AMbassador Kamuran Gürün by Denis Ojalvo

The protagonist of Turkish-Jewish ties in the post 1980 military intervention era, former Undersecretary of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Kamuran Gürün passed away.
By Denis Ojalvo

In July 1980, Israel declared Jerusalem as its capital. In August, the Turkish government suspended the activities of its General Consulate in that city.

On the 12th of September 1980, the Turkish army took control of the state in order to prevent an imminent civil war which, was about to be triggered by the daily clashes of left and rightwing militants.

The National Security Council (NSC) consisting of the top military establishment of Turkey, appointed Ambassador Ilter Türkmen as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Ambassador Kamuran Gürün as his undersecretary.

In his book titled Tumultuous Years – memoirs of an Undersecretary published in 1995, Ambassador Gürün provides his readers with first hand and most authoritative information regarding the debut of Turkey’s ties with the American Jewish Establishment.
Since the assassination of its diplomats by an Armenian avenger in Los Angeles in 1973, the Turkish foreign policy making has been under the mortgage of genocide allegations by the Armenian Diaspora who has been pressing for the recognition as such, of the mass deportations and killings of Armenians which took place in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire’s Eastern Anatolian provinces.
On the 15th of July 1974, The Greek Cypriot national Guards led by Nikos Sampson, made a coup in order to annex the island to Greece. This prompted an intervention by the Turkish military on the 19th of July, which lasted until the 22nd. Having obtained no tangible result, The Turkish military made a second landing on the 14th of August and took control of the northern part of the island.
The Greek Americans mobilized their lobbying skills in order to drive the Turkish forces out of the island. By the same token, the Armenians jumped in the wagon and together with the Greek Lobby formed one of the most formidable Anti-Turkish fronts thwarting all American congressional resolutions regarding Turkey.
Turkey’s efforts to deal with this phenomenon by enlisting the support of the Jewish Lobby date back to 1974 when the Governor of Istanbul Mr. Vefa Poyraz, upon instructions received from the government, established contact with the notables of the Turkish Jewish community and asked them to take part in Turkey’s efforts to explain the reasons of Turkey’s intervention in Cyprus.
In the mean time on the 17th and 18th of December 1974, the Greek Lobby managed to have both the Congress and Senate vote a resolution on an arms embargo on Turkey. This resolution was effective as per the 5th of February 1975.
The Armenian Lobby took advantage of the conjuncture and managed to have the Congress and Senate pass joint Resolution No. 148 on the 9th of April, designing April 24, 1975, as "National Day of Remembrance of Man's Inhumanity to Man".
Jak kamhi and Fred Burla, two Jewish industrialists took part in the task force sponsored by the Turkish Industrialists Union which visited the USA on 6-16 September 1975 for lobbying against the arms embargo.
Below is a summary of Ambassador Gürün’s contacts with The Jewish Lobby and the involvement of Turkish Jews in Turkey’s lobbying efforts, as reported in his previously mentioned memoirs.
When he took office as under-secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Gürün inherited an even bleaker situation owing to the fact that on top of Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus and Armenian Genocide allegations, he had to advocate the legitimacy of the newly established military regime in Turkey.
Ambassador Gürün was seeking the support of the West against the raging Armenian terrorism which, in a span of 11 years from 1973 to 1984 claimed the lives of 41 Turkish diplomats and consular staff. In that scope, he thought that it was important to organize the Turkish Diaspora, especially the one in the USA, and establish a Turkish lobby which would explain to the world public opinion Turkey’s points of view on the afore mentioned subjects.
Following the military intervention of September 12th 1980, Mordo Dinar, a Turkish lawyer and member of the Turkish Jewish community, contacted Ambassador Gürün in Ankara on his own initiative and proposed to organize meetings with the press and the audio-visual media.Ambassador Gürün contacted the Turkish Ambassador Adnan Bulak in Paris and asked him to cooperate with Mordo Dinar.
Mordo Dinar who covered his own expenses, managed to block the broadcasting of certain French Television programs which, were unfavorable to Turkey. He was present during all meetings with the members of the Jewish Lobby, the following year in New York.
According To Ambassador Gürün, Mordo Dinar and Jak Kamhi have been the first two persons with whom The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs cooperated in order to explain the Turkish point of view especially in France and the USA, in order to forestall the adverse currents regarding Turkey.
Jak Kamhi was the person who found the lawyer who represented Turkey in the case of the Orly Massacre perpetrated by Armenian terrorists.
Ambassador Gürün established that the center of the Anti-Turkish activities sponsored by the Armenians was the American Congress in Washington. And that the Armenians were trying to enlist the Jewish Lobby to back their efforts.
It was again, Jak Kamhi who through the Turkish Jewish and the American Jewish Communities, prevented the Armenians from taking part in the Holocaust Museum and who fulfilled an important role in the establishment of a Task Force of non-governmental prominent figures.
Few people know the unforgettable services rendered by these two friends of ours.
Mordo Dinar and Jak Kamhi deserve a great “Thank You”.
On the 12th of February 1982 a delegation of the Jewish Community in Turkey led by the Chief Rabbi David Asseo and whose participants were Jak Kamhi, Jak Veissid and Eliezer Kohen visited the Head of the State General Evren.
Ambassador Gürün prepared a report for the NSC meeting which, had to take place on the 18th of March 1982. One of the topics on the agenda was whether to allow the Jews of Turkey to participate to international Jewish gatherings. It was judged that the Turkish Jews provided proof they could lobby on behalf of Turkey in those forums. The head of State, General Evren, opened the matter for discussion. The Minister of Foreign Affairs Ilter Turkmen opposed the granting of a permission to Turkish Jews to participate to the meetings of the World Jewish Congress on the grounds that this would harm the relations between Turkey and the Arabs.
Ambassador Gürün paid a visit to General Evren on the 24th of March 1982, before traveling to the USA where he was to meet with Jewish organizations. It was agreed between the two that his contacts would be kept secret for the time being. In his meetings with Jewish Organizations, Ambassador Gürün emphasized Turkey’s will to cooperate with these against terrorism and informed them on the allegations of Genocide made by the Armenians and their efforts to hide behind Jewish organizations. The Jewish organizations asserted that they would not contest historic events, but that they were ready to back Turkey and cooperate against terrorism.
Mordo Dinar had a meeting organized by the vice-president of the International Law Society, Mr. Seymour Rubin (a Jew) where columnists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Foreign Policy as well as commentators of the TV chain CBS participated along with specialists of the Middle east Institute.That meeting provided Ambassador Gürün with the opportunity to answer many questions regarding Turkey and its foreign policy, including the Armenian issue.
Following Ambassador Gürün’s journey which lasted until the 1st of May, on the 21st, took place a meeting of the NSC where General Evren asked whether it was appropriate to allow Turkish Jews to participate in World Jewry’s meetings. This time the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Mr. Ilter Türkmen) did not oppose and General Evren gave the necessary instructions to the office of the Prime Minister who in its turn instructed the Governor of Istanbul accordingly on the 27th of May 1982.
After the meeting, some participants asked the minister why he denied that permission during the previous meeting. The minister replied that he was opposed to contacts with the Jewish Lobby.
Ambassador Gürün emphasized that the existential question Turks have to ask themselves is who would take advantage and who would be harmed by the weakening or dismemberment of Turkey? He points that in the setting of those days it would be difficult to assume that Russia, Bulgaria,Greece, Syria and Iraq would care. That Iran, Saudi Arabia and Jordan would be indifferent.
The ones that would be nervous and unwilling to see Turkey weaken would be the USA and as strange as that may seem, Israel.Therefore, Ambassador Gürün suggested a NSC meeting to be convened in order to determine the interests of Turkey and fix the principal guidelines of its foreign policy.
Ambassador Gürün pointed on two means for handling the Armenian Question, and the Kurdish Question when this one is likely to manifest itself. These are:
1- To fulfill all of Turkey’s necessary obligations at the national level
2- Given that Turkey is unable to achieve its goals all alone, to seek partners which share the same perspective and goals with Turkey at the conceptual and operational levels.
He concluded that the only natural ally against the powerful Greek and Armenian Lobbies is the (American) Jewish Lobby.
Under the given circumstances, taking advantage of the Jewish Lobby becomes a matter of national interest. Turkey cannot sit and watch, given the danger of dismemberment, just not to offend the Arabs. The interests of Turkey take precedence above any other thing.
Ambassador Gürün pointed to the fact that the American Congress is abundant of Anti-Turkey propaganda and that if Turkey antagonized with the Jewish Lobby, not one decision favorable to Turkey would pass the Congress.
He remarked that the Jewish Lobby was able to assert its will on the German Government, provide anxiety to the French, and fight with the Russian. In his opinion, what makes things move is not Israel but the Jewish Lobby. Turkey doesn’t need to contact this lobby officially to enlist its support. This could easily be done by Turkish Citizens (Turkish Jews). That is the reason why Ambassador Gürün has been in favor of allowing the representatives of the Turkish Jewish Community participate to the meetings of the World Jewish Congress.
On the other hand, the Ministry reprimanded Turkish Americans for criticizing with an advertisement a plot against Israeli diplomats drawing parallels to plots perpetrated by Armenian terrorists against Turkish Diplomats. Ambassador Gürün thought that this reprimand by the Turkish Foreign Ministry was misplaced.
On the 5th of May 1982, Ambassador Gürün submitted the NSC a report of 61 pages regarding his contacts abroad.He was received by the Head of State and told by the Secretary General of the NSC, General Necdet Urug, that all his oral and written suggestions were agreed with. His suggestions would be discussed in a meeting of the NSC to which would participate Ambassadors Sukru Elekdag of Washington, Coskun Kirca of New York and Adnan Bulak of Paris. The NSC meeting took place on the 21st of May 1982 and Ambassador Gürün read the “Reflections and remarks” part of his report. Ambassador Elekdag underlined the importance of the Jewish Lobby and stressed the necessity of establishing contacts with that lobby and the Israeli ambassador. Thus, Ambassador Gürün became aware of existing restrictive instructions on this subject. Ambassador Coskun Kirca mentioned Arab countries’ attitudes vis-à-vis Turkey at the United Nations and stressed the importance of the Jewish Lobby. In conclusion, the Head of State affirmed that it was in Turkey’s interest to take advantage of the Jewish Lobby.
In his meeting with General Urug (Secretary General of the NSC), the latter told Ambassador Gürün that nobody until then thought about organizing a Task Force (consisting of non-governmental prominent figures) and lobbying organizations, and that if he could institutionalize this subject, he would have rendered the country a big service. General Urug requested Ambassador Gürün to commit himself to this task meticulously.
Ambassador Gürün was received by the Head of State on the 8th of September 1982. In that meeting, he informed the latter of his divergences of opinion with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Ilter Türkmen, which caused communication problems.
These were:

