Three levels of criminality in India

I have deliberately refrained from writing anything critical of the great nation of India during my time here but I got wound up by a few shitty people this week and am in a good mood to jeopardise my visa — which I kind of do need, to continue teaching up to seven days a week for expenses of 2,500 rupees a month (£24, but it doesn’t stop me) at a school for the blind and visually impaired. Who’s doing which nationality a favour?

Little crimes

The security people at Mumbai airport have upset me with their new hustle for robbing passengers on transfer flights. It goes like this: You get off any international flight into India and have thirty or forty minutes to collect your bags and make it to the next gate for your connecting internal flight. Except, the airport staff deliberately hold up the passengers before the body scan, wait for everyone on the list to be present, direct people to lavatories, then wait for them to return and divide the groups into male and female, then apparently sort the two groups by height and tooth colour. Your possessions are supposed to go through one conveyor belt scanner but they join a very slow or stopped queue. You are then delayed going through the body scanner while there’s suddenly only a few minutes or two to spare before the flight gate closes. Aaargh, anxiety peaks. Soon you’ll see that your carry-on possessions (money, bangles, mobile phone, laptop) have not yet been passed through the scanning machine, as if the owner needed to go through first. The practical upshot is that passengers have a choice: to abandon their possessions and run to catch the next flight or to wait for their stuff and buy another flight ticket. It’s a game of separating passengers from anything valuable they are carrying. Making an economic decision, I chose to lose the cash and bits I had been carrying, then phoned to recover my lost property but of course nothing had been handed in. What a surprise.

Moderate crimes

What’s the best way to end corruption? Well, you can always vote. It’s 2024 and India is in the middle of the largest democratic election (969 million registered voters) in the history of planet Earth. Indians living abroad can vote from abroad but have to return first to register, which isn’t very green. The results will be announced on 04 June and the parties involved are Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP (heading a larger 17 party grouping of the National Democratic Alliance [currently 344 of 543], which gives it 50 seats additional weight including a majority in Delhi), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) [heading The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance which includes Rahul Gandhi]; and the Communist Party of India (CPI), which only has 2 members in Lok Sabha and 2 members in Rajya Sabha so forget about them. The Bharatiya Janata Party is expected to win a majority in the Lok Sabha, the ‘House of the People’ or broad first level of India’s parliament, which will inevitably choose Mr Modi as Prime Minister, then he gets to choose the ministers in his government. The PM promises “acche din” — good days for everyone, which sounds fun.

Ahead of the election, some moves with suspicious coincidental timing were made to tip the result in the BJP’s favour. This may have been emboldened by seeing the BJP’s charming friend Russia fix their presidential election by imprisoning or murdering anyone who wanted to stand against Vladimir Putin and instead only allowing his favourite supporters to pretend to stand against him. Three opposition AAP leaders have recently been arrested, accused of corruption, but naturally the court will not rule until after the election. Arvind Kejriwal, another opposition leader, is also on charges of corruption but has a chance to get out on Monday when it will be almost too late. Some minority groups and also journalists have reported discrimination and assaults by supporters of the Prime Minister, to which his party have denied any connection. The new law to ensure one third of seats go to women has been passed but… pushed into the future so it won’t happen for several years.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) generally tries to follow a methodical set of election rules. For example, an election booth was set up in the Gir National Park in Gujarat for the 1 man who lived there because policy says there should be facilities to vote near every habitation. That is quite inclusive, if not extreme, but it is not the only example. Election staff will travel 24 miles to a village in Arunachal Pradesh state to receive the ballot of the 1 registered voter there who is over the age of 18. That’s enfranchising 2 individuals and gaining a lot of positive press coverage but what about the many thousands who are disenfranchised?

Several opposition candidates have been pressured to withdraw and more have been disqualified from standing. Some have announced they are changing sides to the BJP when it is already too late for their party to replace them on the nomination. In Surat, Gujarat, the opposition candidates (1 Congress Party and 5 others) had their registrations suddenly cancelled on various points of order. There were eight other candidates too but they withdrew in protest, probably thinking the local vote would be re-arranged if they did, but it wasn’t and the BJP candidate won by ‘no contest’. In Madhya Pradesh, voting on Monday, Akshay Kanti Bam (Congress Party) has pulled out after the deadline for filing nominations, meaning that the largest opposition party cannot provide a candidate to oppose Shankar Lalwani of the BJP. Akshay joined the BJP yesterday, how fortuitous, having done enough to secure the seat for them. I am sure many more examples will come out in the next few days, none of which will disadvantage the BJP I expect.

