Honestly, a lot of the documentary is a mixture of interviews and CCTV camera footage with a fairly even handed narrative on the top – it, by itself, isn't that shocking and certainly isn't presented in a particularly sensationalist way. I'm amazed by the reaction it has generated. Yes, there's some post-colonial history there and it doesn't look great that it's the BBC that has made it, as opposed to, say, a US or continental European broadcaster. Still, nevertheless, when you see videos of policemen beating up (usually female) students with canes because they've had the audacity to protest, it can't help but make you think.
If you're interested, you can get it (legally) in the UK here: [1] and searching for "India: the Modi question" will most likely provide it elsewhere.
are you perhaps a teen? that's a magnet link, its used to transfer things via bittorrent. we used to put them in the spokes of our bicycles when we'd ride down to the five-and-dime
When I was riding bikes to the store we had dialup and floppies were giving way to CDs.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve used BitTorrent and I didn’t know magnet links were still popular. I hate seeding and there was also a lot of malware hidden in public trackers.
Once I switched to Usenet I never looked back. P2P file sharing has never been a good experience for me.
Media decoders are often rather complicated and often involve parsing data directly into large and constantly changing memory buffers. A huge chunk of Android vulnerabilities have been from vulnerabilities in media libraries, even JPEG parsing has been known to lead to vulnerabilities in Linux.
A sophisticated attacker could make use of bugs in the player to hack the system. This sort of trick is often used against high value targets where the effort needed makes it worth it.
Why does the video player have the capability to do anything other than read video files the user specifies through the system file chooser dialog and play them on the screen?
Because playing them on the screen involves demuxing audio and video, decoding audio and video, usually using two different but complex codecs, some which have extensive capabilities and features (think multilingual subtitles, interactive menus, etc etc). Oh surely your video player should allow you to pause and play with a remote control, right? More code surface. We probably need an ability to check for updates. And so on and so on.
But even without anything more than open, decode, play - anywhere a vulnerability exists could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
All of that stuff should be handled through standard APIs. Applications shouldn’t be updating themselves at all; that’s the job of the operating system’s package manager.
Really, a video player should be a dumb bit of glue code that wires together file open APIs with video playback APIs, and a few bits and bobs for saving preferences (API) and allowing remote control (another API). There’s no reason whatsoever for a video player to be able to access files arbitrarily or connect to the internet or log keystrokes in the background or anything else! The only reason they can do this is because we haven’t built operating systems with all this in mind, apart from mobile OS’s that is.
> All of that stuff should be handled through standard APIs.
"Standard APIs" isn't some silver bullet to never have any security vulnerabilities. There can absolutely be vulnerabilities in "standard APIs".
ffmpeg is a pretty standard media utility, and it gets lots of CVEs. Decoding complicated media is complicated and often done in unsafe languages in attempts to squeeze more performance.
neither video/audio decoders nor demuxers nor subtitle format parsing/rendering have OS APIs. hell, there's at least a few ways you can draw a rendered frame to the screen on any OS that will take different paths through either the OS's drawing APIs (if you're not on Linux) or graphics drivers. Even _if_ the OS supported taking video file data and playing it, it wouldn't support all of the codecs/containers/subs you'd want to play.
No, what I’m asking is: why does the operating system allow the video player to do anything other than what it needs to do to play videos? If the video player suddenly starts trying to access files on its own (anything not explicitly chosen by the user through system file dialog) or trying to access the internet then the user should be prompted to give permission.
We have this kind of API permission (capability) system on phones. Why can’t we have a really fine-grained one on desktops? It’s like a firewall for APIs.
The ux you are describing is a lot worse than what people get with vlc or mplayer. For example, you can open videos from the cli, which means there is no file chooser involved. Also if you have a subtitle file (.srt) with the same name as the video you opened, the subtitles will automatically be added. Both of these are things people want as part of a versatile video player.
The level of lockdown you were describing is what we have on mobile platforms (which incidentally still have lots of malware). Generally speaking, people want more flexibility out of general purpose computers.
On the other hand something like pledge would be useful here, since the attack vector is untrusted files, not untrusted applications. With pledge, the application could open any files, then relinquish the ability to open new files before parsing the contents.
The level of lockdown you were describing is what we have on mobile platforms (which incidentally still have lots of malware). Generally speaking, people want more flexibility out of general purpose computers.
I expected this response. I think it's a false equivalence. We don't need to have a proprietary locked-down operating system like iOS in order to give the user full control over the capabilities an application has access to. We just need a standard API for handling these sorts of permissions.
Granularity is usually the problem here. It is very difficult to fully specify the full set of things you expect a program to be able to do. Even if you could, it is not usually something an end-user will want to do, due to the verbosity involved. Permissions are also time / sequence dependent. If you have something that can specify the user's expectations fully, it will be very verbose due to the inherent complexity, so the system will either be unused, default to overly broad permissions lists, or rely on trusting various pre-baked recipes that others have made. At that point I'm not sure how much you have gained for the average user, and it seems you lose some very real usability in the process.
Curious to hear how you would go about solving this problem. It seems that there is just a lot of inherent complexity here and I can't see any way to avoid that complexity without preventing the system from being useful.
Decoding the video involves hardware acceleration, so data is not just processed at the application layer, it's passed much deeper. In very specific and rare attacks, it's been possible to bypass application and even OS level protections by crafting media files. So that when they're processed there's an overflow which dumps some payload into unprotected memory and allows some intrusion into the viewers system. This has been done with photos, general images and videos.
It's not reliable unless you happen to know the specific, unpatched exploit on the target system. There aren't general purpose vulnerabilities for such things.
Many times these kinds of attacks are buffer overflows, tricking the hardware/OS to execute code it wasn't intending. Its not just that the media player starts to behave strangely, often the attack corrupts code outside the media player. See the Android Mediaserver vulnerabilities, or many of the buffer overflow vulnerabilities in ffmpeg.
If an attack corrupts how the OS checks permissions, it doesn't matter if you've got some API framework for calls, it broke out of it.
Most of the time it’s a rar file that contains screenshots, album art, thumbnails, etc. not just a video file. I’ve been burnt a decade plus ago when I automated some extractions into a media folder on an old windows laptop. By the time I noticed, it was deep in the registry and near impossible to remove. It was something akin to MacKeeper malware on Macs, I don’t recall the old windows malware names.
With my Usenet automation I’ve never had the issue in about 9ish years but it could happen. I pay a usenet provider and indexer a low fee to rid myself of torrents and seeding.
This is a really good talk I saw in person on this exact subject. Focuses on using rust and the nom library for safe parsing. He opens with a description of how VLC is one of the worst offenders for vulnerabilities historically because it supports so many different file formats / parsers written in c.
There would need to be an unpatched vulnerability in your player that the file exploited. Only virus I ever got was from an mp3 file that exploited the vulnerable version of winamp that I was using because I hated the newer version.
I've not torrented in at least a decade, and I don't remember seeing magnet links inline in text like that.
Certainly don't miss those hours of waiting for an ISO to download only to find it's all corrupt, or a record label plant, or a handheld recording of a cinema screen...
I think you mean 2 decades. I haven't waited an hour for anything to download since I used to grab bootleg concerts that were very poorly seeded in the early/mid aughts.
I thought you were right at first, but with commercial VPNs constantly be advertised as a way to get around content restrictions, I wouldn't be surprised if more people understood a VPN than a torrent these days. Assuming they're willing to pay that is.
"Understood" is different from "can afford" and "has the ability to purchase," and definitely different from "will subscribe to an otherwise useless British VPN in order to watch two hours of television."
Most such VPN providers have servers on multiple location. UK is very popular location so just connect to it if you already paid for VPN. I think some people already paid for VPN as I can see YouTuber's ads.
You might want to check if your router/firewall/ISP blocks/throttles torrent traffic, I'm seeing 173 seeds and just 18 peers (for the first part), it should quickly go up to full speed.
Unleashing tax officials on an organization painting a negative picture (well, not, Modi and accoplice paint it, the BBC only presents it) is a failed attempt of masquerading an authoritarian government overstepping their limits of governance. If they were honest and not coward they would simply tell: 'Shouldn't uncover our dirty laundry, get out of here or will get hurt!'
They only highlight not cover this way what we already suspect of India being an elective dictatorship (similar to Hungary).
> Unleashing tax officials on an organization painting a negative picture (well, not, Modi i and accoplice paint it, the BBC only presents it) is a failed attempt of masquerading an authoritarian government overstepping their limits of governance.
Isn't that what every government do? Remember that Al Capone went to jail because of tax issues, the government couldn't prove anything he was accused to.
If you look at Germany, Michael Ballweg is sitting in jail (without trial) for tax evasion accusations. The fact that the government didn't like his movement that protested against unconstitutional anti-covid measures was not enough reason to put him there.
Almost every government has a history of unleashing a tax department on their political enemies. We call it a legal state when it happens in our country, and a state terror when it happens in another.
A cynic in me would say that, in this case, India is learning from the best democracies in the world, US and Germany.
EDIT: I'm not saying Al Capone did not do tax evasion, or that Ballweg had all his books 100% clean. In any remotely complex tax system, it's not even possible, since there is always enough place for interpretation. But the fact that some guys are prosecuted just because government doesn't like them, and the ones that government likes get away with it, is unfortunately properly of almost every legal system, democracies included. In the end, Modi's government may find a lakh or two of expenses not filled properly and punish BBC with 20 krores.
My point is just that this is not unique to India, and one should not look down at India and call out on it for doing what everyone else is doing.
Capone was guilty of tax fraud because the money laundering part of his criminal enterprise was the part that was the least well organised. Nothing wrong with that. Somehow I doubt the BBC is laundering billions in bootlegging money.
The German guy is a right-extremist who wants to topple the German state and takes donations from followers. There are investigations for fraud and money laundering for around $150k.
He is in jail because of increased flight risk as he cleaned out his house and was trying to sell it.
The highest German court is currently deciding if his jail time is too long already.
The BBC office in Delhi at the Hindustan Times building employs 200+ people, including many UK staff on temporary attachment. It massively expanded in 2016 but it dates back far longer.
I wouldn't be confident that every piece of equipment in that office was obtained legally in the country, let alone being able to prove it. For example someone whose mobile phone got lost/smashed/blownup last time they were in Kabul, so they bought a new one, then returned to their Delhi office. Or a piece of equipment that was legally imported back in 2012 but the paperwork has gone. Or a UK purchased harddrive that a passing cameraman left in the edit suite, or something bought locally but the receipt didn't list the serial number on it.
I'm confident there will be an "irregularity" somewhere. I'm confident any office in any building in any city in the world will have similar problems irrefutably proving where any equipment came from.
I understand, but looking for one tiny irregularity for political goals is not the same as jailing a mafioso for it who is a money launderer and murderer on a huge scale.
I was arguing with the OP that Capone's sentence was not political but this thing is.
I think iso1631 is saying that there may be enough red tape for imports into India that the BBC could technically be breaking the law for failing to declare/pay duties on some equipment they or their employees brought into the country.
If you're in the US, my experience is that it's kind of an anomaly in terms of relatively light enforcement of import taxes for individual citizens. For example, most countries will look at the declared value on foreign parcels and force the recipient to pay import tax before releasing it to them.[1] If someone walked the same thing over the border, and the government wanted to make things hard on that person, they might accuse them of tax evasion, etc.
[1] For those NOT in the US wondering how this is unusual, individuals generally don't have to pay before receiving the parcel here.
Yes, but how is the BBC responsible for their employees buying phones and bringing them in the country? Was the BBC telling their employees to do this?
It wasn't the employees home raided but the BBC office.
So then who is liable if some dangerous substance is discovered within a company's office in Germany? Or if someone gets hurt by a normal object placed in a peculiar position?
There is an investigation (for that we have the police) on how it got there and who is responsible and if something illegal (determined first by the prosecution office and then determined by a court) was going on.
Probably the building is evacuated and the dangerous thing secured by specialists E.g. a bomb squad.
Then the same thing. The police and the prosecution find out if this was illegal, if the possession is illegal, who possesed if and who brought it and why, then who is responsible and a court decides if someone is guilty. The court will decide if the company is responsible E.g. because of negligence, they might not have implemented the law, educated their employees etc. In the case of dynamite that an employee brought, the company is not responsible, there might be terrorism charges against the employee.
The BBC provides journalists with phones to do their job, be that a live broadcast using something like LU-Smart, or just getting their emails on the road.
> Yes, but how is the BBC responsible for their employees buying phones and bringing them in the country? Was the BBC telling their employees to do this?
> My point is just that this is not unique to India, and one should not look down at India and call out on it for doing what everyone else is doing.
Nobody is claiming that India's corruption is unique or unprecedented, just that it is happening. Germany and the US have done a lot worse than selective prosecution, and it would be better if India did not do those other, worse things.
"It's all right because the US and Germany did it" gives you slavery and death camps.
The question should rather be: Is this a good thing or abusing the power?
