MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Indians vote for better or for Modi?

Be quiet or else

Julian Assange was holding a copy of the book "Gore Vidal: History of the National Security State".

It's about events that led to the establishment of the massive military-industrial-security complex & the political culture that gave the SA the "Imperial Presidency".

India, the world largest democracy with a population of 1.3 billion headed to the polls on April 11 in a marathon election that will continue for six weeks.

The country's multi-phase general elections kicked off. Millions will vote in 91 constituencies across 20 states in the first phase of the polls.
Approximately 900 million voters are eligible to participate in the world's biggest electoral exercise.
The seven-phase elections will conclude on May 19. Results will be announced on May 23.
Voters from across 29 states and seven federally administered territories will elect 543 members to the lower house of parliament called as Lok Sabha or peoples house over the course of over a month.
The party or coalition with simple majority (273 seats) is invited to form a government. The MPs from the winning party or coalition elect their leader who then becomes the country's prime minister.
At least 2,354 political parties are registered with the Election Commission of India - an autonomous constitutional body - for the 17th Lok Sabha elections. However, only around 500 of them are expected to field candidates.
In the 2014 elections, 8,251 candidates from more than 460 political parties contested the élections.
Elections will also be held for the states assemblies in Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha and Sikkim.

More than 11 million election officials, including security forces, are being deployed across over one million polling stations to "conduct the biggest management event of any kind". More than 450 officers and staff work at Election Commission's headquarters in the capital New Delhi. Election officials and security forces travel by foot, road, trains, helicopters, boats and sometimes elephants to reach remote areas. In the 2009 general election, a polling station was set up in the Gir forest of western Gujarat state just for one voter.
India is home to about half a million transgender people, who were recognised by the Supreme Court in 2014. Approximately 39,000 voters have been identified as "third gender".
About 38.7 billion rupees ($552m) was spent to conduct the 2014 elections, according to the Election Commission estimâtes.
Voting in India is conducted by electronic voting machine or EVM, which was first introduced in 1982. More than 2.3 million EVMs will be used in 2019 elections as compared to 1.8 million in 2014.
To check foul play, vehicles transporting the EVMs will be fitted with GPS devices to monitor their movements.
The EVMs allows voet count to be completed in two to three hours compared to manual ballot paper counting, which could take 30 to 40 hours.
The electoral body also uses digital cameras, videotaping of speeches and the use of wireless networks during the election process.
In the current elections, Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machine will be used along with EVM at every polling station after opposition parties questioned EVMs' accuracy.
The VVPAT allows the voter to cross-check the votes.
"Ever since EVMs were introduced in 1982, they have been questioned and challenged, but they have stood judicial scrutiny and they stood the test of time," Quraishi, the former electoral body chief said.
"Now finally we have introduced VVPAT, which means a paper slip is generated, which you can use to crosscheck the figures in the machines."
About 553 million or 66 percent of all eligible voters turned out in the last election that gave Hindu right wing nationalist Narendra Modi a landslide victory – the first absolute majority in three decades.
However, India's election process should also address the allegations of voter deletions in some parts of the country and work to minimise the influence of money during the campaigning to ensure level playing field. Money power is seen as a major problem in the last couple of décades despite the legal mechanism on expenditure by candidates. These are violated with impunity because there's a lot of black money. Electoral bonds were introduced to bring transparency but they have achieved exactly the opposite since donors to political parties are not known to the public - electoral bonds are promissory notes that allow anonymous, digital donations to registered political parties. A solution could be to disclose who has donated to whom so that people can form their own opinion whether there is quid pro quo or whether it's a case of crony capitalism, say some critics.
Due to cheap data tariff, India is home to biggest markets for social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp.
To check misuse of social media, candidates are required to declare their social media account .
Facebook and Google have promised not to allow malicious content on their platform and will report fake news and hate speech to the election commission. However, Modi can easily follow the examples of Trump's and Bolsonaro's manipulation of social media to use fake news as means to be reelected..

The major candidates are:
Narendra Modi - incumbent prime minister and BJP leader
Rahul Gandhi - leader of the main opposition Congress party
Mamata Banerjee - chief minister of West Bengal state and leader of the Trinamool Congress
Akhilesh Yadav - leader of Samajwadi Party and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister
Mayawati - leader of Bahujan Samaj Party and former Uttar Pradesh chief minister
Tejashvi Yadav - leader of Rashtriya Janata Dal and former deputy chief minister of Bihar state
MK Stalin - leader of DMK party from Tamil Nadu
Navin Patnaik - chief minister of Odisha state and the leader of Biju Janata Dal
Shashi Tharoor - the leader of Congress party and a former minister
Pinarayi Vijayan - chief minister of Kerala state and the leader of Communist Party of India (Marxist)
Asaduddin Owaisi - one of the most prominent Muslim leaders of the country, the leader of MIM
Nitish Kumar - chief minister of Bihar state and the leader of Janata Dal (United).

