++Americans are obsessing over protein and forgetting about fiber. +
++This story has been adapted from Meat/Less, Vox’s newsletter series to help you easily incorporate more plant-based foods into your diet. For five weeks, you’ll get challenges, recipes, and insights on how to make eating less meat work for you. Sign up here! +
++Americans are oddly obsessed with protein. +
++They eat around twice as much of it as the federal government recommends, and 60 percent of US adults are trying to get even more of it into their diets. And this obsession could be making us sick: Excessive protein consumption, especially from cholesterol-rich animal-based foods, is correlated with increased risk of cancer and heart disease. +
++This doesn’t just affect those following high-protein, keto, paleo, or low-carb diets (which, combined, is more than 1 in 5 Americans). It’s a problem for most Americans, especially men. One small, informal study in the UK even found that some men who want to reduce their meat consumption are embarrassed to order vegetarian meals among male friends. +
++Excessive protein consumption is also wrecking the planet, with meat and dairy production accounting for upward of one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions. +
++Globally, most people exceed protein consumption recommendations, but Americans and Canadians take it to another level. Despite eating more protein than any other region, Americans and Canadians eat the least amount of plant-based protein — instead, they get it from animal meat, dairy, and eggs. +
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++This explains why one of the first questions people ask when they learn someone is vegetarian, or just reducing their meat intake, is “Where do you get your protein?” But there are many plant-based foods high in protein, like beans, tofu, tempeh, lentils, peanut butter, plant-based “meat” products, nuts, and soy milk. +
++Unless you’re pretty ambitious about bodybuilding, you probably don’t need to worry about whether you’re getting enough protein while trying to reduce meat consumption or become vegetarian. +
++“On a vegetarian or vegan diet, you can get enough protein if you eat an adequate number of calories from a variety of whole foods,” says Nancy Geib, a registered dietitian at the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Diabetes and Nutrition. And if you are trying to gain a lot of muscle, it’s even possible to compete at the highest level of strength sports as a vegetarian or vegan: In 2016, Kendrick Farris — who is vegan — was the only American to compete in men’s weightlifting at the Rio Olympics. +
++But one nutrient the average American isn’t eating nearly enough of is fiber, and eating more plant-based foods is a surefire way to change that. +
++The fiber gap, explained +
++A 2021 study found only 7 percent of Americans get enough fiber, a problem nutritionists call the “fiber gap.” Fiber is critical because it’s “amazingly helpful in many ways: It slows the absorption of glucose — which evens out our blood sugar levels — and also lowers cholesterol and inflammation,” former Vox senior health correspondent Julia Belluz wrote. +
++A fiber-heavy diet is associated with reduced risk of heart disease, stroke, high cholesterol, hypertension, certain cancers, and more. It can also improve your gut health and help keep you more regular, if that’s important to you. Luckily, the most fiber-rich foods happen to be plants: beans, avocados, berries, whole grains, broccoli, potatoes, nuts, and dried fruit. +
++There are many health benefits to be reaped from a plant-based diet as well. According to the American Dietetic Association, well-planned vegan diets are healthful and nutritionally adequate and can contribute to the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. (Well-planned = eating in a way that is balanced and not obsessing over health or “purity.”) But let’s be clear: It’s not going to cure cancer, give you perfectly glowing skin, or make you feel amazing all the time, as some of the more fringe corners of the vegan internet might suggest. +
+ ++Health and nutrition is a sensitive issue, as there’s loads of pseudoscience out there. You can be an unhealthy vegan or flexitarian, a healthy omnivore, or anywhere in between. (Talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian if you have questions about what’s best for you.) +
++What aspiring vegans should know about B12, iron, and more +
++According to a 2015 report from Faunalytics, an animal advocacy research organization, 26 percent of vegetarians and vegans quit their diet because they felt it wasn’t good for their health. That said, the main problems described — like not getting enough protein or iron — could have been addressed with some basic nutrition guidance. Let’s tackle those concerns. +
++The most important nutrient for vegans to pay attention to is vitamin B12, as it’s almost exclusively found in animal foods. +
++Vitamin B12 is critical to central nervous system development and function, healthy red blood cell formation, and DNA synthesis, and ignoring it can cause short- and long-term health issues for vegetarians and vegans, though healthy meat reducers under 60 years old need not worry about it. +
