- India: Millions Vote Amid Heatwave
- An Inflection Point for Iran?
- Polarization of US-Israel Relations
- Taiwan as West Berlin
- American Dictatorship?
By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
India
Millions have voted amid heatwave alert in Phase 6 of India’s staggered election.
This is the penultimate round of a grueling national election, with a combined opposition trying to stop Prime Minister Narendra Modi from winning a rare third consecutive term.
Nearly 970 million voters – more than 10 % percent of the world’s population – were eligible to elect 543 members to the lower house – the Lok Sabha – for five years.
Last Saturday’s voting in 58 constituencies, including seven in New Delhi, completed polling for 89.5 % percent of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha.
The votes for the remaining 57 seats on June 1 will wrap up the six-week election. In this last 7th phase, 8 states and union territories will go the polls.
Opposition doing better than expected
This election is considered one of the most consequential in India’s history and will test Modi’s political dominance.
If Modi wins, he will be only the second Indian leader to retain power for a third term, after Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first charismatic prime minister.
Modi ran his campaign like a presidential race, a referendum on his 10 years of rule. He claimed to help the poorest with charity, free healthcare, providing toilets in their homes, and helping women get free or cheap cooking gas cylinders (Al Jazeera, May 26).
But Modi changed direction after a poor turnout of voters in the first round of the election and began stirring Hindu nationalism by accusing the Congress party of pandering to minority Muslims for votes.
Hindus account for 80 percent, and Muslims nearly 14 percent of India’s over 1.4 billion people.
“When the polls began it felt like a one-horse race, with Modi leading from the front. But now we are seeing some kind of shift,” political analyst Rasheed Kidwai said.
“The opposition is doing better than expected and it appears that Modi’s party is rattled. That’s the reason you see Modi ramping up anti-Muslim rhetoric to polarize voters.”
Vote against dictatorship
Analyst Kidwai said the opposition has challenged Modi by concentrating its campaign narrative on social justice and rising unemployment, making the contest closer than expected.
Among the prominent opponents is Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, 55, leader of the opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
“Please vote, use your right to vote, and vote against dictatorship,” Kejriwal said after casting his vote.
Kejriwal was arrested in March in a long-running corruption case and jailed for several weeks before the Supreme Court granted him bail earlier this month and he could return to the campaign trail.
Investigators “had no proof and yet they jailed him”, one opposition voter told the AFP news agency. “This is a blunt show of power.”
Kejriwal’s jailing actually benefitted the AAP, Neelanjan Sircar of the Centre for Policy Research, told Al Jazeera.
“When people saw Arvind Kejriwal being arrested, they believed the BJP was actually jailing someone who is legitimate opposition,” Sircar said. “This jailing of Kejriwal convinced the BJP how popular he actually is.”
Modi’s political opponents and international rights campaigners have long sounded the alarm on India’s shrinking democratic space.
US think tank Freedom House said this year that the BJP had “increasingly used government institutions to target political opponents”.
Iran
Iran may not change quickly as a result of President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in the country’s northwest near the Azerbaijan border, but in a New York Times guest opinion essay, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh note that a new generation of even harder hardliners could rise to fill the void.
As analysts have pointed out following the crash, Iran’s president is far less powerful than its supreme leader.
But Raisi was a contender to succeed current, ailing 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and in that regard the death prefigures a different power struggle.
With the other identifiable contender being Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies noted that Iran’s conservatives will need to find a new candidate to take Raisi’s place representing their camp.
In a recent Foreign Policy essay, Sina Toosi of the Center for International Policy noted that the new generation of Iranian hardliners is even more conservative and hardline.
In their New York Times essay, Gerecht and Takeyh pick up the thread, writing: “The new political landscape is largely dominated by younger men who openly lament the older generation’s corruption, lack of revolutionary zeal and unwillingness to take on more forcefully a fading American imperium. And because Mr. Khamenei must rely on this new group to sustain the revolution’s values and keep the theocracy intact, he will have to take their sensibilities into account as he considers both the next president and who should succeed him as supreme leader…All this augurs poorly for the Iranian people and the international community alike.”
At France 24, Leela Jacinto writes that the particularly hardline Paydari Front faction could fill the vacuum left by Raisi’s death.
At the same time, Iran suffers from a shallow bench of potential leaders generally. Ben Dubow writes for the Center for European Policy Analysis.
In a conversation with Foreign Policy Editor-in-Chief Ravi Agrawal and the New Yorker’s Robin Wright, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace makes a stark prediction: that in the next decade, Iran is most likely to either evolve into something more like a military dictatorship or see its regime collapse.
