Achin Vanaik is a writer and social activist, a former professor at the University of Delhi and Delhi-based Fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. He is the author of The Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India and The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism.
Narendra Modi boasted that his party would win a supermajority in India’s parliament, but he came up short and had to form a coalition to stay in power. Modi’s surprising setback creates an opportunity to push back against his authoritarian project.
Narendra Modi is the strong favorite to win a third term as India’s prime minister when elections begin this week. Modi and his allies have prepared a new round of repressive policies to consolidate their Hindu chauvinist project after the vote.
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, the electoral arm of a Hindu nationalist movement, represents the largest and most organized far-right force on the planet. To understand its rise, we must look to India’s 20th-century history.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s conviction for criminal defamation is the latest sign that India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is moving toward Hindu nationalist authoritarianism.
Despite the disastrous outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan, supporters of US-led military intervention still claim war can be a humanitarian project. It can’t.
A heroic struggle has stopped Narendra Modi’s government from ramming through regressive farm laws. Modi is still deeply entrenched in power, but the farmers have shown that mass mobilization can pose a bigger challenge to his rule than parliamentary games.
Ongoing protests by Indian farmers are the biggest challenge Narendra Modi’s right-wing government has faced since coming to power. We can get a clearer picture of this movement and its prospects for success by comparing it to the major struggles of India’s past.
In the last week, simmering tensions on the Indian-Chinese border in the Himalayas have escalated to open conflict, with fatalities on both sides. India’s foreign policy, and not just China, deserves much blame for the escalation.
With the ongoing mass protests to Modi’s anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act, India is at last seeing a real challenge to right-wing Hindu nationalism.
The latest decision from the Supreme Court in India has legitimized the destruction of the Babri Mosque. Meanwhile, mainstream parties and commentators refuse to call it what it is: the latest stage in an accelerating process of Hindu ethno-nationalism.
Progressive Indians must oppose governmental violence against Kashmiris. The powers that would seek to deny the oppressed people of Kashmir the right to freely pursue their goal of collective self-determination must be stopped.
India’s elections show that right-wing Hindu nationalism has achieved total hegemony over Indian society.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s “statesmanlike” far-right leader, died this month. The praise showered on him by Indian liberals shows how far to the right the country has moved.
In India, Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP is consolidating its power through vigilante violence, censorship, and state repression.
Recent regional elections in India handed Modi’s BJP important new majorities. How can it be stopped?
What would justice for those suffering under Indian occupation in Kashmir look like?