One party to rule them all? India’s fraying democracy

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Ah, Sweden. Home to quaint Christmas markets, Pippi Longstocking, Cinnamon Bun Day, and escalating gang violence. We examine the recent rise in gang-related crime in the country and what authorities are trying to do about it. And historically, Black Friday has been a red-letter day for American retailers. But piling into big-box stores and wrestling over cut-price electronics seems even more unseemly this year. We look at how the retail industry is coping in-store and online.

First up, though, For here was a newly created free nation with the second largest population in the world.

It's more than 70 years since India gained independence from Britain and became a democracy. In that time, the country's democratic norms have come under strain. In 1975, Indira Gandhi, perhaps the country's most powerful prime minister, was ruled to have cheated in an election. In response, she plunged India into a 21-month period called the Emergency, throwing opponents in jail and ruling by decree. Many perceive a similar threat to democracy in Narendra Modi, the prime minister since 2014. As leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, he's bullied critics, boycotted unfriendly media, and relentlessly pushed a Hindu nationalist vision that's in deep conflict with the country's secular roots. Democracies rest on the institutions that keep powers dispersed, laws discharged, and justice dispensed. But in India, those institutions are gradually becoming absorbed into Mr. Modi's plans. A country of 1.3 billion people is in danger of turning into a one-party state.

Well, India is, of course, the world's largest democracy.

Max Rodenbeck is our South Asia bureau chief and is based in Delhi.

But it's a very imperfect democracy, which many democracies are, such as the United States, you know, lately has seemed rather imperfect. And so it's not as if one is coming from being a paragon of democratic perfection, but there is a distinct sense in which India's democracy is not in good shape and has been decaying. And that sort of decay seems to have accelerated in the last 6 years, particularly since the coming to power of the BJP, BJP party and its leader, Narendra Modi, India's current prime minister, there has been a systematic but slow process of chiseling away at the independent institutions that underpin the way a democracy works.

Which institutions do you mean though? The judiciary, for example?

Well, the judiciary among other institutions. And it's not so much an attack as that the judiciary has increasingly become kind of complicit in backing up the government and in not being what it has been in the past, which is as a kind of support for freedoms, a support for democratic process. More and more, the Indian judiciary seems to be acting as a kind of agent of the government.

How so?

Well, the Supreme Court, which is a very strong, powerful court, it has neglected to look into some really important cases that really put into question the nature of India's democracy. Such as, for example, last year India imposed direct rule from Delhi on one of its states, Jammu and Kashmir, and the state was cut into two parts, and most of the political leaders of that state were actually locked up for a long period of time. And the Supreme Court hasn't even looked into the question of whether it's legitimate for the government to have done such a thing. But it's not just that it hasn't bothered to look into some things. In other cases, it's looked into cases and made judgments that are very favorable to the government. And in other cases, it's completely ignored the similar cases that affect the opposition. So it seems to have tilted quite strongly towards being just a bolster for the current government in power.

But you indicate that this goes beyond the judiciary as well. And we've spoken in the past about Indian police. Is that a part of this narrative as well?

Yeah, very much so. I mean, the police in India seem increasingly to be cat's paws for the government. And this happens at the central federal level, but also even at the state level. The police just act according to the whims of their political masters in a way that seems to be increasingly exaggerated. So we often see the police putting together cases and arresting people and charging them for crimes that seem kind of unreasonable. A lot of investigation agencies also going after enemies of the government for tax reasons, for various other infractions. So the whole kind of panoply of law enforcement agencies seems to be being put into play to do what the executive wants. Rather than being a neutral arbiter that moves according to the law. One doesn't want to exaggerate. India has not turned into a police state, but what's disturbing is the kind of drift in that direction.

But there must be examples of institutions that are maintaining their independence.

That's very true, and one of its most vaunted institutions is the Electoral Commission, which runs the elections in India with incredible efficiency, a sharp contrast with the United States, for example. And India has a long tradition of an army that has never interfered in government, and these two institutions do remain quite independent, but there are signs that they are bending a bit more than they have in the past, and this does have people worried. I mean, the appointment of army commanders has for the first time become slightly more political. Top officers in the army have made statements that seem like they're dipping their toe in politics. And even the electoral commission, which has very strict rules for how elections are run, has at times seemed to bend and not wanted to punish anyone from the prime minister's party for the same kinds of sins that it's punishing rival candidates for. So there's even in this kind of really strong institutions that have made India unique almost among developing countries as a strong democracy, even there, there's a kind of slow erosion.

You keep saying that it has people worried. I mean, what can they do? What checks on all of these different trends are there?

