Guyanese crude cargo bought by Exxon sets sail for Europe 

Tue, April 26, 2022, 

By Marianna Parraga

HOUSTON, April 26 (Reuters) - A tanker carrying Guyana's first share of oil from a recently inaugurated floating production facility has set sail for Rotterdam, tanker monitoring data showed on Tuesday.

South America's newest crude producer, which has secured billions of dollars in investment from an Exxon Mobil, Hess Corp and China CNOOC consortium, earlier this month fetched $106 million from the sale of 1 million barrels of Unity Gold light sweet crude to Exxon.

Exxon won the purchase through a competitive bidding process following the expiration of a previous deal with a unit of Saudi Aramco for marketing the government's share of crude.

The Bahamas-flagged Suezmax vessel Dimitrios is expected to deliver its cargo on May 10, according to Refinitiv Eikon data.

The Guyanese government, which will receive a larger volume of crude produced off the country's coast this year, has not revealed how it will manage future oil sales.

But Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo in February said Guyana was exploring cutting out the "middleman" and directly selling its share of crude from the country's two floating production, storage and offloading facilities in a move to save on marketing fees.

Exxon did not reply to a request for comment on the final customer or destination of the cargo.

Guyana's government has engaged in previous talks with India to directly sell crude to the Asian nation's refineries, but the parties have failed to reach an agreement over prices.

Exxon earlier on Tuesday said it found oil in three new wells drilled off Guyana's coast, raising recoverable oil and gas potential from its discoveries to nearly 11 billion barrels.

(Reporting by Marianna Parraga Editing by Chris Reese)

Sudan
Violent attacks leave tens of thousands without access to healthcare in West Darfur

Project Update 29 April 2022

People in parts of West Darfur state, Sudan, have been left without all essential healthcare services after a fresh wave of violence started on 24 April around Kreneik town, with fighting reported in El Genina. In both locations, teams from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) supported the two main health facilities. Four days after the attacks, the situation remains fragile and tense, and our teams continue to hear the occasional shots being fired.

Violence and shooting also took place within healthcare facilities, with four hospital staff killed and a number of patients and staff flee in fear for their lives. Our team was informed that all patients had fled; including mothers who had their children on oxygen, interrupting their treatment and fleeing with them.

“The inpatient department was full of patients, as well as the outpatient department and triage area,” says Emily Wambugu, MSF Project Medical Referent working in El Geneina Teaching Hospital at the time of the attack. “There were approximately 200 people waiting for consultations.”

Insecurity has spread over recent months to different parts of West Darfur, making it extremely difficult for MSF to assist communities who have been displaced and affected by the recurrent attacks. The most recent violence that started in Kreneik has once again led terrified families to flee from makeshift settlement to makeshift settlement, in a desperate search for safety.

“It is stressful, because when you think about the hospital and all the lives we have been saving every day, very desperate children coming for hospitalisation, and now we are not able to treat anyone of them,” says Wambugu. “It’s not easy for us, but there is nothing we can do, as we still feel it is not safe to move out and move to the hospital.”

MSF runs different projects in West Darfur state. Until the most recent attack, we provided humanitarian assistance and healthcare services to both internally displaced and local communities. We ran fixed and mobile clinics in and around El Geneina town, and supported the El Geneina Teaching Hospital and the main healthcare facility in Kreneik town.

An MSF team has since been able to assess the status of some healthcare clinics, and visited several gathering sites with newly displaced families that had run for their lives from the fighting inside El Geneina. We are closely following the security situation to restart medical activities and to adapt the movement of mobile clinics to new sites where people are now sheltering, to provide much needed medical care and humanitarian assistance as soon as it is safe to do so.


MSF has been working in Sudan since 1978. In recent years our operations have focused on Khartoum, Gedaref, Blue Nile, Kassala, East Darfur, West Darfur, South and Central Darfur states, with emergency teams launching interventions in other areas as needed.

Hong Kong student sentenced to 5 years in jail for sending pro-independence messages on Telegram

Michelle De Pacina
Fri, April 29, 2022

An engineering student from Hong Kong has been sentenced to five years in jail for advocating the city’s independence from the Chinese Communist Party in his messages sent on instant messaging app Telegram.

Lui Sai-yu, a 25-year-old undergraduate student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, was charged with “incitement to secession” in April 2021 under the 2020 Beijing imposition of the national security law.

Lui was originally sentenced to 3 years and 8 months by Judge Amanda Woodcock when his guilty plea reduced one third of his sentence; however, it was increased to 5 years on Friday after prosecutor Ivan Cheung argued his crime was of a “serious nature.” Woodcock was bound by Article 21 of the security law to sentence the student to at least five years.

The student was first arrested in September 2020 following a police raid in his flat in Fanling. Police seized an extendable police baton, two military knives, a pepper ball launcher and protective gear.

In exchange for the prosecutors dropping two charges from his possession of firearms and offensive weapons, Liu pleaded guilty on Wednesday.

The prosecutor said Liu co-managed the Telegram platform “Channel of Anti-Communism and Hong Kong Independence” to call for independence. Investigators found more than 1,000 offending messages sent by Liu that included statements such as “Liberate Hong Kong; revolution of our times,” “Hong Kong independence, the only way out” and “Fight against totalitarianism.”

“By choosing the forum of an open Telegram channel, the defendant and the other administrator intended to reach out to as many as possible,” the judge said. “This offense was committed during a time when there was social unrest and heightened anti-government sentiment. In this context and in such a social climate the offense aggravated the risks of public and social disorder.”

Liu’s lawyer, Edwin Choy Wai-bond, is considering an appeal. He claimed that posting on Telegram differs from speaking in public, especially since his client is not a well-known person and only has limited influence.

In a mitigation letter, Liu told the judge that his intention was to “let the voice of people be heard.” He referenced the 2019 Hong Kong protests, which was fueled by citizens’ fear of China removing the freedoms promised to the island when it was returned from British to Chinese rule in 1997. Authorities, however, say the law does not erode any freedoms and was meant to restore stability after the protests.

“It was difficult for an energetic and idealistic young man to keep completely uninvolved,” Lui wrote. “My love for Hong Kong was no less than anyone else’s.”

Lui is the fourth person to be jailed under the 2020 national security law that criminalizes any acts of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign or external forces with up to life imprisonment.

Crisis in Sri Lanka a Wake-Up Call for all South Asians

Talk in Sri Lanka about more state intervention to tame unscrupulous privatisation and Sinhalese hyper-nationalism is a warning for all South Asians to learn from similar mistakes.

Partha S. Ghosh
12 Apr 2022


Most South Asians are used to viewing our region through primarily a northern prism. That is, we tend to focus on things that happen on the India-Pakistan front. In earlier decades, our calculations used to hinge upon the role played by the United States. Of late, the Americans have been supplanted, though not yet altogether replaced, by the Chinese. Against the background of the recent developments in Sri Lanka, let us reverse this geographical bias for a change. In the spirit of the Nepal-founded and now Sri Lanka-based magazine, Himal Southasian, let us view the region through a southern prism. The economic turmoil in Sri Lanka may give us some clues to this new approach.