1-That the Minister of Foreign Affairs opined that the Head of State should take part at the Islamic Conference without the presence of Ambassador Gürün.
2-That the Minister of Foreign Affairs thought that Turkey’s relations with Israel should be suspended, whereas Ambassador Gürün was against such a measure.
3-That the Minister of Foreign Affairs was against a cooperation with the Jewish Lobby, but that Ambassador Gürün was in favor of such relations.
4-That since Ambassador Gürün’s points of view were met favorably (by the NSC), the Minister ceased discussing those points with him.
In conclusion, we know that the points of view of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Ilter Türkmen prevailed on those of Ambassador Gürün and that his endeavours did not come to fruition during his tenure as undersecretary of state.

However, that policy would change with the accession of Prime Minister Turgut Özal to power on the 13th of December 1983.
From 1984 onwards, the relations between Turkey and the Jewish Lobby were nurtured. The culmination of the mutual efforts to enhance cooperation between the parties was the celebration of the Quincentennial (in 1992) of the welcoming of Spanish Jews who were expulsed from their country, in Turkish lands.
The Turkish Jewish Community contributed its share to those relations with the blessing of consecutive American governments since then.
Those relations led to a strategic partnership between Turkey and Israel in 1996.
Both the Turkish and Israeli governments should not spare their efforts for safeguarding that precious relationship which took so much toil to achieve.
We respectfully bow in front of the memory of this outstanding diplomat with exceptional foresight, H.E. Ambassador Gürün, the protagonist of renewed Turkish-Jewish ties, and send our condolences to his loved ones. 
Denis Ojalvo

The Most Dangerous Man on Earth

December 25, 2017Tom Engelhardt Leave a Comment

by Tom Engelhardt
Let’s start with the universe and work our way in. Who cares? Not them because as far as we know they aren’t there. As far as we know, no one exists in our galaxy or perhaps anywhere else but us (and the other creatures on this all-too-modest planet of ours). So don’t count on any aliens out there caring what happens to humanity. They won’t.
As for it — Earth — the planet itself can’t, of course, care, no matter what we do to it.  And I’m sure it won’t be news to you that, when it comes to him — and I mean, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who reputedly has a void where the normal quotient of human empathy might be — don’t give it a second’s thought.  Beyond himself, his businesses, and possibly (just possibly) his family, he clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about us or, for that matter, what happens to anyone after he departs this planet.
As for us, the rest of us here in the United States at least, we already know something about the nature of our caring.  A Yale study released last March indicated that 70% of us — a surprising but still less than overwhelming number (given the by-now-well-established apocalyptic dangers involved) — believe that global warming is actually occurring.  Less than half of us, however, expect to be personally harmed by it.  So, to quote the eminently quotable Alfred E. Newman, “What, me worry?”
Tell that, by the way, to the inhabitants of Ojai and other southern California hotspots — infernos, actually — being reduced to cinders this December, a month that not so long ago wasn’t significant when it came to fires in that state.  But such blazes should have been no surprise, thanks to the way fire seasons are lengthening on this warming planet.  A burning December is simply part of what the governor of California, on surveying the fire damage recently, dubbed “the new normal” — just as ever more powerful Atlantic hurricanes, growing increasingly fierce as they pass over the warming waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on their way to batter the United States, are likely to be another new normal of our American world.
In the wake of the hottest year on record, we all now live on a new-normal planet, which means a significantly more extreme one.  Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the political version of that new normal involves a wildly overheated, overbearing, over-hyped, over-tweeted president (even if only 60-odd percent of us believe that he could truly harm us).  He’s a man who, as the New York Times reported recently, begins to boil with doubt and disturbance if he doesn’t find himself in the headlines, the focus of cable everything, for even a day or two.  He’s a man who seems to thrive only when the pot is boiling and when he’s the center of the universe.  And what a world we’ve prepared for such an incendiary figure!  (More on that later.)
We’re all now immersed in an evolving Trumpocalypse.  In a sense, we were there even before The Donald entered the Oval Office.  Just consider what it meant to elect a visibly disturbed human being to the highest office of the most powerful, potentially destructive nation on Earth.  What does that tell you?  One possibility: given the near majority of American voters who sent him to the White House, by campaign 2016 we were already living in a deeply disturbed country.  And considering the coming of 1% elections, the growth of plutocracy, the blooming of a new Gilded Age whose wealth disparities must already be competitive with its nineteenth-century predecessor, the rise of the national security state, our endless wars (now turning “generational”), the increasing militarization of this country, and the demobilization of its people, to mention only a few twenty-first-century American developments, that should hardly be surprising.

Could Donald Trump Be the End of Evolutionary History?
Recently, as I was mulling over the extremity of this Trumpian moment, a depiction of evolution from my youth popped into my head.  Sometimes back then, such illustrations, as I remember them, began with a fish-like creature flippering its way out of the water to be transformed into a reptile, but this one, known as the “March of Progress,” started with a hunched over ape-like creature.  What followed were a series of figures that, left to right, grew ever more Homo-sapiens-like and ever more upright to the last guy, a muscular-looking fellow walking oh-so-erectly.
He, of course, was a proud specimen of us and we — it went without saying at the time — were the proud end of the line on this planet.  We were it, progress personified!  Even in my youth, however, we were also in the process of updating that evolutionary end point.  At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the fear of another kind of end, one that might truly be the end of everything, had become a nightmarish commonplace in our lives.
One night almost 60 years ago, for instance, I can still vividly remember myself on my hands and knees crawling through the rubble of an atomically devastated city.  It was just a nightmare, of course, but of a sort that was anything but uncommon for those of us growing up then.  And there were times — especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 — when those nuclear nightmares left the world of dreams and pop culture for everyday life.  And even before that, if you were a child, you regularly experienced the fear of obliteration, as the air raid sirens wailed outside your classroom window, the radio on your teacher’s desk broadcast warnings from Conelrad, and you “ducked and covered” under your flimsy desk.
With the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, such fears receded, though they shouldn’t have, since by then, in a world of spreading nuclear states, we already knew about “nuclear winter.” What that meant should have been terrifying.  A perfectly imaginable nuclear war, not between superpowers but regional powers like India and Pakistan, could put so much smoke, so many particulates, into the atmosphere as to absorb sunlight for years, radically cooling the planet and possibly starving out most of humanity.
Only in our moment, however, have such nuclear fears returned in a significant way.  Under the circumstances, more than half a century after that March of Progress imagery became popular, if we were to provisionally update it, we might have to add a singularly recognizable figure to the far right side of that diorama (appropriately enough): a large but slightly stooped man with a jut-chin, a flaming face, and a distinctive orange comb-over.
Which brings us to a straightforward enough question: Could Donald Trump prove to be the end of evolutionary history? The answer, however provisionally, is that he could. At a minimum, right now he qualifies as the most dangerous man on the planet. He might indeed be the final stopping spot (or at least the person who pointed the way toward it) for human history, for everything that led to this moment, to us.