Well, there are checks, but this is part of the problem. One can blame Mr. Modi, one can blame his party for grabbing having too much power, and they really do play the game of politics very, very, very aggressively. But at the same time, unfortunately for India, its opposition has also proved very weak. The other rival party, the Congress Party, which is the only party that really operates at the same level as Mr. Modi's BJP, it itself has gone through terrible decline and decay, and it can no longer really rival the BJP, and it has fewer resources. And so it's fighting a kind of losing battle. The kind of functioning of democracy in terms of like having an opposition that puts up and makes protests, it's becoming less and less so because things have tilted so far in favor of the ruling party.

So you're describing a situation that does look like a monotonic decrease of democracy here. I mean, do you think that the wheels are coming off?

Well, not exactly. I mean, the ruling party is very strong and has a huge machine behind it, and it's very popular actually. But India is an incredibly diverse country, and it really is difficult in a way that the diversity of language, of people, of income, of culture is so vast. It is not an easy place for a single party to really impose its will in a sort of blanket across the whole country. And there is strong resistance here and there. But I think there's a kind of race against time in a sense, that there's a momentum for Mr. Modi's party that's just pushing towards more power. But there is strong pushback. And it's just not clear which way it's going to tilt right now. I suspect that over the longer term that India will bounce back and remain a pluralist country and that the ruling party will itself actually begin to realize that it's not in its own interest to totally dominate the scene. So I'm optimistic in the long term for Indian democracy, but for right now, it's under strain.

Max, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you, Jason. It was a pleasure.

If you were to picture crime in Sweden, chances are you'd think less gangland, more Nordic noir. But in recent years, a surge in spectacular crimes by street gangs has captured public attention. The concentration of the violence in certain areas reveals the country's two parallel realities.

Sweden, which has such an idyllic reputation, has actually become a a hotspot of crime and gang violence in recent years.

Wendelin von Bredow covers Europe for The Economist.

In 2016, an 8-year-old boy was killed by a hand grenade thrown into an apartment in Gothenburg. And again, in the same city of Gothenburg, this August, a criminal clan set up roadblocks to catch members of a rival gang. And finally, this summer, 2 Swedish teenagers were tortured and raped in a cemetery. In a so-called humiliation crime. And all this in a country that's known for elks and lush forests and Pippi Longstocking.

But these examples suggest that Sweden is in fact quite a violent country.

Well, on a global scale, Sweden remains exceptionally safe, and its murder rate is only one-fifth of America's. But compared to Germany, a country far closer to home, a study in 2018 found that a man aged 15 to 29 in Sweden A woman is 10 times more likely to get shot there than in Germany. Overall, the crime rate has held steady over the past decades, but gang violence, so these gang murders and explosions, they've gone through the roof.

But how? How did Sweden come to have such a problem with gang violence if nearby Germany, for example, seemingly doesn't?

In Sweden, gangs took off in the early 1990s with biker gangs, and they were led by the Hells Angels, and the other big gang was the Bandidos. But in the following decade, disparate street gangs emerged, and they mainly made money through drug trade and drug trafficking and extortion. And most members of these gangs are very young. I spoke to a sociologist, Amir Rostami of Stockholm University, and he gave quite an interesting explanation of the extreme violence of Swedish gangs.

Because if you look at the maturity of criminal gangs, if they are quite mature, well-organized, they also intend to use less violence because it's not good for the business.

Oh, that's interesting. He said that Swedish gangs are immature and less organized than the gangs in countries like Germany. The German gangs are mainly keen not to attract too much attention from the police. And of course, shootings and explosions do attract the police's attention.

But who's in these, these less mature, less organized gangs in Sweden?

The problem is concentrated in highly segregated immigrant neighborhoods. About 50% of the members of street gangs are born abroad, and some 85%, so the overwhelming majority, have an immigrant background. I went to Husby, it's a suburb of Stockholm, and in Husby, more than 80% of the population are themselves migrants or children of migrants, and they are mostly from Somalia, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. I walked around in Husby, I went to a street market, and you don't hear a word of Swedish spoken. It's sort of quite a happy bustle of foreign languages. And it basically seems seemed not unlike many working-class neighborhoods in other European countries. But Husby was the scene of very ugly riots 7 years ago, and it is one of the 22 extremely vulnerable areas, and that's a classification by Swedish authorities, that are prone to crime and violence. Unemployment in such neighborhoods is very high. Most people are on benefits. They are lonely, they feel isolated, and especially young men then are very much in danger of the lure of gang life.

And given those forces and that concentration, as you say, in highly segregated neighborhoods, this isn't a problem then for Sweden as a whole? It's pockets of this kind of violence?

