By Rishaan Chowdhury
It was a cloudy day in London when Indian batsmen Sunil Gavaskar lined up to bat. The date was June 9, 1983 and India had miraculously qualified for the Cricket World Cup. Gavaskar didn’t know whether India would win the match, and he definitely didn’t believe India had a chance to make it to the knockout stage, considering professional cricket was very new in India, a remnant of the British Raj. Back home the former colony was a dense country of 745 million, plagued by poverty and ethnic violence. India’s qualification was a miracle in itself, however there was little faith in the team’s success. Such little faith that the Cricket Board didn’t even give the Indian team passes into Lord’s Stadium where the final match would be played. Little did the world know that India would not only qualify for the knockout stage but would go on to win the entire tournament in one of the biggest upsets in cricket history.
Forty years later the Cricket World Cup was held solely in India, a world away from that day in London. India’s economy is more than ten times bigger than what it was in 1983 and its national cricket league is the second richest sports league in the world. Meanwhile India’s military has grown significantly, being the third largest military in the world and the fifth strongest. India’s navy has one of the largest numbers of aircraft carriers in the world, second only to the United States. Meanwhile India has spent hundreds of billions of dollars towards improving infrastructure with the two largest aircraft orders in the history of commercial aviation coming from India.
A lot of this rapid growth and development is owed to India’s longstanding Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have been in power since 2014 and have overseen tremendous growth in India, from an economic and militaristic standpoint. Prime Minister Modi has reversed the longstanding socialist position of the Indian government, growing the private sector into the corporate powerhouse it is today. The Pew Research Center writes that eight in ten Indians have a favorable view of Mr. Modi. He has boosted the domestic state of India while astutely steering India towards a position of power in the polarizing landscape of international diplomacy. Prime Minister Modi has figured out how to use America’s need for a counter influence to China in the region while maintaining close ties with its historical ally, Russia. Militaristically, Modi has grown India’s military into a formidable force capable of taking on its regional adversaries. Prime Minister Modi has become the face of modernizing India after decades of stagnation following independence in 1947. In the last few years of leadership by the longstanding Congress party – before Narendra Modi’s election – India’s GDP growth had steadily declined, a descent reversed by the Modi government. According to Dr. Purna Samanta, a retired professor of economics at the University of Nairobi, “there was no India before Modi.”
India’s confidence and diplomatic power has also grown. Earlier this year Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a public statement alleging that Indian government officials had killed Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Vancouver. Nijjar was a member of the Khalistan separatist movement in India, which was largely crushed by force in the 1990’s. Following the accusations a massive diplomatic feud ensued, resulting in numerous diplomats’ expulsion from the respective countries and the denial of Indian visas to many Canadian citizens. But the most striking corollary of this incident was the lack of support Canada received from its traditional Western allies. Despite Canada’s attempts to persuade its allies to condemn India’s action, most carefully avoided an outright condemnation of India. Modi has understood how to capitalize on the Western world’s apprehension regarding China’s emergence as a superpower. The West needs India to fight against China and India needs the West as an ally for its economic growth. However, this rosy picture has a dark underbelly – one that is less talked about. Against the backdrop of a growing economy, Modi’s nationalist leadership has created an environment of religious and social intolerance that raises important questions of the tradeoffs to such economic success.
Narendra Modi is the only person to ever be denied entry to the United States because of a little-known law that prohibits applicants who have carried out “particularly severe violations of religious freedom” from receiving a visa to the U.S. He was on a U.S. blacklist until 2014, when he won the office of Prime Minister. Since his election he has slowly limited the freedoms Indians have. Earlier this year opposition party leader Rahul Gandhi was imprisoned for defamation, after making harsh remarks about Prime Minister Modi. Since 2017 India has dropped eleven points on the Freedom House Index, descending from Free to Partly Free. Additionally, the pride of India’s democracy, its secularity, has been slowly chipped away by Modi and his BJP party. Under Modi’s rule, Muslims have been persecuted on an alarmingly growing scale. In July, a police officer on a long-distance train in India killed his superior officer before targeting Muslim passengers on the moving express train, killing four innocent people. This horrific murder is just one instance of the growing Islamophobia in India. September brought a report revealing that there had been over 255 instances of hate speech against Islam and Muslims in India, averaging more than one speech a day. In 2019, a new citizenship law was passed, making an expedited pathway for non-Muslims to receive Indian citizenship. Specifically targeting India’s neglected northeast and northwest regions, if somebody is found to be lacking citizenship papers – which many people in these regions lack – they will be decreed illegal if they are Muslim but will be given citizenship opportunities if they are Hindu, uprooting families that have lived in these places for generations. A lot of this hate has been fueled by the Hindu nationalism Modi and his BJP have fostered since their inception. Modi has tapped into a nationalist sentiment that has been dormant in India for decades. This Hindu nationalism is what has allowed him to sideline the opposition, eroding India’s democracy and seed the beginnings of a dictatorship. Indians abroad and at home believe in the growth Modi has propelled, and there is irrefutable evidence showing how India has greatly benefited from his leadership. But his power is fueled by nationalism, and throughout history nationalism has been responsible for the demise of democracy, freedom, and the nations themselves, whether it be Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
In 1983 when Sunil Gavaskar lined up to bat, it was the opening sequence of a new beginning for India. Forty years later, as Indian cricket captain Rohit Sharma lined up to bat at the World Cup in September, it’s also a new beginning for India. Still one must ask themselves whether the road that India is turning towards is one that has already been trodden by nationalist leaders throughout history; and what the consequences were for the citizens of those countries who implicitly agreed to the contract of social polarization in exchange for economic success.