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last…?
Whatever you do, however, don’t just blame Donald Trump for this.  He was simply the particularly unsettling version of Homo sapiens ushered into the White House on a backlash vote of dissatisfaction in 2016.  When he got there, he unexpectedly found powers beyond compare awaiting him like so many loaded guns.  As was true with the two presidents who preceded him, he automatically became not just the commander-in-chief of this country but its assassin-in-chief; that is, he found himself in personal control of an armada of drone aircraft that could be sent just about anywhere on Earth at his command to kill just about anyone of his choosing.  At his beck and call, he also had the equivalent of what historian Chalmers Johnson once called the president’s own private army (now, armies): both the CIA irregulars Johnson was familiar with and the U.S. military’s vast, secretive Special Operations forces.  Above all, however, he found himself in charge of the planet’s largest nuclear arsenal, weaponry that he and he alone could order into use.
In short, like this country’s other presidents since August 1945, he was fully weaponized and capable of singlehandedly turning this planet, or significant parts of it, into an instant inferno, a wasteland of — in his incendiary phrase in relation to North Korea — “fire and fury.”  On January 20, 2017, in other words, he became the personification of a duck-and-cover planet (even though, as had been true since the 1950s, there was really nowhere to hide).  It made no difference that he himself was woefully ignorant about the nature and power of such weaponry.
And speaking of planetary infernos, he also found himself weaponized when it came to a second set of instruments of ultimate destruction about which he was no less ignorant and to which he was even more in thrall.  He brought to the Oval Office — Make America Great Again! — a nostalgia for his fossil-fuelized childhood world of the 1950s.  Weaponized by Big Energy, he arrived prepared to ensure that the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet would clear the way for yet more pipelines, fracking, offshore drilling, and just about every other imaginable form of exploitation of oil, natural gas, and coal (but notalternative energy). All of this was intended to create, as he proclaimed, a new “golden age,” not just of American energy independence but of “energy dominance” on a planetary scale. And here’s what that really means: through his executive orders and the decisions of the stunning range of climate deniers and Big Oil enthusiasts he appointed to key posts in his administration, he can indeed ensure that ever more greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will enter the atmosphere in the years to come, creating the basis for another kind of apocalypse.
On the promotion of global warming in his first year in office, it’s reasonable to say, with a certain Trumpian pride, that the president has once again made the United States the planet’s truly “exceptional” nation. In November, only five months after President Trump announcedthat the U.S. would withdraw as soon as possible from the Paris climate agreement to fight global warming, Syria (of all countries) finally signed onto it, the last nation on Earth to do so.  That meant this country was truly… well, you can’t say left out in the “cold,” not on this planet anymore, but quite literally exceptional in its single-minded efforts to ensure the destruction of the very environment that had for so long ensured humanity’s well-being and made the creation of those illustrations of evolutionary progress possible.
Still, you can’t just blame President Trump for this either.  He’s not responsible for the ingenuity, that gift of evolution, that led us, wittingly in the case of nuclear weapons and (initially) unwittingly in the case of climate change, to take powers once relegated to the gods and place them in our own hands — as of January 20, 2017, in fact, in the hands of Donald J. Trump.  Don’t blame him alone for the fact that the most apocalyptic moment in our history might come not via an asteroid from outer space, but from Trump Tower.
So here we are, living with a man whose ultimate urge seems to be to bring the world to a boil around himself.  It’s possible that he might indeed be the first president since Harry Truman in 1945 to order the use of nuclear weapons.  As Nobel Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, recently commented, the world might be only “a tiny tantrum” away from nuclear war in Asia.  At the very least, he may already be helping to launch a new global nuclear arms race in which countries from South Korea and Japan to Iran and Saudi Arabia could find themselves with world-ending arsenals, leaving nuclear winter in the hands of… well, don’t even think about it.
Now, imagine that amended evolutionary chart again or perhaps — in honor of The Donald’s recent announcement that the U.S. was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — call to mind poet William Butler Yeats’s words about a world in which “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” while some “rough beast, its hour come round at last” is slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born.”  Think then of what a genuine horror it is that so much world-ending power is in the hands of any single human being, no less such a disturbed and disturbing one.
Of course, while Donald Trump might represent the end of the line that began in some African valley so many millennia ago, nothing on this planet is graven in stone, not when it comes to us.  We still have the potential freedom to choose otherwise, to do otherwise.  We have the capacity for wonders as well as horrors.  We have the ability to create as well as to destroy.
In the phrase of Jonathan Schell, the fate of the Earth remains not just in his hands, but in ours.  If they, those nonexistent aliens, don’t care and the planet can’t care and the alien in the White House doesn’t give a damn, then it’s up to us to care.  It’s up to us to protest, resist, and change, to communicate and convince, to fight for life rather than its destruction. If you’re of a certain age, all you have to do is look at your children or grandchildren (or those of your friends and neighbors) and you know that no one, Donald Trump included, should have the right to consign them to the flames. What did they ever do to end up in a hell on Earth?
2018 is on the horizon.  Let’s make it a better time, not the end of time.


Republished, with permission, from TomDispatch.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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Copyright 2017 Tom Engelhardt

Making India Great Again?

December 24, 2017Guest 2 Comments

by Sumit Ganguly and Rajan Menon
NATIONALISM HAS become a formidable force in India, the world’s most populous democracy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’s Party) portrays India as a once-glorious Hindu civilization whose identity and power were eroded—first by successive Muslim invasions that culminated in the establishment of the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), and thereafter, until 1947, by British colonialism. For more than half a millennium, in the BJP’s telling, many Hindus were forcibly converted to, or duped into adopting, Islam and Christianity. English became the intelligentsia’s lingua franca. Civilizational self-confidence gave way to feelings of weakness and inferiority—or so goes the Hindu nationalists’ narrative.
Independence did not, in the BJP’s view, eliminate this pathology, because Indian leaders (the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, remains the nationalists’ prime example) and intellectual class remained in thrall to Western ideas and institutions. Hindu nationalists believe that India can reclaim its greatness only by advancing economically and militarily, while drawing on the past, Hindu civilization in particular, for inspiration, pride, identity and political principles. Modernity severed from history, religion and tradition is, in their eyes, a recipe for deracination and submissiveness, not glory. The BJP proclaims that its elixir, combining modernity and tradition, will make India great again.

This is the narrative of India’s past and vision of its future to which Modi, the BJP and its kindred cultural organizations are committed. The consequences of their efforts to realize their goals will matter—and not just to Indians. With an area of nearly three million square kilometers, India is the world’s eighth-largest country. Its population of 1.3 billion people will soon surpass China’s, and the Indian diaspora numbers thirty million, including four million in the United States, about half of them Hindus. (This in itself says nothing about the attitudes of people of Indian origin in the United States—whether citizens or not—toward the BJP, but the party and its affiliated organizations have certainly sought to cultivate them.) At $2.3 trillion, India’s GDP ranks seventh worldwide, and its economic power is supplemented by nuclear weapons and a powerful conventional military force. Thus the reverberations, good and bad, of BJP-style Hindu nationalism are likely to reach well beyond India’s borders.
WHEN INDIA won its independence from Britain in 1947, it lacked any of what are now commonly considered the prerequisites for a strong new democracy. The overwhelming majority of Indians lived in villages, and were dirt poor to boot: per capita GDP then was around $618 (in 1990 constant dollars), compared to $6,600 in 2016, which still places India in 160th place worldwide. Back then, Indians could anticipate an average lifespan of thirty-two years, versus 67.8 years now, and only 12 percent were literate, compared to 74 percent today.

Yet Indian democracy, despite its shortcomings (many traceable to endemic corruption), has proved remarkably resilient, defying the early obituaries. At all levels of India’s political order, power changes hands regularly through elections. Voter turnout (64 percent in the 2014 national election) is generally higher than in the United States (55 percent for the 2016 presidential election). India’s central and local legislatures are forums for raucous debate, if not always for efficient or enlightened lawmaking. The Indian press operates in numerous languages and with remarkable freedom. The army, the bane of democracy in many developing countries—including India’s neighbor and cultural kin, Pakistan—has stayed out of politics.
Sixty years on, this record is remarkable, particularly for a country that remains largely poor and is a kaleidoscope of languages, religions, castes and cultures. True, Indian democracy has appeared in peril at times—notably during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency” rule (1975–77), when she curtailed democratic rights and jailed opposition leaders, relying on constitutional provisions available to the largely symbolic Indian presidency. But her confidence, based on the claims of sycophantic advisers, that she would achieve a sweeping electoral victory that would enable the consolidation of an illiberal polity, proved misplaced. The voters handed her a stunning defeat, preserving India’s democratic political trajectory.
Now, however, Indian democracy faces a new threat.