++But it’s easy to get adequate B12 (the recommended daily amount for adults is 2.4 micrograms) for just a few pennies per day. Take vitamin B12 in whatever form you’d like — pills, lozenges, or oral sprays, all of which can be purchased at your local pharmacy or grocery — and, when possible, eat B12-fortified foods (e.g., most breakfast cereals, nutritional yeast, and plant-based milks). +
++Another critical nutrient is iron. As with protein, some think it’s hard to get enough iron on a less- or no-meat diet, since meat and other animal products are high in iron. However, many plant-based foods are high in iron, too. For example, half a cup of cooked lentils has almost twice as much iron as 4 ounces of beef, and vegans and vegetarians usually consume more iron than omnivores, according to registered dietitian Ginny Messina. +
++The catch is that iron from plant-based foods — called non-heme iron — doesn’t absorb as well in the body as iron from animal sources. Because of this, vegetarians should eat almost twice as much iron as the recommended daily amount, which ranges from 8 to 27 milligrams, depending on age, sex, and whether you’re pregnant or lactating. +
++Like eating enough protein, that’s manageable because iron is found in a lot of commonly eaten plant-based foods: beans, lentils, soy products, nuts, seeds, squashes, dark leafy greens, oats, dried fruit, and quinoa. I recommend Messina’s “vegan nutrition primers” for more practical, evidence-based nutrition guidance. +
++Today’s challenge: Up your fiber +
++Now that you’re aware of the fiber gap, try to close it by eating a few fiber-rich foods this week — and be sure to share this story with anyone who asks how you’ll get enough protein on a less-meat diet. +
++
++The Constitution gives the Biden administration nearly exclusive authority over matters of immigration. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wants the courts to change that. +
++Last Monday, the Supreme Court made its first foray into a longstanding conflict over who is in charge of the United States-Mexico border: the United States government or Texas’s Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. +
++In a 5–4 decision, the Court temporarily permitted federal officials to cut razor wire barriers set up by the Texas government, which had prevented US Border Patrol agents from entering an area where immigrants sometimes cross into the United States. This decision, moreover, came in one of several disputes between Texas and the United States over border policy — with many GOP-led states now backing Abbott. +
++Under existing law, it is well established that the federal government is in charge of nearly all questions of immigration policy and may override state immigration policies that conflict with its goals. As the Supreme Court said in Arizona v. United States (2012), “[I]t is fundamental that foreign countries concerned about the status, safety, and security of their nationals in the United States must be able to confer and communicate on this subject with one national sovereign, not the 50 separate States.” +
++But it is unclear whether the current Supreme Court, with its 6–3 Republican supermajority, will honor this longstanding balance of power between the national government and the states, which has been in place at least as far back as the Court’s 1941 decision in Hines v. Davidowitz. +
++Though the Court’s Monday order in Department of Homeland Security v. Texas was a victory for the Biden administration, it was also an ominous sign that many of the justices are eager to shift power away from the federal government — and toward state officials like Abbott, who are eager to impose more draconian enforcement policies. +
++The case involved an extraordinary attack on the federal government’s primacy over immigration. Texas erected razor wire barriers along a river in Eagle Pass, Texas, that physically prevented federal Border Patrol agents from entering the area, processing migrants in those areas, or providing assistance to drowning victims. According to the DOJ, the Border Patrol was unable to aid an “unconscious subject floating on top of the water” because of these barriers. +
++Federal law, moreover, provides that Border Patrol agents may “have access to private lands, but not dwellings, for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.” So Texas claimed the power to use razor wire to prevent federal officers from performing their duties, in direct violation of a federal statute. Nevertheless, four justices dissented from the Court’s order allowing the Border Patrol to cut the razor wire when necessary to do their jobs. +
++This dispute over razor wire is one of at least three ongoing legal disputes between Texas and the United States over who controls the border. The Biden administration also sued Texas, in a case known as United States v. Abbott, seeking to remove a 1,000-foot floating barrier Texas erected in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. At least one body was found trapped in this barrier. +
++Meanwhile, a third case, United States v. Texas, challenges a Texas state law that purports to give state judges the power to issue deportation orders. That law will take effect in early March unless a court intervenes. +
++At least two of these lawsuits — the razor wire case and the challenge to the state-authorized deportations — should be slam dunks for the federal government under decisions like Arizona and Hines. But Republicans have long railed against federal primacy in the immigration space. And, as the narrow vote in the razor wire case suggests, many of the GOP-appointed justices appear to have embraced their political party’s stance on this issue. +