Three things have happened in the region in quick succession. One, the BIMSTEC Summit was held in virtual mode; two, political turmoil in Pakistan that portends yet another spell of army rule; and three, the virtual collapse of the Sri Lankan state until recently, the poster boy of the region. After all, less than a decade ago, in their voluminous An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (2013), Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen highlighted Sri Lanka’s social indicators as much better than all South Asian countries, India included.

What went wrong so suddenly? All analyses put together point to five principal explanations. First, the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the three mainstays of the nation’s economy: tourism, tea trade, and remittances from expatriate Sri Lankans working in West Asia. Second, the sudden ban on chemical fertilisers in May 2021 forced farmers to switch to organic farming. The political leadership sold the ban as an environmentally conscious decision, but its real goal was to preserve the nation’s dwindling foreign exchange reserves. The outcome was an unprecedented decline in agricultural yield, which pauperised much of the rural population.

Third, the populist policy of reducing direct taxes, although it did temporarily buoy the middle and upper classes, led to a reduction in much-needed foreign exchange reserves over the longer run. Without stable forex reserves, imports of essential commodities such as oil and several daily-use consumer items, including milk and other dairy products, were heavily affected. K. Amirthalingam, an economics professor at the University of Colombo, joked: “We are an island, and we import tinned fish,” pointing to the government’s “abject policy failure”.

Fourth, the deteriorating inter-communal situation in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday terror attacks of 2019 disrupted the economy in certain critical sectors. Since the Sri Lankan Muslims (also called Moors) are traditionally a trading community, popular opprobrium against them inevitably affected the domestic trading scene. Tourist inflows also came down considerably. And the fifth and last explanation, albeit certainly not the least, is the so-called debt trap allegedly laid by the Chinese. Through massive infrastructure development loans, the most prominent among which is the 99-year lease of the Hambantota port complex, the Sri Lankan leadership has seemingly mortgaged the future of the economy to Chinese control, rendering Sri Lanka into a virtual vassal state.

While each of the above explanations is largely well-founded, it is worth noting that barring the COVID-19 factor, the remaining four are the outcome of national politics. Accepting or rejecting foreign assistance is primarily the prerogative of the donee. To put the blame upon the donor if/when things go wrong amounts to putting the cart before the horse. It is indeed frivolous to say that big powers do not influence the politics of small nations, but it is also elementary wisdom that, in the ultimate analysis, the buck stops at the gate of the recipient nation.

No political discussion on Sri Lanka these days is complete without reference to the rivalry between India and China. In their attempts to compete for influence in the corridors of power in Colombo, each has sought to influence the Sri Lankan political class. Some have pointed to recent Chinese success in these endeavours as leading inevitably to increased penetration into the island’s economy. Recent statements made by the Chinese leadership at the highest level clearly point towards that goal.

How will India meet the challenge? The Indian elephant has an in-built handicap to face the Chinese dragon. Besides the relative size of the economies, in which China enjoys a massive advantage vis-à-vis India, my sense is that the Sri Lankans, effectively meaning the majority Sinhalese community, entertain a deep-seated suspicion about Indian intentions. This suspicion emanates mainly from the age-old Sinhalese-Tamil ethnic conflict. This element should be central to our understanding of Sri Lanka’s India policy and, by extension, its China policy.

Although they constitute almost 75% of the nation’s twenty-two million population, the Sinhalese suffer from a minority complex vis-à-vis the 70-plus million Tamils who reside a short hop across the Palk Straits in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. (This demographic psychosis is also evident among Hindus in India today. Despite outnumbering the country’s Muslim population, many continue to subscribe to a ‘Hindus are in danger’ phobia, deviously encouraged by right-wing Hindu leaders who point to the larger global Muslim population).

The general preference of the Sinhalese for China over India can also be understood through the old maxim that familiarity breeds contempt. Arguably, the Indian decision to send the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka in 1987 to play honest broker in the Sinhalese-Tamil civil war was particularly unhelpful. Contra expectations of the Rajiv Gandhi government, the deployment earned the trust neither of the Sinhalese nor the Tamils. Introducing a foreign army to quell a civil war is always fraught with risk, especially so when both contending sides view that army as partisan.

One last point. The Sri Lankan crisis has highlighted the salience of that enduring puzzle about long-term growth and development: is a free economy with less social spending the way to proceed, or should one invest in a welfare state with limited ‘growth’ but greater mass well-being? In the early 1990s, when the failure of the state-controlled economy of India seemed unbearable, the Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh duo chose to open the economy gradually. In the short term, the results were dramatic, but much of that early promise appears on the verge of collapse today as jobless growth has created unprecedented levels of unemployment.

Sri Lanka anticipated India’s 1991 moment by almost twenty years. In the late 1970s, its ‘socialist’ model was replaced by an open economy, which did indeed deliver positive results for successive decades. But now that innings appears under severe strain, and people are once again talking about greater state intervention to tame the toxic mix of unscrupulous privatisation and renewed Sinhalese ethnic hyper-nationalism. The Sri Lankan crisis has thus come at the right time. It is a warning to all South Asians—do not just bail us out of our mess, but also learn from our mistakes, lest you suffer our fate too.

Postscript: No discussion on South Asia can be complete without reference to the state of democracy in the region. All global indicators suggest a downslide, thanks in no small measure to developments in the region’s two traditionally stable democracies, India and Sri Lanka. Today, Nepal is the lone South Asian country to offer some hope.

Kanak Mani Dixit, one of Nepal’s leading commentators, was not off the mark when he wrote in the Nepali Times: “Howsoever decrepit the polity might look and feel, for now, Nepal is a haven within South Asia for its openness, fundamental freedoms and inter-community relations. It must resist the movement towards ‘closed society’ that is evident in the rest of the region including Big India, and nor should the liaison with Beijing require compromising on existing freedoms.”

The author is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. He was an ICSSR National Fellow and professor of South Asian Studies at JNU. The views are personal.

UK Opposition Criticises Boris Johnson's Visit to Bulldozer Factory in India

Apr 29, 2022

PTI/London: The Opposition parties in the UK have questioned in Parliament Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s decision to visit a British-owned bulldozer factory in Gujarat during his visit to India last week.

A number of Labour Party MPs, including Indian-origin Nadia Whittome, questioned Johnson’s visit to the JCB factory in Halol despite the use of some of the company’s equipment in the controversial demolition of properties in north-west Delhi in the wake of recent communal clashes in Jahangirpuri.

The factory visit had created a stir across social media, pointing to the use of JCB equipment in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's “anti-encroachment” drive in Delhi, an issue referred to the courts.

During an “Urgent Question” tabled in the House of Commons on Tuesday by the Scottish National Party (SNP) member of Parliament, Ian Blackford, the Opposition raised cries of “where is he?” after a junior minister was left to answer questions on the topic of “Prime Minister’s Visit to India”.