(Al Capone did tax fraud on a spectacular level, among other more serious offenses. BBC shown a documentary. Feel the difference?)
Also: billion flies eating shit will not make it a good thing. :/
Bad habbit should be a repelling thing not something be repeated and brought forward as excuse for gods sake!
(I cannot tell if the above examples for abuse are founded or not, except Al Capone, my response is for this 'other do so I will too' kind of derailed rhetoric or alibi that I hate so so much)
> If you look at Germany, Michael Ballweg is sitting in jail (without trial) for tax evasion accusations. The fact that the government didn't like his movement that protested against unconstitutional anti-covid measures was not enough reason to put him there.
I think you have that backwards.
Ballweg is in jail because allegedly he took in donations to support a cause, but then (ab)used them for himself personally, defrauding the donors and evading taxation. That's illegal, and thus he's in jail.
Indeed protesting Covid is not enough to put you in jail, because that's not actually illegal. You're insinuating the government chose to persecute him for his political views. That's a pretty bold claim that I think would need substantiation.
FDR famously weaponized the IRS, as his daughter even remarked on it,against his enemies including politicians and political opponents like Huey Long and Mellon (the former Treasury secretary and potential future Presidential candidate and innovator of the “modern” IRS).
“My father,” Elliott Roosevelt observed of his famous parent, “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”
> The U.S. Justice Department has reached a settlement with dozens of conservative groups that claimed the Internal Revenue Service unfairly scrutinized them based on their political leanings when they sought a tax-exempt status, court documents showed.
Al Capone was not a "political enemy" of the state. He wasn't prosecuted "just because the government didn't like him." He was a mass-murdering crime boss.
>Isn't that what every government do? Remember that Al Capone went to jail because of tax issues, the government couldn't prove anything he was accused to.
Yes to varying extends and with varying frequencies. No government is perfectly clean in this regard though some are much better than others. Comfortably wealthy westerners who've never been harassed by any government or quasi-government institutions will happily write of their own governments small amount of it though because that's more comforting than realizing we do it too and having the tough discussion of where the line ought to be.
Twisting the law so you can jail a known criminal for a term that is unreasonable for the charges you can actually convict him on is surely a far cry from jailing political opponents over BS but it is on the same spectrum of odious government behavior and the fact of the matter is that HN types tend to draw the "here is where I stop looking the other way" line on that spectrum a lot closer to the "jailing dissidents" end than people who have adversarial contact with such institutions.
How does this help the point you are trying to make?
> doesn't stop comfortably wealthy westerners who've never been harassed by any government or quasi-government institutions
It comes across like a prejudiced assumption, and just hurts it. Flames others into an incendiary mess. Why are you so mad, who is it towards? Westerners? Dungeons and dragons of all things has been dealing with these ethics surrounding laws for years. Games. Your anger is misdirected at "hn types" because that is just a generalization.
Regardless, your principle stands. The ends justifying the means as a principle is despised for good reasons even if some laud it as well.
I don't think so, I don't think it is fear. I have watched BBC for a long time and they were uniformly critical/negative of everything in India. Other than one or two positive series, their news have been uniformly negative and so obviously biased that I've stopped watching them.
Personally, given the amount of negativity that they have thrown around, I'm glad Modi gave them the shock treatment - I think they have earned it and in spades.
And just in case this is seen as a pure BJP persective, Indira Gandhi had also done so long ago and that straightened them out for a while.
This is a terrible analogy. RT.com is a reliable purveyor of conspiracy theories and incendiary lies. The BBC's examination of Narendra Modi's well-documented behavior leading up to, during and after the Gujarat riots is well-supported by other media and academic sources.
I think a better question is, "Who is causing this reaction?".
As in, who is the person who cannot bear this and is it because the ego is being bruised, or because it portrays India in a certain manner?
Maybe some of these world leaders should consider therapy seeing as they can't handle their own problems by themselves and rather punish people around them for it.
Another victim of the Streisand effect. Modi's reaction to the documentary has done far more damage than just the documentary by itself. It's like the BBC released this doc and Modi's government is giving it free marketing worldwide with the outsized reaction.
This would have been just another docuseries on the BBC had they not reacted like this. Now everyone is sharing links and wanting to see what the fuss is all about.
Current political operatives the world over, particularly conservative/nationalist ones, have since learnt to weaponize Streisand - they stoke polarization on relatively minor arguments, in order to foster a siege mentality where everyone is forced to declare whether they are "with us or against us". This solidifies their support and makes the opposition look vague and unprincipled.
This is a line that goes all the way from GWBush to Berlusconi, Modri, Orbàn, Trump, Abbott, Turnbull, Erdogan, Salvini, and Johnson.
Modri wants this to be a big thing, precisely because it allows him to play the victim against "evil and corrupt colonialists bent on keeping India down". As policies go, it costs effectively nothing and has great propaganda value.
I think the point might actually be to remind the public what Modi did (or didn't do), which was and is very popular in India as abhorrent as it is to the West. He can't openly brag about it but he can make sure everyone remembers before the next election by making it such a huge story. Bonus if it stirs up tension at the right time
It's called realpolitik; and the rest of the world should be calling it like it is.
Modi may be able to brush off the English as patronizing assholes who have no right to lecture India on anything; but that doesn't change the fact he's playing by a Hitler-lite playbook, and speedrunning European rhetoric circa 1930-1945, with the serial numbers filed off.
The British/Irish and the Troubles, the Germans and the Jews; it's really not that hard to perceive the direction things are being steered. That the rest of the world is not more openly hostile to this type of atrocity is more frightening to me than anything else.
But eh, "India's problem, and we have bigger fish to fry". Mark my words: this won't be the end, and the ensuing bloodshed will be a stain on the state for many years to come.
People like this are why we cannot have nice things.
In Punjab, during Covid lockdown Police made people crawl on all fours on national highways for violation of curfew orders. Assaulted people with lathis (cane-charge, another colonial rule legacy). And then newspapers here write every year about infamous "crawling order" passed by Gen. Dyer before the Jallianwala Massacre.
Imagine saying "post-colonial history" about a massacre done by Hindu revivalist movement started and benefited most from the colonial times. This "post-colonial" term has been weaponized by RSS-BJP and plays to their advantage now. Imagine if they can raid BBC offices, what happens to normal press corps.
Curious to know why you think the BBC should be exempt. The head of the BBC is in hot water for arranging a loan for the then British PM, Boris Johnson.
What post-colonial narrative does BBC spew? If you see BBC regional languages programs, you will see that it platforms RSS-BJP's Hindu Nationalistic rhetoric to a far greater degree.
It's not so much Western notions of what liberal democracy should look like, but rather the Western notion that liberal democracy is superior/sacrosanct.
"Liberal democracy" has a very specific meaning — or at least, it has to, or else there's no common language to describe these things. What India is engaging in is objectively not liberal democracy, it's illiberal democracy[1], but that can be okay. The fact that "illiberal democracy is bad" is the Western notion / post-colonial imposition on an independent India.
I personally disagree with most Indians, and tend to prefer liberal democracies, but that's my Western notion (and I say that as an ethnic Indian that went to high school in India, but has settled down in America).
[1] Poland, Hungary, and arguably Turkey are also notable examples of increasingly illiberal democracies
"Meanwhile, Hindu nationalists have been courting allies against their Leftist antagonists, which sometimes results in strange connections to Western white nationalists", writes the Taki's Magazine contributor. Perhaps in this one instance, the West's notion of what liberal democracy should look like is correct. Not every idea the liberal west has is, but the alternatives to these two ideas are horrible.
The connection to white nationalism is specious. Everyone in this story is brown. The differences are about beliefs and culture, not skin color.
It also projects western circumstances onto places where it doesn’t make sense. Multiculturalism is a cultural adaptation to America being a post-colonial, post-slavery, immigrant nation. In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns. The moral connotations are very much tied up in the fact that those other cultural groups are in western countries because of the stuff western people did that wasn’t so nice. That doesn’t have any force when you’re talking about Hindus in India or the Japanese in Japan. Indeed in India it probably cuts the other way. My surname didn’t make its way 3,000 miles from the Middle East to Bangladesh through a process that was very nice.
In the rest of the west it’s an adaptation to post-colonial immigration patterns.
I don't think even a cursory look at the history of Europe in the last few hundred years bears that out - you can probably start at the peace of Westphalia and keep going to the current war in Ukraine. The connection to white nationalism is not specious, it's precisely because it's a form of ethno-nationalism.
Just to be clear: Razib Khan makes the connection to white nationalism, not me. It happens that Razib Khan is himself probably a racial supremacist. But I didn't even have pull any of this in from Khan's background; it was in the article you chose to cite.
Yes, I'm old enough to remember the 1971 war of independence; I was wondering about Rayiner's surname that he mentioned as having migrated from the Middle East. (I could hazard a guess ....)
“They tend to always produce negative pieces about…” is quite an unevidenced statement. I would think fair journalism would produce negative pieces on a lot of people, and perhaps those where the relationship isn’t going well might stick in the mind more.
More generally though, what’s the game plan here if, as your comment seems to posit, there could be (or could be seen to be) an ulterior motive. UK has left EU. Wants trade partners. Not going as well with India as it could. So make documentary to make it go worse? I’m not sure how this would be the BBC being the puppet of the government.
> what’s the game plan here if, as your comment seems to posit, there could be (or could be seen to be) an ulterior motive. UK has left EU. Wants trade partners. Not going as well with India as it could. So make documentary to make it go worse?
There are multiple competing interests at play. Ultimately, improving relationship with India (at the expense of burying what I presume is a legitimate criticism and investigation on BJP) is just not worth as much as the alternative.
I am an Indian and I personally know of few _more_ credible outlets than BBC. They take on their own government and monarchy. Unfortunately, many generations of WhatsApp fake news has convinced that anyone who is not of the "Mr. M is God" persuasion is basically anti-national, not patriotic, not credible. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru are considered villains, and Gandhi's killer has been elevated to God status.
To your other comment though, given Rishi "our own son" Sunak and the jostling of power between China and the west, I'm not sure the relationship between the countries is going poorly.
All major Indian national media has been completely compromised and thugged into submission. There are brave alternate and small liberal media that still have the courage to cover them. Some links for your viewing pleasure.
The problem is that dictators and authoritarians, can not even imagine a independent press. Because the small people are not reall people. Just puppets, manipulated by large peoples and shadowy enemy figures.
Do India has the issue of "strict laws which are enforced selectively"?
Because this reminds me of the traffic light in Grozny, Chechnya that is always red, the people from the regime just ignore it but if someone undesirable doesn't obey the red light(they have no choice, the light is always red) they will face the wrath of the strict traffic code of Chechnya: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1595456040677556226
Similar approach was used in Turkey to take over the mainstream media from conglomerates. So they create very stick tax code which would be very hard to follow and the government doesn't care anyway and as a result people violate the code all the time. When these businessmen "misbehave", like one of their news channels goes a bit too hard on the government they send the tax people for an audit and uncover all the irregularities and slap a fine that would definitely bankrupt them and if the businessmen play ball most of the fine gets stripped away and goes back to business as usual. If the government loses faith with their ability to play ball or they think it would be better to take over the business, they move forward with the fine. That's how some of the larges businesses in the country were seized by the government or force-sold to government friendly businesspeople at a nice discount.
'True rule of law' in that sense is impossible unless there is some superior authority that can physically prevent legislators/judiciary/executive from writing, or attempting to enforce, contradictory or unenforceable laws.
Which of course is a paradox as the superior authority cannot be bound by written laws in order to do this.
Or like the USA's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which everyone violates at least once a day. It's a felony too. But they only enforce it when someone with power or money gets upset about something. Like when weev used wget instead of browser to look at AT&T's public website and was sent to prison for years.
We have rules but tradition has be to follow person. If a powerful person say something and rules comes in the way, then expect that rules will be bent or ignored altogether. Rules are written often written in a way that leaves them.open to.interpretations.
In India, at least, and probably elsewhere too, charialsmatic leaders are often the one who destroys instrlitutions because rules comes in their way and slows them down (whatever they are trying to achieve). Last charismatic leader before Modi was Indira Gandhi who imposed emergency.
I'd love to see lame leaders and powerful institutions in democracies.
'Following the searches, Gaurav Bhatia, a spokesperson from Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), described the BBC as the “most corrupt organisation in the world”.'
Which just about sums up the independence of the process.
To claim that this incident justifies calling the BBC the "most corrupt organisation in the world" is laughable.
And on this specific case internally within the BBC this man is loathed precisely because it has hurt the reputation of the BBC and he is very likely to resign soon. There is basically zero insitutional support within the BBC for their chair.
Actually it points to the opposite, given the continued press coverage of this (in some media), the lack of confidence in him and the rising likelihood that he will have to resign. In a truly corrupt country everyone knows what happened but there is no repercussion. In the BBC, everyone knows what happened and have zero respect for him and he might have to resign. No system is perfect but the BBC & Modi's government are very, very far apart on the corruption index.
