Delhi melee: India’s citizenship protests

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspect on the events shaping your world. Both technology and society are racing ahead of the law when it comes to matters of free speech. When does an opinion become a belief worthy of protection? When does an offhand tweet become a sackable offense? We take a look at the battle lines and there's a fascinating continuous historical record of Europe's prosperity going all the way back to Roman times. But it's locked up in Arctic ice. The best way to understand what it reveals is to listen to the data. First up, though, protests that have been sporadic for months in India have flared into outright religious violence in the capital in the past week, the worst that Delhi has seen in decades. More than 30 people have died as riots have raged. Much of the anger stems from the Citizenship Amendment Act, a bill that sailed through the country's parliament in December. It provides a path to citizenship for migrants of many faiths. Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, Christian. Pointedly, though, it doesn't include Muslims. It's just the latest bit of policy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bhartiya Junta party, or bjp, advancing the government's Hindu nationalist agenda and relegating the country's Muslims to second class status. That doesn't sit well with many in India who are proud of the country's secular modern history. And the discomfort has been concentrated in the capital.

Delhi has very much been a center of protests against the Citizens Amendment Act.

Max Rodenbeck is the Economist's South Asia Bureau chief, based in Delhi.

One of the more sort of potent forms of protest took shape in Delhi, which is a sit in by women, mostly Muslim women, who've been continuously sitting in in protests since the middle of December. There have been daily demonstrations, also sort of protest marches. All the universities have been on and off strikes as well. The initial protests there was a bit of violence, but then they were taken over by a sort of movement that insisted on Gandhian peaceful tactics. This all went up in smoke this last week in Delhi. There were three days of serious riots, the most serious riots in Delhi since 1984. Actually, as of now, more than 30 people have been killed and several hundred injured and a lot of property damaged. Calm has been restored in Delhi, but it's been a very disturbing three days.

So what is it that's made these protests that were peaceful and quiet boil over this week?

There's been a growing annoyance on the part of the government and government supporters against these sit in movements. Then another thing that happened this weekend was the visit of Donald Trump, the US President, to India in a sort of big state visit with a lot of fanfare, the President of the United.

States of America, Mr. Dolan Trump.

So that's the kind of moment where anybody who wants to make a political point is likely to try to make it. But there was a particular moment when a local politician who's allied to the ruling party took out a rally against these anti Citizens Amendment act protesters in which he declared that as soon as Trump leaves India, if the police don't move in to break up these protests, then basically my guys we're going to do it is basically what he said. And it was almost immediately after that that other groups perhaps, you know, it's not clear whether they're actually associated with the ruling party, but fairly organized groups of Hindu youths armed with sticks and staves and iron bars and so on, then proceeded to surround and attack Muslim neighborhoods.

So these protests have spurred counter protests and now open violence on the streets. I mean, how are the police reacting to this?

Well, to begin with, the police were extremely thin on the ground and it has Raised a lot of eyebrows in Delhi. I mean, why were the police so slow to respond? And there are also multiple testimony and video evidence showing that the police not only failed to respond or responded very half heartedly, but in some cases, actually even appeared to encourage the people, basically attacking Muslims. It was only after two days of rioting and many people dead that the police actually intervened with enough force to actually put an end to the trouble.

And what's the mood like now when you go onto the streets of Delhi now? What's the feeling?

Well, people are shaken and fearful, I think, although Delhi is a huge city and it really doesn't feel the same from one end of the city to the other. But there's a sense of kind of horror because, you know, India has been through this sort of riots before. It's happened in Delhi. Long ago. In 1984, there was a major riot with much worse carnage, which followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, India's prime minister at the time, by one of her own bodyguards, which led to a sort of pogrom against people from the Sikh religion, which was really very terrible. So people have bad memories of this sort of thing. And there's been the hope that India's beyond that. You know, these things don't happen in modern India, but apparently they still do. So I think people are very disturbed by that idea, particularly Muslims, clearly, who are about 14% of Delhi's population, which is a similar proportion to all of India's population.

And you mentioned that, to a degree, perhaps, these riots were an opportunistic move at the time of Donald Trump's visit. Did all of this violence overshadow that visit at all? Did it play a role?

It did to a certain extent, although the scale of the violence wasn't really clear until Donald Trump's last day in India. But certainly it was an embarrassment to the Indian government and to Mr. Modi. And to some extent, it was an embarrassment to Donald Trump. Trump did, you know, praise India to the skies in his big rally in Ahmedabad in a stadium full of 125,000 people. America loves India, America respects India, and America will always be faithful and loyal friends. He was then subsequently asked a question about the Citizens Amendment act, and he skirted the issue and said, look, that's completely an Indian internal matter. I heard about it, but I didn't discuss that with him. That's up to India. Yeah, go ahead, please. But, you know, the news cycle then exposed the scale of this violence, so that did rain on his parade.