Vicky Ford, the Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), was deputed on behalf of the government and said the visit would “supercharge” the India-India trading relationship and that the issue of human rights is regarded as equally important.

 “We do not pursue trade at the exclusion of human rights,” said Ford.

 “We regard both as an important part of a deep, mature and wide-ranging relationship with our partners. The partnership with India is very important for both our countries,” she said.

"If we have concerns, we raise them directly with the Government of India. Our network of deputy high commissions will continue to follow the reports closely, while also recognising that it is a matter for India,” Ford said.

Delhi: Left Parties Condemn BJP’s 

‘Bulldozer Politics’ Under the Garb of

‘Anti-Encroachment’ Drive

It is the patriotic duty of every citizen to save the country

from communalism and plunder of national assets, says

Sitaram Yechury.

Ravi Kaushal
28 Apr 2022


New Delhi: Left parties held a protest in Jantar Mantar on Thursday against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) “bulldozer politics” under the garb of anti-encroachment drives.

Addressing the gathering, Sitaram Yechury, general secretary, Communist Party of India (Marxist), said the latest drive by BJP governments to demolish houses and destroy livelihoods is aimed at altering the secular character of the country.

Thursday’s protest had been called to primarily oppose the action of North Delhi Municipal Corporation in Jahangirpuri where the authorities demolished shops and damaged carts after a clash over Hanuman Jayanti Procession on April 16. BJP’s Delhi president Adesh Gupta had reportedly written a letter to the corporation to teach a lesson to the “rioters”.

However, the Supreme Court put a stay on the demolition drive after it was found that the corporation did not follow due procedures to evict people.

Yechury said it was “clear now that this is indeed a planned conspiracy where the BJP and the Centre are active participants. It is no coincidence that our Prime Minister does not utter a single word on the violence. He took the oath to safeguard the Constitution but his government is hell bent on destroying it.”

On Modi’s recent statement passing the buck to states for high fuel prices, Yechury said: “He is now lecturing non-BJP chief ministers to reduce taxes on petrol and diesel so that relief is delivered to the common man. But he conveniently forgets the speech of finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman where she informed Parliament that the Centre earned Rs 8 lakh crore in the last three years from the oil cess when people were braving the pandemic with income losses.”

Yechury called upon people to reject divisive politics, adding that the Left parties had pledged to mobilise people against this kind of politics.

“Today, nine crore youth are on streets without any employment. Many have left hopes for any job. They (BJP) promised that their government will create two crore government jobs per year. It means 16 crore jobs should have been created by now, whereas nine crore youth are jobless”

He said if there is any symbol of patriotism today, it is to defend the country. “We saw the politics of bulldozers in Uttar Pradesh first when Yogi Adityanath (Chief Minister) addressed the meetings with them in public sight. This has spread across the country. We (Left parties) have been fighting the regime on the front foot,” he added.

CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat, who played a key role in stalling the demolition in Jahangirpuri after the Supreme Court orders, shared her experience of meeting local residents after the violence.

“We were in Jahangirpuri yesterday (Wednesday) and the residents told us they are being terrorised by Delhi Police who are entering their homes and randomly arresting young people. These youth belong to the minority community. What’s interesting here is that we are listening to the same story that a peaceful procession on Hanuman Jayanti was attacked by Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugees. Delhi Police is saying it, BJP president is saying it, and surprisingly the AAP government is parroting it. “

Karat said it was a travesty of justice that Delhi Police could not arrest the accused leaders of Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad. “Forget arresting, they could not name them in FIRs. Their names were removed from the FIR when the VHP leadership threatened action against Delhi Police,” she said.

The CPI(M) leader told the gathering that Jahangirpuri was a settlement where people run their carts by selling fruits, vegetables and other items near their homes. “Women told us that the carts were bought with their hard-earned savings. Already, there is no employment after factories were closed due to pandemic. Yet, Delhi Police chose to break them through bulldozers. I met the shopkeeper whose shop was looted. He said we never discriminated whether customers were Hindus or Muslims, yet the clashes happened.”

Karat said about 120 affected families in Jahangirpuri were still struggling to go back to normal life but heavy presence of police is not letting this happen. “Wounds take time to heal. The families in North East Delhi (where communal violence took place in 2020) are yet to get their lives back on track. The violence did not happen in streets but in minds, too. It takes time, but we want to tell the residents of Jahangirpuri that they are alone in their fight. The Left parties will stand by you in this struggle,” she added.

The meeting was also addressed by other Left parties, including Ravi Rai, Dinesh Varshneya, Kavita Krishnan among others.

“The BJP and the RSS are creating an environment of hate in the name of removing encroachments in Delhi. We have seen this happening in Jahangirpuri and now they are planning to conduct similar activities at other locations in the national capital too. We are demanding the government to end such practices,” CPI-ML Delhi secretary Ravi Rai said, according to PTI.

Building an India with a Scientific Vision

We must fight the battle for a sovereign, socialist, secular democratic republic, for it is also a battle to re-distribute the benefits of development to all sections of people of the nation.

Prabir Purkayastha
25 Apr 2022


India’s struggle for independence was not simply to free India from British rule, but also to build a nation that would deliver development to its people. The fruits of independence would be bitter indeed, if independence did not lift people out of the abject poverty that two centuries of colonial rule had sunk them in. For this to happen, different sections of the independence movement—from the left leaders to Nehru, Ambedkar and Bose—were united in the vision that we need science and technology to develop the country’s productive forces.

The Planning Commission and its precursor, the Congress Planning Committee, embodied this vision of India’s development. After India achieved independence, along with planning of the economy and building the country’s infrastructure, scientific institutions like the Central Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and ICAR were strengthened to help India develop indigenous technology. Higher education, including science and technology institutions, were expanded, and new institutions like the IITs set up.

This can be contrasted with what the BJP has done through the Modi government. It has wound up the Planning Commission. More and more, it has handed over higher education to private and even foreign universities, planting people who have no understanding of science and technology to run advanced institutions. For the BJP-RSS, having the “right” ideology is much more important than the development of knowledge.

It might appear that the BJP’s contempt for knowledge is dangerous only to the social sciences. The way the BJP has destroyed the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) may be the most visible instance of their destructive approach—and it may be assumed that this is because JNU has groomed a generation of scholars in social sciences who are seen as a threat to BJP’s politics. But the BJP government and their plants in the universities have not limited their attacks to just social sciences. Or to JNU. Their attack is on knowledge itself. In institution after institution, people with no vision and little learning have been given powerful positions. The belief seems to be that knowledge is secondary; what matters is that universities indoctrinate the students with the BJP-RSS ideology.

Independence means indigenously developing science and technology knowledge

The leaders of the independence movement knew that science cannot be borrowed or bought. It needs to be developed indigenously. Without scientific and technological knowledge, neither industry nor agriculture can develop. They also understood that the development of a newly independent nation needed a scientific outlook, not only towards nature, but also society. This helps people shed the shackles of superstition—beliefs that looks backward rather than forward. Looking backward—to a so-called mythical golden age when India mastered flight through the Pushpak Rath, or developed nuclear weapons with the Brahmastra, or pioneered genetic engineering—acts as an impediment to creating a new India.