This is whataboutism. Mr. Sharp is hated by most of the BBC workforce precisely because he is the corrupt representative of a corrupt government. Whatever influence he might ever have had on editorial decisions has long gone.
Of course "most corrupt organization in the world" is hyperbole, and I wouldn't discount this specific investigation on BJP (but I have limited interest in that, since I haven't been to India in years)
But blaming others of whataboutism is harmful, since it stifles deserved criticism.
Especially because no one here is really defending the Indian government corruption (for now), so it's not even truly whataboutism.
Tories hate the BBC for being a hive of lefties, and slowly strangle its source of funds; Labour hate the BBC for being partisan to Tories, and will loudly shout they're being ignored at every turn. Apart from a handful of highly-visible figures (Dimbleby, Kuenssberg, Neil), who are easily ignored, the truth is somewhat in the middle. Occasionally too much in the middle, like on Brexit, but in the middle nonetheless.
The article is a bit long, rambling, and rankly not very well written, but it's definitely not a "Tory complains left-wing bias in BBC"-type of article.
Example:
"And here we arrive at a truly awesome, structural bias that is barely guessed at by journalists themselves. The fact is that it is simply understood by ‘mainstream’ media at election time that foreign policy – especially our leaders’ high crimes – is somehow unaccountably, inexplicably, irrationally, not an issue the electorate need trouble its pretty little head about. Even after the devastating, illegal 2003 invasion-occupation of Iraq, with the crime still fully underway, foreign policy barely featured as an election issue in 2005.
Corbyn was presented, relentlessly, as a moral monster, as a threat to humanity on the basis of miniscule, in fact non-existent, evidence. But Johnson and the Tories, and Corbyn’s Blairite enemies, escaped all scrutiny – for the simple reason that their very real crimes have been declared a non-issue by an awesomely corrupt system of media corporations serving the power of which they are an integral part."
Those passages are exemplary of why I'd struggle to take anything seriously coming from that site. A number of largely baseless statements are exposed with breathless language.
I don't think it is. Whether appointments to the bbc are the results of bribes is material to if the BJP statement is just making things up as implied by the original poster.
Whataboutism isn't a catch all term that can be used to get rid of every opposing argument.
Unless they can show a pattern of corruption in BBC appointments, they're just taking a single example to support an otherwise-baseless argument. Sharp is an outlier, brought about by one of the worst ever UK governments in living memory, which is why we know of him and he's under pressure to leave.
No, but it certainly applies to this comment and a whole load of other comments in the thread where people are trying to draw false equivalence by pointing out isolated incidents of corruption or police violence in Europe and thereby implying that we shouldn't be looking too harshly on other countries. False/shaky equivalence as a distraction, AKA whataboutism.
> by pointing out isolated incidents of corruption or police violence in Europe and thereby implying that we shouldn't be looking too harshly on other countries
I don't think they said this. Certainly if they made this argument it would be whataboutism.
I don't know why you are being slated for stating facts. Of course the BBC is not the most corrupt organisation in the world but it's far from benevolent.
The bizarre thing is how balanced the documentary actually is if you watch it. Many senior BJP officials are given plenty of time to defend their case. It focuses on provable events, things which were captured on video or public legal proceedings. If this has received such extreme backlash, I'd hate to see what happens to an actual opinionated news outlet
Check out what happened to the founders of https://www.altnews.in/, a fact checking website. Some would argue they are opinionated but judge for yourself.
My biggest gripe with the documentary is that it simplifies things too much, and in some cases IMHO even misrepresented things.
The way it presents things is, crudely put, "Hindus and Muslims were living happily together in India, and then Modi came along, stoked tensions, and things all went south". While Modi definitely played a part and has much to answer for, things are significantly more complex than that. "Muslims set pilgrims on fire during the Godhra train burning" accusation/assumption – which probably isn't true – didn't come out of thin air, as such things did happen before.[1]
One example of what I considered serious misrepresentation is (quote from the documentary) "In June last year, a BJP spokeswoman made comments about the Prophet Muhammad on TV that angered Muslims in India and around the world". Curiously, it doesn't say what the "comments" were, so I looked it up and they were really mild:
"I want to ask those with affection for the Prophet that at the age of 53, he married a 6-year-old girl Aisha and then at the age of 56, he consummated that relationship with 9-year-old Aisha ... does such relationship not come under the category of rape?" [2]
Which is a long-standing and common criticism, and the ages are generally accepted by Muslim scholars as well. And the "around the world" means the usual religio-fascist countries that are angered whenever someone criticised their religion; you know, the type of people who think that someone getting beheaded for showing a cartoon or stabbed in the eye for writing a book is just a fantastic thing.
Yet, the way it's presented in the documentary leaves the impression that she said something vile and horribly Islamophobic. She did no such thing. Yet she was suspended from the BJP, seemingly mostly to placate violent threats from some Muslims. Several people died in the protests over those comments. The person who made the remarks had to have security due to death threats.
There's a bunch of things like this where I felt it presented a rather myopic view of things. Not false exactly, but not the full story, either.
One could counter by saying that the film was only intended to examine Modi's role, and isn't supposed to be a full examination of the full conflict. But I think one needs to understand at least the basics of the full conflict and context to examine Modi's role in it.
Of course, none of this justifies India's response to the film. But I did not like the documentary, and did not consider it all that balanced. Yes, BJP officials were given ample time, but by focusing on only a specific set of events instead of a more complete picture it was quite balanced.
* I meant the say "by focusing on only a specific set of events instead of a more complete picture it was quite UNbalanced." in that last paragraph (too late to edit).
i really wish they made the documentary correctly, especially given how much time they had since the events to work on this.
i get the pushback from the current administration for any media criticism, but i am surprised by how many indians are unaware of these events. i hate to see them only get an incomplete picture.
My great-grandparents were victims of pogroms and my grandfather's family was killed by the nazis. The BBC doesn't go far enough in explaining why someone who led ethnic massacres isn't fit to lead a country.
The link was redacted once I'd allowed about 32 Gb worth of illegal downloads off my private server, elucidating which known person led which ethnic massacres.
[edit] please review the context of this thread and/or watch the BBC documentary in question for a deeper understanding of the topic.
I have no idea what you're even on about any more; you're talking in riddles with vague references to this and that, but nowhere is it clear what you actually mean.
I agree - there is nothing in the documentary about Modi and the BJP that has not been hashed out dozens of times before. Its all the more surprise that it is getting suppressed, which will lead to people watching it even more than if it was ignored.
The BJP is media savvy, but using the Indian bureaucracy and especially the Tax department to score points is clumsy.
Government using its tools to silence and pressure the media is a tale as old as any in India. Modi was a persona non grata for many western countries and US would not even give him a visa to enter the country after Gujrat riots. Mostly everyone alive at that time knows about his role in the riots but the fact remains that folks in India are willing to overlook it. Modi has one of the highest approval ratings when compared to other world leaders (amongst their constituents) and so long as people in India dont care, Modi will continue to abuse the Government machinery to silence and discipline dissidents.
It’s worth noting that many companies such as Apple are diversifying from China due to the overreach of the political powers, but they’re moving over to India where the same thing is happening.
They are not diversifying from China because of China. They are because of deteriorating relations with the West that may put them at risk in case of, for instance, sanctions against China.
The West will have some deteriorating relations with India as well if India decides to start ethnic cleansing or stripping citizenship from 100 million Muslims. Consider how much business we do with Burma (approximately $0), even though the labor is quite cheap there. The BBC documentary is a warning shot.
To be clear, this is not about the West taking sides in religious or ethnic issues; there are limits on what kinds of violence people are willing to accept in the supply chain. China is incredibly hard to divorce from, but we're doing it.
> there are limits on what kinds of violence people are willing to accept in the supply chain. China is incredibly hard to divorce from, but we're doing it.
What may or may not happening in China has nothing to do with it. The issue is geopolitical and the seemingly collision course between an increasingly powerful China and the West, especially the USA.
Edit: Likewise, with China the #1 threat the West will want to keep India on side. An example is Russia: India has been keeping its trade with Russia, and even increased it since the war in Ukraine started. The West has been very quiet on that.
The BBC documentary itself is rather benign and brings nothing new to the table other than elevating a UK viewpoint over what many locals have done in the 2 decades in between. If anything, it only displays the BBC’s colonial biases.
The response to this run of the mill documentary which likely no one would have watched and/or heard about has been chilling. The Modi government has absolutely embarrassed itself and has basically gone out of its way to prove that whatever the documentary says is correct, whether it is or isn’t. And the doubling down will hurt not just the governments but also the country’s image.
Between India and China you're looking at roughly a 1/4 of the world population. This makes it hard to use sanctions in ways that work better against smaller, less critical countries (like Iran, Myanmar). Even Russia, which doesn't hold quite the same level has been painful for Europe to sanction.
It's also problematic having to fight battles on all fronts at once (and at home for the US, which isn't exactly at the height of democracy itself)[0].
It's also worth being aware that much of the world sees the other side of the US, meddling and not really doing so in the best interests of the local population (not to mention UK colonial history).
We're in this funny place where the US often dictates globally but the protections that are in place with it's own laws only extend as far as citizens. Which is where you end up with all the 5-eyes spying on each other and sharing intel, thereby avoiding the protections put in place to prevent the domestic use of those capabilities[1].
The third paragraph is most crucial. Having said that, as an Asian I'm super puzzled with Western countries tendency to moralizing and lecturing other countries internal matter.
Is it wrong to bring up bad treatment of a citizens countries to the leadership of that country? Western countries in feel comfortable doing this because in general they treat their citizens far better than other countries treat their own.
We can't let past failure stop the criticisms of genocide and slips into authoritarian behaviour. We all (globally) have to try to hold each other to account.
>We all (globally) have to try to hold each other to account.
I'm sorry but De facto it is kinda ridiculous. Since "western" entities almost completely control media and influence. Criticism always occur one way street.
Al Jazeera, scmp, nhk, cna, Hindustantimes, haaretz and even al arabiya are all becoming more common. I'm in the American southeast. Please dont generalize.
> Criticism always occur one way street.
? What kind of sources are you listening to? Even the Rupert Murdoch ones are filled with vitriol critizing their respective regions. A publication having a xenophobic bent, and that being useful to politicians is another tangential thing.
The two are hardly comparable. The current Chinese party has been in power for many decades. The Modi BJP government hasn’t even been in power for 10 years, and frankly, if it wasn’t for a highly inept opposition intent on shooting itself in the foot, would likely have been out of power by the next election.
foxconn had seen labour protests in both Indian and Chinese locations, in the former before the latter in recent memory.
don't forget the american stance on india-pakistan conflicts during the cold war either. the west can do as they please with sanctions against india. they cannot be so liberal with china, however.
the eu, for example, puts a lot of restrictions on indian drugs and produce in the name of "regulations" and gets away with it.
at the end of the day, the people of india can have a "surprised pikachu" revelation about their current leader and choose to change him with someone else comes the election time. you cannot say the same about the other place. the west can influence on the same as well, if they so wish.
When every country is ruled by capricious dickbags you might as well spread your eggs across many baskets so that the actions of any one set of dickbags are better hedged against.
Lol, could have just brushed this aside with a comment instead of outright censoring a globally available media. Like what do they expect, no Indian should ever watch it in India or something but it is fine if outside of India?
This is how freedom of speech dies, bit by bit......
"Communal disharmony." A lovely term to justify a good old dose of authoritarianism or censorship, for 'the greater good' (or 'communal harmony' in this case).
I am not sure about worldwide. I see no trends in Latin America or Africa. Notably, the Mexican president recently decided not to pursue constitutional changes to lengthen his rule, despite his supporters calling for that. And despite a stressful transfer of power from Bolsonaro to Lula in Brazil, it did go through without major bloodshed.
But Israel, Turkiye, and India are in a bad state. Netanyahu, Erdogan, and Modi are quickly tightening their grips on their respective governments.
Also I know China is not considered to be a democracy, but the past few leaders before Xi only lasted about 10 years each, while Xi is seeking a much longer rule.
I am not aware of any major changes in Europe, or the rest of Asia.
Israel, Turkiye, India, China, and Russia are heavy weights, though. So definitely something to watch for moving forward.
It depends a bit which time-frame you use as well. Taiwan and Indonesia have become more democratic since the 90s; Balkan countries (former Yugoslavia) are doing mostly okay today. Possibly some other countries as well.
Russia had a "decade of democracy", which also failed quite spectacularly. It doesn't really have a long democratic tradition that you see in other countries.
You'd be surprised by just how many Modi (and right-wing) supporters exist among influential Indians in the Silicon Valley. They're not even subtle about it on Twitter.
It seems like the West, and the US more specifically, isn't capable anymore of physically reproducing/replacing its technocratic elites, which in this day and age mostly means its tech elites. Which made me wonder what would happen in case of a direct US vs China war when in some companies 20% to 30% to even 50% of the engineers have some close family connections on the Mainland. Will those engineers and tech people be ok with seeing China losing and their close family back home physically hurting?
