It Could Happen Here Weekly 245

**Garrison Davis** (0:01)
Cool Zone Media.

**Robert Evans** (0:03)
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

**Mia Wong** (0:28)
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where sometimes the here is the world's largest democracy and that I think I'm actually not sure how many Americans are aware of it. This is in fact India, a very basic fact about democracies around the world.

**Robert Evans** (0:43)
If you're calling either the US or India the world's largest democracy, you got to put an asterisk or a couple of them in there either way.

**Garrison Davis** (0:51)
We'll get to that in a second.

**Robert Evans** (0:55)
Land of asterisks, age of asterisks.

**Mia Wong** (0:59)
Yeah, with me to talk about the age of asterisks and maybe how to get out of it is Robert Evans.

**Robert Evans** (1:04)
Yeah, yeah, asterisks on that too, why not?

**Mia Wong** (1:07)
Oh boy, and I'm Mia Wong, I guess asterisk there too?

**Robert Evans** (1:11)
Sure.

**Mia Wong** (1:12)
I don't know, I got nothing, I got nothing.

**Robert Evans** (1:13)
Well, what are we talking about today, Mia?

**Mia Wong** (1:15)
We are talking about the fact that a couple of weeks ago in India, protesters managed to accomplish something that is unprecedented in the 12-year reign of Indian Prime Minister and enemy of the show, the Butcher of Gujarat himself, one Prime Minister Modi.

**Robert Evans** (1:33)
Narendra Modi, thank you very much.

**Mia Wong** (1:35)
Yep, hate him, Jesus Christ.

**Robert Evans** (1:37)
Yeah, yeah.

**Mia Wong** (1:38)
The entire time he has been in power, no one has successfully been able to manage to force him to make a cabinet member resign.

**Robert Evans** (1:46)
No.

**Mia Wong** (1:46)
And protestors just did this.

**Robert Evans** (1:48)
Yeah. This is the first, it's not the first, because the most recent set of elections didn't go great for him, but this is like the biggest break in his armor we've seen since the Modi regime kind of clanked into place.

**Mia Wong** (2:02)
Yeah. And to understand sort of what that means, we need to talk a bit about why Robert was like, yeah, asterisks, that's a democracy on both this and the US.
Which is that, so Modi's ruling party is the BJP, and I would classify the BJP as the world's largest fascist party. It has a horrifying 140 million members.

**Robert Evans** (2:26)
Jesus H. Christ.

**Mia Wong** (2:27)
Yeah, not good. Very bad. Oh boy.

**Robert Evans** (2:30)
Yeah.

**Mia Wong** (2:31)
Yeah. And it's also like not the only ultra right-wing Hindu nationalist party in India. There are also others. So yeah, great, great things happening here.

**Robert Evans** (2:40)
Yeah, this is why you've had ethnic cleansings against Muslims and other non-Hindu groups and chunks of India over the years.

**Mia Wong** (2:47)
Yeah. So they've been in power, like effectively uncontested. I mean, they didn't do great in last elections, but they held on to power and they've been in power for 12 years now, during which they have both transformed Indian politics and also just continued to get more and more right wing.

**Robert Evans** (3:02)
Yep.

**Mia Wong** (3:03)
There's something I think is worth mentioning with the BJP, which is that it's not like most political parties, even fascist ones, in that it's not like it's a political party that developed a paramilitary, right? The BJP was developed as the political wing of a very, very far right anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist paramilitary group called the RSS, which was responsible for a whole bunch of absolutely hideous crimes even before the BJP took power or even existed. So again, like this is a ruling party that is like the political wing of a paramilitary, not the other way around, and it's been running India for 12 years.
And as Robert sort of mentioned before, the BJP has faced some challenges to their power. They've also faced large scale protest movements before, most notably sort of the farmers protests in 2020 and then 2024, which were about attempts to implement right wing market reforms to India's agricultural markets. But they've successfully been able to maintain this policy of just refusing to dismiss government ministers in the face of protests until now. So what has actually been happening?

**Robert Evans** (4:11)