++Why the federal government has virtually exclusive authority over immigration +
++So why do states play such a diminished role in immigration policy? A partial answer can be found in the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which states that federal law and federal treaty obligations “shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” +
++This is why the Homeland Security case — the razor wire case recently decided by the Supreme Court — should have been a clear-cut victory for the federal government. There is a federal law explicitly stating that Border Patrol agents may enter other people’s land “for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.” Under the Constitution, that law is supreme over any state law or policy. +
++This principle, that federal law overcomes state law when the two conflict, is known as “preemption,” and preemption is particularly strong in the immigration context. As the Supreme Court held in Hines, preemption in immigration cases extends not just to federal laws that explicitly conflict with those in a state, but also to any area where Congress has enacted a “complete scheme of regulation” governing an aspect of US immigration policy. +
++Hines involved a Pennsylvania law that required non-citizens 18 years of age or older to register with the state, “receive an alien identification card and carry it at all times,” and to present this card upon demand to police officers and other state officials. At the time, federal law also required non-citizen immigrants to register with the federal government, but the federal law did not provide for ID cards or specify many of the requirements imposed by the Pennsylvania regime. +
++In striking down this Pennsylvania law, the Court warned that states must play an exceedingly limited role in immigration policy because of the risk that a single state could damage US relations with other nations. “One of the most important and delicate of all international relationships,” Hines explained, “has to do with the protection of the just rights of a country’s own nationals when those nationals are in another country.” The Court added that “international controversies of the gravest moment, sometimes even leading to war, may arise from real or imagined wrongs” inflicted on the citizens of one nation by another. +
++That does not mean that the United States must treat every single foreign national with caution or deference. But it does mean that, if the United States decides to risk an international incident by treating a foreign national harshly, that decision should come from a government that is accountable to the entire American people — and not just to the people of one state. +
++“The Federal Government, representing as it does the collective interests of the forty-eight states, is entrusted with full and exclusive responsibility for the conduct of affairs with foreign sovereignties,” the Court said in an opinion that was handed down before Alaska and Hawaii became states. Thus, “for national purposes, embracing our relations with foreign nations, we are but one people, one nation, one power.” +
++One corollary to this rule of federal supremacy, Hines also held, is that comprehensive federal regulation over immigration-related matters preempts state regulation that touches on similar matters, even if the federal law does not explicitly say that state laws are preempted. In the Court’s words, +
++++where the federal government, in the exercise of its superior authority in this field, has enacted a complete scheme of regulation and has therein provided a standard for the registration of aliens, states cannot, inconsistently with the purpose of Congress, conflict or interfere with, curtail or complement, the federal law, or enforce additional or auxiliary regulations. +
+
+The same rule should apply to the not-yet-in-effect Texas law permitting state courts to issue deportation orders. Just like the Pennsylvania registration scheme at issue in Hines, Texas is stepping into an area that Congress has comprehensively regulated with its law allowing state courts to order deportations. Federal law provides for a network of immigration officials and specialized courts that determine which immigrants may remain in the United States and which ones must be deported. Texas may neither “curtail or complement” these courts with its own state-level immigration system. +
++Nevertheless, state laws seeking to undermine Hines now seem likely to arise whenever a Democrat is in the White House. The 2012 Arizona case involved such a state law, known as SB 1070, which sought to “discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens” by giving state police new authority to arrest and detain individuals they had “probable cause to believe … has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States.” +
++Yet while the Supreme Court in 2012 was quite conservative, it did not bite on this effort to undercut Hines and instead blocked several key provisions of SB 1070. Arizona was a 5–3 decision, with Republican appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy crossing over to vote with three liberal justices (Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal Obama appointee, was recused from the case). +