It is through the scientific temper, or a scientific outlook towards nature and society, that we develop new knowledge for a new future. Accepting our past instead of falsifying it would allow us to understand our real achievements in the past, whether in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, or metallurgy.

Independence means an independent national economy

National liberation struggles in different parts of the world have found that the blood and race framework of European nationalism did not work for them. Most of the colonised countries were composites of multiple identities—religious, ethnic and linguistic. The colonial powers divided people of the colonies on the lines of religion, language and ethnicity (always terming it as tribal in the colonial view). In contrast to the old divide-and-rule imperial game, the task of a national liberation struggle was to unite people in spite of these multiple identities.

In addition, the left and other leaders of the independence movement located the nation on the terrain of an independent national economy. The key element in all such national struggles was control over the state through which imperial oppression—economic and physical—was carried out. The starting point of the struggle against imperialism was the struggle against the colonial state; this struggle united the people and shaped the anti-colonial, national consciousness. These two elements—secularism as the basis of uniting the people and economic development—distinguished the vision and action of all the leaders of the independence movements in different parts of the world; including, of course, India.

For the RSS, the British were not the enemies; the nationalists, the secularists and the Muslims were. The view of the nation that Hindutva ideologues—Savarkar, Hegdewar, Golwalkar—held looked to the exclusionary ethnic nationalism of Nazi Germany (or Fascist Italy) for inspiration. They contested the inclusive vision at the core of the independence movement. They argued that the Indian nation should be based not on its desire to be free from colonial rule, but on “re-discovering an ancient nation”. The vision Savarkar formulated is of a Hindutva nation based on race, culture, and language: race as Aryan, culture as Hindu and language as Sanskrit. Savarkar himself clarified that the Hindutva on which he based the nation was different from the Hindu religion. RSS leaders took over this concept of the nation from Savarkar. Such a nation was based, said Golwalkar in We, or Our Nationhood Defined, “...on essential value of the five unities, Country (Geography), Race, Religion, Culture and Language towards making a complete Nation concept.”

Savarkar’s concept of an Indian nation was not original but borrowed from late 19th century-early 20th century German nationalism based on blood (race) and soil, which Nazism took over.

Blood and race are recurring themes in Savarkar’s writings on the nation.

This racial European nationalism was accompanied by external wars to establish national borders and acquire colonies. Alsace-Moselle saw three wars between France and Germany, the Franco-German War of 1870-71 and the two world wars. European “explorers” such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco Da Gama “discovered” already inhabited lands, and established the first European colonies. The Spanish and Portuguese enslavement of people in Africa and the Americas was justified by the Doctrine of Discovery, a Papal Bull issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493. It essentially argued that non-Christians were not fully human and so could be dispossessed of their lands, enslaved, even killed by Christian colonisers.

The European colonisers’ “belief” in the superiority of Christians as people, transformed itself, quite painlessly, into scientific racism: the white man would bring “civilisation” to the natives. Both these “civilising missions”—the Christian one before, and then the explicitly racist one—were accompanied by slavery, genocide, loot and plunder.

This vision of the coloniser’s nation—based on exceptionalism and racial superiority—reflects in the blood and race version of Savarkar-Golwalkar’s Aryan Hindu nation. How did colonised subjects such as Savarkar and Golwalkar come to use the very concepts that had led to their subjugation? Perhaps they explained it away by viewing the British not as colonisers but liberators from Muslim rule! For them—as for their descendants such as Modi, who in his maiden Lok Sabha speech refers to 1,200 years of servitude and the notion that foreign rule begins with Muhammad Ghori’s victory over Prithviraj Chauhan. Or did a Brahmanical world-view with a caste supremacist vision of India make it easier to readily assimilate a racist vision, as Raosaheb Kasbe describes in his book, Decoding the RSS?

Building a nation through Constitution, planning, public sector

The colonial conquerors looted, enslaved, massacred the people of Americas, Africa and Asia on a grand scale, finally building a system that continually created wealth in the colonial metropolis while impoverishing their colonies. Prof. Utsa Patnaik’s research indicates 44 trillion dollars were siphoned away by colonial Britain from India. India and China, which till the 18th century, produced about 50% of the world's GDP, came down to less than 10% within 200 years.

It was slave trade from Africa, colonial plunder from India and other parts of the world that “financed”, or provided the capital necessary for the industrial revolution. As Marx noted,“... capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” It also led to the destruction of the weaving community and the de-industrialisation in India. Marx writes vividly about this, “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.”

While capital was and is extremely destructive, it married science and technology to the production process, continuously revolutionising it. Development today is not just that of factories and machines but also the knowledge embedded in the machines.

For the national movement, independence meant not only kicking out the colonial rulers but also the development of its people. Independence would truly be achieved if India could develop and became free from the absolute poverty, abysmal life expectancy and illiteracy British colonial rule had left behind. It, therefore, had to act on a vision that embodied two complementary tasks: an India for all its people, and a state that would develop all its resources, including human resources.

Bose, as Congress President, set up the Planning Committee in 1938, which he asked Nehru to head. Both drew inspiration from Soviet experiments with planned development after the October Revolution. After independence, to overcome the double burden of poverty and inequality left by the British, the Planning Commission carried the vision of the Planning Committee forward. The leaders of the national movement viewed planning and building a public sector as a necessity, not just for India’s industrial and agricultural regeneration, but for the re-distribution of the benefits of development to all sections of people. They wanted the development of productive forces based on scientific knowledge, and the biggest resource to developing it is its people’s scientific capability, expanded through education.

After independence, developing scientific and technological capabilities was a priority for the Indian state. It built the CSIR laboratories, the five Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs), the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and a host of other scientific institutions. Beginning with the Bombay Plan formulated by Indian capital, there was a common agreement that development needed infrastructure, and only the Indian state had the capacity to develop infrastructure on the scale India required for rapid development. This is what the successive Five-Year plans embodied.

Many identify Nehru as the creator of the hydro-electric projects India undertook after independence. While Nehru fully supported multi-purpose irrigation and hydro-electric projects, people forget that the blueprint of multi-purpose projects—combining irrigation and electricity generation—and a unified national grid, was developed by Ambedkar. As law minister, Ambedkar drafted and introduced the Electricity Act, 1948. He believed developing electricity generation and a national grid were the basis of industrialisation and saw “…industrialisation as the surest means to rescue the people from the eternal cycle of poverty in which they are caught.” (Read: Ambedkar’s presidential address to the Policy Committee on electric power in Sukhdeo Thorat’s ‘Ambedkar’s Contribution to Water Resources Development’.)