The elections take 40 days because it involves more than one-eighth of humanity. Those voters will speak 22 official languages and thousands of dialects. Tens of millions will never have learned to read.
How do you conduct voting in a country where more than one in four people are considered illiterate?
Every Indian party is assigned a small symbol that becomes their identity in the eyes of voters.
For instance, the hand is synonymous with Congress.
The BJP's symbol is a lotus flower.
Smaller parties such as the Bahujan Samaj party have a Monopoly on the elephant.
Where it gets tricky is on polling day, when the Election Commission expressly prohibits parties from advertising Inside ballot stations. In a 2010 election in Gujarat state, an independent cndidate had chosen a cooling fan as his symbol. Amid 42°C températures, one zealous official demanded every fan be removed from the polling station, lest it improperly inflence voters...
All of the voters - literate and illiterate - will vote from the shadow of the Himalayas right down to the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago; in tribal communities without running water or electricity; in Delhi’s genteel southern neighbourhoods and in the teeming slums of Mumbai.
If that weren’t complicated enough, Indian law mandates that no voter be forced to travel more than 2km to their nearest polling station – in the world’s seventh largest country by landmass. Faced with this logistical challenge, India’s Election Commission holds votes in phases over the course of a few weeks, with results due on 23 May.
That allows its 11 million poll workers and security officers to administer the more than 800,000 polling stations that are required. Most importantly, it allows every voting booth to be secured by federal security forces – who are considered harder to influence or intimidate than local police. These caravans of workers and election machinery shuttle across the country by vehicle, helicopter, camel, elephant, bullock cart and boat. The total cost is put at more than £5bn.

Every Indian citizen over 18 is eligible to vote, provided they are not in prison, have not been declared “mentally unsound” or been convicted of electoral crimes such as bribery. The electoral roll this year includes 900m people – about three times the population of the US. More than 84 million of them will be first-time voters, making the aspirations of Young India a key election issue.

The franchise has been extended in recent years to include Indian citizens who reside Overseas.

The Election Commission touts its commitment to ensuring everyone gets to vote. In a district in Kerala, just a single man was registered to vote. Officials tried to persuade him to travel to a nearby booth. He refused, and so in the 2004 polls, a team of six people established a voting booth for him alone. (He kept them waiting about five hours before he showed up.)

People cast their ballots using a briefcase-sized, battery-powered electronic voting machine. The devices are highly controversial. Parties routinely claim the machines are being hacked, programmed to favour the party in power, or deliberately slowed in districts where the ruling party is weak. None of these allegations have ever been proved.

In 2017, the Election Commission invited parties to prove they could hack the voting machines – none were able to do so.

Staff from the commission say the voting machines are more environmentally friendly and prevent sabotage such as ballot stuffing or the theft or destruction of boxes of voting slips.

After voting, each person’s finger is marked with indelible ink, preventing them from voting twice.

The voting system for India’s lower house is first past the post (FPTP), meaning whoever gets the most votes in a particular seat is declared the winner, even if their share is well short of 50%. It leads to discrepancies between a party’s vote share and the number of seats it wins in parliament. In the last election, for example, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) won 31% of national votes and captured 282 seats – 114 more seats than it would have won under a proportional representation (PR) system, where seats are allocated based on a party’s share of votes.

Its main opponent, the Congress party, won 19% of the national vote but just 44 seats – 61 fewer than it would have won under PR. Turnout is normally around 60%, but in 2014 a record high 66.4% cast ballots, reflecting the momentum kicked up by prime minister Narendra Modi and his BJP.

For the vast majority of the country, the elections pass without a hitch.

Nonetheless, since the 1970s, violence has been a persistent feature of the polls, though never at a high enough intensity to seriously threaten the process. The most significant threat is in India’s so-called “red belt”, areas where the government has been fighting a Maoist insurgency for more than 50 years.

As in the USA, Brasil, and other countries, fake news may be an issue.