THE PRESENT danger does not emanate solely from the pinnacle of the political order, as was largely true during the Emergency. Nor can it be reduced to the personality and proclivities of one political leader. To be sure, the ruling BJP, headed by the charismatic, silver-tongued Modi, champions Hindutva, which effectively conflates being authentically Indian with being Hindu—per a distinctive, rigid definition of what Hinduism entails and represents. But the Hindutva project is also being pushed from below, especially by an organization linked to the BJP from which many of its top leaders, including Modi, have emerged: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, or National Volunteer Society). Complementing the BJP and RSS (Modi joined the latter in 1971 when he was twenty-one, and rose through the ranks to become its national general secretary) are the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, or World Hindu Council), established by some RSS leaders in 1964; its militant youth wing, the Bajrang Dal; and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, or All-India Student Council), a powerful presence on university campuses. These and other like-minded organizations constitute the Sangh Parivar (loosely, the Family of Societies).
In ideological coherence, organizational resources and popular appeal, the Hindutva movement commands greater resources than Indira Gandhi could muster during the brief Emergency years. The acolytes of Hindu nationalism have also proven fervent and skillful in spreading their message, through persuasion as well as occasionally force. Their commitment to religion-based nationalism presents a greater hazard to Indian democracy than the Emergency did, because India contains 170 million Muslims (more than any other country save Indonesia), as well as Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews and Zoroastrians. Although Hindutva has encountered resistance from other Indian political parties, the press and civil society, non-Hindus in particular cannot but feel threatened by its words and deeds, which slyly cast doubt on their status as authentic citizens without denying it outright.

Imagine being an Indian Muslim who hears of coreligionists being beaten up, even killed, by Hindu nationalists who consider the cow sacred and do not want a country in which those so inclined can eat beef. Or consider what non-Hindus of any religion, and Indian Hindus who believe that the state should not owe fealty to any single faith—which, incidentally, the Indian constitution stipulates—feel amid cultural campaigns to rewrite curricula and to memorialize a once-glorious Hindu era during which Vedic mathematics and science dominated the world, and the Aryans, whom Hindutva presents not as a people who migrated to India but as indigenous, spread enlightenment far and wide. If you are a journalist, college student, scholar, writer, or activist in a civic group who condemns the chauvinism of Hindutva, you could face vilification and death threats, or even murder.
In short, the specter of Hindu nationalism haunts BJP-ruled India. Attacks on minority communities have become common, and academics, students and journalists who highlight the harassment and intimidation are subjected to public calumny, and have occasionally been killed. Yet top BJP panjandrums make no secret of their animus toward Muslims, as well as other minorities and ideological adversaries, regardless of what religion they practice. The RSS, with its trademark white shirts and khaki shorts, martial drills, patriotic slogans and songs, and distinctive salute (right hand on the chest, the palm facing down), serves as the party’s force multiplier and base. It now feels at liberty to demonize Muslims—essentialized despite being divided by class, language, culture and cuisine, as well as interpretations of Islam—and even paint them as a virtual fifth column for India’s archfoe, Pakistan.

THE FOUNDERS of the modern Indian republic understood that a country of such religious, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity required a political order suited to fostering harmony through the habit of compromise. They designed a secular constitution that could accommodate and manage India’s heterogeneity. Yet the Indian conception of secularism differed from its Western counterparts. Instead of creating a wall of separation between temple and state, India’s leaders, most notably its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru of the Indian National Congress (INC), forged a constitutional order that respected all faiths. Seventy years after the country’s independence, those arrangements are now under frontal assault. To understand how India arrived at the BJP moment, it helps to identify the historical catalysts and turning points—including an acknowledgement that the Congress Party has itself undermined the principles with which it was long identified.
From the outset, a small but vocal minority within the Indian political class rejected the constitutional commitment to secularism. Especially in the post-independence era, this staunchly anti-secular element found a home in the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), an anticommunist, pro-business party that stood for the creation of a Hindu polity. Given the extraordinary role that the INC had played in the national independence movement, and its success in folding a range of political viewpoints into an inclusive structure, the BJS made only limited electoral headway. So did the RSS, which was established in 1925.

The political weakness of the BJS and Nehru’s towering influence within the INC ensured that there were few serious challenges to India’s secular ethos and practices during the first several decades of Indian independence, and that the country made progress on a range of social issues that could have easily rent the nascent republic apart. Between 1952 and 1956, for example, under Nehru’s tutelage, the Indian parliament passed four bills that significantly reformed a range of Hindu customs and practices. Quite predictably, the BJS insisted that Muslim personal laws relating to matters such as divorce and inheritance also be modernized. However, Nehru demurred, arguing that Muslims had just emerged from the trauma of the subcontinent’s partition and that the issue should be deferred. In consequence, Indian Muslims retained a separate legal code on personal matters.

Despite Nehru’s own initial opposition, the country also resolved, through the States Reorganization Act of 1956, another issue: the demand that India’s states be organized on a linguistic basis. Nehru had originally opposed this idea, fearing that it could balkanize the country. However, he changed his mind when faced with relentless pressure, including the death of Potti Sreeramulu, an activist who fasted to death in December 1952 during the struggle to gain statehood for what would later become Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh. The success of this legislation laid the groundwork for the accommodation of similar demands based on cultural diversity and distinctiveness, and mostly without violence. Notable among them is the persistent requirement that a proportion of admissions to educational institutions and governmental job openings be earmarked for India’s disadvantaged castes and tribal peoples.

Despite these successes, the first few decades of Indian independence were hardly free from ethnic and religious tensions. Hindu-Muslim riots erupted periodically, Muslims faced discrimination in various walks of life (as did lower-caste Hindus), social intermingling among the communities was limited and the push to declare Hindi the official language provoked riots in the south. Still, the apparatus of the Indian state did not regularly harass or intimidate Muslims, nor give Hindu zealots license to demonize or persecute them. That it does so now is owed to the atrophy of the Congress Party, which controlled the central government almost continuously from 1947 to 1977, when Indira Gandhi’s electoral gambit backfired and led to a coalition government headed by the Janata Party.
It was Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, who opened the floodgates to the anti-secular tide now sweeping India despite a personal commitment to secularism (she married the parliamentarian Feroze Gandhi, a member of the miniscule Zoroastrian community known as Parsis). Her father had carefully fashioned and nurtured a range of institutions suited to reconciling India’s great cultural and religious differences through bargaining, promoted mores of civil discourse, and cultivated a nationalism unmoored from religion and ethnicity. In marked contrast, his daughter eventually undermined many of these institutions and values, sometimes in response to crises and at other times driven by electoral opportunism.

Worse, as her popularity dwindled and Congress declined as a political force, she pandered to sectarianism. Perhaps the most momentous example was her promotion of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a violent but charismatic Sikh preacher in the state of Punjab, in order to undermine the Akali Dal, a local political party and member of the Janata Party–led coalition government. Her ploy boomeranged to deadly effect once the Congress Party regained power in 1980. By then, Bhindranwale had become a formidable political persona and a proponent of a separate Sikh state. He and his followers commandeered the Golden Temple, one of the holiest Sikh shrines, turning it into a command post for a statewide ethnoreligious insurgency. Unable to quell the rebellion using the police and paramilitary forces, in June 1984 Gandhi deployed the Indian Army to evict Bhindranwale and his acolytes from the temple. Bhindranwale was killed during the shoot-out, but became greater as a martyr than he ever was in life.

Worse was yet to come: two of Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards took revenge by assassinating her on October 30, 1984, which in turn unleashed a pogrom against Sikhs in New Delhi, leaving three thousand Sikhs massacred and many dead in other cities. Their property was pillaged, and Sikh women were raped. Key individuals within the Congress Party egged on or even joined the attackers, and police failed to protect the victims—or, some say, were even complicit.
Indira Gandhi’s political heirs did little to roll back the forces she had unleashed. Her son and immediate successor, Rajiv Gandhi, a political neophyte and former airline pilot, made a feeble attempt to restore the Congress Party’s vitality and original spirit. However, once he encountered resistance from party stalwarts he quickly abandoned those efforts. Moreover, he too had a tendency to indulge divisive impulses. For instance, when the Indian Supreme Court issued a judgment in 1986 granting an indigent Muslim woman, Shah Bano, alimony, he used his parliamentary majority to overturn the judgment—a decision made with an eye on the orthodox Muslim vote.