This vision of electricity as a necessity (not a market commodity to make profits) formed the basis of Ambedkar’s 1948 Electricity Act. The vision was destroyed jointly by the BJP and the Congress in the new Electricity Act, 2003. That the Congress should have laid the groundwork for this dismantling of the electricity sector though its policies of privatisation and fragmenting the grid, speaks volumes for the road it has travelled from the independence movement and its earlier vision of India. As for the BJP, they never supported a Nehru’s or an Ambedkar’s view of planning and the economy. So their view of the electricity sector is no surprise.

The other vision: Fake nationalism or BJP’s Fake in India

To develop technology, independent India set a goal of self-reliance—Made in India. The goal of self-reliance in technology was backed by a set of policies that insisted on transferring all technology to the Indian entity. In this policy of self-reliance, transferring knowledge was as important as imported plant and machinery.

In contrast, we now witness a continuous assault on institutions of education and research; on reason and science, of myths and madness masquerading as science and history; of flying chariots and interplanetary travel; genetics in the Mahabharata; evolution as false; or, if true, superseded by the “much superior” theory of dasaavatar (Andhra University vice-chancellor G Nageshwar Rao’s address 106th Indian Science Congress). For them, the objective is a “nationalist” India based on religious identity. That is why the need to demolish reason and history; a majoritarian India, in which minorities would have very little rights; an India where reason has to be surrendered to myths old and new; where wealth and caste mean merit.

The RSS bitterly opposed planned development and the public sector and regarded planning and nationalisation of India’s resources as unholy “socialism.” They wanted India completely left to market forces and unfettered entry of global capital. The only role the state should play is help Indian capital negotiate better with foreign capital; in other words, the crony capitalism we see in action. That is why Modi replaced the Planning Commission with a toothless think tank called the Niti Aayog. That is why he is dismantling the public sector, selling it to friendly capitalists, and inviting foreign capital under the slogan of Make in India. It is a journey of betrayal—from self-reliance to just Reliance!

The difference between the idea of genuine self-reliance, and the current vacuous slogan of Make in India is this: one involves the insistence on transfer of knowledge and developing that knowledge further; the Modi version is an invitation to global capital to exploit India’s cheap labour, along with tax breaks and subsidises, including virtually free land.

In Hindutva’s exclusionary view of nationalism, it is the land that is the nation; it is the land that is pure: Savarkar’s punya-bhumi and pitra-bhumi. That is why Modi—quoting Deen Dayal Upadhaya—said recently that Muslims have to be “purified” (pariskar) to be fully Indian.

Presumably, global capital becomes “purified” and fully Indian by just coming to India.

The Modi government does not recognise that people and knowledge are key in technology development. Today, the top five companies in the world by market cap are digital monopolies. Take Apple Inc., the world’s biggest company in market capitalisation terms. It does not own a single factory. How does it do this? It owns the designs, the software and brand of Apple. Apple gets about $300 for each iPhone it sells, while Foxconn, the company that manufactures the phone gets only about $7. This is the nature of the knowledge economy.

Not surprisingly, despite Modi’s Make in India hype, India’s year-on-year GDP growth had started slowing down significantly. Even after the Covid-19 second wave is over, India’s GDP is well-below the 2019 figure, making a mockery of soon becoming a “five-trillion dollar” economy.

It is not where you produce, but what knowledge you have that determines winners and losers in the global economy today. Developing people is key to the future development of a country. That is why any nationalism that defines itself through land, and not people, belongs in the past.

The vision to align with imperialist capitalist powers and not support national liberation movements was also the post-independence foreign policy view of the RSS: it viewed non-alignment and planning as two sides of the same evil, socialist coin. Instead, they argued for a “holy” alliance of Christians—read ex-colonial powers and the US—Jews (read Zionist Israel), and Hindus on one side, against unholy communists and Muslims.

The struggle for an emancipatory vision of science

The attacks against minorities and certain castes and communities are not an aberration. They are fundamental to how the RSS, BJP and their various front organisations think. Today, these attacks are on the fundamental values enshrined in our Constitution, including economic democracy. These attacks are taking place when India has again become as unequal as it was under the British, as the French economist Piketty called it—from British Raj to Billionaire Raj; where 9 families now own more wealth than half of all Indians (Read: Oxfam Inequality Report, 2019).

A scientific vision of the past and the future is key in this fight. Giving up knowledge in the belief that the ex-colonial powers will readily hand it to us is a project of re-colonising India. This is why we must fight, this is our battle for a sovereign, socialist, secular democratic republic that we fought for during the independence movement.

This is an edited version of the author’s M. Basavapunnaiahh Memorial Lecture delivered on 14th December 2021.

INDIA
The Higher Judiciary’s Increasing Role in Protecting Interfaith Couples

Three shops belonging to the boy’s family, namely, an online service centre, a tea stall and their chicken shop, were demolished.

The Leaflet
28 Apr 2022



RECENT events in Dindori district in Madhya Pradesh may well become a metaphor for the use of State machinery to bully interfaith couples who wish to marry each other out of love. Earlier this month, a Hindu girl eloped with a Muslim boy, but they didn’t know that they can legally get married under the Special Marriage Act, 1954 [SMA], a legislation that allows solemnisation of marriages irrespective of the religion of the couple. Lack of this awareness meant that a case was filed by the girl’s family against the boy under Section 366 of the Indian Penal Code, dealing with the offence of kidnapping, abducting or inducing a woman to compel her marriage.

What happened after this, however, was outrageous. The district administration, under pressure from local fringe elements belonging to the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party in the state, razed the properties of the boy’s family, on the specious ground that they were illegally constructed – the same argument which is currently used across the country to demolish properties belonging to persons of minority communities, suspected of participation in communal riots. Three shops belonging to the boy’s family, namely, an online service centre, a tea stall and their chicken shop, were demolished. Subsequently, the administration, again under pressure from the fringe elements, razed the house registered in the name of the boy’s father, using the allegation of “illegal construction” as an excuse.

A video of the girl emerged a day after the house was demolished, in which she requests the Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and the Dindori Superintendent of Police to extend protection to her and her husband or else they will commit suicide as they are being tortured, and their house and shops have been demolished.

Indeed, it is increasingly becoming a challenge for interfaith couples to get married in India, without the protection of the judiciary. On Monday, a single judge bench of Justice Nandita Dubey of the Madhya Pradesh High Court extended protection of personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution to Dindori’s interfaith couple, Sakshi Sahu and Asif Khan, on the ground that they married each other willingly and that being citizens of India and adults, they have a right to choose the life partner of their choice.

Notably, this is not the first time that Justice Dubey extended protection to interfaith couples. In January this year, she protected the rights of an interfaith live-in couple by observing that “no moral policing” can be allowed when two individuals have decided to live together willingly. In February, a Madhya Pradesh High Court bench comprising Justices Sheel Nagu and M.S. Bhatti ordered the release of a 19 years-old girl from Nari Niketan and gave her the choice to live either with her partner, belonging to another faith, or her family. The girl chose to live with her partner, with the latter telling the court that they would get married under the SMA and would pursue their individual faiths.

