This is so hilarious and disconnected from reality. Democracy doesn't happen on Signal. The biggest sign that democracy is well and good in India is that we have well-run elections and orderly change of elected officials, and we have strong laws on books and more sensible laws get passed as well and all this is done in the open in broad daylight (and broadcast on YouTube). Taxes are paid and collected and spent – yes, there is corruption but that's not a strike against democracy. Also, we are in a vibrant multi-party system and quite a large part of the population identifies themselves with one party or another and volunteer to do party-ideology building work. These are signs of a healthy functioning democracy. Whatever happens to those 13 apps or Signal, it won't matter much to the citizenry of India.
What an incredibly pessimistic definition of democracy. By your standards, even the People’s Republic of China could be considered very close to a functioning democracy, albeit with the caveat that they don’t allow multiple parties.
If free speech, independent media, lack of corruption, the right to privacy and the right to fair treatment by the law are not requirements to call something a democracy, then you are just making up your own definition of the word.
I’m not saying India isn't a democracy, but it’s not black and white, it’s a scale.
The Economists 2022 Democracy Index ranks India at #46 as a “flawed democracy”, together with countries like Poland and Italy. There’s no shame in that. Don’t let your own pride in your country blind you to the problems it has — no country is without them.
How does multi-party politics with vastly different ideologies across extremely diverse and regional electoral constituencies and massive well-run elections with orderly change of power happen? Free speech and free media are very much alive and well in India. Yes, corruption still exists and we can't wait to cut it down by another ten times soon – digitization has already helped in big ways.
Btw, I don't have to agree to your definition of democracy. India has its own culture and history of citizen representative governance that is thousands of years old. And I definitely don't have believe what ranking Economist gives India. The trust in old media is at an all time low.
Really? Rahul Gandhi (Opposition) was jailed for free speech? Governemnt banned BBC documentary and raid their offices in Delhi? Jailed comedian for free speech? Journalist visiting victim was jailed for 6 months is free media/free speech? Thretening to jail twitter employees if they don't remove tweets critical of this government is a free speech?
> Corruption
Didn't this government bought as many as MLAs as previous 5 government combined?
Did anything happened to Adani?
Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
> Really? Rahul Gandhi (Opposition) was jailed for free speech?
No he is being prosecuted for a law his party created. He looses the MLAship by a law created by his party. He has been tried in a court of law. He wasn't plucked from the clutches of his mother and thrown in jail.
> Governemnt banned BBC documentary and raid their offices in Delhi?
It was a propaganda piece. Modi was tried in court by opposition and you should read the remarks by supreme court on the nature of the allegations against him.
Not commenting on the others since I don't know about it.
> Didn't this government bought as many as MLAs as previous 5 government combined?
Yes along with residential plots on Venus.
> Did anything happened to Adani?
What should happen to him?
> Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
No?
I guess you don't understand free speech. Fighting a defamation case with powerful lawyers besides you in a court of law and losing it and then appealing it in a higher court, all while being out on bail and able to plan and campaign actively in an ongoing state election is the definition of justice system working fine in a democracy.
> Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
Explain please. I'm genuinely curious to know what these scams are.
PM Cards - Government told the court that they do not want under RTI.
5G Spectrum sold for as much as 2g. But 2g was a huge scam. Since 2g, Indian wireless usage increased by 10 folds. So either 2g was not a scam, and genius or 5g auction was a bigger scam. You decide.
Demonetization - UP had a state election. Gujarat had panchayat election. Since Modi/Shah knew about it, they converted their cash. It wasn't about the black money. It was about reducing oppositions cash holding during the election. I was in India, and I saw how BJP was able to distribute liquor & money in the villages while everyone was standing in line.
Thanks for agreeing with me about the all the other issues.
During Covid, Modi created a fund with the name "PM Cares" pretending that it was a government fund by using national emblem of India in the Fund's documentation. And it is illegal for the national emblem to be used for private entities. They took money from government organizations, and their staff salaries. The government banks showed banners on their websites to asking people . On demands of an CAG Audit, they backtracked and said this is a private fund and not subjected to government oversight.
Petitions filed under the Right to Information Act 2005 by the Indian Express to 32 public sector undertakings (PSUs) in India indicated that a total of ₹21050 million had been transferred to the PM CARES Fund, primarily from their corporate social responsibility budget allocations for 2019-20 and 2020–21. A petition for the same information that was made to the Prime Minister's Office was denied, with the Government of India stating that the Fund was not a public authority and did not have to account for the funds under the Right to Information Act. In December 2020, the Indian Express reported that a total of 101 public sector units had transferred ₹2,400 crore (US$300 million) from their corporate social responsibility funds, and a total of ₹155 crore (US$19 million) from staff salaries, to the PM CARES Fund.
I am getting "403 Forbidden" error for 2 out of 3 audit statements from the link that you shared.
It is indeed one of the biggest scam by Modi BJP government where they siphoned off over 10,000 crores of money on the name of providing coronavirus relief.
1. Why they used national emblem of India in the Fund's documentation while it is illegal for the national emblem to be used for private entities?