The successor to the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the BJP, promptly attacked the legislation as another example of the Congress’s “pseudo-secularism” and propensity for “minority appeasement”—the latter term a dog whistle for churning up resentment against Muslims. Still, even those committed to secularism saw Rajiv Gandhi’s move for what it was: a blatant attempt to garner Muslim votes. This was not the only example of Rajiv Gandhi’s pandering to obscurantist religious forces. In 1988, when Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, and even before Iran issued its infamous fatwa against the author, Gandhi, responding to the outraged demands from Muslim clerics, banned the novel.
Meanwhile, the BJP was busy mobilizing its base. Among the high points was the September–October 1990 Rath Yatra, or Chariot Journey, by the party’s leader, Lal Krishna Advani—which Narendra Modi, then the BJP’s general secretary in Gujarat, played a major role in organizing. In a Toyota decked out to resemble an ancient chariot, Advani started his trip in Somnath, where, in 1026, Mahmud Ghazni destroyed a temple during one of his invasions from modern-day Afghanistan. Advani’s destination was Ayodhya, where, according to Hindutva lore, an ancient temple consecrating the birthplace of Lord Rama stood until it was destroyed in the sixteenth century under the Mughal emperor Babur to build the Babri Masjid (Mosque of Babur). Though Advani was arrested before reaching Ayodhya, the fanfare surrounding his stunt allowed the BJP to further publicize its Hindutva project.

Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May 1991, and his principal successor, Narasimha Rao, inherited a problem that the slain prime minister had created. Under attack for blatant pandering to the Muslim minority, Rajiv Gandhi had tried to mollify his critics by unlocking the gates to the Babri Masjid, thereby giving Hindu activists unfettered access to the site on which they had been campaigning to erect the Rama temple. Muslim outrage increased in 1990, after members of the VHP damaged part of the mosque. Rao’s efforts to appease Hindus while averting a violent Hindu-Muslim clash failed. Militant Hindus (many belonging to the RSS, VHP and related groups) stormed the mosque on December 6, 1992, and leveled it within a few hours. Some two thousand people were killed in subsequent violence throughout India, mainly Muslims.

Against this backdrop, in 1998, the BJP formed a coalition government. The party failed to make much headway on its anti-secular agenda, partly because it had to rely on various other political parties to maintain a parliamentary majority. Nevertheless a second anti-Muslim pogrom took place under the BJP’s watch, in February 2002—this time in the western state of Gujarat, where Modi was the chief minister. The chain of events leading to the bloodshed began with a fire (in the Gujarati city of Godhra) on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya after commemorating the anniversary of the Babri Masjid’s destruction. (The precise circumstances that produced the fire remain contested; word spread that Muslim vendors at the station had set it after an altercation with the pilgrims.) A number of pilgrims died in the blaze, and Hindu mobs rampaged through Godhra and other cities in Gujarat, attacking Muslim communities. As many as two thousand people, the vast majority of them Muslims, were killed, and many more were displaced. As during the 1984 anti-Sikh violence in New Delhi and elsewhere, local police mostly stood by.
Modi rejected any responsibility for the pogrom, and to this day he has expressed little to no remorse. In speeches given after the violence he appealed for calm, but focused on expressing outrage over the deaths of the pilgrims and attacking the unfair press coverage that Gujarat was receiving. Notable was the absence of any sorrow over the rampage during which many Muslims were killed. On at least one occasion Modi was downright callous: asked during a June 2013 interview with Reuters whether he felt remorse, he replied that he had experienced sadness—just as a passenger in a car would have, had the driver inadvertently run over a puppy. The analogy was invidious: the mass murder of Muslims in Godhra was likened to an accident, the victims to a puppy. Reuters translated kutte ka bachcha as “puppy.” While that word choice is not incorrect, it fails to convey that in Hindi Modi’s words also carry an offensive connotation—all the more because Muslims regard dogs as unclean. This did not go unnoticed.

Various court cases were launched against Modi, and the Indian Supreme Court eventually created a commission of inquiry. The report was submitted to a court in Gujarat, which concurred with the commission’s finding that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. Other than one or two members of his cabinet, who were implicated in the events, there have been no other indictments against the pogrom’s perpetrators.
THE BJP-LED coalition government, known as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), lost power in 2004, and a Congress Party–dominated coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), then managed to complete two successive terms. Though the quality of the UPA’s governance was mixed, there were few instances of egregious violence between Hindus and Muslims. In the latter part of its second term, numerous financial scandals came to light. These malfeasances aggravated an already disaffected public and tilted voters toward the BJP, which, under the leadership of Modi, pledged to restore fiscal probity and deliver effective governance.

During the 2014 election, aside from a few swipes against illegal (Muslim) immigrants from Bangladesh, Modi downplayed the BJP’s Hindu nationalism and instead touted his economic record in Gujarat—a choice that may have contributed to outright victory for the BJP, which won 282 seats in India’s 543-member parliament. But following the victory, Modi, as prime minister, quickly got down to business on the cultural front. One of his first, and most misguided, directives required that all official correspondence involving the national government, including on social media, be in Hindi, which is mostly spoken in northern India, and is the native tongue of only 41 percent of all Indians. The status of Hindi had for all practical purposes been dormant. Modi not only resuscitated a volatile dispute that had produced bloodshed in years past, especially in the state of Tamil Nadu in the 1960s, but also challenged the national consensus that the Indian state should respect linguistic diversity. Modi, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, however, consider Hindi the national language, and making that status official remains central to their mission of safeguarding Indian culture and unity. This objective ignores the sentiments of non-Hindi speakers, and risks reviving the unrest that erupted in the 1960s.
Not surprisingly, the reaction from the state of Tamil Nadu to Modi’s edict was swift and negative. Muthuvel Karunanidhi—whose party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK, or Dravidian Progress Federation), was at the forefront of the 1960s protests against enshrining Hindi as the national language—remarked that “the pm should focus on development rather than on promoting Hindi,” adding that the BJP’s stance on language policy “amounts to an attempt to treat non-Hindi speakers as second-class citizens.” Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, Jayalalithaa Jayaram, likewise warned Modi that his linguistic directive was “against the letter and spirit of the law” and “causes disquiet to the people of Tamil Nadu who are very proud of and passionate about their linguistic heritage.”

While the BJP’s fervor for recognizing Hindi as the national language may have diminished, the consequences of its victory on other cultural fronts are disturbing. Since Modi’s election as prime minister, there has been a sharp increase in attacks on Muslims (as well as Dalits, who occupy the lowest rung in India’s caste system) accused of eating beef or selling cows to the beef industry. According to Indian press reports, there have been sixty-three attacks since 2010, with twenty-eight people killed (the vast majority of them Muslims). 97 percent of the murders occurred after Modi’s election in 2014, more than half of them in states ruled by the BJP. Even a casual survey of Indian newspapers shows that violence by self-appointed guardians of the cow has been on the upswing and become a prominent topic of public debate. Opposition to slaughtering cows has been a longstanding priority for the BJP, the RSS and the rest of the Sangh Parivar. While Modi and other BJP leaders have certainly not ordered any violence, or even encouraged it directly, their Hindutva project and related cultural campaigns by the RSS and others have undoubtedly created a political atmosphere suited to a rise in vigilantism by Hindu extremists.

Modi has warned that resorting to violence to defend the cow violates the law and will not be permitted. But missing, just as it was after the 2002 bloodletting in Godhra, has been a forthright defense of Muslim rights or even an acknowledgement that the vigilantes’ victims have overwhelmingly been Muslim. As observed by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one India’s most prominent public intellectuals, dwelling on the tally of attacks misses the point. “These lynchings,” in his view,
“are fiendishly redefining citizenship. The significance of this violence is not just the number: Whether it is 15 incidents or 50. . . . This violence establishes a new political dispensation, where a group of people claim direct sovereignty: They act above formal law and order institutions, they feel entitled to enforce the morality, and their impunity comes from the fact that they can now stand in for the ‘authentic people.’”
The result has been the emergence of “a monstrous moral order . . . irrigated by the blood of our citizens.”

THE COMMITMENT of the BJP and other groups to revamping the school curriculum and rewriting textbooks is a second front in the culture war. Soon after the 2014 election, Modi appointed Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, a historian active in the RSS-affiliated Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (BISY, or All-India History Reform Project) as the head of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the main governmental organization that funds research and scholarship in history. Rao—whose credentials have been questioned by some of India’s most eminent historians, including professors Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar—soon added three historians, all members of the BICY, to the historical research council. The motive underlying such appointments is clear. Mahesh Sharma, the minister for education, vowed to
“cleanse every area of public discourse that has been Westernized and where Indian culture and civilization and culture need to be restored—be it the history we read or our cultural heritage or our institutes [i.e., cultural and educational institutions funded by his ministry] that have been polluted over the years.”
One can be forgiven for concluding from this statement that India’s cultural heritage, thousands of years old, faces a mortal threat.