These judgments are in consonance with the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Shafin Jahan vs. Asokan K.M. (2018), wherein it had declared an adult’s right to marry a person of choice as an indispensable part of personal liberty and privacy. The judiciary, therefore, should not be a mute spectator to the state government’s intention to bully the interfaith couples through illegal demolitions.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court’s effective intervention to protect the interfaith couple from harassment is a timely reminder of how the higher judiciary can play a pivotal role in changing people’s perceptions regarding marriage and living together. Last year, the Allahabad High Court had declared that Section 5 of SMA, which requires parties to give a 30-day public notice of their intention to marry, as not mandatory, in order to protect their fundamental rights of liberty and privacy. The High Court found that the couple in this case had taken the route of religious conversion, in order to avoid the 30-day waiting period under the SMA, and the risk to their privacy and dignity.

With many states enacting laws to make conversion of religion by marriage unlawful, the SMA may indeed prove to be a blessing-in-disguise for the interfaith couple. However, the Supreme Court should decide the pending case (Nandini Praveen vs. Union of India) which challenges the many procedural obligations under the SMA, expeditiously in order to make it more effective.
Courtesy: The Leaflet

INDIA
Why Religious Processions are Like Soldiers Marching Across Foreign Lands

Such processions are about establishing psychological domination of Hindus over Muslims in order to subjugate them.

Ajaz Ashraf
28 Apr 2022


Religious processions pair binaries to trigger conflicts between Hindus and Muslims. These binaries include domination and resistance, conquest and subjugation, sacred and profane and such like. The pairing builds upon a long history, and memory, of harnessing religious processions as a tool for political mobilisation, a scintillating account of which is provided by political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot in his essay, ‘The politics of processions and Hindu-Muslim riots.’

The phenomenon of religious processions culminating in violence is more than a century old, and repetitive in its performance. But the recent violence on Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti has injected two new elements into religious processions—the state’s post-violence role; and the use of mass media, particularly TV channels and social media, to further deepen the binaries outlined above.

Religious processions are much like columns of soldiers marching through a foreign territory. Opposition to the march creates a context and pretext for retaliation, mimicking, for instance, America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Russia’s of Ukraine. Just as these types of invasion polarise the world, so do religious processions segregate the people of India into two opposing camps, engaged in incessant verbal duels.

Obviously, no area in India can be labelled as foreign or deemed out of bounds for processions, whether Hindu or Muslim. It is considered a religious community’s right to have its processions wend through any area in a city, subject to the approval of the authorities. Opposition to such processions becomes an infraction of that right.

History and memory have helped create this right and what constitutes its infraction. One reason for processions turning violent is because of their exclusivist nature. Many decades earlier, Hindu groups participated in Muharram processions and Muslim musicians would perform at certain Hindu festivals. The inter-community participation worked as a natural check on processions turning into communal conflagrations.

Backstory of Processions

The twist came in 1896, when Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Kesari newspaper noted, “Why should we not be able to convert large religious festivals into political rallies?” Tilak asked Hindus not to participate in the Muharram processions of Muslims, and then brought out the Ganesh Chaturthi festival, celebrated to mark the arrival of Ganesh on earth, from the private to the public sphere.

Tilak’s idea was to utilise the Ganesh festival to mobilise and unite Hindus, with the aim of incorporating into Hinduism, as Jaffrelot points out, a “practice he [Tilak] perceived as a strength of Islam—assembly [or congregation] and worship as a community of equals.” With lower castes barred from entering temples, religious processions became an occasion to transcend the caste-class divide.

This was to be achieved through a show of masculinity and militancy. Thus, the Ganesh procession saw young Hindu men donning the uniform of Shivaji’s soldiers, and chanting militant slogans marking the immersion of the Ganesh idol. The reimagined exclusivist Ganesh festival and procession, the British administration knew, could become a recipe for rioting if it were to pass through Muslim-dominated areas. The administration took to deciding the route the Ganesh Chaturthi procession should or should not take.

In 1894, in Poona (now Pune), Tilak’s followers had already defied the District Magistrate’s order and taken their procession past a mosque, triggering a riot. They did the same next year. But this time, Muslims had stockpiled weapons. A bloody riot followed.

A new template for rioting was created, marked by, as Jaffrelot writes, three features—the sense of Hindu vulnerability to the violence Muslims were accused of initiating; using processions to build Hindu solidarity; and insistence on a particular route to take out a procession. The last often meant processions would pass through Muslim areas, peppered with mosques.

Religious processions sparking riots became more frequent and bloodier during the Khilafat movement (1919-1924), as was the case in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1924 and 1926. Although there were many causes behind India bleeding periodically—the slaughter of the cow, for instance—religious processions enacted, rather dramatically, the provocation-reaction model, gradually evolving into a veritable call to battle.

Consider this: Hindu processionists would insist to pass through a Muslim area; it would be known in advance that music would be played before mosques. Muslims sentiments would be expected to get hurt, because of which the authorities were often inclined to banning them. A priori determination implied that if processionists behaved as was feared and Muslims did not retaliate, they would have tacitly accepted their defeat or subjugation.

The Ashvamedha Theory

To fathom this psychology, think of the Ashvamedha ceremony of ancient India. The territory across which the king’s horse, after being set loose, would traverse without being challenged or captured was deemed to belong to him.

Likewise, religious processions are designed to bring into play the dynamics of domination and resistance, conquest and subjugation. Whoever wants to be defeated and subordinated? This is more so as processionists refuse to honour the sacredness of mosques. For them, these holy places are sites for engaging in profanity, evident from their playing music, chanting derogatory slogans and raising saffron flags from the domes of mosques.

This psychology is palpable from the example of Nagpur that Jaffrelot cites in his essay. In 1923, the city’s small Muslim population complained that Hindu processions, accompanied with blaring music, were often being taken past mosques. On 30 October 1923, the administration banned all processions.

In response, Hindu Mahasabha leader BS Moonje rallied 20,000 Hindus to protest against the ban. “Having proved his point, in November, he [Moonje] organised a procession which involved music and passed several mosques. Since both camps had been armed beforehand, the subsequent riot entailed heavy casualties,” Jaffrelot writes.

The binaries of invasion and conquest, assertion and subjugation, sacred and profane continued to be the features of Hindu religious processions even in post-Independence India. The goal now was of uniting Hindus across the caste divide to challenge the hegemony of the Congress. The list of riots sparked by religious processions can be accessed (here and here ) from the data of the Paris Institute of Political Science, popularly known as Sciences Po.

In many of these riots, the RSS and its affiliates played a principal role. The experience gained from a long chain of riots proved useful for the RSS and the Bharatiya Janata Party to mobilise Hindus during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, during which processions, with participants lustily chanting anti-Muslim slogans, seemed like an army marching out to conquer a foreign land, as seen in those period films.

