Thin skins, criticism, and rule of law

Dangers even in functioning democracies

The tales on the “International” page of today’s New York Times and in the Wall Street Journal each caution us to value the rule of law over the pervasive challenge of pesky, fragile egos. In a democratic society, those two tendencies can sadly diverge for our interests rather than align as Prime Minister Modi’s behavior particularly reminds us.

To be clear, India is the largest democracy since that nation’s population is roughly four times that of our own, if not larger. Their parliamentary democracy is not as old as ours since India’s independence only occurred in 1947 but few genuinely worried about its vibrancy until Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government came to power a decade ago. India’s military is definitely subservient to the civilians and processes function relatively well, despite unequal economic and social opportunities (another topic for another column).

Make no mistake, India has suffered some of the most profound sectarian violence anywhere. The end of the British rule led to the Partition into Hindu-predominant yet secular India and predominant Muslim Pakistan unleashed pure barbarism. More recent evidence of the hatred included the 2001 Islamic terrorist attack on the floor of the Parliament in Delhi or the four-day Lashkar-e-Taiba Mumbai massacre of 2008. These were heinous acts—period.

It is hard to overstate how passionately societies subjected to violence may crave retribution, often administered by mob rule. In most cases, law holds but mob violence in any society is failure of the rule of law because violence invariably spins out of anyone’s control, often even the person instigating such acts. India’s Muslim, Hindu, and other sects see this too well but they are hardly unique in this dilemma.

Muslims constitute a major portion of India today—more than 172 million people or roughly 14% of the overall population. The overwhelming majority of them are peaceful citizens but, under Modi, increasingly disenfranchised as well. The result of a legislative agenda and parliamentary majority favoring this Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party offers few options for criticizing the BJP leader, whether it is the opposition Congress Party (which did surprisingly well in recent elections but still is decidedly in the minority) or Muslims or any one else. The factors among critics is not more unifying than that.

The article hones in the fourth year anniversary of Umar Khalid, a Muslim political campaigner who has advocated for peaceful protests, facing incarceration as a result of no due process. The government charged “he made antigovernment speeches and participated in WhatsApp groups that were organizing protests. He was accused of instigating riots in Delhi that left more than 50 people dead.” Apparently he is seen as a major instigator of the violence yet evidence of a role is not entirely clear from the article. Modi’s government held no trial occurred so no evidence to support the presumption was offered. The article goes on to note explicitly that the victims were mostly Muslims killed by Hindu violence. He did attend a sister’s wedding but has otherwise been denied bail.

Democracy is a system of governing whereby those with differing views exchange ideas compete in a free and open manner to gather voters’s support In unfettered, open elections by which majorities earn the legitimacy from the voters to govern, not rule as kings. Democracy is not nor has ever been nor can be based solely on the whims of a single individual to be genuinely competitive elections. Modi’s democracy operates not that differently for critics, especially Muslims, than Xi Jinping’s system treats those who challenge CCP dicta or Vlad the Impaler’s punishment for critics in the media or alternate political movements. In each case, the single, thin-skinned ruler is intolerant of anyone casting aspersions on his utterances, not matter how exclusionary or ludicrous they may be.

Of course there is a difference in scale between Modi’s incarcerations and those in China but the issue remains the same: political constraints and obstacles to raising questions, much less doubts, about the appropriateness or the legality of the ruler’s declarations too often become criminal activities in the eyes of the ruler. China’s willingness to put Uighurs into “reeducation camps” is horrifying because the latters refuse to put the CCP above their religious law. Is it truly any better to throw someone into prison for four years without a criminal trial because he advocated for protests against laws aimed at disenfranchising a religious minority? Seriously? Isn’t that pretty awful as well, rather like Christians seeing themselves under threat in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where they can be punished for exercising their faith just like Jews? The question is not the relative preponderance of cases as much as the behaviors themselves in a supposedly participatory, competitive political marketplace. How else can citizens express their views without engaging directly in armed resistance?

I am NOT justifying sectarian violence anywhere—no where— but I am dubious of systems that seem to tied to personalization of the ruler’s whims instead of the country predictable, rule of law with at least a modicum of justice for all.

