. The supreme court has been a roadblock to these undemocratic efforts, and has sometimes reversed such illegal declarations. But increasingly, the Modi party is influencing the court system too, by inserting and promoting their pawns into the courts.
Last month, they also confiscated bank accounts of their main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. This is something shocking, and yet it got next to no media coverage.
Flush with cash, and with their opponents either stripped off of cash or imprisoned, they are close to pulling off the Putinization of India.
This is a disaster for India. And this is a warning for the US. The institutions that seem standing strong for a century or more can fall. Democracy can end in just a handful of years if the liberal forces slip up.
Wish us the best as we begin our perhaps-last battle for democracy in the coming month.