India’s online population is now 500m people – more than double what it was in 2014, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. The big political parties have built up networks of tens of thousands of online activists who help to push their messages out over Facebook, WhatsApp and newer apps such as the short-video service TikTok.

A lot of what is shared is fake, for example, photos currently making the rounds of a woman in a bikini that some claim is Sonia Gandhi, the matriarch of Congress. (The pictures actually show Ursula Andress, the first Bond girl.)

There is little India’s election authorities can really do to stem the flow of misinformation. But it has drawn up an agreement with major social media companies so try to take down fraudulent information as quickly as possible. The apps themselves are trying to partner with media companies to fact check information, and are warning their users not to believe everything they read.

Counting day is 23 May. Each district will begin counting ballots around 8am. In case of a clear result, as in 2014, we are likely to know the shape of the new government by noon. Counting in closer booths may extend to the evening. If no party claims a majority, we may see days of squabbling to form a governing coalition.

The process of building coalitions can be even messier than the campaign. Parties are frequently accused of trying to lure opponents to cross sides with promises of ministries, projects for their constituents – or old fashioned suitcases of cash.

The past few years has seen the rise of "resort politics", in which party leaders sequester their members in five-star resorts, often taking their phones away, to prevent them from being poached by the other side.

After crossovers became endemic in the 1960s and 1970s – one Haryana state legislator changed parties three times one day in 1967 – an anti-defection law was inserted into the Indian constitution.

On paper, it bans elected members from changing parties or joining new ones after the polls, but in practice, the law is inconsistently applied and party-shopping still occurs.

The elections decide the makeup of the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house. The group that can form a governing coalition becomes the government and their leader becomes the prime minister.

India’s upper house, or Rajya Sabha – similar to Britain’s House of Lords – is made up of notable people chosen by the Indian president and people elected by members of India’s 29 state assemblies.

The main contenders with a nationwide presence are:

Modi and his supporters would say that India is finding its feet as a world power. It has a leader who has used his big majority to cement some important and long-delayed reforms, such as a goods and services tax, the world's largest free medical scheme for the poor and a national bankruptcy law.

But all the pillars of “new India” are yet to be laid. Modi supporters say he needs another term to implement land reform, bring in a national social security scheme and continue rolling out Aadhaar, the world’s largest biometric identity database. His Hindu nationalist base would add: he needs more time to reshape the nation’s character and institutions from the secular, multicultural vision of India’s first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru, into the essentially Hindu nation the country really is at its core.

His opponents, including the Congress party president Rahul Gandhi, say Modi has spent five years undermining the country’s free institutions: meddling in the supreme court, intimidating the media, undermining the reserve bank and encouraging police to look the other way as Hindu mobs target Muslims and other minorities. They say he has failed to create jobs, is ruining India’s reputation as a tolerant country, and is running a “billionaire Raj”, favouring some of the country’s wealthiest corporate titans over the poor.

Modi’s strongman style has prompted a fierce backlash. Opposition leaders with divergent agendas have put them aside to form anti-Modi alliances. Regional politicians such as Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal say they are now campaigning to “save democracy”. In Utter Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, bitter arch-rivals Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati have banded together to try to deny Modi another majority. It is clear that no one party will be able to dethrone the Indian prime minister, but a broad coalition of leaders may be able to pull it off.

India’s political scene is extraordinarily complicated, with thousands of candidates and hundreds of parties jostling to forge alliances that cut across caste, religious and linguistic divisions. Even pollsters struggle to comprehend it, and few have been able to accurately predict the result of the last three national élections.

In December, Modi’s BJP lost three state elections in a single day. Echoing that downturn, most polls in the first two months of this year showed the BJP shedding seats and failing to win a majority of parliament, though it was still in the largest party in the house. But since India jets crossed into and bombed Pakistan last month, in the worst clashes between the neighbours in decades, Modi’s support appears to have rallied. Three polls so far in March have shown him winning a narrow majority, though the wisest observers treat the opinion data with scepticism.

National security has dominated the election campaigning in the wake of a military stand-off with neighbouring Pakistan following a suicide attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is seeking reelection, has used national security and a promise to build a temple for Hindu god Ram to galvanise his Hindu support base.

In the past five years of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, social tensions have gone up due to attacks on minority groups such as Dalits and Muslims.

The opposition parties, including the Congress party, have questioned the government's handling of job crisis - the worst in 45 years - and agrarian distress.

Modi's main challenger, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party has promised minimum income job guarantee (Rs 6,000 or $87 per month) for the poorest 20 percent of the population.