2. If it was a private fund, why they took thousands of crores of money from government organizations?
3. If it was a private fund, why they forced donations from government employees' salaries? [1]
4. Russian arms firm to donate $2 million to PM CARES Fund [2]
5. Instead of getting it audited by "Comptroller and Auditor General of India" why they are auditing it through a private Chartered Accountants firm that is closely linked to BJP? [3]
I am pretty sure criminal defamation is a jailable offence, no matter if you are the Leader of Opposition or not.
Mr. Gandhi was convicted by a court of law, not the executive or the legislature.
If you call all Modis criminals, be prepared to backup such a statement.
It is after all a reasonably large thing to be called a thief and a criminal if you are a merchant yes?
Trust in media is low because authoritarians and their apologists know how important it is to undermine anyone who can hold them to account for their crimes against the public good. They have learned to aggressively demonise journalists who come from a tradition of fact checking and responsible reporting, in favour of sycophantic hacks who will happily spew the authoritarian position in exchange for a few ducats or an invitation to the annual Despots' Gala.
Why do you think I'm pick-and-choosing anything. Old media with their kingmaker mindsets is just as free, alive and well as before to spew their BS opinions as news. But like never before, every individual has access to huge amount of social-proofed realtime information and communication – thanks to cheap smartphones armed with cheapest 4G data plans in their hands. This has led to everyone with a brain experiencing the gel-mann amnesia effect stronger than ever. And so, the trust in old media has dropped like a rock to the bottom of the ocean.
>> Free speech and free media are very much alive and well in India.
where :) ? They have become zombies.
>> Btw, I don't have to agree to your definition of democracy. India has its own culture and history of citizen representative governance that is thousands of years old.
This reminds me of the dialogue from Swades, which is so apt. Be proud but don't hide behind the ancient past. You are not living in the past, but here and the now, and that culture is once again being shackled not by outsiders this time but people you have anointed yourself.
please ignore. this is BJP cybercell doing blogspam. this looks copypasta, some carefully crafted text. I bet it would be searchable because it must've been used elsewhere already. let me try
You're a formidable commenter who has contributed a great deal to HN, often with minority views and that's fine. But we need you to take a few steps into the intended spirit of the site, because your comments have been trending in very much the inflammatory direction. Can you please review the guidelines and recalibrate?
Up until the Soviet Union split up, Western academics praised the USSR as the best thing in the world since sliced bread. I remember a story by Solzhenitsyn where he says a journalist came to their gulag and interviewed them. Since they were right before camp guards, they praised the Soviet system of 'correction through labor' since they liked breathing.
He assumed the journalist knew it was a scam and wouldn't dare publish it.
Years later, after Solzhenitsyn left the gulag, he moved to the West and he saw that interview was published word for word and the journalist wrote a piece praising the 'humane' Soviet system over America's 'cruel & evil' prison system!
Another example: during the Holodomor (Stalin's engineered famine) that killed 6 - 8 million in Ukraine, New York Times' Moscow Bureau chief Walter Duranty privately acknowledged to British intelligence that as many as 10 million folks had died. Publicly, he praised the Soviet system and said everything was abundant [0].
I could go on and on, but whether it's the USSR, Mao's China, or Castro's Cuba, there's a pattern of Western academics & media personalities praising brutally violent regimes.
Now, I'm not saying Putin's Russia is Christian & right wing; I'm simply pointing out how Western media never misses a chance to support the wrong guys.
It’s completely nuts how you’re being downvoted. My family wasn’t in America for all the anti-communist stuff, and indeed my home country was more Soviet aligned. But it’s apparent even to me that america media covers communism with kid gloves compared to any sort of right wing government.
Article titles include “how to parent like a Bolshevik” and “why women had better sex under socialism” and “why George Bernard shaw had a crush on Stalin.”
Unlike in US, fascist supporters in India are everywhere in STEM. I would give this person some credit though because usually they are very open in their support.
You seriously underestimate how many fascist supporters there are in STEM in the US (and Europe for that matter). Contrary to what you might assume from the public focus on DEI from big tech companies, there's a vast underbelly of reactionaries. Not to mention very influential people like Peter Thiel, who is openly hostile to the concept of democracy.
They also happen to often fall into the exact demographics right wing fringe theories cater to. Men in tech who grew up on a diet of nerd culture with sexist tropes will find it easier to believe evopsych nonsense that "women are just not biologically capable of achieving greatness in tech", white and Asian guys will find it easier to believe that they just lucked into being racially predisposed to being smarter. Worse, the discrimination perpetuated by these ideas may even be misinterpreted as evidence (because after all, they don't think sociology is a field that has any merit).
This is incorrect. You're not allowed to download TikTok onto a government issued device if you're employed by the government, but it is absolutely not banned in general.
They banned it for gathering data they are not supposed to just like India. But Element & other secure communication services are being banned for a tangential reason
Does that mean there was no democracy in India before Signal existed? It does seem like a big exaggeration to mark the "beginning of the end of democracy" just because a single app gers banned. I am curious how many people in India use Signal.