And I suppose that Mr. Trump is familiar with the kind of controversy in that he himself has been accused of obliquely or in some cases directly targeting Muslims at home.

Certainly, yeah, that's something that Donald Trump is quite familiar with, although in the Indian context, it's rather different from the United States. I mean, you know, Trump's statements that drew a lot of ire had to do with Muslim immigrants, whereas in India, it's a 200 million strong minority. It's the world's largest minority, in effect. But I think some of the attitudes towards Islamist extremism and the supposed propensity of Muslims for that sort of thing are pretty much shared between Donald Trump and Mr. Modi and his party. Even so, I think there is a more shocking level of actual kind of sectarian feeling and sometimes downright bigotry by Mr. Modi's party, which would be very shocking to Americans, I think.

And coming back to the citizenship bill.

That sparked the violence in Delhi, you said things seem comparatively calm now.

Do you think that's a stable situation?

Will there be more protest until something is done about the bill?

Unfortunately, yes. This is a very stubborn government and they've actually put a lot of their credibility into this law, which is very puzzling to a lot of Indians who don't necessarily share the hard line Hindu nationalist ideology of Mr. Modi, even if they like him and voted for him because he's a charismatic figure. So they've invested an awful lot in this citizenship bill, but they've really lost so much trust that I'm afraid the resistance is going to be very strong. Actually, you know, a lot of the individual Indian states have now said they will actually resist imposing some of these new citizenship rules in their own states. So the scene is set for a continuing contest over this. You know, it's possible that the Modi government might find a way to back down or to water things down or to change its approach. But that hasn't been the style of Mr. Modi in the six years that he's been in power.

Max, thanks very much for joining us.

It's been a pleasure, Jason. Thank you.

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One of the more dizzying aspects of the digital age is that although you can make your voice heard around the globe with a couple of clicks, it's increasingly difficult to know whether you should. You might end up at the bottom of a Twitter pylon, water cooler, conversations might get tense, you might even get fired from your job, and it's not clear if the law would protect you.

I would argue that free speech at work is somewhat under threat.

Sascha Nauta is the Economist's Public Policy editor.

Firstly, because employers are increasingly keen to get involved in what employees say outside of work, but also because they are increasingly policing the type of language employees use at work. And both of those together, I would argue, are a threat to free speech.

So why do you think that this is a threat now? Why more a threat than it's ever been?

Well, two things are really changing. There's this convergence of technological change and cultural change. Social media is everywhere now, and whilst that is on the one hand, wonderful, it blurs your work Persona with your private Persona and it can become unclear sometimes who is tweeting here or who is making a post. And companies are increasingly worried about that. And whereas before when you stepped out of the door of your office you were off duty, today it's very unclear whether you're ever off duty and where indeed your employer may have a reasonable case to say, well, hang on a second, you can't say that, or you may have hurt the company by saying that. There's a second thing which is that sort of the nature of belief is changing. So whereas before, earlier in the 20th century, most people would have affiliated with religious beliefs, that is now changing. Religious affiliation is going down and in exchange other types of beliefs are filling that void. So put that all together, you have a real change in both the means as well as the types of communication that people are putting out there.

But the nature of these debates comes quickly up against the law given right to free speech.

Right.

I mean, what are the legal issues around this as it stands now?

Well, it's very different per country, but I would argue on the whole, the protections specifically for free speech in the workplace are fairly weak. In the past, protections have Come for specific groups. So if your beliefs of your views came out of religious beliefs, there are fairly solid protections in place for not being dismissed because of those. And one of the interesting things that's happening now in Britain is that understandably people are starting to argue, well, hang on, what about non religious beliefs? I feel them just as deeply and they are just as important to me as religious beliefs are to others. Can I get protections, please?

So you say that the sort of in part the retreat from religion, where there is plenty of case law to define what free speech is protected, means that there are new beliefs no less strongly held, that then the legal question kind of arises, what kinds of things though are we talking about? And how does one draw the line between strongly held belief, for instance, about say animal testing versus dislike of immigrants?

Yes, it's extremely complex and it depends in Britain which is probably gone furthest with looking at these kinds of protected beliefs. Part of the criteria are things like it needs to be genuinely held and more than just an opinion, it needs to be a weighty and substantial part of day to day life, it needs to have a certain level of cogency and seriousness and it needs to be worthy of respect in a democratic society. Those criteria were set in Britain with a case in 2009, but roughly it means that something like supporting a football team wouldn't meet those criteria because it doesn't sort of impact your day to day life in a substantial way, no matter what some football fans might argue. But ethical veganism in certain cases did count as a protected belief.

