India PM uses tactics to subdue opponents
NEW DELHI, April 15, (AP): Indian Prime Minister
and his government are increasingly wielding strong-arm tactics to subdue political opponents and critics of the ruling Hindu-nationalist party ahead of the nationwide elections that begin this week.
A decade into power, and on the cusp of securing five more years, the Modi government is reversing India’s decadeslong commitment to multiparty democracy and secularism.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has brought corruption charges against many officials from its main rival, the Congress Party, but few convictions. Dozens of politicians from other opposition parties are under investigation or in jail. And just last month, Modi’s government froze the Congress party’s bank accounts for what it said was non-payment of taxes.
The Modi administration says the country’s investigating agencies are independent and that its democratic institutions are robust, pointing to high voter turnout in recent elections that have delivered Modi’s party a clear mandate.
Yet civil liberties are under attack. Peaceful protests have been crushed with force. A once free and diverse press is threatened. Violence is on the rise against the Muslim minority. And the country’s judiciary increasingly aligns with the executive branch.
Narendra Modi Stake
To better understand how Modi is reshaping India and what is at stake in an election that begins Friday and runs through June 1, The Associated Press spoke with a lawyer, a journalist, and an opposition politician.
Mihir Desai has fought for the civil liberties and human rights of India’s most disadvantaged communities, such as the poor and Muslims, for nearly four decades.
The 65-year-old lawyer from India’s financial capital Mumbai is now working on one of his - and the country’s - most high-profile cases: defending a dozen political activists, journalists and lawyers jailed in 2018 on accusations of plotting to overthrow the Modi government. The accusations, he says, are baseless just one of the government’s all-too-frequent and audacious efforts to silence critics.
One of the defendants in the case, a Jesuit priest and longtime civil rights activist, died at age 84 after about nine months in custody. The other defendants remain in jail, charged under anti-terror laws that rarely result in convictions.
“First authorities came up with a theory that they planned to kill Modi. Now they are being accused of being terrorist sympathizers,” he said.
Hacked
According to digital forensics experts at US-based Arsenal Consulting, the Indian government hacked into the computers of some of the accused and planted files that were later used as evidence against them.
To Desai, this is proof that the Modi government has “weaponized” the country’s once-independent investigative agencies.
He sees threats to Indian democracy all around him. Last year, the government removed the country’s chief justice as one of three people who appoint commissioners overseeing elections; Modi and the opposition leader in parliament are the others. Now, one of Modi’s cabinet ministers has a vote in the process, giving the ruling party a 2-1 majority.
“It’s a death knell to free and fair elections,” Desai said.
Waheed-Ur-Rehman Para, 35, was long seen as an ally in the Indian government’s interests in Kashmir. He worked with young people in the majority-Muslim, semi-autonomous region and preached to them about the benefits of embracing India and its democratic institutions - versus seeking independence, or a merger with Pakistan.
❑ ❑ ❑ Floods kill 33 in Afghanistan:
Heavy flooding from seasonal rains in Afghanistan has killed at least 33 people and injured 27 others in three days, a Taleban spokesman said Sunday.
Abdullah Janan Saiq, the Taliban’s spokesman for the State Ministry for Natural Disaster Management, said Sunday that flash floods hit the capital, Kabul, and several provinces.
He added more than 600 houses were either damaged or destroyed while around 200 livestock died.
The flooding also damaged around 800 hectares of agricultural land, and more than 85 kilometers (53 miles) of roads, Saiq said.
Western Farah, Herat, southern Zabul and Kandahar are among the provinces that suffered the most damage, he added.
❑ ❑ ❑ Lightning, rains kill 36 in Pakistan:
Lightning and heavy rains have killed at least 36 people, mostly farmers, across Pakistan in the past three days, officials said Monday, as authorities in the country’s southwest declared a state of emergency.
Most of the deaths occurred when lightning struck farmers harvesting wheat and rains caused houses to collapse in eastern Punjab province, said Arfan Kathia, a spokesman for the provincial disaster management authority. He said more rains were expected this week.
Rains, which also lashed the capital Islamabad, killed seven people in southwestern Baluchistan province over the weekend, and eight others died in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province bordering Afghanistan. Authorities in Baluchistan declared a state of emergency.
❑ ❑ ❑ Pakistan probes death of suspect:
Pakistani authorities are investigating the shooting death of a man who had been acquitted of killing accused Indian spy Sarabjit Singh in a Lahore prison in 2013, a police official said Sunday.
Pakistan has previously accused India’s intelligence agency of being involved in killings inside Pakistan, saying it had credible evidence linking two Indian agents to the deaths of two Pakistanis last year.
The man who died in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Sunday was Amir Tamba. He was a suspect in the death of Sarabjit Singh, an Indian national who was convicted of spying in Pakistan and handed a death sentence in 1991.
But Singh died in 2013 after inmates attacked him in a Lahore prison. His fate inflamed tensions between the two South Asian nuclear-armed rivals.