India is no longer the model free-market democracy that Westerners spent years imagining, encouraging, and touting. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi having bent the media, big business, and democratic institutions to his will, India’s markets and politics are becoming less free – as the ongoing election is set to confirm.
HONG KONG – A couple of months before India’s general election began on April 19 (voting will continue until June 1), the opposition Indian National Congress made a stunning disclosure at a press conference in New Delhi. Apparently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had frozen some of the party’s main bank accounts and slapped it with an outsize bill for a minor tax-filing lapse five years earlier, leaving it with no money even to pay for electricity or salaries, let alone conduct an election campaign. The freeze was soon lifted, but the message was clear: this wasn’t going to be a regular election.
Though Congress had ruled India for most of the period since independence in 1947, Modi’s rise to national power in 2014 has left the party flailing. Congress officials decried the account freeze as a “deep assault on India’s democracy,” but this was merely the latest example in a longer-running saga. Modi’s government has spent a decade eroding civil liberties and minority rights, curtailing dissent, undermining democratic institutions, and building a cult of personality. While Western governments continue to pretend that India is the world’s largest democracy, the country is beginning to resemble a Central Asian dictatorship.
For more than a decade, Sicily has been trying to revive its villages by selling vacant houses. Writer Lisa Abend heads to the largest island in the Mediterranean to see how life has changed.
(Mussomeli is roughly 60 miles from Palermo.Photo by Julia Nimke)
Like any small town that isn’t yours, Sambuca di Sicilia, located about an hour’s drive south of the Sicilian capital, Palermo, feels a little intimidating at first. Stroll its perimeter on a late afternoon in winter, when the sun sets the buildings alight, and eyes follow you. Order the town’s signature minni di virgini—breast-shaped cakes filled with cream, chocolate chips, and squash jam—and a hush silences the chatter in the local bakery. It’s not unfriendly, this exaggerated alertness, but it does make you, the visitor, feel a bit self-conscious.
By the time I walk into a small restaurant that first evening seeking dinner, my self-consciousness has reached an uncomfortable peak. The restaurant’s only other guests, a middle-aged couple, fall quiet as I make my way to a table. After the waiter and I stumble through my order, impeded by his poor English and my worse Italian, I pull out a book to hide my awkwardness while I wait for the food. But when the first course arrives—a heap of ocher-tinted pasta topped with crimson shrimp and shards of pistachios—I am so clearly delighted by the dish that the waiter then decides we are friends. He introduces himself by name, Giovanni, and when two women with their children enter the restaurant, he seats them next to me and introduces them as well. “La famiglia,” he says—his own, and that of the chef, who, stepping out from the kitchen to kiss his wife, also comes over to greet me.
Two hours later, I walk out into the night air, aloft on a wave of bonhomie and sturdy Sicilian wine. Oh yes, I think to myself. I could live here.
I’m not the only person to arrive at that revelation. In fact, I had come to Sicily to investigate a program that has attracted thousands with the same notion. A program that allows people, although they may not have the financial wherewithal to go full-bore Tuscan-villa-with-frescoed-ceilings-and-private-vineyard, to nevertheless live a different version of the dream. A program that promises them a house for a single euro.
Graphic content / The bodies of children killed in an Israeli strike, lie on the floor at the morgue of the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir Balah in the central Gaza Strip on October 22, 2023, as battles continue between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group. (Photo by Mahmud HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
Pragmatism and conscience are two different factors that often come into conflict when making decisions.
Pragmatism involves being practical and focusing on what is realistic and achievable in a given situation. It may prioritize efficiency, results, and the most effective means of achieving a goal, even if it means compromising on certain values or beliefs.
On the other hand, conscience refers to an individual’s inner sense of what is right or wrong. It involves moral principles, ethics, and values that guide one’s decisions and actions. Conscience is often associated with doing what is perceived as morally right, even if it may not be the most practical or beneficial option.
In some situations, pragmatism and conscience may align, leading to decisions that are both practical and in line with one’s moral beliefs. However, in other cases, individuals may face a dilemma where being pragmatic may conflict with their conscience, forcing them to make tough choices between what is practical and what is morally right.
If moral dilemma involves heinous or criminal acts against humanity, then the equation weighs heavy on conscience. Such horrific acts and atrocities are not only morally reprehensible but also a stark example of the dangers of unchecked power, systemic oppression, and the disregard for human life.