Though a number of Indian cities have been included in the most polluted list, pollution has failed to become an election issue.

Women representation in Lok Sabha has been low despite India electing a woman prime minister, Indira Gandhi, in 1966. In the outgoing Lok Sabha, only 59 lawmakers were female.

India is home to 172 million Muslims, who are underrepresented in the democratic institutions. In the last parliament, only 22 MPs were Muslims - the lowest since India conducted its first elections in 1952.

The issues that matter to India’s 1.3 billion citizens can vary from district to district. Campaigns are finely tuned to appeal to particular constituency. In one notable example, members of the Hindu nationalist BJP were arguing they would try to curtail the slaughter of cows in a majority Hindu region of the country, while arguing they would improve the quality of beef in a majority Christian one. But there are some broad national issues:

Farming. Indian farmers are ailing. Years of droughts and crop failures have wrecked their businesses. The government has favoured policies that keep food prices low to benefit the country’s urban masses – but that’s bad news for those who actually grow the food. Tens of thousands of farmers have marched on Delhi regularly in the past three years to make their unhappiness known.The Modi government has sought to win them over with a series of cash handouts, but it is unclear whether it will be enough to win back a constituency of farmers and farm workers that makes up nearly half the country.

Jobs. Modi stormed to power in 2014 in part on promises to create millions of jobs. Many young Indians, hungry for work and frustrated by corruption, enthusiastically backed him to get the country’s economy moving. But it is becoming increasingly clear the Modi economy is actually shedding work, not creating it. In January, the Business Standard newspaper obtained a jobs survey the government had had for weeks but refused to release. It revealed that India’s unemployment rate had grown to 6.1%, the highest rate in 45 years.

India and Pakistan’s recent tit-for-tat air strikes have put national security high on the election agenda. Modi has fashioned himself as the nation’schowkidar (security guard), even changing his Twitter handle to add the title.

Modi is the staunchest Hindu nationalist ever to occupy the prime minister’s office. His victory has empowered the Hindutva movement, which argues that the country’s first leaders miscast it as a secular republic made up of diverse communities. A strong Modi victory in 2019 would be a green light for Hindutva activists to continue rewriting school books, reforming the law to protect sacred cows, and agitating to build a Hindu temple on the ruins of a medieval mosque in the north Indian town of Ayodhya.

Modi has governed with an iron fist and resisted the normal checks on an Indian prime minister’s power. He has meddled in independent institutions such as the reserve bank, universities, the supreme court, the national statistics office and the media. (Modi has still never given a press conference in India as prime minister.) He has been accused of misusing the country’s police and intelligence services, with some opposition leaders now saying they only speak on the phone using the encrypted messaging service WhatsApp – fearing that their phone calls and data use are being monitored.

Now let's focus on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was voted into power five years ago with a comfortable majority. The bad news is that he is seeking another term for his Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP and like the likes of Trump, Bolsonaro and Netanyahu, may win. That is what I wrote about him when he was first elected:

A Índia e o galope do extremismo

While in 2014, Modi campaigned under the slogan "sabka saath, sabka vikas" (collective efforts, inclusive growth), this year the prime minister has made nationalism the pillar of his electoral strategy. The military escalation with Pakistan in February gave his campaign a significant boost and helped him launch what very much looks like a hyper-nationalist blitzkrieg.
Almost every electoral rally Modi leads, features pledges to defeat Pakistan, photographs of slain soldiers, and a barrage of militaristic rhetoric. Just days before polls were to open, the prime minister addressed first-time voters, saying: "Will you dedicate your vote to the brave men who conducted Balakot air strikes, to the CRPF men who lost their lives in the Pulwama attack?"
India's air strikes on the Balakot region in Pakistan in the aftermath a deadly attack on a military convoy in Pulwama district of India-administered Kashmir managed to reverse the downward trend in Modi's popularity ratings. In January this year, his approval rating was hovering around 32 percent. This came after his party lost by-elections in three key states Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh held late last year.
After the Pulwama attack, however, Modi's rating shot up to 62 percent, as he rode on the "revenge" wave that swept through the country.
As India descended into anti-Pakistan sentiment, the many failures of the BJP government were conveniently swept under the carpet. The promises for economic development and vigorous job creation never materialised in the past five years. Modi's economic record appears mixed at best.
While he managed to push through some business-friendly reforms that facilitate business activities such as cross-border trade and construction permits, and has overseen GDP growth reaching seven percent, he has failed to enforce economic changes to improve the lot of the majority of Indians and lift their standard of living.
Last year, farmers marched barefoot in the national capital to remind the country of the rural and agrarian distress. In January this year, millions of workers went on strike against the Modi governments anti-labour policies. Among their complaints were a lack of jobs and the merger of state-run firms that were struggling to sustain themselves.
The job situation in India has gone from bad to worse. A report by the National Sample Survey Office leaked in February revealed that unemployment in India is at 6.1 percent - the highest it has been in 45 years.
The ill-conceived and executed demonetisation programme, which was hailed as one of the most heroic and bold decisions by the Modi government, failed miserably, to the extent it does not find a mention as an achievement in the party's election manifesto.
But while Modi failed to fulfil his 2014 campaign promise to bring the "good days ahead" and an era of nation-wide prosperity, he still left his mark on India. Much has changed in the country in the last five years, often in a bad way.
Some of the most powerful institutions of the country have been undermined. Aspersions have been cast on the Supreme Court of India, the constitutional temple of the country. In an unprecedented move a year ago, four Supreme Court judges decided to convene a press conference and speak up about being forced to work in a problematic atmosphere that could disrupt the fairness of judicial processes.
The Central Bureau of Investigation, India's premier law enforcement agency, where people's hope for justice rests, has been mired in controversy after its director Alok Verma was removed - a move many have seen as politically motivated.
Independent institutions like the Reserve Bank of India have witnessed a churning and controversial exits. Government officials and non-compliant administrators have complained in off-the-record conversations of surveillance by the state. Public servants, ministers, politicians, and the general population now prefer talking on WhatsApp, fearing phone tapping.
India's civil liberties have also taken a hit. Minorities have increasingly become the target of mob violence. Hate speech has been normalised, while human rights activism has been increasingly suffocated and at times even criminalised.
Critical voices have been languishing behind bars. Civil rights activist Sudha Bhardwaj, who has campaigned for minorities' land rights of and who was recently honoured by Harvard Law School as one of 21 women inspiring change, has been incarcerated since October last year for crusading against unjust practices of the state.
Over the past five years, India has become a nation that increasingly chooses to stigmatise its own citizens on the basis of caste, religion, and economic status in clear violation of the basic tenants of the Indian constitution.
Modi's disregard for civil liberties is only paralleled by his disdain for the free press. In his five-year term, he has not held a single press conference or answered direct questions from the media.
Pressure on mainstream media has increased and many prominent editors and journalists have had to leave the newsrooms of major outlets. Just a few days ago, journalist Kishorechandra Wangkhem was released after spending four months in jail for a YouTube video critical of Modi and the BJP. Wangkhem who was booked under the draconian National Security Act was released only after a judicial order from the High Court of the state of Manipur.
Real news in India has now been replaced by half-truths, while fake news has flooded India's social media, making its way to government statements.
For every criticism of the excesses of this government, the rightful critics are given a skewed version of India's past. They are reminded of the Indian partition, of the self-serving nature of freedom fighters like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi; India's history is being re-written, re-imagined to build the Hindu-nationalist narrative as the redeeming idea for the country.
India is at a critical juncture in its history. Indian academic and author Pratap Bhanu Mehta recently pointed out: "There is something happening to our democracy which is mutilating the democratic soul. We are becoming a nation of resentful hearts, small minds and constricted souls."
The 2019 election is more than about Narendra Modi and the BJP, the Congress or any other opposition party - it is about the character of their nation and the preservation of its democratic and pluralistic foundations.
Another term for Modi and the BJP would give them the mandate to proceed with their Hindutva experiment with impunity and expand it. This election will indeed be a battle for India's values and soul.

VENEZUELA

PALESTINA
bds

On April 10 the man regarded as the founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel (BDS), Palestinian activist Omar Barghouti, headed to the airport outside of Tel Aviv intending to embark on a U.S. speaking tour and attend the wedding of a relative. Despite possessing a valid visa through 2021, he was prevented from boarding.

According to a statement released by the Arab American Institute (AAI), the group sponsoring his talks, Barghouti was told his travel block was due to an “immigration matter.” Airline staff told him they had orders from the U.S. Consulate in Tel Aviv and and U.S. immigration services not to let him on the plane.

The denial sparks questions whether legislation circling on Capital Hill to curtail boycotts against Israel has come with a shadow policy to prevent its most vocal advocates from entering the country.