Processions after 2014

It may seem outdated to insist on Hindu religious processions passing through Muslim areas in this era of Hindutva ascendency. After all, the minority community, over the last eight years, has been constantly battered, bruised and demonised. That the Hindutva brigade should continue to organise processions to mobilise Hindus testifies to the harsh truth that it still needs to consolidate Hindus to win elections. The economic slowdown, in fact, has made belligerent processions almost a necessity for the BJP.

Its task is facilitated by the 24x7 focus of TV channels on the violence sparked by religious processions. Skirmishes in Madhya Pradesh or Gujarat become talking points countrywide. For instance, how many knew of Jahangirpuri, a working class quarters in Delhi, until a fortnight ago?

But there are also psychological and ideological dimensions to the RSS persisting with religious processions. Hindutva cannot claim victory as long as Muslims resist or fight back against processionists shouting slogans abusive of them and their religion. Their resistance is a symbol that they have not been subjugated. This is why bulldozers were rolled in to demolish shops and houses in those areas where Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti processions were allegedly stoned by Muslims.

This punitive action, dressed up as a drive against encroachment, is to tell Muslims that their resistance will invite State retribution, a message, once again, transmitted across India through TV channels and social media. This message is designed for Muslims inclined to resist Hindutva in the future: Accept provocations, insults, perhaps even desecration, or endure punishment and impoverishment.

Indeed, no victory is complete unless the vanquished accept defeat and their subjugation. No victory is final as long as the conqueror is resisted. Just as Hindutva, despite setbacks, has pursued its mission of building a Hindu rashtra, there are many out there, Hindus and Muslims alike, who are unlikely to give up on the idea of a multicultural India. And so, India is doomed to bleed.

The author is an independent journalist. The views are personal.

In India, Religion and Neoliberal Individualism Have Converged

Neoliberal Hindutva is riding on a convergence of religion and market, that is fuelling a push for individualistic self-realisation.

Ajay Gudavarthy
27 Apr 2022


Today, there are two unmistakable strands to the aggressive mobilisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party. One is instrumentalising religion and the second, weaponising the free market. Aggressive neoliberalism is hand in glove with militant imageries of religious figures. The monetisation and privatisation of public assets have combined with de-privatising religion and dragging it out to the streets. “Free market” is not about being free but “compensatory consumption” for the middle classes and subsistence for the underprivileged. In the same way, religion is not about spirituality but justifying majoritarian dominance.

Postcolonial scholars had vociferously argued that the sacred would militate against instrumental market value. The spiritual domain was supposed to involve a collective investment in otherworldly pursuits that shun crude materialism. The market was supposed to bring in relations based on free exchange and contractualism in the place of rigid hierarchies. As Amartya Sen has argued, the market is like language, a medium to promote choice without judgment.

Against most of the prognosis, religious ethics and market values seem to have come together to strengthen muscular majoritarian rhetoric. Both religion and the market don’t seem opposed to authoritarian forms of governance. Latent practices within religion and the market are simultaneously being conjoined and mobilised by Hindutva politics. A closer look allows us to see that religion is about individual self-realisation. It offers an individual a path to realise the finality of truth. Faith-based practices are deeply experiential but in a tautological sense: One needs to believe to experience faith and have unflinching faith to experience truth/God. Not realising God only means a lack of faith or inability to get rid of doubt.

In other words, the failure to experience faith is itself a lack of faith. To experience faith, one must pursue it without asking questions or thinking of outcomes. Viewing faith through the outcome lens amounts to a corruption of faith. In turn, a lack of faith leads to a loss of the desired outcome.

On the other hand, the instrumental logic of the market is about being ‘atma nirbhar’ or self-reliant. One moves up the ladder through enough prayas or effort (“sabka prayas”). However, failure is an individual’s responsibility or the result of chance, luck, which did not put a person in the right place at the right time. Every individual must take responsibility for their success, so it is all about individual commitment, talent and effort. What is valued in such a frame is not freedom but security—a search for security through personal effort. Strangely, then, freedom is the collective price paid for individual safety. The State, like God or the leader, only keeps a watch. God cannot be blamed for an individual’s failures, just like a leader cannot be held responsible for lack of motivation, and the market cannot account for lack of merit.

This convergence of the individual ethic of religion and the market seems to be driving the current drive to combine religious mobilisation with neoliberalism. Both direct us towards self-realisation and self-oriented success. Over the last five decades, privatisation and neo-liberal reforms have broken the legitimacy of a shared ethos. All welfare is appeasement or patronage, demanding hateful exclusion or faithful loyalty. To exclude and profess loyalty are the new guarantees of security. One must exclude the ‘otherised’ Muslim, and to do this, one has to remain loyal to those pursuing it on your behalf. Outside this frame stands the sheer individual, exposed to the vagaries of chance, luck and greed.

This is the phenomenon behind the extensive Hindu solidarity we see. The mobilisation we see exists alongside entrenched individualism. ‘Community’ is only a façade to justify weaponising religion and pursue an instrumental market. Within the confines of rhetorical religious unity and community solidarity, one can aggressively accumulate, exploit and appropriate.

The State, like capital and the market, is predatory, and what it does is protect aggressive pursuits without the interference of the law. In fact, the new-found role of the State, to protect from the interference of law, is repeatedly being demonstrated—through, for example, the demolitions in Jahangirpuri and false cases filed during the Delhi riots. Even judicial pronouncements are being blatantly violated—to demonstrate that the law stunts the market and growth by impeding religious unity. Today, the law is projected and seen as a threat to the security of the majority.

The terms of reference have changed, so harping on constitutionalism, law, secularism, rights, and democracy no longer speak to reality. Today, law and the Constitution are seen as appeasing minorities and vocal left-liberals abusing freedom.

There have been faint attempts to challenge the vitriolic by distinguishing between Hindutva and Hinduism, love and hate, harmony and violence. But for the majority community, the two sides of these binaries have seamlessly merged. They feel you need violence for peace, militant Hindutva to realise the more spiritual side of Hinduism, and unadulterated hate to love ourselves and one’s religion without guilt. Merely drawing the wedge between Hindutva and Hinduism is not disturbing this sense of reality. It isn’t making the majority rethink the voluntary consent they have lent to the current regime. Secularism as separation of religion and politics has become unacceptable, but even combining religion and politics for spiritual self-realisation is under stress. We have an instrumentalised version of faith whose roots lie in the neo-liberal marketisation of social life.

The “animal spirits” of the market have converged with social Darwinism of the religious kind. Festivals are no longer about celebration but violent assertion, as consumption is no longer for survival or status but for giving life new meaning. The pandemic years only entrenched nihilistic attitudes. It has not forced us to pause and rethink. Resistance to such reality has to be internal, not external. At the very least, it would mean seriously addressing the security concerns of the dominant community without justifying violence, pulling back market-oriented voluntarism with structural welfarism, and critiquing religious toxicity across religions without concessions or differentiating majority from minority.

The author is an associate professor at the Center for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. His forthcoming book is Politics, Ethics and Emotions in 'New India' (Routledge, London, 2022). The views are personal.