This matters because it’s a moving target in any society. Rule of law, an established set of precepts about predictable lines for behavior, offers ground rules on how actions will be received by government on behalf of society or visa versa. Rule by law is creating a system whereby the law becomes punishment and another arm of the state rather than an arbiter of what is acceptable under previously announced norms.

Rule by law is the purview of thin-skinned egoists who fail to recognize their power rests not from legitimacy granted by the governed but from a mere segment of the population who are in a transactional relationship with the egoist. If he (usually this is men, though I am sure women could fall prey as well but don’t currently populate the realms of supreme governing positions to the same degree) designates some segment of the nation as preferred based on religion, ethnicity, gender, or some other characteristic, then that privileged group will support his positions regardless of how harsh the effects on the remainder shut out of the arrangement. This too often, if not always, becomes a pernicious system whereby criticism becomes the reason to lock up opposition because challenging the orthodoxy of the leader becomes the crime. That strikes me as pretty basically anti-democratic, a major reason people detest the CCP.

Gradually, as the individual’s hold on power endures, those issues for which he will tolerate counter views diminishes, increasing the likelihood of criticism rising along with jailing individuals. It becomes a vicious cycle seen throughout history as weak men in power confront the reality that their will does not equate to that of a society, much less the world. Even Alfredo Stroessner, the decades’ long strongman in insignificant, remote Paraguay, became so intolerant of opposition that it coalesced to oust him. Same was true for the Duvalier father and son tandem in Haiti, the communists in East and Central Europe before 1989, and various other examples.

But, Modi is a particularly noteworthy one because he leads an enormous democracy, a system whereby more than a billion people register their views on a periodic basis at the election box. I am unaware of any widespread movement to silence those people entirely, as occurs under Vlad or Xi with sham votes or by delaying elections, but stopping the erosion of democratic principles is especially difficult because it has been linked to that egoist’s appeal to those with whom he has built a “special tie”. His supporters who see the egoist as supremely sympathetic to their vision, their grievances, their fears rarely acknowledge the shifting nature of his genuine commitments.

Pernicious, singular ideas can move at will or ignore evidence to change bad ideas. Thin skinned egoists can decide to align with their seeming enemies when it suits their purposes or abandon allies but in any case without listening to critics’s responses—or even those of supporters, if they prefer.

Don’t get me wrong: the BJP’s defeat at the polls this summer led him to moderate some of his exclusionary rhetoric but how will his most ardent fans view that action long-term should it undercut their sense of privilege? In China’s case, the story in today’s Wall Street Journal about a quarter of a trillion (yes, trillion with a T) of U.S. dollar equivalent capital flight should come with a warning label: the people able to export their money in the hundreds of billions of dollars are Party members who made money within the system in the first place, not rogue actors nor Uighurs. These people are trying to exit the system now because they no longer see its advantage for their future, a reminder that will certainly bother Xi and his buddies in the leadership compound at Zhongnanhai every evening. When Vlad went into Ukraine in February 2022, some of his oligarchic buddies sought to extricate themselves from the western sanctions for the same reasons as Chinese sending money abroad: the future no longer looked as promising for their desires.

Egotistic dictators rarely take well to their supporters challenging them any more than their long-term opponents. Therein lies the dangers of single man rule: ultimately they too often resort to violence to continue the system. That violence can aim at supporters or opponents because anyone not praising the egoist becomes a danger of intolerable proportion. That scene rarely ends well for anyone at all, including the world as a whole at times.

All of these things-skinned, fearful men could turn around but I doubt it. The question will be whether they provide examples other pursue: that is the terrifying part as the state has a great deal of power. If voters are ignored, the state has all the power. That rarely ends well.

I welcome your thoughts. Am I totally off base? Do you see concerns in India under Modi? Are the CCP or contemporary Russia really all that different or merely more extreme and more skilled at the game?

I appreciate your time. Please feel free to circulate this if of value. I appreciate your commitment to this column, especially subscribers. Do send me any thoughts as I welcome them.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Jason Douglas and Rebecca Feng, “The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Rush to get Money out of China”, wallstreetjournal.com, 23 October 2024, Retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-capital-flight-2ba6391b?mod=china_news_article_pos1

Suhasini Raj, “Four Years in Jail Without a Trail: The Price of Dissent in Modi’s India”, NewYorkTimes.com, 23 October 2024, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/world/asia/india-muslim-dissent.html?searchResultPosition=2