GWYNNE DYER: What can the justice system do to combat tyranny in US, India?

India and the US, the world’s biggest democracies, are in danger from populist governments, leaving the justice system the last defence

India and the United States are the world’s two biggest democracies, and both of them seem to be in danger. In each of them, populist federal governments are deliberately polarizing the population, radicalizing the politics, and seeking to undermine the impartial rule of law. In other places, such an approach has often ended in tyranny or civil war.

How do India and the U.S. compare? India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a classic populist leader, although he prefers an austere and religious style to the more florid approach favoured by Donald Trump. Both men control their political parties with an iron hand, both flaunt their religions in public (although only Modi really has one), and both try to eliminate or co-opt all rival centres of power.

Both men also have a complete disregard for the truth. Their rhetoric about helping the poor while actually serving the purposes of the rich is the same. Above all, their scapegoating of minorities is the same.

(For Modi, it’s Muslims, for Trump, it’s practically anybody non-white.) Yet neither man is really preparing to stage a violent takeover. Muslims, Modi’s target minority in India, account for about one-seventh of India’s 1.4 billion people.

They are not immigrants. For the most part, they are the locally born descendants of families who converted from Hinduism to Islam during the long centuries when most Indian states had Muslim rulers. But Modi treats them as alien and even hostile.

He leaves the real gutter talk to the street-level troopers of his Bharatiya Janata Party while he takes the higher road — but not all that high. In the last federal election (2024), speaking to a Hindu audience, he referred to India’s Muslims as “infiltrators” and “those who have more children.” (He meant that the wicked Muslims are trying to outbreed the innocent Hindus.)

What can the justice system do? Nasty stuff, but it doesn’t always work. Take cows, for example, which are seen as a potential food