What would happen if the US starts playing it rough with India? When you've got the CEOs of some of the biggest US tech companies being of Indian descent themselves, not to mention the large percentage of Indian engineers active in the Valley and not only.
It was way easier to set up the Manhattan project when many of the people involved had escaped physical annihilation here in Europe (against them and against their close family), but will the US be able to reproduce a future Manhattan project (let's say in AI) using and employing people whose families back home (in China, most probably, in India, as a possibility) would be directly and life-threatening affected by their work? I have my doubts.
Many Indians in America or Americans of Indian descent disagree with the rise of fascism in India. Of course many also fall into the default nationalistic mode and become defensive.
Actions to take against a ruling party that has widespread support from the police, legislature, judiciary, and media are limited.
In India, about 15% of Indians are Christians, Muslims, or other non Hindus. And among Hindus, about 40% are Dalits. The majority of Indians in India are threatened by this rise in fascist actions and rhetoric.
And yet, even against all odds, a few people in India stand up for justice. The silence or inaction of the majority should not be criticized too harshly since it is not easy to put everything on the line. But those that do deserve all of humanity’s appreciation.
Under Modi, India’s press is not as free anymore - April 2, 2020 - Vindu Goel and Jeffrey Gettleman
https://archive.ph/zPhMH
Jailed Indian journalist gets bail almost two years after arrest - September 10, 2022 - Shaikh Azizur Rahman
https://archive.ph/5sxUA
Rana Ayyub, journalist and Modi critic, barred from leaving India - March 30, 2022 - Aakash Hassan
https://archive.ph/Ibu7S
> Many Indians in America or Americans of Indian descent disagree with the rise of fascism in India
I'm aware of that, as I'm also aware that many Russians (especially the educated tech elites) are against the current government in Moscow.
I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the guys calling the shots in Washington, as in, what measures should be taken in regards to the Chinese very-well represented tech diaspora in case of a war against China? (and, as I said, if some skirmishes involving the current Indian leadership were to start). When it came to Russia it looks like the the US and the West went all in, almost all Russians were treated as guilty by default unless.
I'm wondering if the same actions will be taken against the Chinese working for the big US tech firms (or against the Indians). I'm saying that that would be harder for the US to carry out (compared to the current shitting on the Russian diaspora).
Where did you get 40%? The proportion of scheduled castes is somewhere in the mid-20s, you only get into the mid- to high-30s if you include "Other Backwards Castes," who aren't Dalits but are able to make a general case that they were low on the status hierarchy historically. But, cynically, that whole framework is mostly just a way for the numerically large smallholder classes to create reservations, that were originally meant to correct for untouchability, for themselves through a sort of caste-based patronage politics.
There are also lower and higher castes among Indian Muslims and Christians as well. It's a indigenous form of social stratification, more analogous to how we think of ethnicity or race, that's independent of peoples' confessional identity.
Do you think there is a rise in fascist actions and rhetoric in India? And that the majority of Indians are threatened by this?
Thanks for correcting me on OBC and Dalits. The framework is definitely problematic. And it adds another layer of complexity to racial, religious, and economic demographics. Thanks for prompting me to learn more about this.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/06/29/attitudes-ab...
I would hesitate to characterize everything happening as fascist since that's a loaded term and I think it brings in a lot of baggage when transposed cross-culturally that confuses more than it clears up. I think there has been a rise in extremism and political violence that is largely, but not exclusively, driven by the hard right. And I think Modi has a particularly callous, realpolitik approach to governance that enflames social tensions and imposes burdens on marginalized members of society in pursuit of a "development and superpower status at any cost" agenda.
But I don't think it's accurate to say the majority of Indians are threatened by this. The BJP enjoys fairly strong support among Dalit communities (about 40% in the last election IIRC), with a decent amount of the remainder voting for Dalit organized political parties due to communal affiliation rather than categorical opposition to the BJP as a party. The party as a whole is not minoritarian or fringe (though it has such factions within it), and the attempts by English language media to treat them as a sort of pariah government will backfire.
The party's attacks on civil society are troubling and, while, the presence of roving goon squads running around terrorizing people over random slights didn't start with them (and is usually more by junior local parties like the Shiv Sena), their selective approach to meting out justice and slow-rolling investigations has begun to normalize this behavior. This will only mean further ratcheting up of communal tensions across the country and making the social trust and cohesive political culture necessary for democratic institutions to work more brittle.
But all that said, they don't seem to really be engaged in the kinds of election rigging we see from right-wing parties in other countries with creeping authoritarian movements (like the USA). They actually win fair elections straight up, without leaning on counter-majoritarian institutions or voter suppression schemes like our own GOP rely on. Nor do they engage in the same extent of corrupt, clientelist political organization that the opposition Congress Party is dependent on (there is plenty of corruption, but it's India and we apply a normalized scale). I think a lot of the English language commentary on Indian politics has trouble grappling with the fact that this is a political party with a broad-base of popular support across the country. They try to cast it as a minority faction that is playing unfairly, characterized by its most lunatic fringe elements, but that is simply not the case. It's a mainstream institution with serious statespeople in it that mostly engages in consensus-seeking approaches to enacting policy.
I also don't really think the BJP is in the driver's seat with the ratcheting up of rhetoric and political violence as much as it is victim of some sort of societal radicalization loop as everyone else (though Modi, and particularly some of the goons under him, are a bit of an accelerant). I think the conflicts about national identity is a predictable consequence of globalization and a colossal generation of poor and rural communities being fast-tracked into structured, urban, capitalist lifestyles and all the social dislocation that brings.
You actually see the same kinds of hardening of identity lines and empowering of regressive and conservative elements across all religious groups in India. It's just that the Muslims and Christians aren't numerous enough to push that agenda as effectively in the political arena. But internally Muslim and Christian communities in India have also begun to adopt more fundamentalist and hardline approaches to practice. Many of the traditional, indigenous Indian Christian traditions are losing ground to more aggressively evangelical Churches (largely bankrolled by American missionaries). The traditionally syncretic Islamic traditions in India have become increasingly strict. Even the vaguely atheistic, educated secularist set is enamored of Marxism and other dogmatic ideological positions. It's an endemic social disease that seems to be even worse in India than it is here.
The size of the Hindu population creates a disparity in power dynamics in a democratic country that makes the same tendency extra problematic. But characterizing this as just being a "Hindu" thing is missing the underlying driving force and mistaking a symptom for the disease. The pluralist country of my youth, where everyone was kind of loosey-goosey about these boundaries seems to be gone. I just hope this is some sort of temporary mania brought on by all the social dislocation I mentioned and not the new status quo.
Just wanted to chime in and say that this was a good read. Reminded me of reading editorials when I was younger. I agree with most of these points, and especially appreciate the fact that you present a nuanced view. Too often, western views are translated directly to other places and result can be inaccurate assessments.
Why do you feel it necessary to deflect criticisms instead of addressing them directly?
The purported rigging of elections in the US does not justify the eroding of democratic institutions in India [0]. Claims of increasing evangelism and strictness among Christians and Muslims doesn’t justify the large number of public lynchings of minorities [1] and politically motivated prosecutions of media outlets perceived to be critical of the BJP or their affiliated organizations.
Several organizations have recognized this deterioration of Democratic institutions and adjusted their ratings accordingly [0]. I understand you may think this is a conspiracy against India, but be assured it is not. Western countries have a deep seated interest in preventing unfettered nationalism and fascism from causing a widespread conflagration.
The term fascism is not used flippantly [2]. The RSS was modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. The RSS and the currently ruling BJP have a symbiotic relationship. Perhaps you were referring to the RSS when you say the BJP is not in the drivers seat.
You are well spoken and obviously care for India. I urge you to take a more critical look at what is happening in India. The international community is not trying to perpetuate colonialism or hold India to a unique standard. They want a vibrant trading partner that upholds human rights and rule of law. They also do not want to see a genocide occur in a country that is the worlds largest democracy.
There is no deflection. I was pretty clear about erosion of democratic norms being bad in both places. I made a comparison to provide a sense of perspective as to scale and then said the BJP wins fair elections to illustrate that conflating them with the right in America leads to bad misconceptions. The right wing in the US plays from a position of weakness. They only have institutional power due to the counter-majoritarianism in our system and their ideology is completely hollowed out. This is also what drives them to attack democratic or non-political institutions because they have no ability to retain power otherwise. They know they're a generation away from irrelevance and are desperate.
The right wing in India plays from a position of electoral strength and they have a clearly defined ideology with an evidently compelling narrative. They have well articulated things they're fighting FOR, not just an inchoate ball of resentments they're lashing out against. They are simply more concerned with functioning governance and having a political system that works than the Republicans are because they expect to live out the next 100 years.
Because they are electorally competitive they do not meaningfully threaten free and fair elections. They threaten a specific cluster of civil society organizations that are politically hostile to them (and, just so we're clear, I think this is bad too) but that's a completely different and more solvable problem. Over the next 10-15 years I worry more about the long-term health of American democracy than I do India's. India's problems are more of a 50 year horizon depending on whether the bad trends soften or harden over time.
India suffers from illiberalism, not authoritarianism. The seeds were sown before Modi's political career ever got started. The Congress party was buying votes by currying favor with caste-based parties and religious leaders, building the salience of these factors in political organizing. The norms of censoring media due to public outrage were already well established in the early 2000s when Christian and Muslim leaders organized to ban controversial media like "The Da Vinci Code" and "Satanic Verses." This isn't whataboutism, but a demonstration that when international activists frame this as a uniquely BJP or Hindutva problem, it doesn't exactly look like they're prepared to grapple with how deep the problem actually goes and care more about scoring political points.
I mentioned how the boundaries between religious communities were porous when I was a kid for a reason. The only solution is to reduce the salience of communal ID as a cleavage point. You have to hamstring regressive goons across the board, you can't be particularistic it just doesn't work.
It was a low blow for you to say I was "excusing lynching" by mentioning fundamentalism. I never said anything of the sort. You seem to view different religious communities as if they live on different planets and make decisions in isolation. These are the same people living in the same world and are all reacting the same way to the same cultural forces. Only directing the treatment at conservative Hindus is like only treating the orange cattle in the herd. They're just going to keep getting sick from the others. They pick up behaviors and respond to their surroundings. This is how the RSS started. Yeah it was modeled on Mussolini's party, but it is also true that it was a counter-reaction to the Moplah Massacre. You could tell a story that paints Savarkar as Huey Newton as easily as Mussolini and you'd only be about 10% less right. These sorts of people feed off each other and you cannot just expect one religious community to cast off its nutcases while allowing others to write the civil code and get government grants. Americans have a really reductive approach to power dynamics between races that buckets everything into White oppressors and non-White oppressed classes. It's a crude oversimplification here, but it is hilariously out of touch in India. There are a lot of overlapping dimensions of identity and everyone is a minority along at least one of them. There is a bottomless well of history for people to harbor resentments over, with plenty of justified grievances to go around.
> Several organizations have recognized this deterioration of Democratic institutions and adjusted their ratings accordingly [0].
I put it right in the start that there's been attacks on civil society and breakdown in social trust and political violence so I don't know why you're claiming I'm ignoring this. I will still stress that these adjustments are not uncontroversial, even within those organizations. In the actual text of the Freedom House report they point out that while the trend-line is bad the downgrade is partly a quirk of their methodology which doesn't handle edge cases well. The "Partly free" rating makes it look overly severe, and something as simple as using a 5 point scale instead of a 4 point one would have avoided it.
I sincerely do not believe a genocide is in the cards and people need to cool it. Violent riots and vigilanteism ARE going to happen, but that actually calls for a different set of interventions that revolve around professionalizing the police force, tackling corruption, speeding up timelines to prosecution and trial, and creating more jobs and opportunity for young men and women. The worst case scenario you are looking at is something more like the the post-Reconstruction American South than Rwanda or Kosovo in the 90s, or even Pakistan in the 40s and that's only if they fail at doing all of the above. (And I feel ridiculous needing to stress that the post-Reconstruction South was not good! But there are many different ways to not be good, some worse than others. And they require different responses.)
> The term fascism is not used flippantly [2]. The RSS was modeled on Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. The RSS and the currently ruling BJP have a symbiotic relationship.
And it has evolved substantially in the nearly 100 years since then. We might as well be talking about how the Democrats used to be the party of slavery and Hitler modeled his Jewish policy on their model of segregation. The organization itself is enormous, and is affiliated with everything from priests who go around serving free school lunches to goon squads that go around beating up couples for holding hands on Valentine's Day. It is partly due to this big tent and their reformist streaks on social issues like casteism and LGBTQ+ rights that the more extreme wings think the RSS has "gone soft."
FWIW I'd see Modi as a Latin American caudillo type, like Juan Perón minus military regalia (who I will also stress WAS NOT GOOD). But even that's an imperfect analogy for a host of reasons.
