The Big Con by Pankaj Mishra 6th April 2023 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n08/pankaj-mishra/the-big-con Extracts The Economist estimates that the share of billionaire wealth in India derived from cronyism has risen from 29 per cent to 43 per cent in six years. ... The new Indian plutocracy owes its swift ascent to Modi, and he has audaciously clarified the quid pro quo. Under the ‘electoral bond’ scheme he introduced in 2017, any business or special interest group can give unlimited sums of money to his party while keeping the transaction hidden from public scrutiny....
Modi also ensures his hegemony by forging a public sphere in which sycophancy is rewarded and dissent harshly punished. ... Human Rights Watch has detailed a broad onslaught on democratic rights: ‘the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government used abusive and discriminatory policies to repress Muslims and other minorities’ and ‘arrested activists, journalists and other critics of the government on politically motivated criminal charges, including of terrorism’...
The defamation campaign against George Soros and the conspiracy-fuelled crackdown on India’s leading think tank, the Centre for Policy Research, are only the latest in a series of measures – bribing opposition politicians to defect; unleashing mobs to attack opponents on the streets and on social media; subverting the judiciary and the education system; denouncing same-sex marriage as a cause of ‘complete havoc’ – that are making India safe for oligarchy and unsafe for nearly everyone else...
The Western rush to embrace Modi’s India isn’t only fuelled by the profit motive. Increasingly, the mollycoddling of yet another exponent of crony capitalism and ethnic-racial supremacism is driven by the imperatives of the new Cold War: the Biden administration’s resolve, deepened by the war in Ukraine, somehow to contain China. Adani’s lavish purchase of the port of Haifa came after the US put pressure on Israel to disallow his Chinese rival, the Shanghai International Port Group, from managing a port frequented by the Sixth Fleet of the US Navy...
Rupert Murdoch anointed Modi as India’s ‘best leader with best.. policies since independence’. Addressing packed stadiums in India and the US with his ‘loyal friend’, Trump confirmed Modi’s place in a global far-right constellation. But it was liberal and centrist politicians, businessmen, economists and journalists in the West who built regimes of casual untruth about Modi and his India...
Like the Russian elite, Modi and Adani have succeeded in bending, repeatedly, the moral arc of politics and journalism towards greed. As New Delhi prepares to host a G20 summit in September, Western officials and opinion-makers more keenly echo Modi’s claims for India’s democracy with words such as ‘largest’ and ‘vibrant’. Both adjectives were deployed last month by a State Department spokesperson as he tried to evade comment on Modi’s crackdown on the BBC.
Fawning on a Hindu supremacist, as his supporters routinely clamour for a genocide of Muslims in India, also entrenches lies and propaganda deeper in the public life of Western societies. Adani’s business empire may or may not turn out to be the largest con in corporate history. But far greater dangers to civic morality, let alone democracy and global peace, are posed by those peddling the gigantic hoax of Modi’s India – the first big fraud of the new Cold War.