The worst crime India supports today

Then there’s India’s foreign policy: Genocide. The longstanding cooperative arrangement between Russia and India can’t wholly be blamed on Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the deal they are honouring goes way back. Despite the Indian government’s work to improve relationships with the US and other western nations, as a counter-balance to China, those western countries stood in disbelief as India protected Russia and India openly supported brutal forced conquest, genocide, rape, torture, chemical weapons, the murder of prisoners of war and the permanent abduction of somewhere between 85,000 and 200,000 of Ukraine’s children. Russia under Putin has now committed all of the same war crimes as the Nazis under Hitler and India is absolutely in support of Russia’s actions, opposing UN resolutions condemning land grabs under false pretexts and the extermination of innocent civilians. India buys Russian fuel, equips its army with Russian weapons and then recently it was discovered that India enables Russia to avoid international sanctions by buying Russian petrochemicals and exporting them to the west as if originating from Indian refineries.

So what gives? Why does India side with global evil? Is India itself also blatantly evil or is it just a super loyal friend to a bloody monster? Perhaps India is in such need that it does feel it can afford the luxury of moral scruples? The record is clear that India and Russia have for years supported each other on contentious international issues but why now help such large scale criminality for which no rational person would offer any moral defence? Why does India, basically a socialist democratic country, help an apparent Nazi dictator in Russia to kill the population of Ukraine, a democratic socialist country that has never harmed India? Is it about profit? Perhaps it isn’t.

The Soviet Union was India’s largest trading partner until its collapse. The first Indian astronaut was sent up by Russia. The Soviets helped to create the Indian Navy, provided its first nuclear submarine and, currently, up to 85 percent of all military weapons in India are of Russian manufacture.

1955: The Soviets supported India’s claim to the whole of Kashmir, then vetoed UN Security Council resolutions in 1957, 1962 and 1971 calling for it to be a shared state with Pakistan. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979), India declined to vote against Russia in the UN. 1961: India seized Goa from Portugal. This was opposed by the US, the UK, France and Turkey but supported by the Soviets who vetoed the anti-Indian resolution in the United Nations Security Council, so India kept Goa. 1971: India and the Soviet Union signed the ‘Peace, Friendship and Co-operation’ treaty. 1978: Atal Bihari Vajpayee, founding member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) declares that Russia is India’s only reliable friend. 2000: The Declaration of Strategic Partnership was signed between Vladimir Putin and PM Vajpayee, followed by the 2010 Special and Strategic Partnership, in which Russia guaranteed to defend India’s claim to Kashmir. In the Czechen War of 2008, India opposed the right of return for citizens displaced by Russian aggression, so that Russia could clear the land for their own settlers. In 2014 and again in 2020, India refused to support resolutions opposing the Russian invasion of peaceful neighbour Ukraine, to steal their sovereign territory, and then went on to oppose all resolutions protecting human rights in the region. 2019: India unilaterally withdrew special status for Jammu and Kashmir, a move which was opposed in the UN but defended by Russia. 2020: The Russian Ambassador to India, Nikolay Kudashev, said “New Delhi may not have the political clout that comes with being a permanent member of the UN Security Council, but since entering into a strategic partnership with the Soviet Union soon after independence, it has done everything it can to show its support for Moscow in the international arena.” So, the two countries are partners against the world, whether right or wrong. 2020 onward: India desperately requires Moscow’s support in territorial conflicts with China, otherwise China can do what it wants in the disputed territories, such as following its favourite tactic of simply issuing new maps and then getting small island nations to support its claims (buy their allegiance) in the UN. The corrupt system works both ways, you see, and China is a big panda squatting on both India’s and Russia’s doorstep.

I think the next Indian government, whoever wins (um, that’s the BJP), will learn to regret reinforcing this particular alliance. No one well-respected benefits from befriending a criminal psychopath and then promising to stick with them until the end as they walk hand in hand toward a cliff edge.