> The international community is not trying to perpetuate colonialism or hold India to a unique standard. . .They want a vibrant trading partner that upholds human rights and rule of law.
Firstly, upholding human rights and rule of law has never been a prerequisite for being a trading partner with the USA. Depending on what you're trading, it is as likely to be a detriment as anything.
Secondly, India has been held to a unique standard by the international community since independence. This is nothing new. Most recently the international community said and did nothing when Chinese forces illegally initiated skirmishes on the Indian side of a disputed border, but mere months later got on India's case about the importance of upholding a "rules based international order" when Russia illegally invaded Ukraine. Narendra Modi was banned from entry into the United States, an unprecedented action to take against a foreign politician that we have never done before or since. Now he's not a great guy, but I will wear my keyboard out and not even get a fraction of the way through a list of deplorable leaders who would have been more deserving, starting with MBS on the night he dismembered an American journalist. Things like this make it difficult for even centrist or liberal Indians to take US based international organizations seriously. These antics have severely eroded their credibility when they try to raise alarms about things like the subject of this article.
For whatever it's worth I think India SHOULD be held to unique standards because it's got a billion people and if it ever bothered to project diplomatic influence it would exert enormous pull. But the hectoring tone that international organizations adopt reads as condescending, hypocritical, and filtered through the biases of a narrow clade of English media figures rather than coming from any position principled concern. All of this, obviously, makes it difficult for anyone who gives a shit to operate.
> they don't seem to really be engaged in the kinds of election rigging we see from right-wing parties in other countries with creeping authoritarian movements (like the USA). They actually win fair elections straight up, without leaning on counter-majoritarian institutions or voter suppression schemes like our own GOP rely on.
This is common for creeping authoritarianism, though. Putin won his first presidential election fair and square, and the first thing that he cracked down on was free press, not elections themselves. I'd say that the latter were not massively fraudulent until 2011.
The rest of the pseudo theory about identity fault-lines, and mental gymnastics about "English media biases" doesn't even warrant a reply let alone a reductionist one. The right-wing political party governing India is affiliated with fascist organizations, and this isn't even remotely debatable.
The USG uses sanctions against organizations or individuals that act against its interests. When it is in a war, nationals from that country will receive increased scrutiny but I hope USG have learned from the internment of Japanese citizens in US during WWII that there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. (Gitmo indicates they have indeed learned something.)
I understand your point about how unfair and unjust guilt by association is. In a country that hoists the banner of freedom and attracts the best and the brightest from around the world, the US must take steps to protect civilians in the US from bigotry and discrimination. Regardless of their background.
I apologize for the current political climate causing Russians civilians in the US to feel this way. If it is of any solace, be assured they are not alone in their experiences.
> The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the most popular political party among Indian Americans. One-third of respondents favor the ruling BJP while just 12 percent identify with the Congress Party
> Indian Americans hold broadly favorable views of Modi. Nearly half of all Indian Americans approve of Modi’s performance as prime minister
This goes to a central contradiction which I’ve observed among Americans originally from the subcontinent: “liberalism for thee but not for me.”
In Washington, DC, there was a big rally against the revised Indian citizenship laws, all participants looking plausibly Indian. Of course, I have no idea of how influential the participants are.
Yes, extreme ideologies (left and right wing) and authoritarian views are on the rise because of three factors playing out at the same time:
1. Globalisation showing its cracks and becoming increasingly clear to be the reason for the skyrocketing of inequality and the widening of the wealth gap between the rich and the poor
2. People waking up to the fact that the West and the East are equally bad with a constant stream of bad leaders who make bad decisions for their own riches and for the huge hypocrisy as well as the apparent propaganda to which we are all (West and East) are subjected by our own governments and mainstream media outlets
3. Internet and social media making 1. and 2. extremely visible to everyone in every corner of the world
As a result the world is becoming a lot more cynic on a much wider scale than ever before, people are becoming increasingly more selfish because they see that this is how the world operates as a whole without any shame and people are therefore increasingly more inclined to give their vote to people who "offer" radically different views to the status quo.
> People waking up to the fact that the West and the East are equally bad
You probably want to define what "East" is in this context. If East is Russia + China, it's trivially easy to prove that the West is better for its own citizens.
1. Economic levels in the West.
2. Respect for citizens' lives in the West.
I'm from a country that used to be in the Eastern Bloc, and let me tell you, nobody respects its citizens' lives like the collective West. Yes, the West is still horrible for many groups for human dignity, and yes, they don't always respect their citizens' lives, but boy, are they an improvement over most of the rest of the world.
And we have the numbers, check out military casualties for each side in various wars. The West has by far fewer military casualties than China or Russia have.
And that mentality permeates everywhere. Because if you don't care if your troops die in a war, you won't care if they die in a mine or an office building.
Before you reply, keep in mind I'm talking about statistics.
> People waking up to the fact that the West and the East are equally bad
The West has resources and well-oiled propaganda machinery in place to control the dissent that's why they don't need to use violence as openly as not-so-rich countries. When their monopoly is threatened, they act equally ruthlessly.
> The West has resources and well-oiled propaganda machinery in place to control the dissent that's why they don't need to use violence as openly as not-so-rich countries.
Disregarding the fact that proving your angle is super hard.
So what? It sure beats beating and killing people.
> When their monopoly is threatened, they act equally ruthlessly.
Ok, but if they don't have to do that all the time, it <<still>> makes them better.
It's a tough pill to swallow, go check military casualties for wars. Get back to me after reading Wikipedia pages (so nothing super fancy) for 50-100, chosen randomly, and tell me how many have higher casualty rates for the Western party.
My back of the napkin analysis says that at most 10% of those wars have more Western casualties.
At the end of the day, that's what it boils down to. If you find ways to avoid violence and when you do have to become violent your stuff is better armorer, moves faster, shoots farther, flies higher, well, that's because someone ultimately, to some degree, maybe because they were forced by public consensus, respected citizens' lives.
It doesn't much matter how you get to that respect if you do get there more than your perceived rivals.
> The West has resources and well-oiled propaganda machinery in place to control the dissent
Can you elaborate on this? Resources I agree with - but that boils down to controlling dissent by just removing a source of it which is not the same as controlling dissent by cracking down
> controlling dissent by just removing a source of it which is not the same as controlling dissent by cracking down
You will have to elaborate on how these two phrasings mean different things i.e. what's the difference between "cracking down" on the sources of dissent and "removing" the sources of dissent, and why you support one and condemn the other (if you do.)
Cracking down - the government suppresses dissent by force.
Removing the source of dissent - this means solving the underlying issue that would otherwise cause the dissent. This would be government/society providing for the needs and desires of it’s population.
I think most would agree that the first is much worse than the second.
Russia stretches from the West to the East but the vast majority of life happens in a very small vertical part of the most Western flank of Russia, which is why I actually consider Russia ethnically and culturally to be part of the West, just stuck in a horrible past.
I would love to see a statistic where China has more military casualties than let's say the USA, in total numbers and in % of population I think the USA will exceed China, not least because the USA has been at war ever since I'm alive, China, well not so much.
I'm not going to go down this rabbit hole with you. You can select metrics which will "prove" that the West cares more about its people than China or other Asian countries and equally you can pull metrics which will unequivocally "prove" the opposite. This is precisely what I meant in my original comment.
> I would love to see a statistic where China has more military casualties than let's say the USA, in total numbers and in % of population I think the USA will exceed China, not least because the USA has been at war ever since I'm alive, China, well not so much.
LOLNO.
This is very well documented, and even if you ignore all the Chinese civil wars, most of which had more casualties than regular wars. Heck, one of their civil wars had almost as many casualties as WW1.
The US has been in a lot of wars but their military casualties are very low overall. They generally beat the other guys up very badly but they're quite careful to not lose people, in comparison with other countries.
Do you think that the person you replied to was condemning the US for casualties to US soldiers, or casualties that US soldiers caused?
Also, it's not really thoughtful to compare 3000 years of Chinese history to the history of the US since 1898 (the US's first modern imperial war, against the Philippine population.)
I'm Chinese. I'm not commenting on Russia but please keep China out of "trivially easy to prove that the West is better for its own citizens". Chinese citizen have been found to be far more satisfied with their government and their future prospects than for example the US. This "propaganda"-sounding fact is even something found by western institutions such as Harvard, York University and Democracy Perception Index! Even here in the Netherlands, Chinese diaspora that I know and that have come here in the past 10-15 years are very positive about China. In China, police don't wear guns, and women can safely walk on the streets during the night — something which you can't say about many western countries.
Of course China still has many of its own problems. But the cartoonish notion that it's some sort of totalitarian police state dictatorship where everybody wants to flee from is propaganda. China and the west both have their own problems and their own strong points.
> Chinese citizen have been found to be far more satisfied with their government and their future prospects than for example the US.
How could you possibly know this? I'm from an Eastern European country that was under dictatorship (partially inspired by North Korea and PRC).
There's a deep culture of duplicity in such authoritarian regimes. You'd be a fool to say stuff that puts a bullseye on your head.
Saying that stuff is not working correctly and the future isn't bright is an implicit criticism of the authorities and I'm sure the very politically astute and smart Chinese citizens are super aware of this.
Research by Harvard, York University, Democracy Perception Index, more.
Or you could... go visit China, talk to Chinese people. The majority of them support the government.
And I haven't even brought up my own friends and family as anecdotal evidence.
But let me turn this around. If you're so convinced that all satisfaction is fake and a result of coercion, then how do you possibly prove that western European countries are not dictatorships? You could always argue that elections are fake, and that all their citizen who says that their country is a democracy only say so under coercion. One can always rationalize this to the point where the notion becomes unfalsifiable.
You should check out the talks of Kishore Mahbubani, ex-UN Security Council head, ex-Singapore diplomat. He has seen the Soviet Union, he has seen what a dictatorship looks like, and what's going on in China looks nothing like that. The past 40 years, the freedom of the Chinese people have exploded. 40 years ago you couldn't choose what clothes to wear, what to study, where to live, where to work. All of that has changed. Millions of Chinese travel abroad every year, and they all return to China. Why would they do that if China is such a miserable place? Why would a "dictatorship" allow its citizen to travel abroad where they are exposed to democracy?
The answer is twofold: China isn't a dictatorship, and you can't reason about all countries using this dictatorship-vs-democracy dichotomy. These are the best 30 years out of 3000 years for Chinese people, Chinese people have been freer than they have ever been in Chinese history. Western analysis projects a Stalinist communism dictatorship on China but this projection is wrong and doesn't fit. China has authoritarian elements, yes, but it is still very far removed from the typical dictatorship that people imagine.
Case in point: the recent Covid protests. Western media has been writing for several years now about how "all-powerful dictator-for-life Xi Jingping" made up an anti-Covid apparatus merely for his own entertainment and to show off power and to control people. Then suddenly there were protests. Did they sent in the tanks? No, they... lifted the 0-covid measures!
Seriously, does this sound like what a power-hungry dictator would do? Maybe, just maybe, everything you think you know about China is wrong, and all the shallow China analyses you have read in the news are all wrong. In this "dictatorship" there are 15000 (!) protests a year, and often the protesters get what they want.
> The answer is twofold: China isn't a dictatorship, and you can't reason about all countries using this dictatorship-vs-democracy dichotomy.
Can I complain about the man in charge? If I go to social media and I post that I hate the bear, what happens? :-)
For comparison purposes, on a daily basis, Klaus Iohannis (the Romanian president) can fill his fridge with meat, as we say in Romanian (I'll let you figure out from which body part that meat comes from :-))) ).
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Oh, to note. I hope you're right and those material freedoms cover more non-material freedoms and that China will especially have a friendly policy towards its neighbors. I'm not optimistic at the moment.
The ability to criticize the president is not what's important here, and in fact a focus on that as being some sort of golden metric is also another hurdle in properly understanding China. This is part of the typical "dictatorship-vs-democracy" dichotomy thought that I'm criticizing for not being a good fit for China.
Concretely: yes in China there is censorship, and yes you can't just criticize the president. However, you can criticize policy. Not only can you, people do: as I've said before, there are 15000 protests in China every year, and often times the government gives in to protesters. The 0-covid protests resulting in lifting of 0-covid measures being a big recent one.
In contrast, in many western countries you certainly have the freedom to complain about more things, but your ability to get policy changes is almost non-existant. Not so in China: policy changes happen all the time as a result of protests, even if there are topics that are more taboo than in the west.
Material vs non-material freedom is also not the point (even though it's somewhat relevant). There are classes of immaterial freedom in China that the west doesn't even recognize as freedom. For example, the sheer safety in China grants one a huge amount of freedom of movement. A female Australian acquaintance once told me that she thought that political freedom and freedom of speech are the most important things. But once she visited China and experienced how safe the streets were, and how she could walk around during the night without escort, she realized that she valued freedom of movement much more.
