Lessons from China for the BJP

The brutally authoritarian, one party-ruled China’s startling turnaround on its vicious ‘zero-Covid’ controls and restrictions on freedoms holds out important lessons for BJP ruled India.

In a country where largescale demonstrations are highly unusual, the groundswell of civil protests over China’s exorbitant mass-testing, harshly enforced quarantines and lockdowns were the most vehement since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy campaign.

However, numerous Covid-afflicted districts in China were released from lockdown measures on December 1, even as police and security personnel moved in quickly to disperse street rallies across the country.

Beijing typically avoided acknowledging that its climbdown was compelled by the protests, with State controlled news agency Xinhua quoting China’s seniormost official in charge of its Covid response as claiming that a “new stage and mission” in the pandemic response was due to “the decreasing toxicity” of the omicron variant, increasing vaccinations and the “accumulating experience” of battling the virus.

The authorities’ retreat was nevertheless remarkable, as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is widely categorised as an authoritarian state with characteristics of a dictatorship.

There are fears, however, of a crackdown directed by Xi Jinping, who consolidated his position just this October when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at its 20th National Congress, confirmed him as the country’s uncontested President for an unprecedented third five year term.

India has hitherto been a liberal democracy, with the Supreme Court upholding the right to peaceful protests, while ruling that “democracy and dissent go hand in hand, but then the demonstrations expressing dissent have to be in designated places alone”.

The apex court maintained that in a democracy, the rights of free speech and peaceful protest must be encouraged and respected, with Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution guaranteeing the right to freedom of speech and expression and Article 19(1)(b) allowing peaceful assembly without arms.

Yet, the Narendra Modi government had launched a grievous offensive against boy and girl students, housewives and others protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019, and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) where as many as 69 people were slain and thousands of others arrested from the time the agitation began on 15 December 2019 until it was halted by the pandemic on 24 March 2020.

Similarly suppressed had been independent India’s longest-lasting agitation, that of the farmers protesting against the now-repealed three farm laws from 9 August 2020 until 11 December 2021. Union agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar maintained that his government had no record of any farmer deaths, though the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, which spearheaded the campaign, estimated over 670 deaths.

Asked whether the government would monetarily compensate the families of the dead farmers, the minister said, “The ministry…has no record in the matter and hence the question does not arise.”

The protesters, who included young as well as aged farmers, were caned and brutalised by the police, which also used tear gas and water cannons against them, and dug up roads and erected barricades and sand barriers to halt their advances.

Moreover, Union minister of state for home Ajay Mishra Teni’s son, Ashish Mishra, who was in his Mahindra Thar vehicle that allegedly mowed down four agitating farmers and a journalist in Lakhimpur Kheri in Uttar Pradesh on 3 October 2021, was arrested only after the Supreme Court intervened, but was granted bail in February in the run-up to the elections in the BJP ruled state.

The minister, who had vowed to resign if his son was at fault, only smiled when asked about his son’s release, and began campaigning for the BJP a day after the bail was granted, despite furious reactions from farmers and opposition leaders.

Unprecedentedly in modern India, the government bad-mouthed both the agitations, terming the protesters seditious, anti-national, pro-Pakistan, even termites, traitors and infiltrators.

Equating itself with nationhood when it is the public that is supreme in a democracy, the government arraigned many of the protesters under the draconian Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code that lays down the punishment for sedition, and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

Indeed, a report by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)—its Commissioners appointed by the US President and the leadership of both political parties in the Senate and the House of Representatives—maintained: “In 2021, the Indian government repressed critical voices—especially religious minorities and those reporting on and advocating for them—through harassment, investigation, detention, and prosecution under laws such as the UAPA and the Sedition Law.”

It added that the two laws have been invoked to create an increasing climate of intimidation and fear in an effort to silence anyone speaking out against the government.

China has been brutal, but not abusive, and makes no claims of being a democracy, as the Indian government does at world forums.

Mass agitations in China gestated from a single protester named Peng Lifa, who used the social media handle, Peng Zaizhou. He was bundled into a police car shortly after he had hung two protest banners on a Beijing overpass on the eve of the CCP Congress, one of which railed, ‘Remove the traitor-dictator Xi Jinping!’, while the other read, ‘Food, not PCR tests. Freedom, not lockdowns. Reforms, not the Cultural Revolution. Elections, not leaders. Dignity, not lies. Citizens, not slaves’.

Public anger, however, brewed over when a deadly fire on 24 November in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in far north-western China, killed at least 10 people and injured nine in a residential building, raising suspicions that the lockdown measures had delayed firefighters from reaching the victims.

Dodging the overpowering surveillance measures rampant in China, protesters took to the streets, most of them university students, as also women and professionals. Harking to the familiar declaration of the 1989 Tiananmen protesters, they said they were risking the wrath of the State, because “It is our duty”.

Many also sang the socialist anthem, The Internationale, which has been a call to action in demonstrations worldwide for more than a century and which was also sung during the Tiananmen Square protests.

The protests have undoubtedly disrupted Xi’s agenda of deepening political controls. They, and the fact that Covid cases have been on the decline as per the country’s National Health Commission (NHC) data, are leading to a rare relaxation of the stifling policies.

Vice Premier Sun Chunlan’s remarks about a “new stage and mission” in pandemic controls came just a day after the NHC indicated that the rectification of current pandemic measures was under way and that local governments should “respond to and resolve the reasonable demands of the masses” in a timely manner.

Sun also counselled for a “human-centred approach” and for enhancing “diagnosis, testing, treatment and quarantine” measures, and continuing vaccinations, especially of the elderly, and strengthening medication and medical resources. Top health officials have also acknowledged that long-term closures “can cause anxiety and life difficulties”.

Chinese authorities may clearly have taken note of the vigils and demonstrations that took place worldwide to express solidarity with the protests. Among those foreign officials and organisations that too have voiced support has been the US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, who remarked, “We’re watching this closely, as you might expect we would.”

UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told reporters that Beijing should “listen to the voices of its own people… when they are saying that they are not happy with the restrictions imposed upon them”.

However, if the Modi government’s excesses remain unchecked despite Supreme Court strictures and castigatory reports by the USCIRF, the US State Department, Freedom House, Sweden-based V-Dem Institute, as also the United Nations Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and sundry other agencies, then Xi-ruled China is not likely to change much either.

Beijing is unlikely to soften its stance on the concerns raised by US President Joe Biden on its coercive actions against Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan, though Biden had a conciliatory meeting with Xi on 14 November during the G20 summit in Bali, where he expressed confidence that competition with China would not turn into a military conflict, and both leaders reaffirmed that a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won.

India, with regard to the Chinese occupations in eastern Ladakh, was a notable oversight.

China’s zero-Covid strategy is projected to throttle the world’s second largest economy—a key driver of global growth—well into 2023, and has pulled down manufacturing and services activities in November to seven-month lows.

The GDP is forecast to grow 3.2 per cent this year, well below the official 5.5 per cent target and the 8.1 per cent achieved in 2021, making 2022 the slowest year for GDP growth in over 40 years, excluding the Covid-affected rate in 2020.

The International Monetary Fund warns this growth forecast may be cut even further. Financial publication Caixin estimates the unemployment rate to be at its highest since March 2020.

Beijing will reportedly adopt a two-track approach, where it will slacken some virus restrictions to pacify the protesters, while stepping up censorship, propaganda and force to avert the protests from expanding into a movement that could pose an existential threat to the regime.