Gagging Democracy India-Style

India, the world’s most populous country, is ruled by Narendra Modi who is the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP. He first became prime minister in 2014 and has been reelected twice since though in 2024 with much lower margins. Before coming to power in Delhi he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat where he presided over a major massacre of Muslims. Modi and the BJP promote Hindutva, Hindu majoritarianism. It is laced with Islamophobia. Modi is allied with India’s billionaire class who control the country’s major media and function as cheerleaders for a regime that gags democracy, free speech, and dissent.

Recorded at Surrey Public Library.

Speaker: P. Sainath

P. Sainath is an award-winning independent journalist who writes about rural India. “I cover the people who live at the bottom end of the spectrum,” he says. He is the founder and editor of PARI, the People’s Archive of Rural India. He has taught journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic College in Mumbai for more than 35 years and has held visiting appointments at UC/Berkeley and Princeton. He is the author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts and The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom.

Description from www.alternativeradio.org