Pragmatism, if taken to an extreme without moral considerations, can potentially justify and rationalize heinous acts like the Genocide and total razing of Gaza in the name of self-defense. This highlights the importance of ethical principles, human rights, and moral values as essential checks on purely pragmatic decision-making.
Biden Administration abandoned any moral consideration when giving green light to Israel with no red-lines in the name of self-defense. Biden provided all the military resources, including mass civilian killing bombs, and diplomatic cover to Israel to unleash mayhem over Gaza leading to thousands of deaths of innocent Gazans and genocide charges against Israel at ICJ. Biden continue to send to Israel mass civilian killing bombs even after Genocide charges against Israel. Gaza Genocide is a glaring example of use of morally unchecked military power, both by Israel and our powerful country, over Gazans occupied and besieged from all sides by Israel-and innocent civilians nowhere to go.
In November 2024 voters will have the choice to use their conscience, moral authority, and pragmatism to weigh-in.
In his latest book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, Fareed Zakaria proffers his own 21st-century spin on storied historian Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal work The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848. Like the famed 20th-century historian, Zakaria recounts how the French and Industrial Revolutions profoundly shaped the structures, norms, and guiding principles that made our society what it is. The ubiquitous commentator also identifies a few more “revolutions” that aren’t generally considered revolutions, both pre-industrial era and contemporary.
While Zakaria may not be in Hobsbawm’s league, the Mumbai-born son of a political family who was a wunderkind editor of Newsweek International and remains a Washington Post columnist is still going strong at 60. Those who just see the erudite scholar on TV, where he presides over an eponymous CNN program, may not be aware that he earned a Harvard political science PhD under Harvard mainstays like Samuel Huntingtonof Clash of Civilizationsfame and Joseph Nye.
Much of what Zakaria writes is familiar, but that doesn’t make it unappealing. Anyone assigned to read the classic tome, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by the famed German sociologist Max Weber won’t be shocked to find that Zakaria locates the seeds of Western democracy in late 16th-century Holland, where northern Protestant provinces broke away from the Catholic Hapsburg empire. The Netherlands bestowed great agency to local authorities—much like America’s founders did two centuries later. In another precursor to Constitutional principles, early Holland enshrined the freedom of religion.
With the foundation for democracy laid, enter stage right: capitalism. In the 1500s, the Netherlands was a thriving maritime nation rather than an agricultural one. Fewer than a quarter of its workers were in agriculture—unusual for this period—with more than half in trade and manufacturing. Merchants, not aristocrats, held cachetand influence in this milieu. The world’s first stock exchange can be traced back to the Dutch East India Company’s issue of shares to the public to raise funds. At the same time, the Bank of Amsterdam served as a quasi-central bank, another historical first that Adam Smith described in detail in The Wealth of Nations. “It was telling that the Netherlands gained fame not for its castles or cannons but for its banks and merchants,” Zakaria writes.
This Dutch revolution took root in England during the Glorious Revolution, a not-quite-revolutionary sequence of events in the late 1600s. Following the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I in 1649, parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell seized power, presiding over the short-lived republic of Britain—which it became for the first and only time in its history, a mere decade before the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Upon his death, his brother James ascended to the throne. However, his heavy-handed Catholicism did not go over well with Parliament, which invited his Protestant daughter, Mary Stuart, and her husband, William of Orange, to invade. William, of course, was the quasi-leader of the Dutch republic. Why quasi? As we learned earlier from Zakaria, the prescient early Holland didn’t have a monarchy.
The bloodless ascension of Mary and William as joint monarchs to the British throne in 1688 constituted the Glorious Revolution. But why does Zakaria include this un-revolutionary moment among his pantheon of revolutions? “For the first time in British history, the new royals were endowed with power by an Act of Parliament, making them limited, constitutional monarchs,” he writes. “This marked the turning point of England’s political modernization.” Stability flowed from the new arrangement, making the country ripe for Dutch ideas, such as religious tolerance and freedom of thought as embodied by Isaac Newton and John Locke (who was allowed to return from exile in the Netherlands), and, of course, capitalism. Now that the Dutch had passed the liberal baton to England, Zakaria chronicles how England led the charge toward modernity. These two accounts of lesser-known European history, early Holland and the Glorious Revolution, are illuminating and convincing.