++Texas’s deportation law is probably best understood as an attempt to relitigate the Arizona case, but to do it with a much more conservative, and much more partisan, Supreme Court. Since 2012, Kennedy left the Court and was replaced by Trump-appointee Brett Kavanaugh — a fairly hardline conservative who dissented from the recent Homeland Security order. Meanwhile, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal feminist icon, died in 2020 and was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett (though Barrett, it is worth noting, joined the majority in Homeland Security). +
++If Hines is overruled or undermined, in other words, it will not happen because of any change in American law or the Constitution. Rather, it will happen solely because the Court’s personnel has changed — and the new justices tend to vote with the Republican Party. +
++Texas’s arguments in the floating barrier case are less frivolous than their arguments in the other two cases +
++Hines is much less of a factor in the Abbott case, the one challenging the floating barrier blocking a stretch of the Rio Grande, because that case turns not on an immigration law but on a federal statute intended to keep major American waterways unobstructed. +
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Courtesy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
++The floating barrier at the heart of the Abbott case, according to two federal judges who ruled against Texas in this case, “is roughly 1,000 feet long, made up of large four-foot orange buoys fastened together with heavy metal cables and anchored in place with concrete blocks placed systematically on the floor of the Rio Grande.” It also features “a stainless-steel mesh ‘anti-dive net’ extending two feet into the water.” +
++This barrier appears to be responsible for at least one death by drowning — an unidentified victim who most likely was a migrant attempting to cross the southern border into the United States +
++The federal government challenges this barrier not under a federal immigration law but under a statute providing that “the creation of any obstruction not affirmatively authorized by Congress, to the navigable capacity of any of the waters of the United States is prohibited,” and forbidding the construction of any “wharf, pier, dolphin, boom, weir, breakwater, bulkhead, jetty, or other structures” in a “navigable river … of the United States” without approval from the Army Corps of Engineers. +
++This case was previously heard by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a far-right court that frequently acts as a rubber stamp for legal theories offered by MAGA litigants. The three Fifth Circuit judges initially assigned to this case, however, included two Democrats and one Republican — and they split along party lines, with the majority agreeing that the floating barrier violates the federal statute. +
++That three-judge panel’s decision is no longer in effect because the full Fifth Circuit agreed to rehear the case in a process known as “en banc” — a process that, among other things, allows the full court’s right-wing majority to reconsider decisions that were randomly assigned to panels with a Democratic majority. +
++In any event, the panel divided on whether the particular stretch of river that contains the floating barrier qualifies as a “navigable” waterway under the relevant federal law. +
++Judge Dana Douglas, the Biden appointee who authored the panel’s majority opinion, pointed to the fact that federal law defines what constitutes a “navigable” waterway quite expansively. Among other things, the relevant federal regulation provides that “a determination of navigability, once made, applies laterally over the entire surface of the waterbody, and is not extinguished by later actions or events which impede or destroy navigable capacity.” +
++Douglas also points to several official federal documents which concluded that the relevant section of the Rio Grande is navigable, including a 2011 determination by the Army Corps that this river is navigable from “the Zapata-Webb county line upstream to the point of intersection of the Texas-New Mexico state line and Mexico,” and a 1984 determination by the US Coast Guard that the Rio Grande “was listed among the navigable waters of the United States pursuant to treaties with Mexico and for Coast Guard regulatory purposes.” +
++In dissent, Judge Don Willett, a Trump judge, essentially argues that these determinations by expert federal agencies were wrong and that they misread two longstanding treaties. +
++It’s doubtful that Willett, a lawyer with no training in engineering, hydrology, or maritime navigation, reached a more accurate conclusion than two federal agencies with considerable expertise in such matters. But Willett does make a plausible case that the relevant section of the river has not historically been used very much by commercial vessels. Among other things, he points to a 1975 Army Corps study which found that “there was ‘no [then-current] commercial activity occurring within’ that stretch of the river.” +
++So this does appear to be an edge case. It’s not surprising that migrants would prefer to cross the Rio Grande at a narrow point that does not lend itself to easy commercial navigation. +