US-Israel Relations
Formerly marked by bipartisan consensus, the US-Israel relationship has become polarirized along partisan lines, political analyst, pollster and Haaretz columnist Dahlia Scheindlin writes in a Foreign Affairs essay.
Israelis seem to prefer former President Donald Trump over current President Joe Biden, Scheindlin writes, while in the US support for Israel’s war against Hamas – and “unrestrained backing for right-wing Israeli governments” – has become a “political litmus test.”
“The growing friction between Israelis and Americans didn’t emerge with the current war in Gaza,” Scheindlin writes. “Longer-term social and political trajectories in both countries suggest that the famous ‘shared values’ that have for decades underpinned the relationship were already under pressure. But the war has brought this tension, and the partisan politics driving it, into full view. This does not mean that the countries are on a collision course, but it raises important questions about the nature of alliance for the years to come.”
Taiwan
How dangerous are tensions across the Taiwan Strait?
The Economist called it “the most dangerous place on earth,” as mainland China’s territorial claims on Taiwan, Taiwan’s resistance to those claims, and an ambiguous US alliance with the latter could collide to produce a superpower war (Fareed Zakaria, Global Briefing, May 15).
At the Brookings Institution, Ryan Hass argues things will likely stay calm (if precarious) for a few years at least. The centre-left, pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) retained Taiwan’s presidency in this year’s election – to Beijing’s chagrin — but Hass writes that political pressures (and a legislative minority) will keep incoming DPP president William Lai from making any drastic moves.
In a Foreign Affairs essay, Dmitri Alperovitch casts Taiwan as a modern-day West Berlin.
“The United States competition with China is a sprawling, multifaceted struggle that bears remarkable similarities to the Cold War,” Alperovitch writes:
“It is a race for diplomatic and economic influence, a conventional and nuclear arms race, a space race, a scramble to establish military bases in Africa and East Asia, an ideological struggle between authoritarianism and democracy, a tech and economic war, and an espionage war…
“Taiwan, like West Berlin, is small, but it is the only place in the world where the competition risks sparking a hot conflict and, indeed, the only place where both countries are actively preparing for war.”
Practically, Alperovitch offers a lesson: Taiwan is more important to Beijing than West Berlin was to Moscow, but Washington’s resolute defence of West Berlin maintained a status quo that eventually saw the USSR back off and seek détente.
Today, Alperovitch writes, the US should similarly highlight the preferability of an uneasy status quo to a calamitous war – and bide its time while China’s aging population weakens its economy and thus its hostility.
US on Path to Authoritarianism
Could the US become a dictatorship? Some renowned pundits say yes – and imminently!
In a Washington Post essay last November, Robert Kagan argued that a dictatorship under former (and perhaps future) President Donald Trump is looking increasingly “inevitable”, as checks and balances may struggle to constrain him if he wins the White House again.
American democracy has already approached a breaking point:
When Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, it was a collection of career government officials – Justice Department staff who threatened to resign and state election workers, most notably – who ensured the vote result mattered.
But the “price of supporting Trump has risen higher and higher at each turn, Kagan wrote then.
In a CNN/Global Public Square segment Kagan elaborated, arguing Trump may not have any calculated plan to become dictator – but would be one simply because he “wants what he wants when he wants it and how he wants to get it.”
A recent issue of The Economist takes up the same topic, producing a similar answer. For one thing the highly respected magazine writes, consensus on the democratic transition of power has eroded: “Each candidate for president this year has accused the other of trying to destroy American democracy…
“But Biden is an institutionalist, with reverence for the old ways of politics.
“But Trump who has mused about being a dictator, if only for a day, is different. His refusal to concede in 2020 led to the attack on the Capitol [housing the Senate and the House of Representatives] on January 6th 2021, and it prompted a record number of lawmakers to oppose certifying the vote. Now Mr Trump’s suggestion that he may reject another loss has raised the risk that congressional Republicans try to block certification.
“For their part, some Democratic representatives have suggested they might not certify a Trump victory, believing that he disqualified himself from the presidency by taking part in an insurrection. Thus can one president’s disregard for a norm erode the pillars of the system as a whole.
Elsewhere, the magazine explores in greater detail the various checks and balances that could fail (Zakaria).
The Economist notes, disturbingly: “The Brennan Center, a think-tank at New York University, has identified 135 statutory powers that accrue to the president when he declares a national emergency. These include things like the power to freeze Americans’ bank accounts or, under a law giving the president emergency powers over communications that was passed in 1942, to shut down the internet (which thankfully would be pretty hard in practice).
“In theory, Congress is meant to review and potentially revoke the president’s declarations after six or 12 months.
“In practice, it is casual about curtailing them. Over 40 emergencies are currently in force. Some of them are more than a decade old.”
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
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