To understand China one must move away from the dichotomy. China should be understood using entirely separate paradigms, on its own terms, not the terms that the west (in its relation/history with the Soviet Union) tries to project on China.
Personally, I could not tolerate living in a country where I have to watch what I say out of fear of me and my family ending up in prison for years. (Or in an internment camp, depending on my ethnicity.) Perhaps your Australian didn’t think they had anything interesting to speak out about; if they did, they might be singing a different tune.
By the way, a decade ago, Russian leadership suggested that Russia was a “democracy with Russian attributes,” and that it had to be understood on its own terms. Of course, it was just a convenient fig leaf for the erosion of freedoms and consolidation of power happening behind the scenes. We can all see where Russia is today.
I am glad Chinese people are still able to affect policy, but I wonder how long that will last. If there is a war with Taiwan, will the government tolerate dissent? I think not.
As I said earlier, I never claimed that China has no problems, and I welcome genuine efforts to improve the human rights situation in China. But current efforts are simply not genuine and are merely geopolitical attacks disguised as human rights concerns.
To make a comparison: the US also has many grave human rights abuses, including jailing people for saying "too interesting" things. But the US is not painted as some human rights abuse hellhole. It's clear that in the minds of many, human rights abuses in western countries can be bad but are at least redeemable or even incidental, while Chinese sins are inherent, systematic and unforgivable.
And again: here you hold political rights as the highest goal. I dispute this notion. This "one might be singing a different tune" can be reflected right back at you: if you've experienced how it is like to live in a country that has had 150 years of war and poverty, where eating your next meal is not guaranteed, with western "democratic" countries looting your treasures (and still having them on display in foreign museums today) back then when your country was itself dabbling in introducing democracy and republicanism, then maybe you would value safety and economic prosperity way more than you do now.
Said differently: when you are poor, you are not free, period. The ability to vote has no value on an empty stomach with thugs roaming the streets. The Chinese government has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, which is also a big human rights improvement. That does not excuse bad things, but it's worth putting things in perspective, something which many refuse to do because few are willing to hold an honest conversation about China.
> By the way, a decade ago, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev said that Russia had “democracy with Russian attributes,” and that Russia had to be understood on its own terms. Of course, it was just a convenient fig leaf for the erosion of freedoms and consolidation of power happening behind the scenes. We can all see where Russia is today.
Whatever problems you have with Russia has got nothing to do with China. Saying that "X has problem A, so Y must also have problem A" is a fallacy. Correlation is not causation.
> I am glad Chinese people are still able to affect policy, but I wonder how long that will last.
The ability to affect policy has increased over years, not decreased. In the past 15 years, government has improved systems to consult citizen.
This notion of yours have been around for at least 10 years. But when you ask Chinese how many of them would rather live in 25-30 years ago, you will not find many.
> If there is a war with Taiwan, will the government tolerate dissent?
You got this entirely backwards. Many people in China support reunification with Taiwan. If Xi Jingping announces today that he accepts Taiwanese independence, then he'll be overthrown tomorrow and replaced with another government that supports reunification.
Also, dropping this here: https://asiatimes.com/2022/11/harvard-guru-gives-biden-a-d-f...
Dr. William Overholt, Harvard professor: "we are creating the problem that we think we’re trying to deter."
In other words, all this talk about China invading Taiwan, and taking actions to "deter" China from invading Taiwan, incentivizes China to invade — because people fundamentally misread China's relationship with Taiwan. But the US government knows this and is deliberately stirring things up, breaking decades of diplomatic agreements, in order to goad China into shooting first so that the US can have a war with China while claiming moral superiority.
I did not: I am fully aware of this fact. However, while the majority of people in China may support a war with Taiwan, many will not. What will happen to those that oppose it? Will they be allowed to protest in the streets, or will they be brutally repressed? I know where I'd put my money.
As to everything else, China should be commended for bringing so many people out of poverty. But authoritarian regimes are not sustainable. Give too much power to one man, and he almost invariably gets it in his head that he is the state, and starts repressing, pogromming, and dismantling any person or institution that gets in his way. (Observe that Xi has already eliminated presidential term limits.)
I was born in Russia. The Soviet Union brought many millions out of poverty, including some of my direct ancestors. Was it all worth it in the end, though? I'm not so sure. The sins of the Soviet government ruined millions of lives and lead the country to where it is today: a crippled, fascistic, frothing-at-the-mouth oligarchy. Perhaps that's what's in store for China in the future. I really hope it manages to avoid this fate, but I'm not optimistic.
Here you are projecting Russia and Soviet Union onto China again. Yet where is your evidence that the projection is remotely fitting? I cited a source: prominent statesman Kishore Mahbubani who testifies that the Soviet Union is not at all comparable to China.
With your point wrt Taiwan you seem to be saying that if anti-war protests are suppressed then that is evidence that the country is a dictatorship. But the problem is that many countries — even western ones — suppresses dissent once they enter a war. Heck Germany is not even officially at war but anyone voicing public support for Russia can be legally reprimanded.
You also seem to ignore the aspect of whether people can actually enact policy changes. People protesting against the Middle Eastern wars didn't prevent them. What use is the ability to protest when they don't change anything?
I really don't know why everybody obsesses about Xi's term limits as if that's some sinister sign. Observe that Xi has been around for about as long as Merkel and Kohl.
More generally, all this talk about "authoritarian regimes" is projecting something into China which does not fit. Observe the fact that the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China were extremely weak, and look where that got us: poor, exploited by foreign democratic powers. When you look at the past 2000 years of Chinese history then you see that prosperous times come when central government is strong. Conversely, when central government is weak, the people suffer. Whatever problems you have with Russia and Soviet Union should not be projected onto China. Whatever problems the west had with strong governments should not automatically mean that China's biggest problems are the same. We've had more problems with not having enough state power than too much state power.
> With your point wrt Taiwan you seem to be saying that if anti-war protests are suppressed then that is evidence that the country is a dictatorship. But the problem is that many countries — even western ones — suppresses dissent once they enter a war. Heck Germany is not even officially at war but anyone voicing public support for Russia can be legally reprimanded.
I bring up Russia because it's the authoritarian government I'm most familiar with. An authoritarian government doesn't "reprimand" people when it needs consent for a given policy: it imprisons them or worse. You can see this happening in Russia today with anti-war protests, where dissenters are thrown into prison for years or even sent to the front. I believe similar things were happening to the protesters in HK when China took over. Are you saying people won't be imprisoned for protesting military action in Taiwan? I find that unlikely.
If I lived in Germany, no part of me would fear imprisonment if I voiced support for Russia. (Though it's likely somebody would kick my ass.)
> I really don't know why everybody obsesses about Xi's term limits as if that's some sinister sign.
Why did he do it if not to consolidate power?
> Observe the fact that the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of China were extremely weak, and look where that got us — poor, exploited.
Authoritarian policies also got you the Great Chinese Famine, leading to tens of millions of lives pointlessly thrown away. Was anyone held accountable? The answer is no, because an authoritarian government's "strength" is also its weakness when fault lies with the strongman at the helm. (As an aside, Yang Jisheng is the author of perhaps the most comprehensive account of the famine, "Tombstone." Are there any universities in China teaching his work? Are his books even allowed to be published?)
I understand you are familiar with Russia. But China is not Russia. You don't know China. By your reasoning ("Russia was X so China must also be X"), WW2 Germany (a democracy) was fascist therefore all other democracies must be fascist too.
"Mehrere Bundesländer haben bereits angekündigt, das öffentliche Zeigen des Symbols zu ahnden. Grundlage ist der Paragraf 140 im Strafgesetzbuch zur „Billigung von Straftaten“. Demnach kann dies mit bis zu drei Jahren Haft oder einer Geldstrafe bestraft werden"
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The famine was a result of inexperienced governance in peace time, not "authoritarian policies". Just like the Irish potato famine was not a result of "democratic policies".
The Cultural Revolution was not a display of authoritarian power. Instead, it was mob rule fueled by revolutionary zeal. During the Cultural Revolution, the state was largely non-functional. Many people joined Mao's campaigns willingly, as opposed to Mao sending his army to force people at gunpoint to do things.
The Cultural Revolution was an attempt to fix a broken country, by leaders who had little experience with peacetime operations. Today, Mao's mistakes are officially recognized. Both good and bad came out of the Cultural Revolution: there was a famine, but life expectancy also rose by more than a decade. One also has to keep in mind that famines were a regular thing in China during previous rulers, so with this context one can say that that famine was the last one China ever had. Given all this, to then describe the Cultural Revolution and the famine as "authoritarian rule" is hugely reductionist and misleading.
The sort of reductionist rhetoric you employ can just as easily be applied to democracies. Nobody was accountable for when the British Empire put China on drugs. Nobody was accountable for the Iraq war. By your own reasoning, "democratic policies" lead to imperialism — a wrong conclusion due to reductionism.
The point isn't "the US also bad". The point is "the US is also bad and people/countries allow them to". Big distinction.
Yes the west is far bigger than the US. However the west is also broadly aligned with the US. Whereas e.g. western Europe condemns and even sanctions China for what it sees as human rights abuses, they look the other way when it comes to US abuses, giving no more than a "tssk". There has been no diplomatic sanctions against the US for its illegal Iraq invasion (amongst others). Worse, some of them even join the US, such as Australia who went to Afghanistan and then killed a bunch of children. The west is bigger but many are complicit.
Of course US crimes don't excuse Chinese crimes. But when double standards are so widespread, it's simply impossible to have any kind of honest or constructive discussion. The double standard must be destroyed first.
> In contrast, in many western countries you certainly have the freedom to complain about more things, but your ability to get policy changes is almost non-existant.
Citation needed.
Western policy changes happen all the time due to protests, all across the West.
Exactly. I am a White European male who grew up in Europe, but I was lucky to travel to many countries across the world and I spent many months in China because I found it very interesting to experience this country myself and make my own opinion and I couldn't agree with you more. Honestly, of course China has many problems, and in many ways China will always have very unique problems which no other country will ever have - which comes as a result of having to find solutions to the world's largest population which nobody else has to deal with - but overall I found Chinese people to have an extraordinary nice life. I visited big multi million cities, way off the tourist route and also small villages and people seemed to live very happy and community driven harmonious lives. I entered the country with a lot of bias and left completely shocked. It definitely opened my eyes and has made me look at many things from a very different perspective today.
EDIT: Again, I'm not ignorant to the problems in China, but I don't need to list the because our main stream media makes sure that every person in the West knows about every little problem China has. So instead I focus on highlighting some of the many positives which I've seen and experienced as well, because for some reason the people in the West are (deliberately) not being told about those.
> which comes as a result of having to find solutions to the world's largest population which nobody else has to deal with
The population of China was about 1.412 billion, quite similar to the population of India at 1.408 billion so not really an accurate statement that nobody else has issues of population scale to deal with.
It’s difficult to argue CCP rule hasn’t been a blessing for most Chinese citizens. There are major blemishes, and signs point to Xi having taken advantage of the popular complacency. But Beijing has delivered on its mandate to date. I’m a China hawk, and I can recognise that.
US prisons are not concentration camps. The majority of people in US prisons have committed usually dozens of crimes and the plurality of inmates have committed violent crimes[1]. No one is in a US prison for praying, teaching their children a language the state disapproves of, or similar non-crimes. There are no forced sterilizations in US prisons.
Many people in US prisons are there for drug related offenses, which were invented precisely to jail the black population. And while you probably can’t be jailed for praying, you definitely can be put there for rough sleeping or many other non-crimes invented for that specific purpose.
But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
If you had looked at the link I shared you see that only 20% of US prisoners are there for any charge related to drugs and most of them have multiple priors. The policies were not invented to "ail the black population" this is patently false. The war on drugs was championed among others by figures like Jesse Jackson and the whole of the Congressional Black Caucus in the 1980s.
> But you are right it’s not directly comparable - the usual American way of dealing with the Uighur ethnic group is killing them from safe distance (see Middle East), not incarceration.
Again you're engaged fully in whataboutism here. I get that you have a giant hate boner for the US, but you're spewing nonsense. I'm not here to justify the war in Iraq, it was wrong. But locking up 3 million people in your own territory for no reason and surveilling a whole population around the clock is pure evil. Its gross that you're trying to defend it.
Not the guy you're replying to, but I take issue with "it's gross that you're trying to defend it".
"Locking up 3 million people" is a false claim. If you look into the source of the claim that "1 million people" are locked up then you'll see that that's based on interviewing around 10 people, and then extrapolating their villages' figures to the whole of Xinjiang. The quality is evidence is so bad that even the Uyghur Tribunal failed to provide any evidence for the "1 million people" figure, but they still concluded "genocide" despite lack of evidence.
This "3 million people" figure that you cite now is absolutely without evidence. It's just the media taking the "1 million" figure and then sensationally inflating it, until finally people like you take "3 million" as a fact.
Calling it "[genocide] denial" (sic) is a way to shut down conversation and to dismiss counter-evidence and criticism out of hand.