The BJP’s cultural revolution has not been limited to purging Western ideas. In BJP-ruled Rajasthan, textbooks featuring British writers and poets have been replaced with ones including (justly celebrated) authors such as Rabindranath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda. But also dropped were the writings of Ismat Chughtai, a feminist who wrote in Urdu (the language of Indian Muslims), despite being part of Indian culture, as well as Hindi stories deemed to contain too many Urdu words. The revised schoolbooks on political history give short shrift to the role of Jawaharlal Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi in India’s struggle for independence, portrays the Congress Party as initially ambivalent about the end of British rule, and elevates the role of Hindu nationalist personages such as Veer Savarkar, Gandhi’s rival. In Gujarat, which is also run by a BJP government, schools use textbooks on moral education suffused with Hindu philosophy at the expense of India’s other religions, authored by Dinanath Batra. Batra, for some of whose books Modi has written the foreword, drove the campaign that bullied Penguin India into withdrawing acclaimed University of Chicago historian Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, in 2014, on the grounds that she presented a sexualized interpretation of the religion. Similarly, Batra hasn’t shied away from redrawing maps of India to include the rest of South Asia (plus Tibet and Myanmar), in keeping with the Akhand Bharat (Undivided India) concept associated with Hindu nationalists.
No less insidious has been the outright falsification of educational materials. Some examples include the exaltation of Vedic science to the point of having children learn that it invented airplanes, with Rama’s flight from Sri Lanka to Ayodhya in the Hindu epic Ramayana constituting proof; that stem-cell research originated in ancient India; and that the Hindu monarch Maharana Pratap was not defeated by the Mughal emperor Akbar in the 1576 Battle of Haldighati—in which, incidentally, Akbar’s troops were led by a Hindu warrior, Raja Man Singh of Amber—but emerged victorious. Another textbook fails to mention that Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s first prime minister, or that Gandhi’s assassin was for many years a member of the RSS (as well as of the Hindu Mahasabha, another Hindu nationalist organization)—and indeed may have remained one, despite the movement’s insistence that he resigned in 1946.

Another feature of the Hindu nationalist cultural campaign has been attacks on intellectuals and students deemed to be “anti-national,” which effectively means that they dare to condemn the BJP and other Hindu nationalist organizations, or express ideas that supposedly besmirch Hinduism. What’s dangerous about the “anti-national” tag is that it verges on depicting criticism of a political party, its government, its leader and the idea of Hindutva as tantamount to treason. Figures well known in the West, such as novelist Arundhati Roy and the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen, have been vilified. But so have those who are well known in India but not necessarily abroad, like the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. After the RSS demanded that he be arrested and that his novel Maadhorubaagan (published in English as One Part Woman) be banned, the harassment and intimidation that followed led him to announce that he would stop writing altogether, urging his publishers to cease issuing his works and his readers to burn them.

The historian Malleshappa Kalburgi, a critic of Hindu nationalism and religious superstition, suffered a worse fate: he was assassinated in 2015. So were two other writers—Narendra Dabholkar, in 2013, and Govind Pansare, in 2015. Most recently, in September 2017, the journalist Gauri Lankesh was shot dead outside her home in Bangalore for likening RSS-style Hindu nationalism to fascism. The promiscuous use of the “anti-national” label to demonize the BJP’s critics, on occasion to deadly effect, has led dozens of Indian writers, filmmakers and artists to return their official awards, and others to protest the climate of intolerance. Hindu nationalist organizations have not been formally charged for these deaths, and may well not have been involved—but as with the attacks on those suspected of eating beef or raising cattle to supply the beef industry, their charged rhetoric has fostered an enabling climate of intolerance.
PREVIOUS INDIAN governments have certainly contributed to the Indian secular state’s erosion. Yet their decisions, though corrosive, were aimed at winning votes. The BJP’s Hindutva project, by contrast, is an ideologically driven movement to remake India’s polity and society by taking aim at its cultural, religious and intellectual pluralism.

Some of Modi’s critical political appointments make this abundantly clear. For example, in March 2017, Modi chose Yogi Adityanath—a firebrand Hindu priest with a number of criminal cases pending against him, including a charge of attempted murder—to serve as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, which contains nearly thirty-nine million Muslims, more than any another Indian state. Infamous for his inflammatory statements, Adityanath has, among other things, compared the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan to a terrorist, declared that if a Muslim kills a single Hindu then a hundred Muslims will be killed in retaliation, and claimed that Mother Teresa “was part of a plot for [the] Christianization of India.” Within hours of becoming chief minister, Adityanath ordered the closure of two slaughterhouses in the state. Ostensibly he did so on environmental grounds. But the real reason was all too apparent: these slaughterhouses were owned and operated by Muslims. Not surprisingly, online applications for RSS membership soared soon after his appointment.
The atmosphere of hostility toward Muslims that has emerged under Modi has seen a rash of attacks on hapless Muslims transporting cattle in various parts of the country, even when the animals were not intended for slaughter—which most Indian states ban. Among the egregious examples was the killing of a Muslim man, Pehlu Khan, in Rajasthan in April 2017. Even though he and his associates were legally transporting dairy cattle, a mob attacked their trucks and proceeded to beat them. Khan succumbed to his injuries. The police then registered cases against Khan’s associates, as well as his assailants. Modi has spoken out against such attacks, but has also made clear that he adamantly opposes the slaughter of cattle for beef—even though cow-slaughter bans in every BJP-ruled state deprive Muslims, Christians and a substantial portion of Dalits of a vital source of cheap animal protein.

Although the BJP’s anti-secular offensive operates at multiple levels (political, social and cultural), it is alarmist to draft requiems for Indian liberal democracy. The BJP has doubtless acquired considerable clout, but it nevertheless faces a range of obstacles. One is Hinduism itself. Ironically, the Hindutva faithful seem blind to the pluralism that marks their religion. Unlike most other faiths, Hinduism lacks a common scripture or universally agreed upon places of worship, and its capacious pantheon accommodates as many as 330 million deities, many confined to particular parts of India and unknown beyond them. As the American anthropologist Milton Singer argued decades ago, while some Hindus in northern India pay homage to the Sanskritic “great tradition” of Hinduism, what animates the lives of millions of Hindus across the country and beyond are the religion’s “little traditions.” They cannot easily be effaced or even absorbed into the monolithic Hinduism envisioned by the BJP and the rest of the Sangh Parivar.

The BJP’s efforts to create a Hindu state have also faced vigorous resistance from many quarters within India—and will continue to do so. Prominent Indian writers, public intellectuals and courageous journalists have spoken out against its anti-secular agenda despite risk to their own professional reputations and even personal safety. The new stories and nationwide protests that followed the murder of the journalist Gauri Lankesh attest to the continuing feistiness of India’s civil society and press. Hindutva-inspired efforts to restrict Indians’ freedom of speech, religious practices and diets will encounter legal barriers as well. In August 2017, the Indian Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the right to privacy constituted a constitutional right, and is moreover essential for securing other freedoms. In a similar vein, in a 2016 judgment totaling more than one hundred pages, the Madras High Court rejected the petition to ban Perumal Murugan’s book. The jurists declared archly, “If you don’t like a book, throw it away. There is no compulsion to read a book. Literary tastes may vary—what is right and acceptable to one may not be so to others.”

The BJP also faces a range of powerful regional political parties, reflecting India’s political and cultural diversity, that have gained prominence in recent decades. The sharp reaction in Tamil Nadu to Modi’s directive that Hindi should be used for official communication shows that the state will resist the BJP’s cultural program, precisely because it embodies the centralization and uniformity they reject. And because these parties have strong regional roots, the BJP will find that they are formidable opponents and, indeed, that it cannot govern effectively without their cooperation.
HINDU NATIONALISM can only do so much for Modi and the BJP. Their staying power will depend on whether they can deliver on the bread-and-butter issues that matter most to Indians. In the run-up to the 2014 election, Modi touted the “Gujarat miracle” and promised to do for the country what he had done for the state. It was not an empty boast: India’s economic growth averaged an impressive 7.5 percent from 2014 through 2017, and foreign investment increased substantially. But economic growth slowed to 5.7 percent in the second quarter of 2017 (from a peak of 9.5 percent in 2015). While most countries would envy even this lower rate, India’s economy must grow more quickly, because twelve million people enter its job market each year. Even if the economic slowdown proves to be a blip, a revival must produce substantial increases in job creation. Modi’s record on this front has not matched his rhetoric, and the outlook is not promising.
That’s not the only problem: economic reform has stalled. Indian national banks have $180 billion in bad debts on their books. The country’s infrastructure remains decrepit. Most notably, the BJP’s sudden move in 2017 to stanch corruption by suddenly invalidating five-hundred- and thousand-rupee notes (roughly 86 percent of the total in circulation) proved to be a blunder; shops refused to accept them, people swarmed banks to exchange the suddenly useless notes and employers were unable to pay workers. Slogans about a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Polity) won’t count for much if the BJP cannot meet the expectations created by Modi’s economic promises.
The BJP’s threat to Indian secularism, though serious, may not prove fatal. India’s cultural and political diversity, the robustness of its press and civil society, the continuing strength of its judiciary, and its strong regional opposition parties and plethora of civic groups serve as counterweights. Much has been written about the ways in which India’s size and unwieldiness hamper thoroughgoing reform and efficient governance. Thankfully, they also provide a powerful defense against chiliastic schemes of homogenization and centralization such as Hindutva.