++Nevertheless, given that federal regulations explicitly state that “a determination of navigability, once made, applies laterally over the entire surface of the waterbody,” Willett is on very shaky ground by trying to second-guess a series of official determinations that the Rio Grande is navigable — many of which predate the Abbott litigation by decades. +
++Gov. Abbott’s public rhetoric about these disputes has focused on his worst legal argument +
++On Wednesday, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled against him in the razor wire case, Abbott released an angry statement accusing the federal government of breaking “the compact between the United States and the States” by opposing Abbott’s preferred border policies. He also claimed that he has the authority to act against the federal government’s wishes because he “declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.” +
++This is, to put it mildly, a terrible legal argument. +
++The clause of the Constitution that Abbott references provides that “no State shall … engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” One thing that immediately stands out after reading this language is that it does not authorize any state to do anything. Rather, this clause is a prohibition on certain state actions; it forbids states from waging “War” except in limited circumstances. +
++It is very odd to read a provision of the Constitution that limits state power as giving a state the power to violate federal law. +
++Abbott’s argument that a rush of migrants trying to enter the United States constitutes an “invasion,” moreover, was rejected by no less of an authority than James Madison. In an 1800 document, Madison wrote that “invasion is an operation of war … And as the removal of alien friends has appeared to be no incident to a general state of war, it cannot be incident to a partial state, or a particular modification of war.” +
++In other words, undocumented migrants from non-hostile nations are neither an “invasion” nor are they something a state can wage “War” against. +
++Federal courts, moreover, have previously agreed with Madison. As one federal appeals court concluded in a 1996 opinion, “[I]n order for a state to be afforded the protections of the Invasion Clause, it must be exposed to armed hostility from another political entity, such as another state or foreign country that is intending to overthrow the state’s government.” Immigration, even by people who do so illegally, does not constitute “armed hostility from another political entity.” +
++All of which is a long way of saying that, if the courts apply longstanding legal principles, Abbott should lose all three of these cases — and he should absolutely lose the two cases seeking to undermine Hines’s conclusion that states may only play an extremely limited role in setting immigration policy because of the danger that a state may harm the US’s relationship with a foreign power. +
++But Abbott is betting that the Supreme Court’s current majority won’t care what established law has to say about his border policy. +
++National festivities this week danced on Indian secularism’s grave — and pointed to an existential threat to Indian democracy. +
++On Monday, tens of millions across India celebrated the opening of the Ram Mandir — a huge new temple to Ram, one of Hinduism’s holiest figures, built in the city of Ayodhya where many Hindus believe he was born. +
++The celebration in Ayodhya, presided over by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, attracted some of India’s richest and most famous citizens. But in the pomp and circumstance, few dwelled explicitly on the grim origins of Ram Mandir: It was built on the site of an ancient mosque torn down by a Hindu mob in 1992. +
++Many of the rioters belonged to the RSS, a militant Hindu supremacist group to which Modi has belonged since he was 8 years old. Since ascending to power in 2014, Modi has worked tirelessly to replace India’s secular democracy with a Hindu sectarian state. +
++The construction of a temple in Ayodhya is the exclamation point on an agenda that has also included revoking the autonomy long provided to the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, creating new citizenship and immigration rules biased against Muslims, and rewritten textbooks to whitewash Hindu violence against Muslims from Indian history. +
++Modi has also waged war on the basic institutions of Indian democracy. He and his allies have consolidated control over much of the media, suppressed critical speech on social media, imprisoned protesters, suborned independent government agencies, and even prosecuted Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi on dubious charges. +
++For many Hindus, the inauguration of the Ram Mandir was a meaningful religious event. But viewed from a political point of view, the event looks like a grim portrait of Modi’s India in miniature: a monument to an exclusive vision of Hinduism built on the ruins of one of the world’s most remarkable secular democracies. +
++Understanding the temple’s story is thus essential to understanding one of the most important issues of our time: how democracy has come under existential threat in its largest stronghold. +
++How the Ayodhya temple dispute gave rise to Modi’s India +
++The dispute over Ayodhya has become a flashpoint in modern Indian politics because it speaks to a fundamental ideological question: Who is India for? +