Was the poster defending Chinese crimes? I see it entirely differently: he's pointing out double standards which is completely legit, even necessary. Let's say that China and the US are both bad. But only one of them is painted as a genocidal fascist expansionist existential threat. There can be no honest conversation about China until double standards are destroyed.
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You invoke whataboutism, but mentioning the US here is absolutely relevant because US officials have admitted on video that an important reason why they were in Afghanistan was to encourage Uyghur extremism, forcing China to respond with anti-terrorism measures.
Imagine your neighbor funding your enemies to harass you. You take measures against the harassers, but you had to resort to some dirty tricks and had to overrespond to make them stop. Your neighbor then reports you for those dirty tricks and overresponse in which you violated some laws. Yes you were absolutely wrong for violating laws, but you are also right in pointing out that your neighbor instigated the situation. Calling out your neighbor is not whataboutism, it's essential context. I don't think you think will appreciate people who deliberately ignore your neighbor's contribution and only focus on you.
... In these camps, do they pull kids from their parents by the thousands, make them drink water out of the toilet, give them tin foil blankets to sleep under - and then "lose track" of them completely? All contracted out at ridiculous rates to private companies, which can't be inspected even by government officials?
China has prisons (for convicted criminals/terrorists) as well as compulsary rehabilitation and vocational training camps to combat terrorism. Western media puts both of them in the same bucket and calls them "concentration camps". A heavy-handed, quite possibly overload broad, anti-terrorism response where there are two different kinds of facilities is not at all the same as "putting innocent people in concentration camps for no reason" and certainly not "they're only doing it to ethnically cleanse". A heavy-handed anti-terrorism response deserves criticism, but is not at all the same as "genocide". The fact that media does so anyway is disingenuous.
Besides, most of the compulsory rehabilitation/training facilities have already been dismantled a couple of years ago when they concluded that the terrorism threat is gone. See this very biased AP article where they try to make you feel like something sinister is going on, but when you read the content then they essentially admit that many security measures are already gone: https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...
Earlier in this thread it is said that China uniquely deserves punishment for its actions in Xinjiang, implying that India doesn't have any problems with minority group abuse, but you really should read into Kashmir and why nobody makes a fuss about that. Even if China's Xinjiang response deserves legit criticism, the fact that Kashmir is given a free pass means that western governments, media and public don't really care about Xinjiang human rights, but merely use Xinjiang as a club to beat China. Not to mention that e.g. France also has an anti-terrorism response on which the Xinjiang response is partially inspired, but nobody talks about that as being some sort of mortal sin. This sort of double standards is a huge abuse of the concept of "human rights".
Look, I support genuine efforts to help China improve in the area of human rights. But current efforts are not genuine, they're just geopolitical attacks hidden behind the guise of human rights, and the public even can't see through this bullshit even though it's apparent if you research things up close, so I do not support them.
I'm not, but I'm in contact with a Uyhur as well as a non-Uyghur Xinjiang resident, and I've researched this topic for a long time. See also my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34789836
TLDR: heavy-handed anti-terrorism response, even if it deserves criticism, is not at all the same as "millions in concentration camps", "forced labor" or even "genocide". Many allegations you read in the media are grave distortions of reality for the purpose of geopolitical attacks and fostering consent for a war against China.
Modi apologists seem to make similar attacks on the media and the west. They claim that the media is biased and out to get him, any criticism of him is anti-national and so on.
No that isn't what I said at all. I never said that Xinjiang is a "benign" situation, I said that Xinjiang's reality is very different from media reporting. Big difference. It's entirely possible for reality to be not benign, but also very far removed from the hellhole that's painted by media. Reality can be complex.
And no, I'm not claiming that Uyghur women who got sterilized are terrorists. I'm claiming that the entire story of there being widespread, systematic, forced sterilization for the purpose of genociding a people, is a false. The source for the forced sterilization claim is Adrien Zenz, who in his "research paper" said that IUD usage in Xinjing accounted for 80% of the country. But when you go to his cited source for that 80% figure, you see that the source actually said 8%. Then when some people made a fuss about that, he... wait for it... changed the 80% into 8% but did not change the paper's conclusion, and tried covering up the fact that he changed the paper at all! Meanwhile, no media is interested in reporting this.
"Modi apologists" have got absolutely nothing with me, but by citing them you're making the claim that everybody who claims that the media is biased is nuts. Then pray tell, what do you call media who looks the other way while a "researcher" fudges his numbers like that? What part of me pointing out shoddy research is "nationalism"?
I dare you to read Adrien Zenz's paper and tell me that it's reliable.
Where politicians lead, society will follow. If politicians are overtly selfish, it should be no surprise that society begins to shift in that same direction.
If it's ok for them, gimme some of that sugar too!
Having said that, maybe it's only the loud minority amplified by a desperate mainstream media making it appear that way?
Yes, I think it's related to the waining political and economic power of the West and buoyed by Putin, Xi Jinping etc getting away with whatever they want
Interesting choices. How about we talk about other countries that get away with various bits of blatant authoritarianism, sexism and racism each with their own unique take: Australia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Germany, etc.
All the prosperity in the non-liberal World is just a gift from the Western Liberal world. There would be not much prosperity in India or China w/o Western companies outsourcing operations over there. Once a middle class is built things start rolling by themselves but til then let's not kid ourselves that the prosperity in these iliberal countries was home-built.
What liberal East India Company? There were a number of EICs, but all of them I can think of (certainly most especially the British) were mercantilist and parts of mercantilist national policies, not liberal.
The mercantilism of British policy and the British EIC were, actually, a quite important factor in both the US push for independence and its ideological connection with liberalism.
While liberalism might eventually have become a nearly consensus ideology in the West, but it certainly wasn’t in the late 18th Century and it certainly wasn’t the ideology of or behind colonialism.
> It wasn’t the ideology behind, sure, but the end result was the same.
That’s unsupportable with evidence because we don’t have a world to test the effects of liberalism in an environment where it isn’t a reaction against established mercanitilism in a number of empires, one of which alone controls a sizable fraction of the globe, but I’m going to say, no, its not.
(I will admit that one problem with economic liberalism is that it tends to entrench existing inequalities, including those produced by pre-existing mercantilist arrangements, but that’s very different than producing the same results.)
The period it seemed invincible was fairly brief. During the cold war, the West wasn't especially "liberal" in it's interactions with the rest of the world.
Post cold-war there was maybe a few years or less of Fukuyama-esque optimism. The Arab Spring looked positive and ended with most places worse than they started.
So - not sure there was much of a window of invincibility. Unless of course you want to hark back to the Fin de siècle period. Imperialism was in full swing so that's controversial.
I somewhat disagree. To me, it looks like many countries are trying to diverge from the sphere of influence of the US, and US doesn’t want that happening. When the big media portrays every other country as dangerous, authoritarian, etc., it’s always interesting to seek for motivation behind the claims. As a quick example, Brooklyn is much more dangerous than pretty much anywhere in Moscow. I can’t imagine NYTimes or any other large publication say that. I wonder if China is perfectly safe and less “authoritarian” as it’s shown on prime time.
I was curious about that stat on crime rates in Moscow vs Brooklyn but I can’t find any evidence that it is true.
In 2022 there were 138 homicides in Brooklyn which comes out to 4.98 homicides per 100k residents. In comparison in Moscow Oblast there were 6.9 homicides per 100k residents (in 2017, which is the latest year I can find information for this stat).
So at least by homicides, Moscow seems more dangerous.
These aren't actually stats! You can't take a bunch of opinions and put a number on each one and call the result quantitative! Murders per 100k is a statistic. Violent crime rate is a statistic.
Pick a statistic that is a reasonable representation of danger (I think homicide rate is a reasonable one) and show that Moscow is lower on that statistic than Brooklyn.
fair point. Plenty of ways to circumvent this, also since there's is nation sponsored DMCA, there'd need to be clever ways to avoid the detection of video upload itself.
Investigating the tax affairs of the BBC is like probing the sexual history of monks who've taken a vow of celebacy. It only demonstrates the "independance and impartiality" of the Indian Tax authorities.
It's not even the first of such 'raids'. Pretty much any sizable org that dares to question the BJP has been struck with such raids. Apart from the above, Newslaundry[1] comes to mind.
Really is the BBC such an uncorrupt entity? A lot of NGOs in India get foreign funding to convert tribals into christianity. Everyone has an agenda. The former colonialists are not holier than thou.
Gee I wonder if the Indian judicial system can be trusted when the government is sending the tax department (and other government bodies) after BBC, Oxfam and Amnesty International
Exactly, didn't hear about the document but henchmen of mr Modi sure know how to do a good free global PR to some hard truths being told.
I love when famous people like politicians reveal their core personality under some stressful situation, that is otherwise well hidden underneath thick layers of PR and masks of politeness. Its always, almost without an exception, a very sad view.
Tells you something about what kind of people reach top politics, manage to not only survive among similar folks but thrive. And then people wonder why less and less people vote globally, choosing between 2 rotten apples and/or potato that has seen the winter of 1912 ain't motivating enough to waste much energy.
And those in the powerful positions feel that the solution is to be harder on the populace, censor them, be less transparent and blame them rather than, I don't know, being more honest and transparent themselves.
It's astounding how consistently they follow the same process. Ego is a powerful thing.
You know kids, remember to keep your panic trigger/duress on your phone to get basic security.
Feels weird but my last comment was about about things including a few times like this one. A few years ago(2019), WhatsApp and VPNs were outlawed and was a crime so I had my VPN toolkit behind panic apps so when I was searched a few times,once walking down a busy street and second while driving a car (was made to get out), duress password saved me.
I think it's also fair to discuss how some of the people who support the BJP and are part of the RSS export their fascist beliefs to places like UK, Canada, USA. These people are actively disturbing decades-long inter-community peace. What I don't understand is if Modi is in power and RSS is given carte blanche, why do these people move abroad and keep hold of their regressive views and hate.
When in his rule they all but acquit two of the most gruesome perpetrators of the riots on a technicality, you can ask that question I suppose. I won't: https://archive.is/Rs5rr / https://archive.is/QqqqK
When you make your comment with "their shitty book," I can immediately say you are an uninformed and extremely prejudiced right-wing person. Have you taken a look into how some hindu preachers twist Hindu books? Or have you known of the dark stuff the Hindu religion has? Heck, some places still treat some people as untouchables and dont even allow them around temples.
Again, if you are an atheist and say all religious books are shitty I would've even understood that.
No, its not their books it always politicians like Modi who base their entire charishma on stifling some community are the problem. Like how VHP and RSS goons tormet lovers on valentines Day or How without any basis in science, some religious fanatics push cows as ultimate savior. Billions of muslims are co-existing worldwide, and no one has problems with them. And if you use extremist action as a metric to judge the entire population, I would say you are bigoted.
For people who don't know what this is about, it's about the 2002 riots who some say border on genocide and Modi withhelding the police to stop the riots.
"It is estimated that at least 250 girls and women were gang raped and then burned to death. Children were force fed petrol and then set on fire, pregnant women were gutted and then had their unborn child's body shown to them. In the Naroda Patiya mass grave of ninety-six bodies, forty-six were women."
While this is a major misstep in my opinion, I think there is a major imbalance in reputable media in the world. We need more non-Western sources of media that are respected. People are realizing, as in this case, that Western countries have skeletons in their cupboards too, and will stop respecting Western media establishments. Imagine China sanctioning the US for treating black people with impunity.
This is an awful take. Western media covers scandals in western governments regularly. You could also always check out Al Jazeera, if you know what their slant is on middle east coverage.
Also comparing anything going on in the US for the last 60 years to the genocide happening in Xinjiang is ridiculous on its face.
>Also comparing anything going on in the US for the last 60 years to the genocide happening in Xinjiang is ridiculous on its face.
Indeed - the fact that black people are being killed and incarcerated for their skin colour in USA is well documented, whereas the “genocide” is mostly just a propaganda tool.
> Indeed - the fact that black people are being killed and incarcerated for their skin colour in USA is well documented
This is a total misreading of the situation. I'm not here to argue that the US has a perfect human rights record, but its an active topic of debate and reform are happening. Moreover, the idea that people are being incarcerated solely for their skin color is not "well documented" and strains credulity as a claim. If the claim is sentencing disparity, then sure there is an issue there, but your claim is wholly false.
Xinjiang is a completely different situation. We know factually that millions of people have gone through reeducation camps, the CCP is trying to eradicate the Uyghur language and force Han culture on the Uyghurs. You can see these modern day concentration camps from satellite imagery. There are well documented cases of forced sterilization. There is no legal process for appeals if a Uyghur is arrested, and we know many of the arrests are for religious practice. The world saw what the CCP did in Tibet, and we're seeing an even more grotesque version in Xinjiang.
The highest estimates, by Zenz, only go up to a million. And it’s not factual at all.
