Opinion: From Modi to Trump: Radical politics and its impact on democracy
How covering India’s tumultuous 2014 elections reshaped one journalist’s perspective on the fragility of democracy
By Ankita Rao
There was a palpable buzz in the country that year.
In the cities, it sounded like the squabble of talking heads — casting one candidate as the establishment status quo. The other, the global headlines said, would be radical. He would turn a blind eye to human rights violations, and capitalize on religious fundamentalism.
But in many of the dusty outskirts that I visited, the rural reaches of farmland abutting industrial waste, that buzz was excitement. It was hope. Radical would be good. Radical would be change.
This was 2014 and I was reporting in India during one of the most heated elections in history. Traveling across the country, I tried to parse the discrepancy I noticed between interviews on the road and the global attention fixating on Narendra Modi’s alleged involvement in the intercommunal riots that had happened in Gujarat, where he was chief minister.
I didn’t know then that the way this election played out would shape the way I understood the vulnerability of democracy. Witnessing this moment would fundamentally change the way I conceived of elections and prepare me for what would happen back at home in the United States just two years later.
Modi went on to become prime minister of India that year. A questionable investigation would acquit him of any responsibility for violence that happened on his watch. He would soon oversee and empower a network of state and local strongmen that would carry out some of the most anti-democratic crackdowns the country has seen.
In the years since then, journalists have been killed, arrested and silenced, and media offices have been raided after broadcasting criticism of the reigning party. The internet has become a political battleground, where access to information is blacked out completely in places experiencing unrest, and posting anything critical on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, can lead to jail time.
These shackles on freedom of expression extend to art and culture, where performers have been investigated or censored for political comedy. And they extend to real life, where religious fanaticism takes a visceral toll on vulnerable communities every day.
Amid this new reality in India, I moved back to the United States just as the 2016 election cycle was ramping up. Once again, I was faced with the noise of the city, where I also lived, and the buzz outside of it that we didn’t seem to want to hear.
I distinctly remember the morning after Donald Trump won the presidency. I was riding my bike to work after a long night of watching a map turn and Brooklyn seemed quiet and tense, but my phone was flooded with messages. The country, including the people who voted for Trump, were in shock.
As much as I felt unprepared for a Trump victory, I felt less unmoored by how to report on that moment. This was not just a difference in politics. This was about the permanent damage an extremist could do to the institutions designed to protect our rights.
India and the United States are drastically different countries, and our democracies operate under starkly different conditions. In many ways, however, the fallout of these democratic breaches feel the same.
Trump and his political allies waged a persistent campaign to vilify the media, and then turned to creating a parallel universe where the guardrails of ethical reporting do not exist. Whereas India struggled with outright censorship, millions of Americans found themselves facing an onslaught of unverified information, which was then used to promote an extreme political agenda.
When the coronavirus suddenly morphed from far-flung notion to our daily reality, Trump faced a country gripped with fear and chose to stoke racism and xenophobia. Soon thereafter, while people took to the streets to protest George Floyd’s murder, the former president chose only to parrot the right-wing message of law and order rather than understand the message of systemic abuse.
As the editor of a democracy project, I had an unenviable seat on the frontlines. Covering voter suppression and threats to the election has previously been seen as a complement to politics coverage but became the central lens through which our newsroom looked at the 2020 election. Suddenly, everything from the post office to the volunteer poll worker was under scrutiny.
On Jan. 6, 2021, when our screens filled with thousands of people breaching the doors of the U.S. Capitol building, I watched with alarm. But somewhere inside, I had known that things could get this bad. I had known that the things we hoped might be just rhetoric and speechifying were instead battle cries.
Unlike Modi, Trump lost his second election. But, as we enter yet another election cycle with him on the ballot, that is not the end of his story, or that of the wider culture his policies have created.
I continue to cover that fracture in the democracy here in the United States and the feverish attempts to restore the balance. But as both countries reckon with the fallout, I am reminded that the threats to people working to protect democracy — from election workers to local reporters — remain very real. And there is no possibility of taking it for granted again.
Ankita Rao is the Washington Editor at Guardian US. Prior to that she was a senior editor at VICE, producer at WNYC, reporter at Kaiser Health News, and an independent correspondent in India. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Online News Association, International Women’s Media Foundation, Pulitzer Center and Fund for Investigative Journalism. Ankita is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and University of Florida.
✨ This article is available for republication as part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.
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