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“While I am keen to chat, my entire family lives in India so there might be some questions that will be trickier for me to answer.”

When an American scholar who studies India said this to me, in response to a request for comment on India’s human rights record, I almost couldn’t believe it. India is a democracy, the largest and one of the most important in the world. American citizens don’t fear retaliation for free speech at home from such countries; it’s places like Russia and China that go after relatives when an American exercises their right to free speech.

Is India’s government really following their lead?

After spending months digging into that question for a new feature published in Vox this morning, I can say the answer is yes.

My reporting substantiated multiple examples of India threatening and even punishing its critics in the United States. The targets, who ranged from reporters to nonprofit workers to ordinary Americans, told harrowing stories of harassment.

Family members back in India summoned to army bases. Employees of a nonprofit arrested. Secret travel bans and waves of online death threats. A prominent member of the House of Representatives told me she was concerned about being personally targeted.

Combining my original reporting with what was already a matter of public record — most notably, allegations of Indian assassination plots in the United States and Canada — it became clear that these incidents were not one-offs. What I uncovered was evidence of a systematic Indian policy of targeting Americans.

The Indian government is punishing people living in the US who criticize its record on human rights and democracy, wielding aggressive policy tools to coerce them into silence. It’s a kind of interference in American politics arguably more brazen than anything Russia did in 2016.

And it looks like it’s working. 

A number of sources, especially those in academia and think tanks, confirmed that people who work on India had begun self-censoring for fear of retaliation from the Indian government. People in Washington are even afraid to attend on-the-record events devoted to examining India’s record. Academics fear that their careers might fall apart if they come onto the government’s radar and end up on a travel ban list. 

Let’s be clear about what this means: The Indian government is successfully repressing scrutiny of its record inside the United States. The American public debate surrounding our relationship with an increasingly important partner is incomplete by design.

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This kind of “transnational repression,” to use a political science term, is a practice much more commonly seen with openly autocratic countries. That India is joining the ranks of Russia and China reflects the degree to which current Prime Minister Narendra Modi has moved his country away from its democratic tradition.

Modi, whose government is responsible for India’s policy of harassing Americans, has been assailing Indian democracy in one way or another since taking office in 2014 (and especially since winning reelection in 2019). He has arrested political opponents, silenced critics in the press, demonized Muslims, rigged the campaign finance system in his Bharatiya Janata Party’s favor, and much more. 

The result is that the “world’s largest democracy” may not be a democracy for much longer, especially if the BJP wins the currently ongoing Indian election (as experts expect it to do).

That’s the reality the Modi government is trying to cover up in repressing critics abroad. They don’t want Americans hearing about what’s really happening in India, let alone organizing to do something about it. And they’re willing to go to extraordinary and (allegedly) criminal lengths to keep American citizens in the dark.

India wasn’t supposed to be this way. Sunil Khilnani, an influential Indian scientist, once described his country’s birth as “the third moment in the great democratic experiment launched at the end of the eighteenth century by the American and French revolutions.” If India continues down its current path, this experiment might prove a failure — a catastrophe for the world and a heartbreaking development for those of us who care about India and democracy alike.

If you want to learn more about this situation — including some damning and never-before-reported evidence of Biden administration inaction — I’d encourage you to go read the entire story. It’s hard to report a piece that revolves fundamentally around people being afraid to speak their minds, but giving them a way to do so safely — and exposing something terrible in the process — felt like it was worth the effort.

I hope you, reader, agree.

You can see the full story here.

And if you’re interested in more of my work on politics and the dangers to democracy, please sign up for my forthcoming newsletter On the Right. 

—Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent

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