But what about the cases where something would be legally protected, for instance, under those criteria you lay out, but would still be problematic for an employer. That might create an uncomfortable situation for some employees, or someone could take reasonable offense, or someone could misread that as a company view rather than an employee's view.

Legal protections case laws clearer on religious beliefs. So let's go back there for a second. Don't give employees a carte blanche. Right, yes, you have extra protections in place because of your religious beliefs. However, they are not unlimited. And if you are harassing or making hate speech or whatever, we still feel that there's a case to be made as an employer to get rid of you. You are tarnishing our brand. So yes, employers absolutely do have a claim to make regardless to whether or not protections are in place.

And that's true whether or not it's a belief or just an unpopular political opinion. I mean, at what point do bosses say I'm employing you and you're harming my business.

I think there it gets quite interesting because employers make a contract with their employees. You provide X work, we give you Y money. Here are the terms and conditions. All of that is reasonable and in a way, I think you should think of speech, sort of in the way that you think of dress code and say, well, you know, of course, an employer can set some reasonable limits on the conduct, including speech, of employees whilst they are in the office or representing the company elsewhere. Right. So that bit is for fairly clear where it gets much harder and where it's sort of really interesting, I think today is, what about beyond that? So where can an employer say, just because you were at home or just because you were tweeting from an account that said, views are my own, where can I still say, yes, but what you said harmed us? So examples can be either most obviously saying something that could harm the business of your employer. So, I don't know, you work for a meat company and you tweet, veganism is the future, don't eat meat. But even more interestingly are views that are not directly related to your job. For example, controversial political views, as we've seen with a number of sports stars who accidentally or otherwise insulted China and got their employers into an awful lot of trouble, which ended up costing them quite a lot of money, even though their jobs had nothing to do with the statements they made online. So, again, the question there is to what extent can and should an employer be able to. To interfere there by disciplining or even terminating a contract?

So all of this just boils down to the nature of the free speech that should be protected.

Yeah, so I think free speech more generally is really at the heart of all of this and indeed, you know, can help us move away from this idea that everybody needs to claim special protection for the simple right to speak up. Ideally, companies will have the same interest as societies in protecting free speech, both at work and beyond that. And when those two clash, this is where you do need robust laws to protect free speech. Because we certainly, as a paper would believe that free speech may not always be in the interest of companies, but it is always in the interest of societies. You know, it's one of the cornerstones of free and open societies to be able to have free speech without fear of losing your livelihood. So in those cases, it is essential, in my opinion, that protections for workers are robust where they aren't already.

Sasha, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

Historians often piece together their accounts of past societies and economies using diverse sources from paintings to written accounts to increasingly hard data, it turns out there's a fairly complete record of prosperity in Europe over the past 2,000 years. And it's held in deposits of the element lead. High in the Arctic. Lead is released into the atmosphere. When silver is refined, it gets carried by winds all over the world. And in the Arctic, it gets trapped in layers of glacial ice. So by analyzing the lead present in Arctic ice cores, scientists have been able to produce a record of the European economy from Roman to modern times. This is what it sounds like. From around 31 BC, the Pax Romana ushered in a sustained period of peace and prosperity. More silver was being produced, leading to higher lead deposits in the Arctic. They increased sixfold in just 25 years. Nearly 200 years later, they were still almost as high until a plague swept through the Roman Empire. It was probably caused by smallpox or measles, and it killed as many as 5 million people. Silver production plummeted over the next 50 years. The next big spike began in 768 A.D. charlemagne, the self described renewer of the Roman Empire, needed money to fund his assault on Europe. But gold was in short supply. So he established a new currency standard, that Livre Carolinienne, based on a pound of silver. His mints turned out huge quantities of this new currency. And Arctic lead deposits increased by nearly eight times in just 20 years. The next peak came when silver was discovered in Jasmstal, a small village in Bohemia. At the start of the 16th century, that mine became the most prolific in Europe. Lead deposits tripled. The Joachimsthaler, a weighty silver coin, became the de facto currency of Europe and the New World. The Thaler, as it was known, even lent its name to another popular currency, the dollar. From around 1750, industrial processes overtook silver production as the chief source of lead pollution. Over the next two centuries, lead deposits grew to 14 times their pre industrial levels, reaching a peak in 1970, beginning with the Clean Air act in the same year. They've now dropped by 80%, but they remain 60 times higher than they were in the medieval era. Historical records are often patchy, piecemeal, clouded. All the better then, that the Arctic has a silver lining. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.