Sumit Ganguly is professor of political science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. Columbia University Press will publish his next book, on the evolution of India’s defense policies. Rajan Menon holds the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the City College of New York/CUNY and is a senior research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. His most recent book, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, was published in 2016 by Oxford University Press.
Republished, with permission, from The National Interest.

Understanding Diplomacy in the 21st Century

22 Dec 2017

By Sascha Lohmann for Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP)

Traditional state-led diplomacy is in crisis, argues Sascha Lohmann. We still need designated specialists who manage cross-border relations, but since the 1980s they’ve lost the intellectual and practical hegemony they once enjoyed over their domain. Many people now see diplomacy “as an institution of international societies, not of individual states.” Well if that’s true, how do you reconcile these two seemingly incompatible approaches? Lohmann thinks stressing economic statecraft is one option.

This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in March 2017.

Diagnosing the Crisis of (State-led) Diplomacy or Trying to Save It?
The project Diplomacy in the 21st Century, initiated and organized by a retired ambassador and former political director of the German Foreign Office, can be understood as a manifestation of the lingering crisis of traditional state-led diplomacy as well as a potential vehicle for designing effective remedies. These two different understandings, the notion of crisis symptom as well as crisis treatment, could serve as normative axes around which the project’s research agenda might rotate, respectively. With regards to the first normative axis, the analytical focus would be to formulate a precise crisis diagnosis. This could be achieved by analyzing the increasing social and political participation of diverse actors in international relations coupled with rapid technological advances in communication as well as infrastructure sectors that taken together decisively impact the traditional practice of state-led diplomacy. With respect to the second normative axis, the project’s agenda could focus on providing analytically-backed arguments for why state-led diplomacy could remain relevant despite the profound social and political transformation.
Regardless of the normative Erkenntnisinteresse, any inquiry into the theory and practice of diplomacy in the 21st century must take into account the evolution of the understanding of diplomacy during the latter half of the 20th century and the plurality of analytical perspectives it has spawned. This is of utmost importance because choosing any of these different analytical perspectives has profound empirical and normative implications for how the practice of diplomacy will be conceived, evaluated and justified in the 21st century. In fact, different perspectives provide different answers to the fundamental question emphasized by Paul Sharp that “when it is that people begin to recognize aspects of their relations as diplomatic, why they do so, and with what consequences.” According to him, this can be attributed to “an uneasy consensus around the idea that diplomacy is whatever diplomats do, but it quickly falls apart again around the question of who are the diplomats.” As a consequence, analytical perspectives based on the traditional concept of state-led diplomacy might be useful for providing potential remedies for the challenges of this particular practice. In contrast, other perspectives that broaden the hitherto narrowly defined concept beyond the interaction among nation states could in fact better account for the marginalization of diplomats by rival state as well as transnational actors.
Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the empirical and normative implications of conceptual choices. In the first part, I provide a brief survey of the evolution of the concept of diplomacy based on two analytical perspectives on its empirical manifestation. In the second part, I try to combine both perspectives by focusing on the increasing use of economic state-craft in the form of international sanctions. Doing so might help to equally provide a concise crisis diagnosis while offering some hints at how it could be remedied.

Two Analytical Approaches to Understand Diplomacy
Etymologically, the term diplomacy most likely derived from the ancient Greek word diploun (for twofold or double) that was used in connection with diplomas (special documents carried by religious envoys that were supposed to ensure a safe journey). Beginning in the sixteenth century, the qualifier “diplomatic” came to refer to the science of codifying handwriting that was needed to authenticate the validity of diplomas issued by religious authorities. After the British parliamentarian Edward Burke replaced what had previously called negotiation by diplomacy at the end of the 18th century, the subsequent understanding of diplomacy would significantly depart from the original meaning of the term. In the course of an advancing modernity, diplomacy in theory and practice came to be understood as peaceful conduct of between consolidated political entities such as kingdoms and nation states. Toward the end of the 20th century, the prevailing conceptualization of diplomacy got substantially broadened which blurred the analytical focus.
The Traditional Perspective on Diplomacy
The traditionally narrow perspective on diplomacy focuses on those actions by specially authorized personnel which are concerned with the professional management of cross-border activities among different kinds of political communities such as tribes, kingdoms, empires, or nation states. Those actions encompass different means short of physical force. Firstly exercised by aristocrats, diplomacy had been increasingly practiced by the emerging bourgeois class since the 19th century. This homogenous cast of diplomats eventually exercised a more or less unrivalled intellectual hegemony over how diplomacy would be conceptualized. In this respect, they declared diplomacy among sovereign entities as the norm while regarding themselves as the only “real” diplomats, a powerful epistemic claim backed up by the symbolic and material resources provided through the institution of the nation state as well as a unique set of responsibilities. For a long time, these traditional diplomats could credit themselves for possessing superior knowledge about the art of diplomacy. Their practical wisdom left its mark on academia providing the intellectual springboard of the emerging discipline of International Relations. Consequently, their writings spawned a vast veteran’s literature chronicling encounters and achievements which long dominated the surrounding discourse on the concept of diplomacy. This state-centric bias was deeply entrenched in the traditional perspective on diplomacy as the “professional management of relations across sovereignties.” Furthermore, this traditional perspective on diplomacy emphasized its non-violent means, official character, and the many representative as well as communicative functions. According to Geoff R. Berridge, diplomacy’s “chief purpose is to enable states to secure the objectives of their foreign policies without resort to force, propaganda, or law.” Due to its non-violent character, diplomacy appeared as “the most important institution of [the] society of states.”
Painting a rather historical picture of the conduct of state-led diplomacy, this traditional perspective long dominated the IR sub-discipline of Diplomatic Studies which remained largely immune to outside theorizing by academics. Instead, the practice of state-led diplomacy mainly determined its theory. The long dominance of this narrow perspective on diplomacy was mainly responsible that “the study of diplomacy remains marginal to and almost disconnected from the rest of the field [of IR theory].” As result, “rigorous theoretical and careful empirical work on diplomacy […] is extremely sparse.” Hence, examples of further theorizing diplomacy along the lines of dominant IR paradigms remained marginal in the field of Diplomatic Studies. After the Cold War, this previously one-way interaction between the practice and theory of diplomacy would gradually become more mutual due to innovative theoretical interventions and fundamental social changes.