Who Will Save Tunisia's Democracy Now?

Tunisia's president has been carrying out a creeping coup, demolishing the country's hard-fought democratic gains bit by bit. With an economy in turmoil and a splintered opposition, is there anybody that can stop him?

Cathrin Schaer, Tarak Guizani, Soumaya Marzouki
28 Apr 2022

President Kais Saied has been dismantling the checks and balances of Tunisia's nascent democracy

Haneen Habbessi is feeling betrayed. The 38-year-old public servant based in Bardo, a small city west of the capital, Tunis, voted for her country's current president, Kais Saied, when he ran for office just over two years ago.

"I defended him fiercely even though we did not know anything about him," she said of the conservative former lawyer, who competed without a political party and promised to fight corruption.

Saied's most recent moves have upset Habbessi though. On April 22, Saied announced he would be taking control of the country's election commission, the Independent High Authority for Elections, or ISIE.

The ISIE was created to ensure that national ballots are legitimate. But last week, Saied said he would replace most of the commission's members.

Former colonial power, France, has expressed 'concern' about Saied's actions

"He took the 'I' [for 'independent'] out of the commission's name," Monica Marks, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University in Abu Dhabi and an expert on Tunisia, told DW. "So any elections organized by the ISIE now are going to be unfree and unfair, and will accelerate the consolidation of his [Saied's] dictatorship."

"The president's decision is a step towards authoritarianism," Tunisian local Habbesi agreed. "We don't want to repeat our bitter history," she added, referring to Tunisia's former autocratic leader, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

Ben Ali was in power for over two decades, until revolution in 2011 pushed him out during the so-called Arab Spring.

FEARS OF NEW DICTATORSHIP

Now many Tunisians worry that their current president is heading towards autocracy. Saied had already more or less taken control of the country after he suspended Tunisia's parliament in July 2021. He argued that infighting among parliamentarians, political gridlock, corruption and economic crisis, alongside the COVID-19 pandemic, required a total reset.

In February 2022, Saied gave himself judicial oversight and the power to sack judges

Like Habbessi, many Tunisians welcomed Saied's move at first, even as others feared he would become Tunisia's next dictator.

Over the past 10 months, those fears have come closer to being realized, even while many still hesitate to call Saied's actions a coup. In fact, it's been more like a creeping coup, carried out in increments.

"What we are seeing is democratic backsliding," Hamza Meddeb, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center and an assistant professor at the South Mediterranean University in Tunis, told DW. "It could eventually end in a sort of authoritarian regime. This is not the case today but might be in the coming months."

Since last summer, Saied has taken control of the country's judiciary, shut down its parliament and dismissed its prime minister, then appointed a new one, as well as increasingly jailed or persecuted opponents. The 64-year-old now rules Tunisia by decree

.

An estimated 80,000 small and medium sized businesses failed in Tunisia during the pandemic

The question now, as all the institutions with any political power gradually fall under Saied's control, is this: Who is left to save Tunisia's democracy?

The Tunisian opposition is fragmented and features various political parties at loggerheads, Meddeb and Marks said.

The country's largest party, Ennahda, has been the most significant power in parliament since the 2011 revolution. As a result, many locals blamed the center-right, religious party for Tunisia's various ailments. This has made it very difficult for other parties to work with Ennahda, even if they are all opposed to what Saied is doing.

However this week, Ennahda became one of five political parties to join a new coalition opposed to Saied's rule. The new National Salvation Front, which includes political rivals as well as civil society groups and independent politicians, said it wants to set up an interim government to rule Tunisia until the next elections, planned for December.

At a press conference in Tunis on Tuesday, the left-wing politician who organized the new coalition, Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, told reporters, "we want a return to legitimacy and democracy."

WILL ORDINARY TUNISIANS REACT?

It is also possible that ordinary Tunisians will take to the streets to protest again, Mourad Abdellaoui , a 46-year-old teacher in Tunis, said.

"I believe the Tunisian people are still divided though," he told DW. "Some people feel the president is doing the right thing, others see it as unconstitutional. But they may well try to exercise pressure by calling for mass demonstrations again."

A repeat of what she calls "rebellious masses in the streets" is one of Hathria Benatia's greatest fears. "I didn't like Saied's speech from the beginning," the 75-year-old pensioner from Siliana, a town in northern Tunisia, told DW. "Little by little, I became sure he was advancing toward a model like Ben Ali's."

When Saied first took power last summer, polling suggested that the majority of locals thought what he was doing was right and necessary. But according to local market research firm, Insights TN, that has changed now. In August 2021, 49.8% supported his course, surveys found. By this February, only 23.2% did.

COULD THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY STEP IN?

Pressure is also coming from outside the country. Nations that support Tunisia with military and economic aid were careful when Saied first took over last year.

"The US has studiously avoided calling his coup a 'coup' since it would legally trigger the suspension of US financial aid to Tunisia," Tunisian political analyst Seifeddine Ferjani explained in an article for US-based organization, Democracy for the Arab World Now. "Many Western democracies have shown a remarkable amount of passivity about Saied's systematic tear down of Tunisia's democracy," he complained.

There's been "dithering," Tunisia expert Marks said, but that too has been changing recently, with statements from US and EU diplomats and politicians calling for Saied to ensure reforms were inclusive and democratic.

If Saied is forced to listen to these calls, it will be because of the desperate state of the Tunisian economy.

Even before Saied's power grab, Tunisia had been dealing with a stagnating economy, a situation made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now prices for fuel and basic foods are rising further thanks to the war in Ukraine.

Currently the country's public debt is almost equal to all national income. To avoid bankruptcy, Tunisia has been in talks with the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, about a third multi-billion-dollar rescue package. A deal is expected in the middle of this year.

Prices in Tunisia are increasing as inflation rose to over 7% last month

FINANCIAL PRESSURE

But financial help might also end up contingent on Saied's behavior.

"If Saied continues to reject an inclusive political process, Europe and Tunisia's other external partners will face a choice about whether to withhold assistance or oppose an IMF agreement," Anthony Dworkin, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, or ECFR, wrote earlier this month.

For Meddeb, it won't be just one thing that brings Tunisia back towards democracy, it will be a combination. "The economic factors won't bring about change unless there is a united and strong opposition that can really convince people it can address economic challenges," Meddeb concluded.

"By far, the most important factor is going to be economic," Marks confirmed. During past protests, including those that pushed dictator Ben Ali out of power, Tunisians called for freedom and dignity, she noted. "What dignity meant to a lot of people was being able to put food on the table and provide a decent life for their families. So the economy has always been a central concern."

President Saied does not have much of a plan for the economy though, Marks added. So the Tunisian opposition needs to unite and then formulate one.

"One of the key questions for me is whether a critical mass of Tunisians recognize that [Saied] is effectively hopeless on the economy and then rise up, before he manages to fully consolidate his dictatorship," Marks said. "There's a huge question of timing here. But sadly I don't think the prognosis is looking very positive."

Edited by: Andreas Illmer