Could Trump and Modi, Two Authoritarian Nationalists and Capitalists, Trigger a War?

In 2016, Amnesty International delivered a blistering report. It said: “The idea of human dignity and equality, the very notion of a human family, coming under vigorous and relentless assault from powerful narratives of blame, fear and scapegoating, propagated by those who sought to take or cling on to power at almost any cost.”

The report went on to say how Donald Trump’s poisonous campaign rhetoric exemplified a global trend towards angrier and more divisive politics, and that leaders and politicians across the world have wagered their future power on narratives of fear and disunity, pining blame on the “other” for the real of manufactured grievances of the electorate.

America’s Descendancy
We consequently live in insecure political times, where the intensification of crises has turned into the emergence of both authoritarian nationalism and capitalism. In the United States, Trump won the 2016 presidential election with a nationalist campaign that promised to put “America first” and to “make America great again.”

Not only did Trump use stereotypes, such as the one of immigrants as “people coming through the border, that are from all over, and they are bad,” but he called them “killers” and “rapists.” He attacked political opponents, called journalists and the press the “Enemy of the People,” and frequently made deeply divisive statements marked by misogyny and xenophobia.

Something else Trump did was to roll back established civil liberties and introduce policies that were profoundly inimical to human rights. In addition to separating refugee families and placing them in cages at the border, cities were terrorized with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Thousands of migrant workers were arrested without warrants and detained indefinitely.

Trump also doubled down on government-sanctioned discrimination by banning immigrants from several Muslim countries. The Supreme Court sanctioned his decision by refusing to listen to any oral arguments. One dissenting Supreme Court justice wrote, “President Trump’s original sin of targeting Muslims cannot be cured by throwing other countries onto his enemies list.”

India’s Descendancy
Like Trump, Narendra Modi, India’s new Prime Minister, dared to challenge human rights and the first rule of the Election Commission Model Code of Conduct: “no party or candidate shall include in any activity which may aggravate existing differences or create mutual hatred or cause tension between different castes and communities, religious or linguistic.”

Modi campaigned on the same fear and bigoted politics Trump did. He dehumanized minority populations, such as Muslims and Sikhs, and called political opponents “prostitutes,” “libtards,” and unpatriotic “anti-nationalists.” Years earlier, he had referred to Sonia Gandhi then president of the Indian National Congress as a “jersey cow” in a reference to her Italian birth.

Modi’s Bharativa Janata Party (BJP) pushed through a nationalist agenda, based on Hindu. Like Trump, Modi has centralized power and expanded capitalist ideals which primarily benefit the wealthy. In the meantime, He has failed to significantly improve health, poverty and education indices. Like Trump, he has weakened or abolished environmental and labor laws.

Following his victory in the 2019 general election, Modi revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir and introduced the Citizenship Amendment Act, which resulted in widespread protests and deaths across the country. The new act strips the country’s only Muslim-Majority state of autonomy and rolled out a citizenship check that leaves 2 million stateless, many of them Muslim.

Descendancy Into War
Another thing the controversial citizenship law does is prioritize Hindu immigrants from surrounding countries by fast-tracking applications while discriminating against Muslims. This includes Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians. Some foresee an India that is purely Hindu. For now, the influx of Hindus will have a large impact on voting by favoring Hindu nationalists.

Another thing that will have a large impact is Modi’s view about Kashmir. After the British left the region, the borders of Kashmir were never decided. Three wars later between India and Pakistan, and with Maoist separatists agitating for statehood, Modi’s decision to strip Kashmir of its special status has provoked both Indian and Pakistan’s forces to clash and fire on each other.

Modi’s Hindu-led nationalist government, which imposed a lockdown in Indian-administered Kashmir, followed by the suspension of the internet and cellphones and steel and barbed-wire street blockades, have led others to fear a major war between India and Pakistan. Critics liken it to Israeli settlements in Palestinians territories, another conflictive region on the verge of war.

Trump’s visit may be the spark that ignites another war over Kashmir, specifically as he sides with Modi and his fascist ways. Trump admires Modi’s dictatorial actions. He is also extremely naïve about world affairs, having been played as a dupe by leaders like Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Even If…
Even if Trump doesn’t provide Modi the spark needed for a major conflict, Trump’s “America First” and Modi’s “Made in India” will. To be sure, nationalistic and capitalistic tendencies, which erode liberal states, never turn out well. Especially with Pakistan, Russia, China, and Iran in the same region. If the world wars have taught us anything at all, it is dictators trigger wars.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.