++The relevant history here starts in the early 16th century, when a Muslim descendant of Genghis Khan named Babur invaded the Indian subcontinent from his small base in central Asia. Babur’s conquests inaugurated the Mughal Empire, a dynasty that would reign in what is now India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh for generations. At least a remnant of the Mughal state survived until the British seized India in the 19th century. +
++The mosque in Ayodhya was a product of the early Mughal Empire, with some evidence suggesting it was built almost immediately after Babur’s forces conquered Ayodhya in 1529. Called the Babri Masjid — literally “Babur’s Mosque” — it was a testament to the impact the Mughal dynasty and its Muslim rulers had on Indian history and culture. +
++During the British colonial period, different Indian factions diverged sharply on how to remember the Mughal empire. +
++For Mahatma Gandhi, who led the mainstream independence movement, the Moghul Empire was a testament to India’s history of religious diversity and pluralism. Gandhi praised the Moghul dynasty, especially its early leadership, for adopting religious toleration as a central state policy. “In those days, they [Hindus and Muslims] were not known to quarrel at all,” he said in 1931, blaming current sectarian tensions on British colonial policy. +
++But the leadership of the Hindu nationalist RSS organization saw things differently. Focusing in particular on the late Mughal emperor Aurangzeb — who imposed a special tax on non-Muslims and tore down Hindu temples — they argued that the Mughals were more like the British than Gandhi allowed. The Muslim dynasty was not, in their mind, an authentic Indian regime at all; it was just another colonial conquest of an essentially Hindu nation. Muslims could not, and should not, be seen as full and equal members of the polity. +
++The Babri Masjid swiftly became a major flashpoint for this historical and political dispute. Because Ayodhya was widely seen by Hindus as Ram’s birthplace, the presence of a prominent Mughal mosque there was seen as an affront by Hindu nationalists. In 1949, shortly after independence, a statue of Ram was discovered inside the mosque itself. Hindu nationalists claimed that this was a divine manifestation, proof that the mosque itself was the site where Ram was born. +
++But according to Hartosh Singh Bal, executive editor of the Indian news magazine The Caravan, the historical record tells a different story. +
++“Members of a Hindu right-wing organization clambered over the walls, took the idol, [and] placed it there,” Bal told Vox’s Today Explained. “This was the first supposed proof that this [site] was in any way connected to a Hindu monument.” +
++For years, this manufactured conflict over religion and the Mughal legacy didn’t play a major role in Indian politics. The Congress party, the political descendant of Gandhi’s secular liberal vision for India, dominated Indian politics — winning every single national election for the first 30 years of Indian independence. +
++But in the 1980s, as the public tired of the Congress party’s domination, Hindu nationalist efforts to stoke tension surrounding the mosque intensified — and caught political fire. The BJP, the political arm of the RSS, made the construction of a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri Masjid a central part of its political agenda. The party, which won just two seats in India’s parliament in 1984’s election, won 85 seats in the 1989 contest. +
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Robert Nickelsberg/Liaison
++The RSS and BJP kept pressing on the issue, helping organize a series of yatras (pilgrimages) to Ayodhya calling for the mosque’s demolition. These grew huge, unruly, and even violent. In 1992, an out-of-control Hindu nationalist mob armed with hammers and pickaxes stormed the Babri Masjid. They tore it down by hand, horrifying many Indians and setting off religious riots across India that killed thousands. +
++Andrea Malji, a scholar of Indian religious nationalism at Hawaii Pacific University, describes the Babri Masjid movement as creating a kind of “feedback loop.” By bringing widespread attention to a source of Hindu-Muslim conflict, the movement actually made Hindus and Muslims more afraid of each other — leading to more conflict between the groups and, thus, increasing support among Hindus for Hindu nationalism. This was very good for the BJP’s political fortunes. +
++“Mobilizing around identity — especially when you’re 80 percent of the country [as Hindus are] is an effective political strategy,” she tells me. +
++The Ayodhya dispute was not the only reason that, in the coming years, the BJP would displace Congress as the dominant party in Indian politics. Modi’s first national victory, in the 2014 election, owed more to economic issues and Congress’ many corruption scandals than anything else. +
++But Ayodhya was the crucible in which the BJP’s modern political approach was formed. Modi’s political innovation has been refining this approach, developing a brand of Hindu identity politics with greater appeal to the lower castes than the historically upper caste BJP had previously managed. As time has gone on, he has only gotten more aggressive in pushing his ideological agenda. +