No, that's right. So Stockholm is one of the most segregated cities in Europe. Mr. Rostami told me that you basically have two Swedens.

I think this is what I call the Swedish paradox. Because you have two realities.

Yes. There's the idealized Sweden on the one hand, and then there's the other Sweden that is marked by extreme violence and frequent explosions. And those two realities rarely come into contact with each other.

But what about law enforcement? I mean, did you get a sense that the police are at least trying to keep this under control?

Well, they've started to try to keep it under control, but many native Swedes are calling for tougher policing. And actually, so are many immigrants who of course, suffer most from the crime and the violence because it happens mostly in their neighborhood.

We don't have an effective police force or crime prevention, to be honest.

Mr. Rostami made this point too.

I think that in its turn are creating a very disorganized organized crime in Sweden.

Sweden has 2 cops per 1,000 inhabitants compared with 3 in Germany. And if you look at crime in the city of Malmö, for instance, in recent years, the culprit has been arrested in only 20% of gangland murders. And actually, the same is true for most of Sweden. So that's very low compared to other countries.

So is that the full solution then, just simply beefing up policing?

I think it's only part of the solution. Some politicians are looking to Denmark as an example. They want longer prison sentences like Denmark. They gave me an example of gang members from Stockholm who committed a murder in Denmark, and they were sentenced to 20 years in prison there, whereas in Sweden they would have gotten 2 to 4 years in a social institution because they were younger than 18. There's also a delegation of police officers from Sweden who went to Essen in Germany and to Berlin, and they wanted to see what local policemen do and maybe copy what they do. So the Swedes are now considering Germany's tougher gun laws and also Germany's methods for confiscating criminal funds. It'll take time to reverse the trend, but I think the Swedes have at last made a start in confronting it.

Bendelin, thank you very much for your time.

It's been a pleasure, as always.

Today, technically, is Black Friday, an American invention that spread throughout the West, purportedly marking the start of the holiday shopping season. In a typical year, millions of shoppers line up for hours, pile into big box stores, and scramble for limited time deals. Bedlam in the aisles of some of the nation's biggest retailers. Bargain hunters at this Georgia Walmart wrestling over pots and pans. But with COVID-19 cases on a relentless rise, both buyers and sellers are understandably crowd-shy.

Retailers usually make one-fifth of their holiday revenue in just 5 days between the Thanksgiving holiday and what's called Cyber Monday. And those 5 days form the start of the shopping season.

Sofia Caldera writes about finance and economics for The Economist.

The peak commerce in-store typically comes on Black Friday, but this year with COVID it of course is not possible for crowds to line up in advance and to press into stores to get the best deals. People will be avoiding crowds and busy shopping malls. They'll be doing much more of their purchasing online.

But retailers must have been seeing this coming from a very long time away. I mean, what have they done to anticipate the drop in in-store visits?

Well, retailers have turned to a solution that's fairly traditional, which is to extend the window for deals in order to bring consumers in earlier and make them more comfortable, especially under COVID conditions. That means that many holiday sales started as early as mid-October, driven in part by Amazon, which relocated Prime Day from mid-July to mid-October. And that discount event allowed many other big box retailers to jump in and call the opening of the holiday season much earlier than usual. Many also included several weekends of sales throughout October and November that they labeled as Black Friday sales or sales using Black Friday pricing.

So has that balanced out then by essentially spreading Black Friday out over a number of weeks that retailers ultimately make the usual level of sales, do you think?

It's certainly worked better online than in person. In data that has to do with foot traffic in stores, what we're seeing is a maintenance rather than an increase of the number of people willing to come into a store and spend. Over the spring, in-person shopping did a nosedive where traffic was 80% below usual week-by-week levels. Since about the end of the summer, that volume has rebounded to more like 25% down year over year, and that level stayed consistent through the weeks in which retailers were increasing holiday discounts.

And so the question is whether the way things are being run this year during the pandemic will outlast the pandemic. Is this kind of the end of Black Friday on a day as we once knew it?

Well, what we're seeing with the pandemic is an increase in existing trends. So Rodney Sides from Deloitte told me that the tradition of everyone going out to shops on the same day was already declining. That said, some people expect that the post-pandemic era will see a resurgence of interest in the kinds of experiential shopping and event-driven purchases that were currently missing. And so it's possible that we'll see some recovery from this extremely depressed year next year. But in total, the moves on Black Friday were already towards online shopping and also pandemic-friendly options like buying online and picking up in-store.

Sophia, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence, which as of this week has been downloaded more than 200 million times. So thanks a million, or rather 200 million, for listening, and see you back here on Monday.