Broadening the Concept of Diplomacy
As James Der Derian argued that “it could well be that diplomacy has suffered from theoretical neglect to the extent that power politics has profited - in theory and practice. When diplomacy is construed as a continuation of war by other means, as is often the realpolitik case, then little intellectual energy needs to be wasted on the illumination of power’s shadow.” Starting in the late 1980s, a new generation of (post-positivist) scholars, including Der Derian, set out to uncover the powerful intellectual forces that had successfully fixed the uniform meaning of diplomacy as interactions among sovereign entities. Their critical interventions signaled the beginning of a decisive change in conceptualizing diplomacy beyond the traditional state-centric perspective.
As the academic field further expanded and compartmentalized, the different analytical perspectives on diplomacy were increasingly shaped by the mutual interaction of scholars and practitioners. This interaction was mainly driven by the loosening of the intellectual hegemony of state-sanctioned diplomats over the discourse about the concept of diplomacy. This loss of intellectual hegemony was in turn spurred by fundamental social and technological transformations in international relations which had grown more interconnected since the 1970s and even more rapidly after the end of the Cold War. The sources of this sea change were twofold: Firstly, many cross-border social exchanges were increasingly managed by a multitude of other state as well as non-state actors. Coupled with a host of transnational challenges such WMD proliferation, transnational violent extremism, climate change, and unregulated migration flows, this increasingly complex landscape required new forms of international cooperation well beyond the capacities of single nation states and thus traditional state-led diplomacy. Secondly, the fundamental transformation in international relations was in addition driven by rapid advances in communication technology. In fact, the emergence of modern mass media had already allowed a greater number of ordinary folks, including journalist as well as academics, to gaze behind the curtain of the Arcanum of state-led diplomacy since the late 19th century. After the end of the Cold War, however, the expanding numbers of actors and their access to information - again accelerated by the advent of the digital age - made the use official channels to secretly and thus confidentially negotiate hidden from public scrutiny much harder.
Taken together, these social and technological changes reduced the prerogative of state-led diplomacy as main mediator in international relations. The increasing acknowledgement of the importance of non-state actors undermined the exclusive application of the concept of diplomacy to politically authorized officials acting on behalf of nation states. As the understanding of diplomacy was broadened, conceptually it evolved into a kind of umbrella term for describing a wide-range of activities undertaken not only by state but any kind of non-state actors including businesses, civil society groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and supra-national institutions. Looking at the contemporary field of Diplomatic Studies, there now exist an elaborated academic discourse based on multiple theoretical perspectives on what diplomacy “really” is. This plurality of analytical perspectives emphasizes different processes and actors that can be conceptualized as being diplomatic. Costas M. Constantinou and Paul Sharp offered a useful typology of these different perspectives on diplomacy as: (1) specific instrument of consolidated political communities such as nation states or international organizations to create and maintain peace, (2) medium (context for solving inter-state conflicts) or (3) mixture of both. Another typology is provided by Christer Jönsson who differentiated diplomatic practices as (1) the content of foreign affairs [foreign policy analysis] (2) the conduct of foreign policy [theories of statecraft], (3) the management of international relations by means of negotiation [theories of bargaining], (4) the use of diplomatic personnel or services, (5) a particular manner of behavior or habitus, (6) a craft including a set of skills of diplomats.
Any of these different perspectives on diplomacy has profound empirical and normative implications. For example, scholarly accounts in the tradition of the English School that emphasize the role of diplomacy as an institution of international society undermine the outstanding role of traditional diplomats in international relations. As summarized by Christer Jönsson and Martin Hall, such a perspective would regard “diplomacy as an institution of international societies, not of individual states” which would be “crucial in forging compromise” among universal and particular propensities of different societies. Such a broad conceptualization of diplomacy is also adopted by other leading scholars of the field. Paul Sharp defined diplomacy as “[t]he way in which relations between groups [including state as well as non-state actors] that regard themselves as separate ought to be conducted if the principle of living in groups is to be retained as good, and if unnecessary and unwanted conflict is to have a chance of being avoided.” In his magisterial 2009 book, Sharp came close to equating diplomacy with tolerance and a peaceful coexistence among groups of people.
In sum, contemporary scholarship in the field of Diplomatic Studies finds diplomats as “the traditional ‘gatekeepers’ [to be] struggling to maintain relevance and [to be] reforming in a bid to hang on to the keys to the gate.” This challenge to traditional diplomatic practice has been traced by the increasing incorporating of many non-traditional diplomatic tasks as well as multi-faceted other duties. Nevertheless, such broader conceptualization of diplomacy bid farewell to the sole prerogative in conducting international relations in the face of the rise of a multitude of non-state actors transacting on different issues and regions on the basis of what has been described as polylateral diplomacy (Geoffrey Wiseman). Seen from these broader perspectives on the concept of diplomacy, the long-term prospects of an entire profession seem to be at stake.

Combining the Two Perspectives
As Alexander Stagnell has rightly warned, adopting such broad perspectives on the concept of diplomacy inevitably blurs the analytical focus. Doing so will ultimately diminish our understanding of key dynamics and processes of international relations. To prevent this outcome, both analytical approaches to study diplomacy should be combined by keeping the traditional concept of diplomacy as interaction among sovereign entities while at the same time broadening the conceptualizations of the means and ends involved. In fact, theoretically-informed accounts of the means and ends of state-led diplomacy are still rare. This seems especially troublesome with respect to the changing nature of statecraft. This change in the global patterns of how statecraft is conducted has been characterized by the declining utility of the use of military force. This is mainly due to three trends: Firstly, any use of military force among major powers possessing nuclear weapons would be overshadowed by a mutual assured destruction. Further, it is exacerbated by the emergence of post-heroic societies across Western countries where material affluence correlates positively with post-material values including a high intolerance, if not allergy, to casualties. Finally, a rapidly growing political and economic interdependence has fuelled what has been termed an “illicit globalization.” It associated unconventional threats such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, trans-national violent extremism as well as crime, and human trafficking cannot be effectively addressed by the use of military force.
As the political utility of the use of military force declined dramatically, the importance of economic statecraft has been greatly elevated in the 21st century in which markets will most likely emerged as the main battlefields of international relations. In fact, the use of economic sanctions is now the preferred policy option to effectively address a wide range of threats to national security. This is due to the fact that the use of economic sanctions is economically as well as politically less costly than military force but can be much more invasive than negotiations and propaganda. In particular, the use of financial sanctions turned out to be the go-to option to confront a vast array of conventional and unconventional challenges after the end of the Cold War.
Confronted with these changing patterns of how statecraft is being conducted, diplomats find themselves in a subordinated role in yielding its powerful economic instruments. At the same time, other actors within diplomat’s own governments, most notably officials from finance and economics ministries with no or only very little diplomatic experience and related skills, have encroached upon their formerly exclusive competencies. This ongoing marginalization might be a path-dependent result of the widespread disregard of economics that traditionally prevailed within the diplomatic corps, comprised mostly of aristocrats who viewed the emancipation of the merchant middle class with utter disdain. Regardless of its sources, the declining role of diplomats exhausts itself to serving as mere “orchestrators.” As such, they are tasked with organizing international coalitions of the willing in order to enhance its effectiveness for creating economic pain for those who are targeted. However, the much more important task of designing and implementing these economic measures is being done by a new cast of “financial warriors” who increasingly merge in their actions the responsibilities of diplomats as well as soldiers. So when the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that contained multilateral sanctions against the financing of terrorism in December 2015, only economic and finance ministers participated in the session. After 9/11, the U.S. State Department has struggled to keep the initiative in designing and implementing anti-terrorism sanctions vis-à-vis the National Security Council (NSC) within the White House as well as the Office for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) within the U.S. Treasury Department. In February 2015, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Intelligence David S. Cohen, one of the main architects of the severe financial sanctions against Iran, assumed the post of Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Up until now, there remain only two institutionalized career paths for institutional positions in the conduct of statecraft, namely those of soldier and diplomat. In order to account for the rising importance of economic statecraft, the two must either be complemented by a third career path or the existing education and vocational training of diplomats must be supplemented by theoretical and practical knowledge about how to best use economic instruments. Currently, both alternatives more or less lack required knowledge given the dearth of literature on those economic instruments of diplomacy which can be employed coercively in negotiations. In fact, existing scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on diplomacy’s relationship to the use of military force as a “diplomacy of violence.” Coercive diplomacy as a concept is not geared at defeating an adversary or enemy but to change its behavior. This is supposed to be achieved by relying on “threat-based bargaining process. […] defined as the deliberate and purposive use of overt threats to influence another’s strategic choices.” For Alexander George, the concept of coercive diplomacy would be entirely defensive as thus different from Thomas Schelling’s strategy that must therefore be more accurately termed as compellance.
As the literature on coercive diplomacy privileged the threat or limited use of military force, it has little to say about the economic instruments of statecraft. This neglect is mirrored in the recent “practice turn” in IR theory and Diplomatic Studies has produced insights into what diplomats normally do or what forms of diplomatic knowledge exist. In addition, recent scholarship has produced anthropological accounts of the various diplomatic roles or “scripts” official state representatives fulfill. While these findings might enhance our understanding about what is going on behind the walls of foreign ministries, it tells us little about the how state bureaucracies decide about the processes and actors that are involved in yield economic instruments of statecraft coercively.
Theorizing the Economic Means of Diplomacy
The theory and practice of diplomacy as related to economic statecraft has not been adequately dealt with in the discipline of IR, including its sub-field of Diplomatic Studies. Whereas some conceptualizations of economic diplomacy surely exist, such perspectives commonly focus only on its non-coercive aspects. Those are related to the promotion of business interests, the negotiation of trade agreements and institutions of economic governance as well as foreign aid. In this vein, scholars identified a trend toward a privatization of diplomacy through the spread of the multinational company and the intrusion of influential business groups into the policy-making process. However, the use of trade and financial sanctions as one of the most public and consequential part of “economic diplomacy” is often neglected. This is remarkable, given that Western as well as non-Western countries have frequently used their economic exchange relationships with other nations as means of coercive diplomacy.
Therefore, practitioners must look to other social science disciplines such as International Political Economy to find insightful treatments of the economic means of state-craft, although these accounts tend to be less interested in the conduct of statecraft. Also, there still exists great conceptual disorder in the study of the economic means of diplomacy commonly lacking a clear differentiation of instruments from the processes of their application as well as from descriptions and value judgments about the produced outcomes. While David A. Baldwin has masterfully avoided these common pitfalls in his seminal book Economic Statecraft, he regrettably shied away from connecting his superb analytical framework to the discussion about the concept of diplomacy, arguing that such a move “broadens the concept of ‘diplomacy’ so much that it makes it difficult to think in terms of diplomatic alternatives to economic techniques.” Baldwin rightly critiqued the overtly simplistic typology of the techniques of statecraft as either pertaining to war or diplomacy. But by rejecting the concept of diplomacy, however, his insightful thoughts failed to gain the attention of diplomats. This is unfortunate as his book can be read as a manual for diplomats who might want to regain lost ground in the conduct of economic statecraft.

About the Author
Sascha Lohmann is a fellow at The Americas Research Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).
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