>eradicate the Uighur language
I suppose that’s why you have official Chinese banknotes with Uighur text on them, and that’s why Uighur kids are being taught their native language in schools.
>well documented cases of forced sterilization
We have the same in USA.
Generally speaking: you’re repeating rhetorics (propaganda) instead of focusing on verifiable information.
What reforms are happening in China> They're still pouring people into camps.
> The highest estimates, by Zenz, only go up to a million. And it’s not factual at all.
The zenz estimate for 2020 is 1.8 million, but estimates are as high as 3 million over several years plus half a million in special boarding schools. A total of 3 million Uighurs is fully 1/3 of their population in Xianjang.
> We have the same in USA.
No, there it literally no forced sterilization in US prisons. You're making that up.
Everyone but China agrees that they are committing genocide, this isn't propaganda.
> I suppose that’s why you have official Chinese banknotes with Uighur text on them, and that’s why Uighur kids are being taught their native language in schools.
There seems to be a lot of evidence to the contrary[1][2]
Not surprising if you know about the actions of this government and the spread of fascist ideology that seeks to recast the history of the Indian subcontinent to favor “Hindu Nationalism”. It is important to keep remembering these crimes, raising awareness, even in the absence of direct action. Many people in this thread sowing doubts about the regime’s hostility towards Muslim minorities and other underprivileged groups in the country.
But evidence beats all the gaslighting talk peddled by those who want to cover up the atrocities.
Some of humanities best and brightest are living in India right now. It’s sad that these people aren’t the ones running the country. The country deserves better than the old man who can’t stand before his own press, much of which is obligated to take his side. I hope that India can find somebody young and engaged to run the country when Modi retires. And not Yogi. That’d be much worse.
The documentary ban seems to be symbolic. Students from number of top universities have publicly shown them on their campuses without any state repercussion.
Having said that the reaction from govt was indeed exaggerated.
This reminds me of actions of Putin's mafia regime in Russia. Has India which occasionally prides itself in being a "democracy with the rule of law" fallen to this level! That the government there can do things like this (which also reminds me of Watergate) without serious consequences is not a good thing and a good showing for India.
Imagine there’s an FBI raid on, or congressional investigation into, whatever American news outlet attacks your political beliefs, and I think you’ll find yourself believing not that the government must be scared of the truth, but that these guys didn’t deserve their tongues.
It’s easy to stand outside a regime’s borders and say it can’t change your reality, and comforting to believe that the truth always comes out in the end, but I think reality is more harsh: “History is written by the winners.”
Barbra Streisand faces an unclear tradeoff between publicizing the pictures of her home that already exist and encouraging the future taking of unwanted photographs of her home.
Modi has much, much, much more reason to fear that tolerating one scandal-raising documentary will lead to further scandal-raising documentaries, and much less reason to believe that ignoring the problem he already has will make it go away.
I don't think the Streisand Effect is a good analogy to try to draw here.
The Modi document didn't touch on India's other skeletons, which is even more repulsive. I am not talking about the usual suspects such as the Caste system and oppression of the Dalits and Adivasis.
I Germany normal people get raided by a SWAT Team if they write "[Politician X] is a penis" on Twitter[1] and this was just some 3 grade local politician.
So I guess this amount of corruption between politicians and police is available to all politicians in germany not just PMs which seems much more fair.
It wasn't a SWAT team. The politician is minister of interior of the state and thus head of the police. He formally filed a police report about an insult, that is indeed available to anybody. Still a local scandal, his name is now associated with being a penis. IMHO unrelated to the BBC documentary (freedom of press vs freedom to insult somebody on social media).
> Germany normal people get raided by a SWAT Team if they write "[Politician X] is a penis" on Twitter
Did the BBC publish anything like that?
Do the German police raid you if you write “[Politician X] is corrupt”?
Don’t get me wrong I prefer to live in a world where anyone can debase themselves by throwing insults at anyone, but I don’t see the paralels with the BBC raid.
Do you know the answers to these two questions, or do you think that stating them without answers will make readers assume the answers are both obvious and supportive of the case you're making?
> or do you think that stating them without answers will make readers assume the answers are both obvious and supportive of the case you're making?
Yes? There is no allegation that the BBC called anyone a penis. I don’t have proof that i can cite because how do you proove a negative?
I can prove that there are media who called a German politican corrupt.[1] I cannot prove that they haven’t raided them, all I can say is that if they did we haven’t heard about it.
It wasn't a SWAT team but a regulary search and a court decided later the search was illegal. Let's see if an Indian court decides if this is illegal.
If you're concerned about Germany, it ranks #13 in World Press Freedom Index (it slipped mostly because of attacks against the press by left and right extremists during COVID) and India ranks #150 (out of 180).
There's, like, far more to the story. I suggest you watch the documentary, even if just to know which Modi actions and quotes you need to focus on obfuscating and distracting from.
For context, BBC is a propaganda/news platform operated by the same state that colonized India, looted an estimated $45T in wealth, committed genocide on its people, etc. BBC also has a consistent track record of blatant anti-India and anti-Hindu bais.
Agreed the BBC is a propaganda machine of Britain similar to global times of China. Now that India's general elections are coming, they will try their best to slander Modi and the current government. India is right to be cautious of foreign media agencies.
Why you say that and how can you? There are a lot of people in and outside India - that hate him with passion.
> Modi has one of the highest approval ratings
He has a dedicated machinery and apparatus to paint him clean and shiny. Look how he screwed up during Covid and post clean-up act.
These tax raids is the "only" tool up his sleeve that he has against his opposers. Would he raid Adani? Nope. Otherwise India and Indians - would not be this ashamed and looted today.
He's nothing but a low cost and offshore version of Trump; can't think straight. Listen to any of his speeches; it's all mumbo-jumbo. I can't get my head around it: how he continues to make fool of over a billion people on a daily basis? The greatest conman of all time. When the current generation of teenagers would look back after a decade - they are going to surely say - "Wtf was that era! <facepalm>".
There is a sampling bias at play right here in HN with the Modi-bashing comments. Indians, and India, is doing great overall. Modi's leadership has played a big role in this.
Indians are (generally) emotionally people, and by no means is it an authoritarian state. In fact, we need wise leaders with vision to manage this population.
The linked article would indicate otherwise? I think one's standards of democracy have to be fairly low, to not see that Indian state is at least proto-authoritarian.
From what I can see, India is doing pretty badly in most indicators, be it democracy indices, HDI, employment (The usual response to this from Right wing is that these are "western indicators", and the government doesn't have any data).
I don't think your nationality matters to witness the sequence of events and come to an objective conclusion.
I saw the video the day it came out. Its an OK video, but I question the timing in wake of the upcoming elections and Modi leading the G20.
Typically I don't call out "ejection e manipulation" or "external interference", but I'm increasingly starting to suspect the intentions of the BBC (and other media)
The metrics you mention are not poor, but our data is poor. Furthermore, numerous research shows HDI and GDP are flawed (but legacy) metrics - this is exasperated by the poor quality data available in a chaotic country like India
"I question the timing in wake of the upcoming elections and Modi leading the G20"
So, at which phase of various intersecting elections and global obligations does the sweet criticism window open? (Note that the elections are upcoming in 15 months.)
IMHO a PM of the largest nation on Earth should be able to weather criticism night and day. People responsible for 1,5 billion souls cannot claim sanctuary against the press. And if Modi's domestic results are as impressive as other HNers claim, there will be no risk of him losing an election from a BBC documentary that the vast majority of the voting population won't ever see.
The only problem I have with this is that free speech is being limited. I don't believe the documentary nor do I belive their government. What if both sides are promoting some sort of a propaganda?
I like to think the government is just incompetently responding to a useless propaganda piece. But the so called documentary could very well be a well timed attack to benefit the more palatable opposition to the current government that has embarassed the West in not immediately bending over backwards in Ukraine war. Or this ridiculous response from the government could actually be a way to bring the Hindu far-right back into the fold since it is not happy with the current government. (The "fascist government" thing really is propaganda btw.)
Readers should note that right now there is a huge wave of cultural-political idea exchange happening in India. Almost all institutions part of this cultural wave and defaming a central figure in that narrative can be bad. It is quite expected something like this as that Documentary came out of nowhere.
Modi should have funded an Indian documentary on the financing of Rishi Sunak and his wife as a way of silencing criticism -- Tories would pull BBC in to line pretty quick then. Seems those with dirty hands are quick to point the finger.
A) Sunak can't just "pull the BBC into line" as it's independent of the government.
B) The BBC regularly criticises the UK government and even the Royal family. If it could get a scoop on some new corruption it would air it as soon as it could.
C) We also have people like Led By Donkeys here who air as much dirt as they can on the government. (We are not short of scandals right now, although few involve genocide).
I don't think it's true though, as evidenced by the Tory media minister Nadine Dorries doing everything she could to de-fund the BBC for criticism of the Johnson government.
She wouldn't do that if the BBC was a Tory mouthpiece under her control.
Just saying that "a growing number of Britons are coming to realise" something doesn't really tell you much. That could be 3 people yesterday and 4 people today.
The BBC criticises both sides of the political fence and both groups complain about it being biased against them.
If it was truly biased to the Tories, people like Frankie Boyle wouldn't get BBC shows and Ian Blackford wouldn't regularly be quoted on the Today Programme or PMQs.
Bias is not binary. The establishment bias of the BBC (which I think does exist) doesn't carry over to coverage of a pogrom in Gujarat, because there's no establishment skin in that particular game.
I consider myself on the left and have spent a bit of time in the UK (Usually vote Labour/Green in Australia). Labour does seem fairly inept in the UK, not certain I could vote for them if given the right.
Certainly Corbyn running around suggesting not arming Ukraine did nothing for my opinion on that front[0].
I agree though, that the BBC and the ABC in Australia both lean left as a rule, though still do their job of holding both to account.
BBC Employees tend to be younger than average (as there are very few over 65s at the BBC), tend to be more educated that average (most jobs will require a college level degree), tend to be more metropolitan (most staff are employed major cities)
Of course there are very few tory or leave voters amongst BBC Staff, probably between 1-in-4 and 1-in-3 if they are demographically representative [1]
The question is how those views come across in the reporting, and generally it seems fairly balanced to me (I usually vote Lib Dem fwiw)
Big difference in that Sunak & his wife's wealth is regularly mentioned in the UK, including on BBC programs, and media daily publishes criticism of Sunak and the government he leads, whereas criticism of Modi is suppressed or drowned out by supporters.
Huh? The "other people" are "suppressed" by "drowning out" because it is a democracy and they are not in power? Because most people support a government doesn't mean the "other people" are being drowned out by suppression?
What a ridiculous and dishonest line of argument you have presented here. Just because you are not a supporter of a democratically elected government doesn't mean you are being drowned out and suppressed. If that were the case you would have disappeared like they do in China. What a hyperbole.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday hailed Infosys and Sudha Murthy, chairperson of Infosys Foundation, as he expressed gratitude to them for their service to humanity."
I think you did not clarify the connection sufficiently. Sudha Murthy is the mother-in-law of Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister. She is quite an accomplished engineer, and also the wife of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy.
Not sure why the offices have been raided, corruption in Indian offices are not new, just because they are the BBC does not make its staff immune.
The show itself adds nothing new in real evidence that can be taken to court, however there is a serious risk it create communal disharmony. Muslims and Hindus have found peace since the event, Indians see it as stirring the pot just before the 2024 elections.
No just like the anti hindu riots in Bengal. But thats not the point, we are talking about Gujarati Hindus and Muslims, completely different state, language and people.
An equivalent list could be made, just with the numbers of 400k Hindus that were exodus in Kashmir. Thats not the point, the point is the view from India is a British outlet like the BBC is meddling with Indian upcoming elections. There is already decades of suspicion around what the British did to create divides between Hindus and Muslims with partition, so this is treated with high suspicion.
1. "Muslims and Hindus have found peace since the event"
2. "An equivalent list could be made, just with the numbers of 400k Hindus that were exodus in Kashmir."
Thanks for proving my point.
[Edit]
"Muslims and Hindus have found peace since the event"
"In November 2022, at an election rally in Khambhat [Gujarat], Indian Home Minister Amit Shah boasted of demolitions undertaken by the BJP in Muslim areas. By emphasizing the issue of clearing out alleged `fake mazars (Islamic shrines or mausoleums)`
[...]
Salma Ben, 50, a resident of Akbarpur, has suffered for simply being a Muslim in Khambhat more times than she can remember. In February 2019, she recalled for The Diplomat, her house was burned down by a violent mob chanting Hindu mantras."
they were rohingya areas, yes muslim, but a immigrant community that had illegaly created settlements, nothing to do with them following islam, does not make one above law and order
Elections are in 15 months, so the election cycle is in three quarters right now. That is not "just before elections", much like 9 pm is not "just before midnight".
If you're interested, you can get it (legally) in the UK here: [1] and searching for "India: the Modi question" will most likely provide it elsewhere.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0dkb144/india-the-mod...