++Through it all, the Ayodhya issue remained a major priority for both Modi and the BJP. In 2019, just months after Modi’s reelection, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the construction of Ram Mandir on the former site of the Babri Masjid could begin. Its inauguration this week is a declaration of victory for Modi and the BJP on one of their signature issues — one of the most visible in a long line of successes. +
++Hindu nationalism versus democracy +
++The Ayodhya dispute helps us understand a deeper connection between the rise of Modi-style populism and the erosion of Indian democracy — that anti-democratic politics is not some kind of bug in BJP rule, but an essential feature. +
++India’s constitution and founding documents unambiguously declare the country a secular nation of all of its citizens. This universalistic vision permeates Indian law and government; it lies at the heart of the Indian state. India’s founders believed this was essential to making the Indian state a viable democracy: There is no world in which the citizens of such a large and staggeringly diverse country could cooperate together if they weren’t guaranteed certain basic equal rights. +
++“We must have it clearly in our minds and in the mind of the country that the alliance of religion and politics in the shape of communalism is a most dangerous alliance,” Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, said in a 1948 speech. “The only right way for us to act is to do away with communalism in its political aspect in every shape and form.” +
++Modi’s Hindu nationalism, by contrast, posits that legitimacy flows not from consent of all the citizens but consent of true people of India. That means Hindus in general, and Hindu nationalists in particular. Because they believe they represent the true nation, Modi and the BJP have no problem steamrolling on the rights of those who disagree with them — including not just Muslims, but also Hindu critics in the press and checks and balances in the Indian state. +
++“It’s very difficult for me to find compatibility between Hindu nationalism and democracy,” says Aditi Malik, a political scientist at the College of the Holy Cross who studies Indian politics. +
++There is nothing in theory undemocratic about the construction of a Hindu temple on a recognized holy site, especially when the construction is duly authorized by the legal authorities. But when it’s built on the ruins of a mosque torn down by a Hindu nationalist mob aligned with the ruling government, it sends a signal not just of Hindu joy but of Muslim subordination by any means necessary. Notably, Modi did not, at any point during the ceremony, apologize to India’s Muslims for the violent way in which the road to Ram Mandir was paved. +
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Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images
++Milan Vaishnav, an India expert at the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace, sees this as exemplary of the BJP’s general approach to wielding power. In his view, the party has presided over a gradual breakdown of norms of restraint governing Indian politics — adopting an “ends justify the means” approach to imposing the Hindu nationalist agenda because they believe they speak for the true majority. +
++“There is this feeling that, because this government is democratically elected, whatever they do has a democratic imprimatur,” he says. +
++Modi’s war on the free press — which has included friendly oligarchs buying up independent media outlets, siccing auditors on critical media outlets, and even imprisoning reporters on terrorism charges — is a case in point. +
++Seeking to force the media to tow a friendly line is undemocratic under any definition, even if the policies are authorized by a legislative majority. But the BJP believes that it, and it alone, speaks on behalf of the Hindu nation — and that critics in the press have no more right to challenge them than Muslims do. +
++There is every reason to believe that India will continue following this anti-democratic path in the years to come. +
++Across India, Ram Mandir’s inauguration was widely seen as the beginning of Modi’s reelection campaign. With elections scheduled to begin sometime in the mid-to-late spring, Modi is previewing a campaign focused on his appeal as an almost godlike champion for Hindus. +
++“[The temple inauguration] bolsters an image of Mr. Modi as the champion of Indians abroad and Hindus at home; as someone who keeps his promises,” Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow studying South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, tells me. “Expect much much more of this as election season gets underway.” +
++The consensus among India watchers is that Modi will win comfortably. The BJP is coming off three victories in December local elections, and the prime minister himself has an approval rating somewhere in the 70s. Whatever one’s opinion of Modi’s Hindu nationalism, there’s no doubt that it’s genuinely popular with hundreds of millions of Indians. +
++In evaluating India, we have to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. First, Modi and his agenda is genuinely popular with the Hindu majority. Second, this popularity has given him room to pursue an ideological agenda that imperils the long-term viability of Indian democracy. +
++When Modi said in his speech at Ayodhya that the day marks “the beginning of a new era,” this might very well be true. India could be at the beginning of a long illiberal night — one its democracy may not be able to survive. +